Welcome to My Breakdown

by Benilde Little

  15

  Mom’s Malady, My Menopause

  THE OCTOBER evening had taken on a blustery fall chill. My mother was scheduled for open-heart surgery the following day. I was sitting next to her hospital bed, listening to her sum up the state of her health and the litany of her recent encounters with medicine.

  I can’t walk three feet without losing my breath. They finally figured out what was wrong with me. My cardiologist, that handsome Dr. Lappa, found out that one of my valves is leaking. I told him I’d had another valve replaced six years ago. They put a pig part in me. My other cardiologist, Dr. Mahdi, turns out was the daddy of one of Ford’s friends. They always took good care of me, but after he found out I was Ford’s grandma, he took extra good care of me. When they recommended surgery, I didn’t think twice about it. “Let’s do it,” I said. But everybody was all worried. You even said to the doctors, “But she’s eighty-two. How’re you going to do that kind of operation on somebody her age?”

  Dr. Mahdi said, “Other than her heart, she’s in perfect health.”

  I have to admit I thought that was funny. “Other than her heart,” like you can live without one. I want to get better. I want to be able to do all the things I used to do. I don’t like sittin’ around. It was bad enough that Matthew took my car keys from me, just because I got a little confused one time and we got separated at the mall and the police was called. They thought I’d escaped from the old folks’ home or somethin.’ They didn’t believe me that me and my husband came there together and had got mixed up about where we were supposed to meet. I told them call Neal, but you weren’t home so here comes Cliff to get me. He had to drive all the way down to the Woodbridge Mall from Montclair.

  Well, the night before the last surgery I remember you stayed later than your usual time, past visiting hours. Lookin’ at me all sad, telling me, “You’ve been a great mother. I was so lucky to have you.” How you love me and appreciate everything I did. I think you thought I wasn’t gonna come outta that surgery. But I knew I would. I’d made up my mind that I wasn’t ready to go yet, even though I was sick to death of hospitals. I’ve been in and out of the hospital in the last few years, had to be six or seven times. Before I got into my late seventies I didn’t have any problems. I had never been in the hospital. Before all this mess with my heart, my regular doctor, Dr. Haggerty, thought she saw a mass on my pancreas during an X-ray and was sendin’ me to all these specialists. I remember how you broke down right in the elevator after we was leavin’ one of ’em. I looked at you and told you, “I’m not worried about this. I don’t have no cancer or nothing. I gave it to God.” I wasn’t ready to go. I used to walk three miles every day, cut out salt, went on the trips for Matthew’s navy reunions, visited with my brother Fred and what sisters I had left. I had my kids and grands. I had managed to make to it see my grandson Kamal graduate from Brown, like I always promised him I would. I might even make it to Baldwin’s weddin’ if she get married at twenty-one. I’d be ninety.

  I can tell you tryin’ to work up a cry, Neal. You always was a crybaby. I’m not one for a whole lotta mushy stuff, but I’ve changed as I’ve gotten older.

  You better go home now, sweet pea. It’s late and you know this neighborhood, it’s kinda rough. Get the guard to walk you to the parkin’ lot.

  Mom had no idea what was raging inside me as I left the hospital. All I could think about was losing her, and I wasn’t ready yet. I’d actually convinced myself that someday I would be ready. It just wasn’t now.

  I had walked these streets—Osborne Terrace, Lyons Avenue—every day to and from high school, hanging out at Area Board 9, the community center that used to be down the street. I understood that the place had changed since I’d lived there, but it was still my neighborhood. Still, my mother had cautioned me to have a guard escort me to my car, so I walked up to the two Black twentysomething security guards talking at the entry desk. I asked if one of them would be willing to walk me to my car. One of the men assessed me. His look felt harsh and negative. I said something about being from the neighborhood. I told them that I once lived here thirty years ago. I heard myself and realized how long ago that was and remembered how I used to feel when someone, especially someone Black, used to say that to me. I’d feel resentful at the term—“used to”—like they’d gone on to something better than here. I could see the same thing in the guard’s eyes. I wanted to say, “No, that’s not at all what I’m thinking,” but I didn’t. Suddenly I was the older, clueless person needing assistance. The other guard, the one without the edge, said sweetly that of course he’d walk me.

  The next day, after my mom was prepped for surgery and given the anesthesia and her chest was opened up, they checked her blood and realized it wasn’t clotting. She had been on Coumadin, but the doctors thought they’d stopped it long enough before the surgery for her blood to clot. They were wrong. She wouldn’t stop bleeding—too many years on blood thinners. So her chest, which was entirely opened, was bandaged, and she lay in an induced coma for two days while they tried to get her blood to bulk up. Baldwin came with me to see her and sobbed and fell on Mom’s bed at the sight of the ventilator breathing for her. I had to leave the room.

  Three days later my mother came through the surgery even better than the doctors had predicted. Mom was already sitting up two days after her surgery when her surgeon came into her room. He was a large and vigorous man with thinning blond hair, a medical star that Beth Israel had hired away from the Cleveland Clinic. My mom reached out to hug him and he leaned in. “I can’t believe you’re sitting up already,” he said.

  Mom beamed at him like a teacher’s pet.

  The nurse on duty turned pink, and after the doctor left said to my mother, “I can’t believe you hugged him.”

  “Why?” Mom said, with all her bemused surliness.

  “Because, he’s, well, no one does that.”

  “Humph,” was all Mom said, but the nurse got her meaning: I’m not like everybody else, and he puts on his drawers same way I do.

  The surgeon, in addition to repairing the main leaky valve, ended up performing a bypass and patching up a hole in my mother’s heart that she’d had her entire life but that no one knew about because it was behind a ventricle. He also shaved down her heart muscle, which had become enlarged from years of overwork. The metaphor of my mother’s overly large heart couldn’t have been more appropriate. She seriously believed that we are each our brother’s keeper; that we are here to take care of one another. My mother was better than me. She was better than most.

  She was the sort of person who went to Jamaica on vacation, became friends with some impoverished locals, got their addresses, and came home and bought new jeans and mailed them. She would not only give panhandlers money on the subway when she was visiting me in the city, but she’d also talk to them. To her, they were no different than the people in business attire riding the train home from work. One day when I reprimanded her for talking to a homeless man, she scolded me, “Don’t be telling me who I can talk to.” Left unsaid: He puts his drawers on same as you.

  After two weeks in the hospital, she was finally released. She had to go into a rehabilitation/nursing home for three weeks. Still weak, she was primarily in a wheelchair. When she walked the halls with her physical therapist, Jason, it was with a walker. I hated seeing my mother like this, but not as much as she hated “the damn walker.” Sometimes I watched her work with Jason in the weight room. She grunted and groaned but got up the weight that was strapped around her ankle, lifting it in a slow kick.

  Jason looked at me. He said, “She’s amazing.”

  Another fan.

  Me, Baldwin, and Mom visiting her at rehab.

  Around the time of my mother’s multiple heart procedures, I thought the difficulty in my life had peaked. I remember I kept losing things. Some I’d find, others would simply vanish never to be seen again, like my cell phone. One day it simply disappeared. Cliff and I were traveling the next day for a
week in Anguilla, sans children, to celebrate my fiftieth birthday. I thought that I’d just happen across my lost phone after a long-needed rest. But when I got back a week later, still no cell phone. I never found it. Another day we needed a few things from the A&P. Cliff handed me three twenties, and I put the money in my jeans pocket. I got to the store and no money. Sixty dollars, just gone. Then there were the misplaced glasses, purses, keys, and simple words and names that I no longer seemed capable of recapturing. Later, I also lost my diamond engagement and wedding rings. They simply evaporated. I’m still hoping that they’re somewhere in my house.

  I complained to my husband.

  Hardly listening, he said, “Too much stress.”

  I felt so sorry for myself that I called my mother, knowing she’d feel sorry for me too.

  “Oh, that’s terrible,” she said. “I hate when I do that.”

  “Ma, you’re eighty-three, of course you can’t remember things.”

  She cackled.

  Soon, my full-time activity became trying to figure out what was wrong with me. My mom was making steady progress in rehab, but I seemed to be falling apart. Like so many women my age I was scatterbrained, depressed, had carbohydrate lust and alcohol craving, all of it pointing to the big “M.” At the time, Oprah was doing many shows on menopause. She devoted entire segments to Dr. Christiane Northrup, author of The Wisdom of Menopause, the menopause bible. I bought this book and devoured it. On the same subject, the hilariously brilliant writer Sandra Tsing Loh wrote the following in an Atlantic magazine essay entitled “The Bitch Is Back”:

  Northrup notes that before this time in history, most women never reached menopause—they died before it could arrive. If, in an 80-year life span, a female is fertile for about 25 years (let’s call it ages 15 to 40), it is not menopause that triggers the mind-altering and hormone-altering variation; the hormonal “disturbance” is actually fertility. Fertility is The Change. It is during fertility that a female loses herself, and enters that cloud overly rich in estrogen. And of course, simply chronologically speaking, over the whole span of her life, the self-abnegation that fertility induces is not the norm—the more standard state of selfishness is. . . . [I]f it comes at the right time, menopause is wisdom.

  Tsing Loh broke down our adult life trajectory like this: if a woman gets married in her twenties and has all her children in her late twenties or early thirties, by the time she reaches her menopause years, her kids are leaving the family home and she is free. But for me and most of my contemporaries, it hadn’t worked out that way. We put college, grad school, and careers first, which meant we weren’t even thinking about marriage until thirty. By the time we found the one we could be thirty-five, and if we wanted to have a little time just with our spouse, that meant we were thirty-six, thirty-eight, forty by the time we had our first kid.

  I had adventures in dating and traveling while living the single life in Manhattan. I’d wanted to be settled in my career before I got married and had kids. I didn’t marry until a month shy of my thirty-fourth birthday, had Baldwin at thirty-six and Ford at forty-three. I was doing what most of those in my milieu were doing at the time. However, by the time we got to having it all, we were right up on perimenopause. It was the scenario Dr. McCurtis had observed on the phone.

  Okay, so I was in menopause, and it was hell. I had to do something about it. I couldn’t just throw frozen meat at my kids as my mother did to me when I was fifteen and was sassing her while she defrosted the freezer. She was forty-eight. I had been standing in the kitchen telling her how I wasn’t going to do whatever it was she was telling me to do; she was quietly removing packages of frozen meat wrapped in white freezer paper and placing them on the table; back and forth, back and forth. All of sudden I sensed something coming at me and had the good fortune to move my upper body slightly to the side as the bricklike pack of ground beef whizzed past my ear. I looked at my mother, and I honestly can’t remember if she’d even bothered to look up at me. I walked out of the kitchen and didn’t say another word.

  I decided to try bioidenticals, the estrogen and testosterone creams and the progestin pills that are purported to be safer than synthetic forms of hormones. This treatment was supposed to be plant-based, and didn’t travel through the liver; therefore, there was no risk of breast cancer.

  A friend referred me to a doctor whose office was in a part of New Jersey I’d never heard of, even though it was a half hour from my house. I drove along the Passaic River, taking twists and turns through neighborhoods that went from a cookie-cutter American Beauty set to something out of the movie Deliverance. I met with Dr. Gomez,* a kind man who talked to me for over an hour about his personal story with male menopause, a lack of testosterone, which he thought cost him his marriage.

  “You will feel better, I promise,” he assured me.

  He took eight vials of blood and told me to come back in a week. When I went back, he ordered estrogen and testosterone creams and progesterone in a pill. He sold me niacin and CoQ10 supplements. I walked out of the office almost happy, or as happy as I was capable of feeling at the time, at the prospect of finally feeling better. I’d heard dozens of women on Oprah and elsewhere testify about the wonders of hormone replacement and how it had given them their lives back.

  “How long will it be before I feel better?” I had asked him.

  “It usually takes anywhere from one week to three weeks,” he’d said. “You will feel better.”

  I went to sleep that night, dreaming about feeling better. The first week I took the pills and applied the creams, I felt nothing but extreme sleepiness at night. By nine thirty I would be so sleepy, I had to pull my leaded legs upstairs to bed. I’d shut down like I was on codeine. The second week, the same sleepiness but no other changes. I called the doctor. He assured me that the treatment would work; give it time. I was calling him three times a week, and by the third week, still nothing. I felt sleepy, hungry, grouchy, and still had only enough brain bandwidth to go to CVS and remember two things. I called him again; he was away at his father’s funeral. When he returned, I offered my condolences. Perplexed as to why the pills and creams weren’t working, he said the problem was probably my thyroid. He prescribed Synthroid. I pushed back and said I’d never had a thyroid issue, but I was desperate so I got the pills. The first day I took one, I felt like I was turning green and my chest and arms were bursting out like the Incredible Hulk. The second day, I felt the same, plus so hungry that I could’ve eaten my own leg. By the third day, with those symptoms persisting, I stopped taking the pills. I continued with the bioidenticals and talked to Dr. Gomez three times a week.

  “We’ll just keep trying,” he said, although I sensed he was becoming as frustrated with me as I was.

  After four months, I stopped calling and stopped taking the meds.

  For the money and time I spent on this process, I could’ve bought a spa weekend. The big question for lots of women during this stage of life is whether to take synthetic hormones. I couldn’t figure out what I should do. I was certainly finding many other ways to cope, including drinking, shopping, socializing, and sleeping. I didn’t try having an affair or running away, and obviously I didn’t commit murder or suicide.

  Eventually, at Cliff’s urging, I began going into Manhattan once a month to see Dr. McCurtis. Walking down the tree-lined street to his Central Park West office was part of the therapy that worked for a while—but it was short-lived. It became apparent that this “storm of murk,” as William Styron described depression, would not let go with talk therapy alone. So McCurtis prescribed Wellbutrin and later added Prozac. I took the two pills, eventually only taking Prozac, for about a year. I did feel better, enough to join a gym, hire a trainer for three months, and begin a rhythm of extreme exercise: hard workout classes four days a week and jogging on the weekends. I’d read that thirty minutes of serious cardio exercise can be as effective as antidepressants for mild to moderate depression. I decided that was me, and that exerci
se was all I needed to manage my moods. I had stopped shopping and drinking so much, limiting it to weekends, even though I found myself still looking forward to it too much.

  I wanted to get off the meds and I did. I was doing a little better, was a little calmer, not getting too overwhelmed and cursing out too many people. I upped my yoga practice and read spiritual self-help books. I usually felt the presence of sadness waiting at the door, but I used all the will and strength I possessed to keep the door shut. I was working full-time at keeping it together.

  One afternoon, as I sat at my wooden kitchen table, surrounded by newspapers and the mail, Charlie started barking. I looked out from the kitchen window and saw my children holding hands, walking up the driveway. My heart liquefied. Baldwin had happened to pass as Ford’s school bus letting him off and the two of them walked home together. My fourteen-year-old daughter and my eight-year-old son held hands as they talked to each other. Right then, I was so glad to have been there, to be a witness. A calm came over me and, for that moment, all was well.

  16

  Shame

  IT WAS the Monday after Thanksgiving. I dutifully went to the gym then went for coffee with three women friends afterward. Two of the women had been secretly having an affair and they’d told me about it. My trainer Lisa, the “out” lesbian, said something to the group. The other woman, let’s call her Kelly, who was married to a man, said, “You’re so bossy.”