Birthday season begins

Z.'s long-awaited fourth birthday was on Monday. I keep starting posts and not finishing them, so I'm going to resort to the random bullets form just to get it all out of my head:

• Twenty-one kids, 16 of them three or four, the rest all younger siblings: this is because of the way that Z. falls at the exact midpoint of the very large group of kids at her school who will be entering kindergarten in the Fall of 2010. Last year I argued that she should be included in the youngest preschool class, instead of being kept in the infant/toddler program for a third year. That was one of the best advocacy moments I've had as a parent, with the greatest unforeseeable positive consequences, and if a crazily large fourth birthday party is the only downside, I say hooray. (This year, the class wound up split so that she's almost the oldest in her room, but the two older preschool classes spend a lot of their day together, so now she has new, slightly younger friends in her class but her slightly older friends from last year are still current.)
• Despite how high it was on the overstimulation meter, the party was still a roaring success. When the parents are hitting it off and having a great time, you know things are going well. We used the bookstore, which has three levels, and it was very low-key. Storytime downstairs in the kids' section, freeplay in the reading nook on the second floor, crafts in the community room on the third floor. Kids could move on when they got bored, and it was fine. We paid for pizza, cake, balloons, favors (minimal), and paper goods. I think we spent more than we needed to on the paper stuff, but not too much. Otherwise, I feel like we did it well, for not much money, and minimal headache.
  
• Z. made out like a bandit, of course. I've introduced a concept that I take seriously, which is that of the birthday season, which starts on your birthday and continues for a month afterwards. It's kind of like your birthday is the shiny, blazing head of the comet, and the season is its lingering, tapering tail. This works for me because I have a lot of birthday anticipation and post-birthday let-down, and I could see it going the same way with Z., and I don't want to live with her crashing.
  
• Declaring it birthday season lets us ration the presents, and this is a HUGE advantage. Really, I think y'all should all copy me. She opened all of her grandparent and cousin presents while her grandparents and cousins were here, on the day of her party (the day before her birthday). She opened her parent presents on her birthday, plus the present from her favorite friend. The rest she's been opening one in the morning and one after school, and it means she's actually played with each one instead of discarding it in a frenzy of acquisition.
  
• In theory, this would also let us pace ourselves on the thank-you notes, but we have let that slip and will probably do them all on the weekend.
• The binky fairy came to our house on the night before Z.'s birthday. We didn't expect the binky fairy for another night, but Z. said she was ready. No more binkies for sleeping--until she was three she had a binky in her mouth every minute she wasn't in school. Last year we eliminated them except for sleeping and car trips, and in the Fall we let the car trips drop. Getting to sleep with them, and early-morning-still-in-bed use, these were the last regular holdouts. She still has one for the emotional emergencies we have recently dubbed cyclone feelings (post to come on these eventually, I hope) but it lives in the catch-all space that is my underwear drawer.
  
• I mostly forgot about my labor and Z.'s NICU stay. I had a day or two of saying "hey, I think I'm better, no more PTSD," and then A. left a detail in a story that she would have edited out if I hadn't declared myself better, and I promptly crumpled. So not all the way better, but much, much, much further along the road. And learning that A. has been editing out details like that for years (it was about a mother and baby being separated)? I was terribly touched.
• It snowed hard the night before Z.'s birthday, and her birthday itself was a snow day. The night she was born it was the same way. That was a good echo.
  

Guns

Yesterday, in the car home from our Valentine's tea, Z. asked about my friend Helen dying. For those of you coming in late on this story, Helen died by gunshot at the hands of a stranger who has never been caught.

Z. has figured it out--she put together my sensitivity about guns with Helen's death and she asked, a few weeks ago, if Helen had been killed by a gun. I said yes. A direct question, you know?

So now I had to tell her a story about a bad guy, a real bad guy, and Z. was already obsessed with bad guys, and weapons, and jails, and the various ways of neutralizing bad guys and unleashing your power against the more powerful. It's the kind of storytelling that we find unremarkable in small boys. Z., with her love of dresses and purple and fancyness, is all about the ways of violence in the world.

She wanted to know about the bad guy who killed Helen, and when a story enters Z.'s repertoire she wants to hear it again and again. I do not usually put limits on whether she can ask questions, but it was hard to keep going, and A. finally stepped in and said that she was too young for us to keep telling this story, and when she was older she could ask for it again. I don't know if that was the right way to handle it, but I didn't want to be telling the story, so I let that decision stand.

Instead, we talked about the mechanics of guns, how they work.

Today, when she was playing with A., Z. said that if Z. shot the bad guy one more time, he would have to go to jail. I guess she's still working it all out for herself. But god, it was easier to watch her at it when we were pretending it was all still make-believe.

Trauma, trauma everywhere

Hey all, Z. was born at 2:02 am on March 2, 2005. Seventy-five hours.

I'm gonna write youall a cheery "Now we are three" birthday party kind of post, but you'll have to come back for it tomorrow.

That day, her very first birthday, was the worst day of my life and A.'s, so far. The celebration, the amazement of her arrival, the jubilant end of the long labor nightmare, that sense that we had arrived at the far shore and could triumphantly collapse in its safety: that all lasted 20 minutes, until Z. passed out at my breast while her footprints were being taken.

After they took her from me, after they resuscitated her, after I had reached my hand into the isolette to say goodbye, after they wheeled her from the room and I didn't know where in the hospital the NICU was, after the door closed behind her, what I thought was: "so much for that pregnancy."* Not even "so much for that baby," because I hadn't held her long enough for her to seem real to me, really outside me.

For the first five days of her life, Z. was attached to machines and sedated to the point that initially her eyes rolled back in her head. This was all because of the misdiagnosis (seizure) that was offered to explain her agonal breathing. The breathing trouble was clearly was life-threatening, but it just as clearly ended with no lingering effects. A partially obstructed airway was what she actually had, and a correct diagnosis would have meant no need for a level 3 NICU. But a seizure diagnosis did mean a level 3 NICU, and that meant Z. left the hospital where I birthed her, and seven hours before the earliest moment I was permitted to release myself.

NICUs save lives, I'm totally clear on that, but my baby's life and health were never in danger while she was in a NICU. Maybe that's why I'm also totally clear that NICU's are in the business of separating you from your child and they believe it's for your child's own good, so they set out to convince you of the same thing at the moment when you are least confident of your ability to parent or your identity as a parent, if this is your first pregnancy, and your body is yearning, physically aching to be with your baby.** It is a godawful way to begin parenting. The hospital has your child, and the hospital decides the hoops that must be jumped before your child is given back to you, and the hospital doesn't always tell you what those hoops are, and the hospital reserves the right to change the hoops without bothering to tell you they've been changed until days later, and the nurses call you "Mom" like that word means you're four years old.

I frequently make the Freudian slips "when Z. died," or "Z.'s death" when I am talking about something that happened at Z.'s birth. That was what it felt like. Being home with my wrecked body and my wrecked emotions and no baby and no real idea when I would have the baby, leaving the hospital without her day after day, she began to recede from me just the way she vanished from me when the isolette left the labor and delivery room. I was sort of stupefied that relatives were celebrating this event that felt like a trainwreck to us.

My best friend was my hospital grade breast pump, and I sort of mean that non-ironically. Pumping gave me a way to feel like I was connected to Z, even when she wasn't being permitted to drink it yet. It was something I could do as a mom when we weren't with the baby, it organized my hours and my days, it was measurable. I could see I was getting better at the lactating thing, at least, and I could even control it to some extent, with fenugreek tea and massage to get my let-down going, though the pressure to keep up with hospital feeding protocols during the three days Z. was transitioning to breastmilk threatened my sanity more than anything but the initial separation.

When the nurse said "Mom? There's a problem with your breastmilk," moments before the protocol was set to start and Z. was going to have my milk for the first time, you can imagine how hard I hit the roof. When it was all untangled, it turned out that some other baby's urine tested positive for marijuana, but that baby's sample was labeled with Z.'s name. (The clincher in our favor? That urine sample didn't test positive for barbiturates. Which it should have. If it were Z.'s.)

I wouldn't say that moved me from disintegration to ferocity, because I was still plenty disintegrated, but it at least let me understand that I could dredge up another response to the circumstances. And the circumstances permitted more responses: once she was fully on breastmilk, the wires and electrodes started disappearing. We started asking the doctor and PA who knew us best what it was the staff was looking for to feel comfortable releasing Z. to us. While the answers still shifted around some, they all focused on X or Y staying the same as the barbiturate left her bloodstream.

But really the answer lay elsewhere, because in the end, the unit, which had been half-empty when Z. was admitted, started to fill up again, and someone saw no reason for a normal, sedated baby to be there when there were quads and twins arriving on the same day. Z. left the hospital at one week old with clinical levels of phenobarbitol still in her system, a drug that had last been given to her five hours after her birth.

My mother returned to stay with us Z.'s first days home, and when the baby cried in the night, the next morning she told us what a relief it was to hear it. And it was.


*At the time I had that thought, the pregnancy wasn't, in fact, over, because the placenta was still inside me. After 75 hours my labor shut down prematurely. You know how in childbirth class they tell you that your body's adrenaline can stop or slow labor? Well, even with the Pitocin drip in my arm opened all the way up, I wasn't having another contraction. While we waited to hear word about Z. from the NICU, my midwife extracted the placenta manually.

Beats twiddling your thumbs.

**Which is not a particular yearning that you get back when the kid turns three. Alas.

While we're all taking a break

Seventy-five hours. I was in a haze of endorphins, and time felt very strange--it was something that had texture and elasticity. Each contraction had its own pattern, its own colors, its own rhythm. I knew, going through it, that it was the most heroic thing I'd ever done, because it was a hard labor and it would have been if it had lasted six hours. The pain in my back was intolerable without counterpressure, and the contractions never got organized. It seemed like every few contractions I had to come up with a new way to get through them. I danced deep in my hips, I rocked, I got on hands and knees, I squatted, I knelt with my upper body draped on the birth ball, I sat and rolled on the birth ball while I nearly fell asleep leaning forward on the bed, I lay on my side with my upper leg propped with pillows. I held onto my spouse, my mother, my doula, my midwife. I climbed stairs sideways, I gripped the side of the bathtub from both inside it and out, I hung onto the banister, I grabbed onto a rope hung over door.

My water was broken. I vomited more or less daily. On the third day, I took castor oil and it got messier. I was at the limit of my body and it didn't seem like the baby was ever coming out. The baby started to seem like the enemy. The baby did seem like the enemy. I just needed her to come out so my labor would be over. When I talked to my midwife about it ("How do I stop thinking about the baby as the enemy?") she said the only other person in the world who was physically experiencing my labor with me was the baby.

Z. didn't have such a great time of it. A few months after she was born, we discovered that she started crying when she heard male voices singing. It was abrupt: happy baby, distraught baby. She did the same thing when I lowed like a cow for her: happy baby, distraught baby. I realized that was what the sounds I made during labor sounded like to her. She was traumatized by it, too.


I was a homebirth mom; I only transferred to hospital after 65 hours of active labor at home, and I transferred because I needed to sleep. If I hadn't intended to have a homebirth, I would have had a cesarean, and I didn't need a cesarean. My health and Z.'s health would both have been compromised needlessly, and given that she was transferred to a different hospital for complications unrelated to my labor, our separation would have been even longer and more profound.

So, I do consider my hospital birth--anaesthetized, on Pitocin, and hooked up to machines--to be a homebirth success story because it was a vaginal birth I would not have been permitted if I'd started in a hospital setting, or even in a birth center. Thank god I had a midwife who trusted what she knew a normal birth looked like. Thank god that if it was going to take me that long to get there, I had someone willing to give me the time, and that she, A., my mother, and my doula all gave me the support that I needed to use it. Thank god.

But god has a sick sense of humor, you know? Because this homebirth sucess story was not a successful homebirth. My doula was calling me a birth warrior, but I don't feel like a won a victory. I feel like my body had this big ugly surprise that it waited my whole pregnancy to spring on me, and I'm still coming to terms with it.

(Oh, and restart your watches at midnight, okay? We'll be back on the clock, then.)

Pause in the proceedings

Z. was born in a non-leap year, so all of you with watches running, you can relax for a day. This one doesn't count.

I'll try to get back on later to talk about it more.

Hey!

Ever wonder what 75 hours feels like? Start your watches.

2005, my water breaks. Contractions start in 15 minutes.

Maybe next year I'll be over this instead of shoving it in everyone's faces all over again.

Year to Come

On this day of last year I was walking around less than one cross-eyed look away from falling and crashing into sharp, jagged shards of myself, the result of living too long without sleep and compressed by the full, combined vulnerability of motherhood and small business ownership. But a day or two later, there was something about the turn of the year that encouraged me. Sometimes it does. The Fall was behind me and the just-finished retail season's numbers were very good compared to the previous year's. The store was closed for the first week of January, which gave me a break, and our first day of inventory seemed to go well. Major plumbing work happened that was long overdue. It seemed like even if I was still fragile, I was getting a little more functional, and that there was reason to think things would settle down enough for me to catch up on lost sleep, at least.

Then Helen Hill was shot and killed by an intruder in her home. A few of you reading this knew her and were rocked by her death as much as I was. I spent January in shock and tears, searching the internet for answers that weren't there. I read every newspaper article. I combed her memorial site constantly. I read every blog I could find. I listened in on message board discussions between her friends in Halifax and between slime who'd never met her but were willing to say that her political views led to her death.

Anything that mentioned her name or her husband's, anything that gave me a scrap I could use to understand what had happened, I searched it out, hour after hour for weeks. I wanted to spin those scraps into a story that would let me contain the shock of Helen's murder, but what I found instead was a map of the way one violent death in one doorway in one American city tore into person after person, uncontainable.

It tore into her husband and son more than anyone, of course.

I've been sending them care packages. I sent the first one the day I heard, a package of books that had in common that they held no mention of parents. The exception was Michael Rosen's Sad Book, a simple, searingly honest picture book about the author's anger and grief at the death of his mother and son. Charming Boy's father and grandmother later told me that during the weeks they stayed with Helen's family, that was Charming Boy's favorite, the one he wanted to have read to him over and over.

Since that first package, I have tried to send one box a month. I haven't quite met that goal, but maybe every six weeks, I've collected a few books and toys and added things Z. or I have made and sent them off. Z. is only a few months younger than Charming Boy--if he were going to her daycare, they would be in the same class, so she takes a close interest in these care packages. We usually have a box going, collecting things over the course of a few weeks, but after I sent the last one off--late, as usual, mailing out my blue-and-silver-wrapped tchotchkes a few days after Hanukkah ended--well, I haven't started a new one.

What could I possibly send for the beginning of January, the end of the first full year without Helen? The beginning of the next year? The beginning of all the next years? I'm stuck. All of a sudden that next package feels beyond me.

I think I need to send it anyway, though, and I think I need to get it in the mail before Friday and Helen's yahrzeit. But I have no box going and I can't begin to think about what to put in one. I sort of want someone to give me a shopping list this time so I don't have to think and can just do. So I'm asking you for one. Be my autopilot, will you? What should I send this time?

And, no, at the risk of sounding snarly, I don't want to be told about what a nice gesture the care packages are. I just want to get a push to get over the lump of my grief so I can keep going with them.

Triggers

Today, the dog bite on Z.'s left hand is pretty much healed, and it's her last day on antibiotics. She may not even have a scar, when the redness fades.

Oh, yeah, her left hand: the same arm that was broken last year. It didn't make me happy to see her favoring it again, though she only favored it for a couple of days. And it shocked me back to the NICU to smell antibiotics in her diaper--the first diapers she ever wore in her life reeked of amoxicillin, too. Not that I was allowed to change those, since they were still attempting to get a urine sample from her at the time and it was very easy to dislodge that little bag, but I smelled them when the nurses took them off. I recognized the smell last week from how it smelled 2 1/2 years ago. I recognized the smell then from my own pee earlier that morning, in the maternity ward across town where I'd given birth and she'd been taken from me. Those needless chemicals passing through our bodies and our separation were just two of the long list things that I hated about having wound up in the hospital to birth her.

And the dogbite itself, well it flipped my mother out, thirty-odd years after I was bitten as a toddler.

It was a week like that. Everything and everyone set on edge. I've been seized by an irrational need to hold Z.'s hand everywhere we walk.

So when I was riding in a friend's car this weekend, and I watched the sequence unfurl as we were hit by another car turning left? It was just the next shoe dropping, you know? It was the thing I'd been expecting from the moment I got in the car, the thing I expect whenever I get in any car. The only thing surprising was that when we looked for damage, there was hardly a mark to be seen: the fender had done its job well.

I only wish every collision left so little to regret in its wake.

Figs and strollers

Sorry that it's been quiet here, all. Time gets a little tight around our house during the Jewish Holidays, and we are still in the middle of them. Tonight and tomorrow are Yom Kippur, and Sunday we need to put up our sukkah in time for the beginning of Sukkot on Wednesday. Day care keeps closing, I haven't been getting enough time at work, and the evenings have been crowded with errands and back-to-school events. In the triage of focus that comes with the beginning of the year, blogland has lost out to the real world. I promise to catch up with everyone when things settle down ... after, oh, Columbus Day or something.

And, oh yeah, my head has been done in a little, too. I've had this one in draft all week, turning it over and working at it for really much longer than you'd think, given the end product.

Monday, I kept Z. home from school even though she was not sick. If you've been reading this blog for awhile, you'll realize that for me, admitting this is a little like someone in AA admitting to spending last night with a fifth of bourbon. Getting Z. to school on time, five days a week, every day she's fit to go, has been my marker of functional recovery since last Spring, and on Monday I blew it.

It was the Monday after the big school break for Rosh HaShana. And last year, on the Monday after Rosh HaShana, the first day back to school after that same break, I turned at the top of the garden steps and picked two figs.



It was a perfect, sunny, cloudless, early-Fall day. You know the kind. Z. was standing behind her stroller. She was in a phase of pushing the stroller. She was too short to see over or around the stroller. She wasn't touching the stroller. The stroller was at the top of the steps, and she was behind it. I turned and walked three steps to the fig tree. I picked two, for her lunch. I turned back. Her stroller was beginning its first bump down the steps. She was flying in an arc through the air above it. Somehow I was back on the top of the steps. There was no way I could throw myself beneath her to break her fall. She fell head first. I saw her crown was going to take the impact. I saw her death about to happen in front of me, while I was trapped at the top of the stairs.

It wasn't so much I shouted as the words tore themselves out of me: "Oh, God, Z.!" I do not pray for things. I don't think that prayer works by intervention. I don't even capitalize "god." I don't believe there is a personality behind that word. But when my daughter's death was in motion in front of me, I prayed for something omnipotent to stop it from happening.

At the moment of impact, I did not close my eyes, and I did not turn away, and she did not come down on her crown. Somehow, she twisted. The sound of her hitting the sidewalk was the kind of sound you never want to hear, but it was her ribs and her arm that hit. In the final instant, she twisted towards me, towards the sound of my torn words. The thought of an interventionist god is as alien to me as ever. But maybe, maybe, I can believe in the fierce desperation of my love for her.

When I kept her home this past Monday, the Monday after the big school break for Rosh HaShana, I did not turn at the top of the garden steps to pick figs. There were, blessedly, no strollers in my day.

Answering the birthday question

This year, I learned that chiropractic works. I learned how to knit with fishing line and beads. I learned a pomegranate tree will survive and break dormancy in my front storeroom. I learned how to take care of curly hair. I learned what an airbag looks like after it's gone off. I learned a good therapist is worth almost anything, and so is a good events coordinator. I learned what a failing transmission sounds like. I learned how to order books from publishers electronically. I learned what pwned means.

To my surprise this year, I learned I am a writer. I thought I was a reader, a teacher of writing, and an editor of other people's work, but writing itself was not something I claimed. Now, thanks to some of you, I do claim it.

I learned something I had been taught but had not understood: that writing is in its essence an art form of connection. My words on this screen are nothing but pixels until you read them. But once you do, the words I was hearing in my head, you are now hearing in yours. Few connections are more intimate.



And this year, I learned that the hits can keep coming. There's no upper limit to the number of things that can knock you over, and no lunch break guaranteed in your contract. I re-learned that in an instant a life can be gone with no bringing it back, and there's no limit to the number of bad things that can happen in a month, or six months, or a year. There's no limit to who is vulnerable in your life. If you love, you are vulnerable beyond the limits of your own body. If you even just connect, you are vulnerable.

Nevertheless, I learned connections are the only way to heal those kinds of injuries, so I am trying to figure out how to live, connected and vulnerable and open.

(Wish me luck, people. And help me out, okay?)

And you--did you take some time to think about it? This past year, what did you learn?

Summer Days

My life has been spent on the academic calendar. It's only the past two years that I've had a year-round job, and since I'm my own boss, even that feels like a bit of fiction. Because I'm married to a teacher and used to be one, the summer is still the time of year I think of as dedicated to recuperation from the ravages of the school year.

I am also a seasonal affective disorder sufferer, so my year cycles through low and high. I am likely to be depressed by December and January, even in a good year, and I haven't had a good year in quite some time. This makes me a much better early-season gardener than a mid-season one. By the time the bulbs start to bloom, I am desperate to see the ground returning to life and beauty, so I watch for the crowns of my perennials with the eye of a scavenger.

I feel no similar desperation about keeping the jungle at bay in July. If it grows, it grows, and around here July is much too humid to do anything outside but swim. And August! Forget it. August is for doing as little as humanly possible, preferably in New England.



But as long as there is air conditioning (and in a bookstore in a humid town, there must be air conditioning!), I get things done in summer, usually in bursts of phone calls and fits of organizing energy. Actually, that's how I get things done no matter what time of the year it is, but during the summer I have bursts of bursts, and need less time to flop and catch my breath in between.

This summer has been something of an exception. I have had one notable accomplishment: I hired a bookkeeper. I have yet to give her any of the stuff she needs from me, but I did hire her.

The other high points of my working summer were, for me, occasions for congratulating myself on having hired and promoted well. I had relatively little to actually do in pulling off the fabulously successful HP7 launch party, and the "Best of" honor that we were given is down to my event coordinator more than to me. She's the one who envisioned and organized the festival that got us noticed in April.

Having hired and promoted well, having been freed from most of my child-care duties while A. was home, I have more or less let things go along without me for a couple-few months while I spent most of my energy on getting my emotional life together in various ways.

That work was long overdue, but it's far from done and there is one week left in summer. I'm worried about the fall. I'm worried that I haven't made enough progress, and I'm worried that what progress I've made was only possible because of the conditions of this summer. I know I'm in far, far better shape than I was this time last year. But I haven't tested that much.

It's almost time to go back to school, and I don't know if I'm ready yet.

(Illustration by Z. [detail])
(The orange spirals are Z. and Mama, but I don't know which is which.)

How far have you come?

Niobe asked today if you ever look back at where you started--I didn't comment over there because it would have been out of place for me to do so among the women grieving for lost babies. Z. is alive and well and in her bath with her Mommy as I begin to type. She's thriving.

And since I started this blog, I have come to understand that deeply. One of my big accomplishments this Spring was to let her go to school five days a week.

Oh, where to begin on keeping her home? Z. was home with me for the first six months. We were lucky to have a parent at home that long. But when I tell you I was bleeding from her birth right up to the eight-week follow-up appointment, will you understand that my sanity was also precarious for that long and longer? Forget getting showered and dressed, forget brushing my teeth: if I made it off the bed before A. came home, it was an accomplishment. When A. returned I would thrust Z. into her arms and flee to the garden.

And yet I think that time on the bed was where I respun the threads of connection to my daughter and started knitting my sanity back together. At first, she didn't like being cuddled or touched that much. She didn't resist it, but she didn't seem to relax into it, either. Baby massage didn't calm her down. I did a lot of experimenting with what kind of touch worked--wrapping my hand around one place on her ribs, below her armpit, worked. Rubbing her head a little bit firmly along her suture line. Stroking her legs, sometimes, too. And she wouldn't sleep unless someone was spooned with her, which I found encouraging, though it has taken us until last week to teach her she can go to sleep on her own.

Of course I read all of this in light of her NICU time. She spent her first week in a plastic box with needles in her--and at that point, her first week was very very very recent. So a lot of what I was doing on the bed was teaching her how to be touched and I don't downplay it. But limiting my world to a mattress was not the healthiest thing to have evolved so early in my parenting career.

The best thing I did that summer was hire a girl Friday, a former student who was my mother's helper and assistant in all the preparations for the store. She only came a few hours a day, and not every day, not nearly as long as A. was gone (A.'s school-year schedule keeps her out of the house around 11 hours a day), but knowing she would be there made a huge difference in structuring my day. And then A. finished school and things were easier, and Z.'s day care started a couple days before A. started up again, and then, officially, I was a day-care mom.

I counted myself a failure in the stay-at-home department. I adored the baby, but she took everything I had. I wasn't like those moms who I see walking with a baby in a sling or pushing a stroller to the co-op, moms with routines. Moms with weekly baby groups. Who get out of the house every day. Instead I was home with pillows all around me and a boppy in my lap, unwilling to move a sleeping baby even to get some sleep myself. I had traded away functioning as a professional in the world--or functioning in the world at all--in order to spend all day nursing.

It is unbelievable to me now that I didn't recognize this as depression. Why not? Who knows? I mean, I do know: I saw myself getting better gradually, and I was, at least until the store opened. And I knew that I didn't have post-partum depression. Once Z. was home I was really very fierce about our connection and I didn't question whether I was a good mom, not fundamentally. And it wasn't really six whole months on the bed.

I bawled the first day I left her in day care. She came down with this coxsackie virus only a day and a half after starting. She had an uninterrupted cycle of colds from October to June. I distrusted the mom of three who was the lead teacher because I was sure she was judging my parenting--I mean, she was judging it. But that time away from her was full of renovations and preparations. And when the store opened, it was never enough time.

Her first year, the plan had always been to keep her home on Fridays, but the colds kept her home a lot of other times, too, sometimes so many days that she would have to go in on a Friday instead just so I could get things done, so I wound up seeing her schedule as very flexible. This didn't matter when she was an infant or even a young 1, but I kept it up past her second birthday, and by that time I had to admit I was keeping her home for me, because I didn't want to face work or I because I felt like I could give myself Mama points for putting her needs above mine. I did it because having a flexible schedule was one reason I started my own business--lord knows it wasn't for the financial stability. And I did it, I think, because I liked being at home with her as a toddler in a way I didn't like being home with her as an infant. We got out. We did things.

But there were huge tantrums in the morning, and finally I realized that she never knew whether she was going to school in the morning. That was when I got it. And I got it from having put up a blog post--in not giving her a clear line on this one, major thing, I was keeping her world unstable. So she started going to school every morning.

And I think that was an important moment for me in giving her credit for her health and survival. It meant stepping back from her, hovering less, and in taking that step, the emotional piece followed. She's no more likely to die than any other two-year-old. And, of course, no less. But I'm seeing both sides of that now.

Do I still imagine the car that's going to slam sidelong into Z.'s carseat when we go through the intersection? Well, since A.'s accident in May, it has become the car that will slam into our front while we're turning left at the end of a light cycle. But we turn left less often than we go through intersections. So that's progress.

Charming Boy

Charming Boy is the name I'm using for Helen's son. He was at the memorial this weekend, looking very, very much like her, as we all saw in her films because Helen had included footage from her own childhood in some of them.

I was struck by how he seemed to be protecting himself, evaluating the grownups around him with care. All these grownups, talking about his mama! Z. is a few months younger than Charming Boy--in fact, she is now the age he was when he woke up in the dark of the early morning because his dada scooped him up to go and investigate why his mama was crying out "Please don't hurt my baby!"

This is the same plea I made in the three words ("Oh, God, Z.!") that tore out of me while I watched Z. flying, crown-first, through the air to the concrete sidewalk last September. I was talking to god. Helen was talking to a man with a gun, but maybe god was listening because the only one of them not shot that morning was Charming Boy.

Thank god, all Z. suffered was a broken arm. But she regressed on every front; she played the game of putting a pretend cast on her arm until she could no longer fit an empty toilet paper roll over her hand; she is only now becoming confident of herself in space. I see 18 month-olds doing more adventurous climbing than she does at 27 months and I know this is not just her native caution. The world of stairs and high places has looked very dangerous to her for a long time.

Charming Boy's arm didn't break, his heart did. And so did his daddy's. There is no mama to nurse him better. Seeing him this weekend, seeing how he loves to run and play and climb, but keeps his words and his spirit hugged close to himself, I could hardly let myself think of how the world of grownup people must look to him.

Filling in the details

This past weekend, I had planned to be in New York for the book industry's gigantic trade show/overstimulation-fest. But as I listened to myself talking about it, I realized that the only reason I was going was that it was on the East Coast again this year. It would have been my fourth one in a row and I still have ARC's floating around the house from the first one I went to.

When I decided not to go, I felt giddy, like I had just received a gift weekend, but A.'s parents had been counting on us coming to New York for a visit, so they came down on Sunday. Not a big deal by itself, but we had also turned down two social commitments on grounds of being out of town, a family birthday party Saturday evening and a bridal shower early Sunday afternoon. Those events got added back into the schedule. It was one way to learn I'm just not up to that much socializing in one weekend.

The birthday party was fine. It was all people we know from shul, and toddler-friendly. I left feeling like "y'know, this social thing isn't too hard."

Sunday morning I woke up with the strange pain that has replaced menstrual cramps since my period came back--I get nerve pain from roughly the right side of the base of my uterus, stretching down the inside of my thigh to a few inches above my knee. This is so exactly the same every month that I imagine someone with more precise knowledge of anatomy could even name the nerve, but it only puzzled my GP when I brought it up in my physical earlier this month.

Sunday was worse than it's been in awhile. With ibuprofen, homeopathics, heat, and more sleep, I made it downstairs just in time for lunch. Grandparent visits usually get Z. riled up beyond the point of napping, but to our surprise she took herself upstairs for a nap when lunch was done. As A. and I were getting ready for the shower (the grands had agreed to babysit), I felt more and more like I could handle no more people. If I could just lie down for five minutes first I'd be better. But I was crying by the time I had my glasses off. I had one of those outpourings of self-hatred that punctuate my life. I've dragged A. into debt, I can't do something basic like get myself to sleep on time, I am too fragile to go out in public, I can't even take the baby when she asked me expressly to give her time to grade, etc.

In the end I stayed home and napped with Z. while A. made an appearance at the shower. After our nap, I stayed hiding in the bedroom, reading the ARC for Sophie Gee's forthcoming novel, waiting for the next dose of ibuprofen to kick in, listening to the grandparent-induced hilarity happening downstairs and feeling cowardly and flat. Eventually A. brought up a bowl of ice cream and with this final fortification I felt up to rejoining the family.

This sleep thing is the dark heart of my state of mind.

My problem is that I get to the end of the day desperate for time to myself, so even though A. and Z. are usually asleep by 10, I stay up til 1:30 or 2:00 to get those hours in. Left to my own devices, I'm pretty much a 1am to 9am sleeper, so even when I'm very tired this doesn't seem that late to my body clock, especially in summertime when it's still light out at 8pm.

But A.'s alarm goes off at 5:30 and Z. is usually up by 7, so I'm losing a few hours every night. I also haven't slept through the night more than a handful of times since my second month of pregnancy, 3 years ago. This cycle builds on itself until I crash.

Sorry for the quiet

I inadvertently took the weekend off b/c of an in-law visit, a daunting social calendar (at least for me), and a meltdown. I just made it through reading everyone else's blogs, and have no time for a real post here, nor even for a response to the comments on my last post.

I'm trying not to blog after dinner so I can catch up on sleep (see meltdown, above), so it may be kind of a quiet week in the Rhyming neighborhood, but I will get back to you!

If anyone wants to weigh in on the topic of meltdowns and self-induced sleep-deprivation, the comment fields are yours to do with as you please.

Strangely...

...I am posting this from a computer in the lounge of the Honda dealership, and all the Blogger buttons are in Chinese. Go figger.

The car saga continues, and continues to intersect with the therapy saga. (Sorry, I'm not up to hunting down html for internal links in Chinese, but the post about switching therapists and car problems is in my archives under Depression. I'll try adding the link later.)(Okay, it's later now, and here it is.)

On Friday, I was going to have my last therapy session with my ineffective therapist. What I haven't said about Ineffective Therapist is that almost the first thing she did when we started last Fall was offer me medication, while also acknowledging that I'm not the type to want to use it. I didn't want to use it, and the idea of going on antidepressants still scares me and, honestly, makes me burst into tears if I think too hard about it. But Ineffective Therapist, now that I think about it, didn't have a lot else in her bag of tricks. She put me on other ingestables instead--vitamins and minerals and Bach flower remedies. The supplements probably helped some, but it wasn't enough.

Here's what happened Friday: the car wouldn't start. I had cut it rather close because I had to open the store on Friday, and I hadn't gotten Z. to day care before store-opening time, so by the time I called Ineffective Therapist to cancel it was very close to the time of my appointment. And she asked if I wanted to reschedule. Which I didn't. I stopped therapy with her over the phone instead, explaining I was going back to Dr. L. She took it okay, not great but okay, and ended the conversation by saying that if I wanted to start medication she would be happy to help.

After that phone call, I called daycare to say no Z., because I figured there was no guarantee I'd be done with car stuff in time to pick her up. Then Z. and I had adventures with tow trucks and extremely nice co-op shoppers--the tow truck couldn't accommodate a car seat even though I told the dispatcher I was travelling with a toddler, and Extremely Nice Co-op Shopper saw me while she was loading her groceries into her car and offered to follow the truck. Good Samaritans just stop me in my grumpy tracks--and I gotta pay it forward next chance I get.

We were in the dealership a good long time, and it wiped Z. out and she was sick all weekend with low appetite and spiking fevers, but she seems okay this morning, except for waking up at 6:00. That was because I needed to get the car here early enough for a loaner. And why am I back here after spending most of the day on Friday? They replaced the battery, but didn't have time to check out the whine. And so here I am, waiting for that loaner so I can get to my first full session with Dr. L.

What I think about antidepressants is that they seem like an easy solution to a hard problem, and I'm not sure that they don't do more papering over than actually solving anything. I don't like the idea of feeling worse while they kick in. I don't like the idea of side effects so severe that many people can't tolerate them. I don't like the fact that they're only slightly more effective than placebo, and help only half or less of those who use them. I don't want the effect on libido--really, really, I don't think my marriage could take that. I don't like facing a withdrawal process getting off of them. And I don't like the idea of something chemical affecting my mood, though if the rest weren't there I think I'd be more willing to risk it. But I'm not, not yet.

Depression

The central fact of my sensory life right now is depression, but I skirt around it here. I name its source (PTSD), I sometimes go into its effects (meltdowns and financial screw-ups), but I don't often describe it. Here goes:

It feels like a grey, empty place at my center, from my lungs to my belly. It is as though there's a little less light reaching my retina than there should be. My hearing is somehow less differentiated, as background noises fuzz their way up to the foreground. The emotional high notes of my life have been muted, but not the low ones. Happiness will reach me as a trickle coming down, unhappiness as a spring welling up.

My thoughts proceed as though my brain is wrapped in a duvet--it's muffling and hard to get out of. My follow-through is lousy. My memory is patchy. My sense of time is off. My sleep is irresponsible. I think I must prefer exhaustion to remembering my dreams. Books and blogdrift are my anaesthesia.

I started therapy last fall. I felt that being so marginally functional for so long was unfair to A., and I called up a woman whose name my midwife had given me when I was a wreck right after Z.'s birth. I keep deleting descriptive sentences because everything I can think of to say about her would identify her to anyone who knows her even slightly, and I don't want people to think any less of her because of something I write here. Let me try it from another angle, then. Therapy with her has never felt like therapy. Sometimes I leave feeling better, sometimes not, but I don't feel like this is going anywhere. I don't feel like there's anything to be engaged with when I'm not there. I am seeing her again on Friday, and although I haven't told her yet, it will be for the last time.

I realized that in the Fall when I started seeing her, in my heart of hearts I went mostly to demonstrate to everyone who sees me falling apart that yes, I know that I am falling apart and ought to be in therapy. When I met her, I liked my current therapist and I think she would be a good match for me if I were looking for advice and wisdom. Unfortunately, advice and wisdom are not doing it for me. I am not getting better. I don't even see the route to better.

I want to be in therapy to get better.

Surprisingly, I didn't understand this before now. Having understood it, I can't stay with a therapist who isn't really helping me.

Unsurprisingly, this is not at all the first time I've been in therapy. I briefly had a bad therapist in college, and then for a year I had a much, much better one. And finally in grad school I hit the jackpot. I found a great therapist. I was in therapy with her for a few years, jumping in and out as necessary, trying to break some relationship patterns I didn't like, and I stopped therapy with her because I had succeeded in breaking them, which is a heck of a lot to say for your therapist. I think I always knew that if I was really serious about getting better, I would need to call her.

For the sake of bloggy anonymity I will call her Dr. L. Somehow this appeals to me exactly because it's not what I call her: I use her first name, but Dr. Lastname is what she uses on her answering machine.

Last Sunday night, A. asked me to call Dr. L., in a tone that meant she needed me to do this for her. So I did. Dr. L. found a time in her schedule for me. Better than that, she sounded warmly happy to hear from me after 6 years. Thursday morning was my appointment.

Here's where things went to pieces. A. had told me she would wake me at 6:00. I woke on my own at 6:30. A. came up, saw I was awake, waved at me and dashed out of the house for her train. My mother was visiting until Wednesday afternoon, making it the first morning since the previous Friday that Z. had only one grown-up helping her get ready for the day. Heroically, I headed off fuss after fuss and we were both set to walk out the door at 8:30--with parking, it's a 2-minute drive to school, 5 minutes to settle Z. in, 30 minutes for drive in rush hour to Dr. L.'s office, 10 minutes for finding parking, 5 minutes to walk from parking. Eight-minute cushion.

I grabbed my keys from the hook and found no key to the rental car. Now I had a 2-minute stroller-wrestle, 10-minute stroller-walk, 2-minute stroller-wrestle, 5 minutes to settle Z., 5 minutes to walk to SEPTA, indefinite wait for train, unlikely to catch one before 9:00, probably boarding train around 9:15, maybe 9:20. Twenty-two-minute train ride, switch to trolley, not sure which trolley anyway, indefinite wait for trolley, let's say switch+wait is 10 minutes. Not sure how close trolley would get me, let's say 10-minute trolley ride and 10-minute walk. These are probably all low estimates. Now my session is probably ending as I arrive. There is resistance to therapy, and then there is sabotage.*

I called A. at her school and told her to look at her key ring. She said, "Oh no." She said, "I'm really sorry." She suggested SEPTA. It was instant meltdown for me--"I can't make it, how can I make it, I have to walk Z. to school, there's no way I can make it. SEPTA! Do you know how long SEPTA takes?" (She does, she used to live not far from Dr. L's office when we were dating.)

Mama in tears. Z. patting Mama's face, saying "I made you happy." This is not how I want her to grow up.

The next 40 minutes were me forcing function to overcome meltdown. It was a little convoluted along the way, but the final piece was me once again teary, briefly explaining the tears in order to ask the synagogue office (Z.'s daycare is at our synagogue) if I could use a phone to reserve a PhillyCarShare car. The rabbi offered to help me in any way he could, which I believe I interpreted correctly as an offer of pastoral counseling--and very decent since the minyan I belong to within the synagogue is lay-led, therefore he barely knows me. I think once I feel settled in the new therapy I may take him up on it.

Five minutes before my appointment, I was finally on my way. By the time I got there, with the end of rush hour in my favor, I still had 20 minutes in my session. Those 20 minutes were fairly breathless since I had to fit 6 years into them, but even so I felt like I was returned to good hands. She listened, she asked the right questions, she knows me already and I know her (at least as a therapist). She asked to see Z.'s picture and saw in her face just what I would want her to see.

She told me that even though I am clearly distressed, I seem to have bloomed in the past six years. I can't tell you how hopeful that makes me feel.

*On sabotage: A. lurks here and some of you know her as well or better than you know me, so I don't think I can just say this and move on. I think it's clear from the post--but worth restating--that I don't think this was conscious. A. says it was not the case, she was simply enormously tired, forgot she had told me 6:00, and didn't look at her key ring because she saw I was up and so she didn't lock the door (our front door opens into a fenced and gated sideyard, and we have two very barky dogs to scare off bad guys ... so we don't always lock it). Since A. didn't take out her keys that morning until I called her and told her to look at them, she didn't remember that the rental key was there. It's certainly true she has been tired, and still shaken from the accident. And although I thought of it independently, she did leave messages suggesting PhillyCarShare and called daycare to make sure I checked our messages. I do believe that she wants me to be in effective therapy, but going back to Dr. L. is the first step towards us finding a couples counselor and the fact I can't get past is that A. could not have undermined it more elegantly and effectively if she tried. She brought me roses on Friday as an apology for doing it, whatever the motivation. They are red, long-stemmed, and organic.

Blogging Against Disablism, One Day Late

My home DSL is still out, so I wasn't able to post this yesterday. Apologies, Goldfish. And apologies, also, because this is somewhat meandering.

One of my tags on this blog is PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. I have PTSD as a result of Z.'s birth and subsequent hospitalization (a misdiagnosis--she's fine. I'm not.) What's important for the topic of the day (or of yesterday), is that this experience has underlined for me the ways in which our health-care system is skewed heavily towards responding to crises and there is little to no support for people emerging from crisis, often with significant damage to their psyches as well as bodies. If there is psychological damage it is even more difficult to get what you need because it is hard to acknowledge that it won't get better by itself. Or through, you know, your steely determination, which you may be surprised to find is in shreds, just part of the damage. And yet the myth of "getting over it" persists.

This is being played out right now as veterans return from Iraq. Do you know what at least the past century and a half of soldiers' "total war" experience has shown? PTSD (or shell-shock, or combat fatigue) is not really a disorder, in the sense that we usually understand a disorder. It's not something that happens if something is wrong with your emotional system--expose any person to enough trauma, and he or she will respond in this way. It's a normal response to being hurt: in other words, it's more like an injury than an illness. The only question is how quickly individuals reach their limit, and length of exposure to trauma is a factor. Everyone has a limit, and experiencing war or sexual assault are what most reliably push you past it.

The New York Times magazine had an article a few weeks back about female soldiers experiencing the double whammy of sexual assault by fellow soldiers and combat exposure. These women are being injured twice over by the patriarchal war machine (quite literally), and then they're left nearly alone to get over it. I would much prefer not to have a patriarchal war machine, but that is a topic for Blogging Against Patriarchal War Machines Day. As long as such a machine is operating, it seems obvious that if our soldiers are being wrecked by their experience, we need to take care of them and we're not. In part this is the shameful inadequacy of the VA system to respond to 1) psychological damage of any kind and 2) the needs of female soldiers. And inadequacy #1 seems linked very much to the focus on the heroic rescue, which means a focus on physical injury and a blindness to emotional ones (including those that accompany physical injury).

In this war, resources are being poured into speedy response to traumatic physical injuries that would normally be fatal, also without adequately supporting these vets in their lives after injury. Saving a life is heroic. It's even manly. But the slogging years of recovery and adaptation and plain old survival--which are much more domestic somehow, much more feminine--those need to be supported, too.

Behind the curtain

I wrote that last one at the store during book group time (people like that we have a book group and, now that we're discounting it, they buy the book of the month, but they don't show up to talk about it.) A. and I had one of our invisible fights immediately before I left for book group time--"invisible" because to someone outside the relationship they don't look like much but from inside they are upheavals.

The moment I stood up from the computer after the last post, I started crying. I cried as I shut down the store, I cried as I locked up, I turned around and put on a bright, sunny, walking-home-at-9 pm face to cross the 20 feet to our garden stairs, whereupon I started crying once again.

I am not in okay shape. I am underslept and overwhelmed and out of touch with myself and scared.

Blogging is good--I am interested in something new, writing a lot, and making new friends, something that is difficult in real life, not so much because I am antisocial as because while we were in Madison a lot of our friends--well, no, all of them, a remarkable and unlikely sweep, but it's true, really very nearly all of them--all of our friends moved away. They were graduate students or rabbinical students and they all got jobs far away just when we returned from far away, obliging us to find new friends while having a baby and starting a business and having a couple of really tremendously sucky years at work in A.'s case: this year she is at a different, different school (as Z. would say) and it is much better for her, which may be why I am falling apart more, since part of our dynamic is that only one person gets to fall apart at a time.

Did you follow all of that?

Blogging is also bad, because just now it is substituting for doing practical things in the real world that might help me get better. So I am going to take a few days off and try to get myself organized or at least slept-up. Make some calls. Clear out clutter. Garden. Maybe swim. Be outside while the weather is warm. Talk to A. instead of hiding up here at the keyboard. Oh, and there's a book festival table and a late birthday party I have to manage to pull off, too.

I'll be back next week--for the Wednesday Whine if not earlier--and I'll catch up with all of you then.

Cabin fever

We spent two years in Madison, Wisconsin while A. was in grad school. There's actually a lot to say about Madison, but the obvious thing about it is that is very cold for a very long time. Winter comes early and stays late, and it's an intense, unrelenting cold in between.

And I have seasonal affective disorder. I was far from my family, far from friends (my old friends who'd gotten jobs in Madison were on leave when we first arrived; the only person A. knew in Madison was her ex, who was a surgical resident); I was jobless, trying to finish a PhD that I was finally admitting to myself I had no use for; and on top of all of that I was realizing that I didn't miss teaching, which was the career I had always seen for myself, and had begun well, and had loved. I should have missed it. But I didn't. I was so relieved not to have to have grading weighing me down. But if I wasn't going to teach anymore, I had an enormous hole to fill.

My first winter in Madison was not pretty. I spent a lot of time reading second-hand mystery novels, knitting from my stash, eating chocolate, feeling poor. I gained a lot of weight on this regimen; even so, almost the first thing I did when we got to Madison was join a gym with a pool, and even in the worst parts of that winter when I just wanted to stay curled in the big armchair which a heap of beautiful wool and a book in my lap, I managed to get myself to the pool regularly.

Since Z. was born, I've barely swum any laps at all--and that's more than two years. Our Y membership is current, the pool is nice and it's not too far. I swam pretty often while I was pregnant and substitute teaching, our first 6 months back. I tell myself it's too difficult to find the time, but I'm managing to waste scrape together all this time to blog, so that's just a little white lie I'm telling myself. I don't want to look at how discouraged I feel about moving my body. It seems so unfamiliar to me now, not entirely trustworthy, and definitely not the body that I know from the water.