"Insanity" is the theme of this month's Blogging for Books contest, and this is my entry: the story of the months when I was whomped by seasonal affective disorder and postpartum depression. If the DSM editors ever decide this particular combination of maladies needs its own name, I propose that they call it SAPP'D (Seasonal Affective/PostPartum Dysphoria). It certainly sapp'd me.
At the time we were living in Scotland. The thing we didn't realize until after my husband got the job offer was how far north Scotland really is: it's at roughly the same latitude as Hudson Bay. The climate is mild because of the gulf stream, but the seasonal variations in daylight hours are considerable. Summers are glorious. Winters -- well, let's just say the British tourism industry isn't plugging winter as the time to see the British Isles. Dreary doesn't begin to cover it.
Five years ago this week I was almost at term with my second son. (The one who was going to be named Maria Caroline. So much for this mother's intuition.) I was anxious: we were far away from family, I had had trouble recovering my emotional equilibrium after my first son's birth, and our first winter in Scotland had been difficult. I was braced for it to be rough. I just didn't know how bad it would get.
I didn't know that I would hemorrhage after the birth, or that the resulting anemia would leave me drooping and enervated for weeks. I remember walking home from the library six weeks afterward, panting and counting my steps to get to the top of the hill.
I didn't anticipate that I would get my comeuppance for all the times I had rolled my eyes at my mother-in-law's tales of my husband's infancy. "He went to sleep on the stroke of midnight," she always said emphatically. "I would rock him and nurse him and sing to him and walk him and he would not go to sleep until the clock struck midnight." "Then you should have just set the clock ahead," I would think complacently, holding my firstborn who always went down peaceably around nine o'clock -- owing, I was sure, to my superior mothering.
But when I brought home my second son, I would rock him and nurse him and sing to him and walk him and he would not go to sleep until somewhere between eleven and one. Because we slept with our first son I had never faced the notorious sleep deprivation most new parents go through. (More smugness remembered ruefully.) Co-sleeping, however, presumes that both parties are asleep. What do you do when a baby just won't go down? I still don't know. I played the same John Michael Talbot album every night, thinking it would soothe us both. To this day I flee the room shrieking when I hear its opening measures. One night as one o'clock neared and my baby was still wide awake, my walking turned to stomping and I began chanting -- part prayer, part howl -- "God, this sucks this sucks this sucks." My husband came sleepily into the living room and said, "What's going on?" "He just won't sleep," I snapped. M said, "I'll take him. You go to bed." In less than sixty seconds he returned with a sleeping baby. I felt like a failure, still too angry to be grateful and too wound up to sleep.
There was no way I could have predicted the intensity of my older son's reaction to his brother's birth. Believe me when I tell you I had tried for months to prepare him. But I am convinced that no amount of prenatal preparation can really get the point across: the reality of a small and mewling infant who can do no wrong even as you suddenly can do no right is enough to send the most well-balanced toddler temporarily over the edge. My sweet and chatty two-year-old transmogrified into a fractious whiny terror who wanted nonstop attention and round-the-clock nursing. (The only good thing I have to say about those first weeks of tandem nursing is that I was back in my jeans at two weeks postpartum, which was handy on the days I managed to get dressed.)
I had forgotten about the newborn time warp, that curious phenomenon in which entire hours vanish while you do the most basic things. Breakfast, sponge bath, diaper changes -- poof! it's time for lunch and you're all still in your pajamas. Here's where the Scottish winter really kicked us in the teeth: by the time we were dressed, my older son needed his nap. When he woke up at three, the sun was going down. I craved sunlight. But on the days when we scrambled to get out the door and head to the park, we were greeted by dismal gray skies and spattering cold rain.
During this time I was ferociously lonely. We had lived in Scotland for a little over a year by the time our baby arrived, and we had made many acquaintances. But there was no one on my side of the Atlantic to whom I could say, "Look, I am really struggling. Yesterday I was literally pulling out my hair in frustration. I don't know how to make things better and I can't keep going like this."
The worst of it was the strain on my marriage. My husband was also deeply unhappy but we couldn't seem to talk without sparks flying. "Hello," one of us would say. "I can't believe you!" the other would retort. I remember saying desperately once, "Please don't pull away from me like this. You are the only person I have here." There was only silence in response.
I can no longer remember many details from those days: I only remember slogging through the endless rounds of meals and laundry (how do you keep a family in clean dry clothes when you have no dryer and it rains every day?), the preparations for Thanksgiving visitors, the Christmas cards and shopping -- all of it while feeling as if I were pushing a Sisyphean weight ahead of me. One day I looked down at my children and thought with dread: "I have to be these boys' mother for the rest of my life." I wanted to cry.
Maybe that was the point at which I said, like Miss Clavel, "Something is not right" -- that day when I looked at my boys and felt chiefly discouragement. I rented a light box and sat in front of it faithfully twice a day. I could feel myself uncurling, kind of like a daisy as the dew is drying. I did those women's-magazine-marriage-enhancing things like pushing myself to say "yes, and..." instead of "but--" when my husband finished a sentence. I made a point of having some fun with my older son every day and I said yes when a woman from church offered to take him to the library once a week so I could get some time alone with the baby.
And I saw the truth of the saying "If Mama ain't happy, ain't nobody happy." When Mama gets less unhappy, ain't nobody quite as unhappy as they were. (Let me reiterate here my contention that the whole thing should be changed to "If Mama ain't happy, the rest of the family cuts her some slack and perhaps gives her a footrub.") On Christmas Eve my husband climbed out of bed after a week of the flu. He went out briefly and came back with flowers (Gerbera daisies, now that I think about it). When he proffered them shyly I put my head in my hands and cried with gladness and with relief that the siege seemed to have ended. Later that night we went to midnight Mass together. As we walked through empty streets I sang quietly: "Light and life to all he brings, ris'n with healing in his wings." Haltingly, cautiously, we lurched back into the neighborhood of normal.
Remember all the Y2K hysteria -- the apocalyptic predictions and the stockpiling of lentils and bottled water? On the last night of 1999 we listened to the radio reports that assured us civilization was not collapsing in Japan and Russia and Italy (the previous month's dire warnings about the state of Italian sewage systems notwithstanding). We played a companionable game of Scrabble. At midnight we walked to the corner where we could see the fireworks exploding over the heart of the city. Back at home I put Paul Simon's "Graceland" album on the stereo and my husband kissed me, tentatively, and then kissed me again.
I used to think "The Boy in the Bubble," the first song from that album, was all about the bleakness and isolation of modern life. But I will always remember hearing it that night as we crossed together from December into January, from the twentieth century into the twenty-first. I hear Paul Simon singing "These are the days of miracle and wonder" and it sounds like hope to me. "And don't cry, baby, don't cry," he sings, and it puts me in mind of stuttering steps toward an unknown future, fuzzy-edged and full of promise.
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