Time is blue now

Time is blue now
and all that I bring
is quieter than
the movement toward the edge of all things

Where am I now?
I'm in the between.
My heart is an arrow
it shoots straight into the core of everything


*********************************************************************************

When Infant was born, my first thought was are you Italian? His eyes were huge and dark (and all gross and alien and newborny), but as soon as the creepy eyes calmed down, I realized they were yours; your big brown eyes looking out at me from my tiny little boy. It was the oddest sensation. I don't know why, but I always thought he'd have his father's eyes, maybe because I kept forgetting the ME part of the equation, that I was carrying not just my husband's child, but also my own. It was too much to take in. I was so afraid and overwhelmed. Husband could be a Nazi extra in a WWII film because he's the original Aryan, so I wouldn't have been surprised to meet a tiny little Austrian cherub on that day, blond hair and blue eyes, but there he was, my little 1/16 Chilean. I told everyone who met him: they're not my eyes--they're darker, see? Not even the same brown. Put us together in front of a mirror and his have a beautiful grey-blue cast, like a perfect stormy sky. My mother's eyes. No one seemed to be significantly impacted by this observation or grasp the difference. I could see them thinking, uh huh, he has brown eyes. But inside my head, I'm shouting, HE HAS MY DEAD MOTHER'S EYES ISN'T THAT AMAZING!!! He could have been born with my eyes, but he wasn't--he was born with her eyes. When everything was dark, and I couldn't decide on a day to day basis whether I was losing it or not, I would sometimes think, what if she's looking out from behind those eyes, what if she's inside him? What if she took his soul? It sounds 100% ridiculous now, but at the time, it didn't seem that farfetched.

I was worried that the whole dead mom thing would lead to postpartum depression. I was the poster child for knowledge about it; I could list the symptoms, I ranted about how mental illness shouldn't be stigmatized and how postpartum depression was under recognized because it's primarily a woman's issue. Everyone checks in on you: the midwives, the social workers, the hospital. But still, I lost my way. There was so much I didn't know. For instance, I didn't know that if you didn't actually want to drown your baby in the bathtub but you kept worrying all the time that it would happen, and you literally couldn't stop worrying, that those intrusive thoughts were part of the disease. I didn't know PPD could also be postpartum anxiety or OCD-related. I thought that if I loved my baby, then I must be okay, because everyone kept emphasizing detachment as the primary symptom. No one talked about the guilt. That's what stopped me from getting the help I needed sooner, and it crept up so stealthily that I didn't even know what hit me.

The illness came cloaked in exhaustion and mourning. It took me over and made me blind; a cataract of creeping grief. One eye to split between grey sisters: mother, wife and me. Oh, what I would have given to just be free. PPD is like one of those viruses that infects your computer and tells you there's a virus on it, click here to fix it, and then you let the monster in. A Trojan, I think they call it. Postpartum depression is a Trojan horse. There's another me living inside of me. She flattened herself like a bedbug, waiting for stillness to come to me so she could crawl across my face in the night and into my mind. She pried me open to get to all the nooks and crannies. The me I couldn't keep at arms' length was the me that said you don't get to feel this bad, you are too lucky, your privilege too great. The shame of who I was burned through the tender foundation of goodness that I believed I possessed. I could see how little I meant in everyone's face, in my baby's heart, on the inside of my eyelids. I knew I was worthless, that I didn't deserve to live the life I'd been given. I mean, yeah, I have a dead mom (okay, maybe that's a slightly big deal), but I also have a husband who stayed home for three months with me on maternity leave, cobbling together FMLA, baby bonding time, and sick time so we could stick it out together. One who stayed up nights to feed the baby so I could sleep, one who cooked for me and cleaned too when I just couldn't manage it (which, duh, he should have, I had stitches and could barely lie in bed, but I still felt guilty). Place that on top of the already ever present guilt at being born who and where I was and not having to eat dirt pancakes to survive, and the burden became crippling.

Husband was so kind and listened when I kept crying every day, multiple times a day. He told me to just let it out. He was there for me, there for the baby. I carried the baby for nine and a half months, gained an ungodly sum of weight. Lost an ungodly amount of sleep. Couldn't eat properly, experienced isolation and depression when I couldn't tell anyone for three months, felt ill and couldn't drink or go scuba diving during our romantic vacation to Turks and Caicos, worried all the time about Zika or where I might find a public bathroom. Not to mention rings and shoes (and vagina) no longer fitting right. But all I could think after the fact was you don't deserve to have PPD, you're not special enough, you've already reaped too much attention for yourself, attention that wasn't rightfully yours. Your husband deserves the spotlight for once.

This is the conversation I had with myself, over and over: I feel guilty. But you shouldn't. But I do. 

The guilt consumed me. I couldn't talk myself out of it. I felt guilty for wanting to step away even to do household chores, to fold laundry. I felt guilty because I would have enjoyed that more than taking care of the baby. I felt obligated to be with him every second of the day and felt guilty when I wasn't. I felt guilty for crying in front of my husband, for the burden I was placing on his already exhausted shoulders. I felt guilty for crying in front of the baby. I worried he could see into my heart and would know how I felt and carry that with him always. I felt guilty for feeling guilty. It was like the claw of a crayfish, unshakeable.

The thoughts crept in like chinks of light through a door or a gap in the blinds, except it wasn't the light getting in, it was all the grimy fragmented leave behinds of my worst self, and they weren't soft, meandering thoughts, but bold, sharp ones that surprised me with their clarity and intensity. They stained my consciousness with feelings of foreboding and washed my dreams in darkness so that I woke up from awful twisted nightmares of eating my mother as tender dark meat and twigs of bones, or wanting to have sex with the baby, or being lost in a murky sea of shipwrecks or unending corridors or wolves.

I dreamed over and over of murky water and of wolves. In one dream a dog became a wolf became a human with a wolf mask and I woke up abruptly, terrified. I was unable to leave them behind. And when I did wake up, there was a whole separate set of whispered worries. Be careful on the stairs, what if you fall. Be careful as you pass the stairs, what if you hit the baby's head on the banister. Be careful in the bath, what if he drowns. What if the window washers fall on you. What if he suffocates in the bedsheets. What if you fall off the pier with the baby carrier on and he drowns underneath you. What if his listlessness is not tireless but heat exhaustion and he dies. What if you molest him. What if he looks like your brother because you slept with your brother, don't you remember? That's not real. Of course it's not. But...what if it is? What if you sleep through him crying and he dies of a broken heart? Or you don't love him enough, or don't show him enough, and he feels unwanted? What if he hates you because you're not enough, and you'll never be enough, because look at yourself. He knows you're a bad mother. He knows you're not worth it. Your husband knows. The man at the retail shop who sees you without make up on a bleary twilit winter day three weeks postpartum knows. In fact he probably thinks you're in here to steal something because why would someone like you be good enough to shop in a nice store like this. The girl whispering to her friend outside the door knows. Everyone who looks at you sees through to the center of you, they see the rot growing there like the blackness beneath the drain, you can't hide it. And you're trapped and you can't break free and you hate yourself for wanting to be free. But he'd be better off, wouldn't he? What if you went for a walk in the snow, in that crisp, deep blue twilight, and just never came home, but disappeared instead, threw a passport in your purse and walked down a jetway into another life? What if you called the neighbor and said can you watch him and then came home and made things simpler for everyone? 

Now that I think about it, I was having weird thoughts during the pregnancy too; I only had a week or two here and there where I felt honest-to-god depressed, but every now and then I would think, what if I had a miscarriage? Would that be the worst thing in the world? Then I'd be free, I could change my name, board a train, forget this whole marriage thing.

Now, I thank god (with a lower case g) for the medication, for therapy, for living in the day in age when we have the option. For the gym nearby. For the kindness of strangers and friends and people who are becoming new friends. For music. For holding this sloe-eyed little monster in my arms speaking baby talk, asking him if I ate his foot, would I poop a foot. Nothing is an easy fix. I still feel guilty often. It's a balancing act. But he moves me and allows me to live with tenderness and compassion. I went to the dark side when you died, but that ache was so different, it was I want I want I want; a deep longing instead of the perpetual chant of I can't bear this anymore. The more layers of myself that I peel off, the more everything hurts. But it hurts like the spring; it hurts like hope. Getting sick made me realize that I have to remember to live now, that I have to remember to live as me and remember to love, and remember to be kind. I understand you less now than I did before Infant was born, because I love him, but I know that I have to put on my own oxygen mask first, I know that protecting myself will make his life better.

You didn't care for yourself. You lived in denial, and you forced us to live it with you. Time keeps passing and I don't feel as thought I'm closer to forgiving you. I still don't understand your mindset. You yourself weren't an addict, so how could your level of denial resemble so closely that of my father, who still think an alcoholic is someone who "passes out in the street" and "can't hold down a job"? Understanding that you were in denial, not just about your husband's alcoholism and personality disorder and the effect on your children, but about your own diseases (Type I Diabetes first and then cancer), this has been a great gift to me. It helps me in my struggle to combat the guilt and feelings of selfishness in order to take care of myself.

There is so much I don't understand about you still and so much I despise. I despise that you were too weak to make the break that would have saved us all. You will never be back on the pedestal again. But there is so much I share with you also, like the morning, the coming downstairs alone and making coffee and holding the mug in your hand while watching the sky change, one moment a washed grey with dimples of scattered clouds, the next, a wide arc of blue. The walking around the garden to examine everything I've given life to, the pondering, the doodling, the philosophizing. I understand now the solitude you craved and required to go on functioning.

I crave it too. I realize now that it's not a selfish desire, it's not a silly indulgence. It's as necessary to me as blood. That is, if I want to keep being me. Between taking the time to make myself whole versus not and becoming bitter and resentful because of it, I'm guessing Husband and Infant might prefer that I take the time. So here's me, taking the time. Say hi to Swayze, crazy lady.