I have made the mistake of sharing this with my husband.
“There’s something wrong with him,” I say.
It is a rare, quiet moment. My mother, who extended her stay out of concern for all of us, has turned in early. The baby is sleeping soundly in his crib, his room filled with the sound of white noise from the humidifier. And the ceiling is a field of blue and green stars from his turtle nightlight.
In our first shared moment in a quiet house, we are sitting on the couch trying to remember how to be alone together. But it feels awkward. He looks different, thin and pale with dark circles under his eyes. I am different in about a hundred different ways, jumpy and nervous, quick to snap. We are both waiting for the noises on the monitor that will send one of us up the stairs.
But when I looked at my husband, I didn’t see the mirror of my own despair. He didn’t seem shattered the way I felt. But, of course, he left for the office every day. Our front door was his portal back to the normal world where people work, and went out to lunch, and surfed the Web at their desks in the afternoon, and met for drinks. People laughed and had thoughts, important thoughts that didn’t fly out of their heads like owls delivering secret messages.
He disappears through the portal by seven in the morning (before the baby, he never left until eight-thirty at the earliest). Sometimes he comes home as late as eight. He says he has to work more now, because of the baby, because I have decided not to go back to work and to stay home with our child. I felt the first trickle of resentment the minute he walked out the door his first day back, clutching his little book of photos. Six weeks later, my resentment has bloomed into a full-blown rage. But I bury it, deep inside. I know it is wrong. I wasn’t really angry with him, was I? After all, he was supporting us now. And it was I who had pushed for a baby.
“We had a hard few weeks,” he says. “But he’s doing a lot better, isn’t he?”
I don’t say anything. There’s a glass of wine for me on the table, but I don’t want it. If I drink it, I’ll have to pump and dump. I hate hooking myself up to that machine, sitting and listening to it sigh and whir as it drains the milk from my breasts.
“The crying,” he says. “That was so hard. But it’s stopped, other than what’s probably normal. And he’s sleeping a lot.”
“He doesn’t seem right,” I say. It sounds weak and a little whiny. I can’t put into words what I feel in my body. My husband stares at me in that way that he has, so present, so earnest. He has his hand on my leg.
“The labor, the C-section, the colic,” I say into the thick, expectant silence. “Maybe it hurt him.”
He is tender, tries to talk it through with me. (He’s just a baby. We’ll all adjust, because everyone does, don’t they? Maybe we got all the hard stuff out of the way, maybe we’ll sail through the terrible twos and adolescence, he joked.) But I had a feeling that we wouldn’t be sailing through anything ever again.
“My father,” I say. And I hate the words before they’ve even tumbled out of my mouth.
“No,” he says, horrified, as though the thought has never crossed his mind. “Don’t.”
“He looks just like my father.”
So much for “date night.”
The next day, he calls in sick to work. Appointments are made-not for the baby, but for me.
My ob-gyn quickly diagnoses me with postpartum depression. And my husband and I sit in her pink, sunlit office while she explains how the massive hormonal shifts that occur after pregnancy don’t regulate right away for everyone. She kept calling it the baby blues, which I think she did to take the edge off of it. Because while “baby blues” sounds soft and pastel-colored, easily managed, postpartum depression is black and red, with thick, hard edges; it bludgeons. It was likely, said the doctor, that my traumatic labor, the emergency C-section, followed by the colic, have contributed to my descent into PPD.
“It all feeds into each other,” said my doctor patiently. “And-P.S.-none of this is a walk in the park under the best of circumstances. More women suffer PPD in a given year than will sprain an ankle or be diagnosed with diabetes. So, you’re not alone.”
To my husband: “Let’s make sure Mom is getting plenty of rest. Can you take the nighttime feedings?”
“Of course,” he says. “Of course.”
And for me, a low-dose antidepressant, the decision to go to formula and stop breast-feeding-which was already on the table because the baby was gaining weight too slowly.
Another failure for me: drugs during labor, emergency C-section, colic, unable to nurse beyond two months. No wonder my baby hates me. I have failed him in every single way and he’s not even three months old.
In the mirror, there’s no trace of the happy pregnant person I was. My ripe bosom, my glowing hair, my round belly-it’s all gone flat. I am dull and deflated, abandoned by life and joy and expectancy. I am flabby and gray.
I have started taking the pills and I pray that everyone is right, that I have been sabotaged by my own brain chemicals. And that the little blue pill is going to put things right again.
“All the hard stuff just goes away-the pain, the stress, the sleep deprivation,” my mom soothed in the car. “You just don’t remember any of it later on.”
Please, please, please, let them all be right. Let it be me. Let there be something wrong with me. Something normal that can be fixed quickly and easily. Please let there be something wrong with me, and let it not be something wrong with him.
8
Luke was waiting for me on the porch when I arrived. A light snow had started to fall, and I’d wiped out twice on the slick roads. I was going to need a ride home from Luke’s mom. He was sitting on the porch swing, emitting a sullen and self-pitying energy.
“You’re late,” he said as I swung off my bike. My pants were ripped, and my knee was bleeding from the second fall.
“She left you?” I said. A red Volvo usually dropped him off, waiting in the street until I opened the door. Whoever it was, a slight woman with a wild frizz of red hair, she’d never gotten out of the car. Her name and phone number were scribbled on the chalkboard in the kitchen. But it was not information I had committed to memory.
“She didn’t wait,” he said. “By the time I realized that you weren’t there, she was gone.”
“You have a key,” I said, climbing the steps.
He pumped his legs lightly and the swing emitted an irritating squeak as it moved back and forth. Something about the noise, about his pouty face, sent a skein of irritation through me. What a baby.
“I was afraid to go in alone,” he said. I didn’t buy it. I’d been spending time with Luke for about three weeks. He was lots of things-a scaredy-cat wasn’t one of them.
“Afraid of what?” I asked. I stood in front of him and gave him a light tap on his foot with my toe.
He shrugged and looked up at me. His eyes were a little damp but he wasn’t crying.
“I just didn’t want to be alone in there.”
I remembered coming home from school alone when I was a kid. Occasionally, I had to let myself in, make my own snack, and do my homework until my mother came back from wherever she was. When the school day had gone well, it was heaven. I’d eat anything I wanted, lie on the couch and watch television, giddy with my own personal freedom.
But when the day had been bad-if I’d done poorly on a test, or been bullied in gym class, which I often was, or if there had been some “incident,” or I hadn’t eaten my lunch because of some kind of cafeteria torture, I’d hate that empty house. I’d hate the way it echoed and was dark when I entered. I hated how no lights were on, and nothing was cooking in the kitchen, no music, no television sound. No mom to metabolize the events of the day.