In June 1992, Bob and I sadly but resolutely moved to dissolve our marriage of fifteen years and an intimate relationship that stretched over two decades. There was no shouting. There had been no fights and hardly any real arguments or major disagreements. The slide began after the children were born, and over the course of ten years the interlocking fibers of our relationship disintegrated as if they had been dipped in a slow-acting chemical solvent from an undetectable source.
My former husband is a good and kind man; he was the sort of father people held up as an example. Trying to explain why a relationship goes bad forces you to conscript all of the small differences, moments of alienation, and petty grievances and amass them in front of the reviewing stand: “See, this is why we lost the battle for the union.” And, like the root causes of depression, the factors leading up to divorce are hardly ever attributable to any one thing. Looking back on it now, however, I am certain that my depression played a role in the dissolution of our marriage.
I came of age at a time when women had more choices than ever before. I was well schooled and opportunities unfolded. I was at home in professional settings that were largely the province of men. By the time my children were school age, I returned to work part-time and we were comfortable financially. It should have been perfect. But I was hideously, deeply, secretly depressed.
Divorce is public admission of a failure. We sought remedies—counseling, time apart. The core of our existence was the boys. We went to lengths to protect them from the pain of a family wreck. In the end, Bob was determined to see us remain together; I was not.
A close friend recounted telling her mother that she was divorcing her husband and giving up on their marriage of ten years. She had two children roughly the same age as my own. Her mother chided her, “Why would you leave a man who is willing to make changes for you?” “Because,” she remembered thinking to herself, “I have already moved on—and there’s no going back.” I don’t think her mother understood. My mother and women of her generation would not have understood either.
It is my impression that women in my generation have been more willing to risk pulling up the stakes of an unsatisfactory marriage. For most of us, the dissolution represents a financial setback; the battle for income parity wages on. But for many of us, with skills and education, independence from a spouse is no longer out of the question.
For me, divorce was driven by a potent mixture of flawed identity, poor self-esteem, and, most of all, persistent and debilitating depression. Granted, there were times when I was angry with Bob for what I perceived to be an intentional unwillingness on his part to initiate or offer “a plan,” be it who we might invite over to dinner or how we were going to spend our vacation. He, by nature, “went with the flow,” and complained that whenever he suggested a plan, I would steamroll right over it; hence it was futile for him to even try. There was some truth to that.
We also had different styles of parenting—an issue that bedevils many a couple. He was easygoing and more tolerant of minor infractions, such as bad table manners or an intentionally rude remark; he was quick to dismiss them as “just a phase” and often suggested that I was overreacting. But I was just as quick to react to small bits of bad behavior on the assumption that these minor infractions would be harder to tackle later on. So, in the end, I became the stricter, more authoritarian parent, clearly the less fun role to play in the family dynamic.
Sometimes I felt shut out: there were “the three guys” and there was “Mom.” And as the boys grew from toddlers to youngsters, from tiny people who needed all my love and protection to boys who rightly doted on their dad and aspired to emulate him, I felt a sense of diminished purpose. Odd mom out.
I know now that the impact I had on my children never changed, it simply changed character as they grew older. But as they naturally gained independence from me, I felt I was approaching a precipice. I had thrown my entire identity into mothering them, and if they were changing the rules of the game, then I would have to change, too. But I loved them with such ferocity that I didn’t know how to change. I needed to figure out who and what I had become, apart from a wife and a mother. What emerged was a completely separate, albeit broken, spirit.
If you are raising children, if you are working and involved in a marriage and family, you know there isn’t even enough time in the day to pick the dirty laundry off the floor before all of the domestic elements, demanding their fair share of attention, conspire against time for quiet reflection. When illness, especially an illness like depression, intrudes on family and makes its own demands, most families are poorly equipped to bear the burden. I wanted to extract my illness from the family; in the end, the illness remained, but the family fell apart. The failure of our marriage was, in large measure, my own, and I am forthrightly sorry that I was not able to manage better.
It was a Sunday. School was over for the year. It was late June, already hot and clear, foreshadowing a long, drawn-out summer. After church we sat the boys, ages eight and ten, at the dining room table. Will sat with his elbows on the table, hunched over a place mat; Max fidgeted with a chain of paper clips. We began cautiously, sketching out the rough outlines of a proposition allowing that Bob and I would be spending more time apart—that “we love each other—as friends,” but that “we are going to stop being a couple.”
The phrases, disguised to be reassuring, spilled out like an odorless poison gas and filled the room with an invisible cloud of small terrors. How could I be so cruel as to torture my children this way? Maybe there is no “right way” to tell your children about an impending divorce. It was one of the most difficult moments of our life as a family. It was unthinkably painful.
The boys were quiet. I could hear a vein in my temple pulsing in time to the wall clock. Words were spoken slowly, hesitantly, not in a torrent of anguish, more like a tape recorder on playback at too slow a speed.
“Does this mean you’re not our mom and dad anymore?” Will began to cry.
“No way, guys. We are a family. We will always be a family. Nothing changes that,” Bob bolstered them.
“So what’s gonna happen?” Max asked.
“Well, nothing really, except that someday Dad and I won’t be married.”
I couldn’t believe I had uttered such an abject absurdity, “nothing really.” How ridiculous to make it sound like a day at an Orioles game!
Perhaps ambiguity is not the best policy. We wanted to be as gentle as possible, but I could see our approach caused confusion and consternation. And after this feeble beginning, Bob and I decided we had best bring the conversation to a close. The boys had absorbed as much as they could for the moment. We distracted them with routine Sunday fare, an outing to the park, a trip to the market, casual events we performed all together, as though nothing had transpired.
That night I put Will to bed. We talked about the much-heralded appearance of the first firefly of the season in our backyard earlier in the evening. Will slept on the lower level of a red tubular metal-frame bunk, surrounded by a flotilla of favorite books and Ninja Turtle action figures. A few weeks prior at soccer practice, a hefty teammate had landed hard on Will’s left arm, breaking it in two places. I slid a pillow under his cast as he struggled to find a comfortable position on his stomach. I rubbed his back and his little body began to quake with muffled sobs.
“This is hard, Mom.”
Of course he meant the split.
“I know, sweetheart. It’s one of the hardest things you’ll ever have to think about. But it won’t stay hard. It will get easier.”
“But it hurts.”
“I know. But Dad and I are going to do everything possible to make sure it’s easy on you guys. It won’t be as bad as it sounds. It just sounds really scary when you first hear about it.”
Nine years later Dennis Malinak was trying to mine the effect our divorce had had on Will. We had spent the better part of an hour in the Hampton Inn lobby spinning the threads of Will’s young history.<
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“Every kid, in my experience, remembers where they were the moment they got the news that their parents were splitting up. It’s like remembering where you were when you heard President Kennedy was shot. They remember where they were and how they found out.”
For a child, learning that your parents are about to divorce is, in Dennis’s opinion, a nuclear first strike in the battlefield of childhood.
“Will insists he doesn’t recollect when you got divorced,” Dennis delivered quizzically, as though he were trying to solve a particularly difficult puzzle.
“No kidding? Really? Well, he might have been confused. It happened gradually, so there was no real marker, no big separation for the kids,” I offered.
“He claims he thinks it ‘just sort of happened,’ but he doesn’t remember the day or the event. Gail, every kid remembers that day. Even if they remember nothing else about childhood, they remember that.”
Dennis was baffled and it troubled him that Will evinced no anger, resentment, or confusion about the divorce. So what kind of imperceptible scar did it leave?
In a letter to his favorite cousin, Alice, in California, Will refers to the “bad news” he doesn’t want to talk about—the divorce. He was eight and a half years old at the time. We had broken the news to him two weeks earlier.
July 2, 1992
Dear who ever gets this (and I know who it is.),
I can not wait to see you. I don’t know your favoret color. So how are you? Im fine. My mom told me that we are going to see our Aunt and Uncle when we’re there. They’ll really spoil us. That is the good news. The bad news I don’t want to talk about.
Let me think of some thing to say.
9:34 p.m…. 9:36 p.m. I’ve got it! Have you been whatching the U.S. basketball team? Thay’re realy kicking some butt. A week from tomoro I get my kast off. I herd Ben broke his finger. That’s to bad. We’ll still have fun. Yes I am in a rush and I don’t know why.
I am going into the third grade. I have to go to bed. I’ll finish this in the morning. At 11:30 my Aunt Lee is comeing. I hope she brings her card game Uno. Later we are going to see Sister Act. Yes it is a long letter. Let me think for a second. Make that a minet. Oh! Did you hear that we got Nintendo? I don’t think we told you. We have sixteen games. It just started raining. It stoped pretty quick. I don’t have any more to say. I’ll see you in a few days.
Love,
Woo.
The summer prior to our separation, I had been diagnosed with major depression and was hospitalized at the Psychiatric Institute of Washington for five weeks in August 1991. The onset of my illness had a long lead-up. But once I was diagnosed, I realized I had been fighting clinical depression all of my adult life.
At first Bob and I didn’t tell our family about my illness or the hospitalization. I wanted to protect them from worrying—perhaps protect myself too from their reaction. The boys were at the tail end of their extended visit with the relatives on the West Coast, but by my second week at PIW I missed them so badly that we asked their grandparents to put them on a plane and return them to Washington earlier than planned. My sister Suzy flew out from California to care for the boys. The boys adored her and she doted on them; if anyone could make the situation less difficult for the children, it was my sister.
Max was almost ten and Will was seven and a half. Bob and I explained what was happening as you would explain a physical ailment: “Mom’s sick and in the hospital, but she’s getting better.”
At first the boys were confused; they couldn’t interpret the mixed message. “Why is Mom in a hospital when she doesn’t look sick?” “What do you mean it’s in her head?” Bob and Suzy took pains to lessen the trauma and the kids came to visit three or four times a week. Max complained that the place “had a weird smell” and Will thought it amazing that the nurses allowed the television to remain on in the common room twenty-four hours a day. As days turned into weeks, I imagine that my children accepted what the adults told them about depression without really comprehending. Once they ascertained that I wasn’t going to die or disappear on them, I think they adapted to the circumstances as best they could. It was the beginning of the new school year; Max began fourth grade and Will started second; school provided a bit of a distraction from the events at home.
After a few weeks, I was permitted a short, supervised visit outside the hospital, and we would go to dinner or for a weekend hike. I tried to be as momlike as possible during these peculiar outings, but after a few hours I was exhausted and longed to be back at PIW. One Sunday afternoon after a picnic in the park, Bob checked me back into the unit. He turned to go and remarked sympathetically, “Don’t worry, kiddo. We’ll have you out of here in no time.”
I stunned both of us with my response:
“No, no, you don’t get it. I’m safe here.”
So many writers have covered the subject of their depression with excruciating detail and poignancy; sometimes I wonder if there is a writer on the planet who hasn’t walked the public through the overindulged garden of his or her depression dementia. The body of literature on the subject—some of it worthwhile, some of it drivel—has become in recent years so voluminous it causes me to wonder: If depression is so common, why is it still so mysterious, so inaccessible, and so stigmatized?
I am not going to attempt to characterize the multiple permutations of the illness I experienced on and off from my nineteenth year forward. But I believe that William Styron, in Darkness Visible: A Memory of Madness, hits the mark when he begins his book with a quote from the Book of Job:
For the thing which
I greatly feared is come upon me,
and that which I was afraid of
Is come unto me.
I was not in safety, neither
had I rest, neither was I quiet;
yet trouble came.2
Styron captures depression’s essence when he equates the “feeling” of depression as akin to being trapped in an overheated room, with no prospect of escape. Depression is not unhappiness, grief, a bad mood, or disappointment. It is exquisitely more complex and harder to characterize. In fact depression is the absence of emotion, an existence in a lifeless void where there is no looking forward to a good meal, enjoying a favorite piece of music, or stirrings of affection for a beloved friend or family member. That’s the “intellect” of depression.
As for depression’s physical manifestation, imagine those few minutes when your skin becomes clammy, your mouth is dry, you feel flushed and desperate—and then you vomit and the moment is over. That brief moment that precedes regurgitation, that’s what depression feels like to me. Only the sensation is unending and there is no relief. Trying to describe depression is a bit like trying to define pornography. Paraphrasing the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stuart Potter, I cannot adequately put words to it, but “I know it when I see it,”3 or, more precisely, I know it when I feel it.
My battle with major depression began in earnest during my sophomore year of college in the fall of 1969. I remember lying on the built-in dorm room bed with its orange batik spread and a van Gogh sunflower print tacked up on the cinder-block wall, too ill to think, too ill to move, desperately trying to manage the bare bones of college-dorm interaction, all the while feeling abject misery.
It would be years before I could place a moniker on the ponderous mixture of pathos and anxiety I felt. Just as Will characterized the run-up to his suicide attempt as being “overcome by a black wave,” I had the very real sensation of diminished physical presence. I felt as though I were losing parts of my body, myself. It did not occur to me that the losses were transpiring in my brain or that these sensations had a chemical genesis.
Clinical depression runs through college dormitories during sophomore year like frat boys on a panty raid. It is not hard to identify its victims—they start by skipping classes, withdrawing into their dorm rooms, turning sleep schedules upside down, increasing their intake of alcohol, or experimenting with drugs.
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Colleges are full of these walking wounded young adults; a few get help, but most do not. In the year 2000, roughly 15 million students were enrolled in degree-granting institutions in the Unite States. Half were less than twenty-five years of age. In a number of recent surveys, ten percent of the students attending universities reported seriously considering suicide in a given year; two percent actually attempted it but only one in four young people sought help for their depression.4
According to Dr. Putnam Ebinger, a friend and colleague and former associate dean of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, college students with depression fall into three categories:
freshmen who are homesick and having difficulty adjusting to life away from the family
sophomores struggling to stay afloat
seniors who start failing classes and become depressed out of fear and anxiety as they approach the end of their college lives
Dr. Ebinger adds, “Then you also have the sporadic cases of students confronting a more specific situation, from parental divorce, to date rape, to relationship breakup, to anorexia and other mental ailments.”
Seldom do these students confide in friends or family. Sometimes they are unaware that they are suffering from depression; more often, however, embarrassment and fear of exposure and stigmatization keep them isolated and alone.
A spate of recent suicides on university campuses has sparked uproar. Increased efforts are underway by university professionals and health care providers to promote awareness about signs of depression and suicide risk on campuses across the country. But the debate has also raised questions that go to the heart of how we define the middle passage between adolescence and adulthood.
Sensible parenting suggests that you keep a child home from school when he or she falls victim to a demonstrable physical illness. No parent would send a child to college with tuberculosis or hepatitis or even the common adolescent virus mononucleosis. But many kids show up freshman year of college with steamer trunks full of depression, anxiety disorders, and addictions, desperately hoping the change of scene will work a miracle. (It rarely does.) And parents are often, understandably, anxious to see their off-balance teens move their passels of trouble into the campus dorm. I can sympathize. The angels of our better nature want to believe what we want to believe. And the inescapable truth is that we want to believe our children are growing up well and healthy; sure, there are rough patches, but in the end we reserve the right to airbrush out the obvious.
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