Ben took FMLA and bought us a month of togetherness. We brought Clara to the aquarium. We watched more HGTV. When they began my medications, I’d stopped nursing—the labs tested my breast milk and called it contaminated. After the ECT they lowered my dose, but when I offered myself to Clara, she declined me. This seemed an appropriate punishment. After everything I’d done to her, I wouldn’t have trusted me either.
Using formula meant Ben could be a more active parent, that Ben could forge a real relationship with Clara. She was now sleeping up to seven hours at a time. Ben was back to sleeping beside me, and he’d lift Clara from the bassinet when she woke crying and take her to the living room, put on sports highlights, and feed her.
They’d had two nights together without me at the beginning of my treatment, and something had altered in that two-night separation, had left a scar more prominent than anything that had occurred with Margaret, more obvious than even Clara’s finger. She still preferred me to Ben, but she seemed wary of me. And I had learned what it was like to be without her—the stiff hospital sheets, the sudden crying jags, the sense that I’d become an echo of myself.
I didn’t think, now, that I would ever finish my dissertation. The fantasy I’d entertained in the throes of my “flight of ideas,” of having both motherhood and a career, was a pipe dream. But maybe it was less that I didn’t want to finish, or that I couldn’t finish, than that I was afraid to finish. I was afraid I would find them again, Michael and Margaret. I was scared I would jump-start the old circuitry, undo all of what my doctors had been calling my good work. Corine, my outpatient therapist, said it would be fine, that most women took up their former occupations, most new mothers found their way back to themselves. She said that it’s generally a good idea to finish what you start.
Corine had a white noise machine in her office, the same brand we used for Clara. She had little individually wrapped mints in bowls at strategic locations, and whenever I looked at them, I thought about little individual mint wrappers piled in some landfill. Corine wasn’t interested in psychoanalysis, or if she was, she pretended that she wasn’t. This pretending was something that had struck me about therapists even before Margaret and Michael, something I’d pointed out to Annie when she’d first gotten involved with her own. A therapist hears you say all sorts of crazy things and then has to pretend that they don’t think you’re crazy. A therapist has to come to work every day in a sweater set and sensible shoes and maybe pearls and a mask of what they think that you should see. I felt like putting on that mask was setting a bad example for those of us who’d considered telling our own truths, but weren’t sure about unmasking. I felt like the resources Corine was giving me were all in service of adapting to society, and not necessarily in service of figuring myself out. But I played along, because I needed to live in society, because we all did, and also because I had Clara.
“Let’s talk about your daughter,” Corine would say, and I would try not to cry. “We can wait until you’re ready,” Corine would say, but I was never ready.
We made a plan for what I’d do if I heard noises, or saw things that I suspected were not actually there. I had to go see Corine twice a week at first, then once, then once every two. I saw my doctor every two weeks to talk about my medications, and my sister was supposed to come by to look for warning signs. Ben was supposed to look for warning signs.
“Let’s talk about your husband,” Corine would say. This I could do. I knew the answers here, or thought I knew them. Because of what we called my “lapse,” Ben had a chance at getting custody of Clara if I ever decided to leave him. He said he wasn’t mad at me, but he said it so often, I knew that he was. I wanted him to come out and tell me, and I said this to Corine, and she suggested couples counseling to air ourselves out, but when I brought it up to Ben, he wouldn’t have it.
“We’re doing well now,” he said. I wasn’t allowed to be mad at him, because I was the one who’d fucked up. But I was mad at him, and I said so to Corine, who was sworn to secrecy as long as I didn’t seem violent. I was mad that he hadn’t helped out more with Clara when she was brand-new, and mad that he was helping so much with her now that she was older. I was mad that he needed so little to be happy, mad that he would say things like “It’s okay if you want to go back to work” or “Do you think the milk is spoiled?” I was mad that I didn’t love him passionately, that I would never feel for him what Margaret felt for Michael.
I’d been raised on the idea that everyone would get one true, deep romance in their lifetime. My mother had fallen in love with my father. My father had fallen in love with Claudia, the preschool teacher who ultimately left him for a wealthier man. Ilsa got Rick and Cathy got Heathcliff and Rachel got Ross. I realized suddenly, sucking on a Life Savers mint in Corine’s drafty office, that I wasn’t going to get anyone.
EVENTUALLY THE MANDATED therapy turned into occasional sessions by choice. At Ben’s request we moved to the suburbs, a fifteen-minute drive from Seth and Linda, a four-bedroom house with a yard. In the winter I could open the door and let Solly do her business out back—we would find frozen feces in the snowmelt when spring came.
Ben wanted Clara’s room painted pink, which seemed too much to me, but in the long run didn’t matter. We put on overalls and paper masks and classic rock and painted the walls. We forgot to put painter’s tape down over the molding and dripped Misted Rose all over the rug, but Ben thought it was funny and put his hands into my pockets and we had sex for the first time in months on the nursery floor while Clara was downstairs with his mom. It wasn’t bad, but it did feel like a tax I was paying in order to keep living in my body.
The microwave in this new house closed tightly. The air vents were silent.
Clara was seven months old when I finally wrote to my dissertation advisor: “I’ve had a family emergency and won’t be able to complete the program.” He wrote back: “This is not unexpected.” Expect, from the Latin ex, meaning thoroughly; spectare, meaning to look.
For my birthday, Ben bought me a replacement for the ruined volume of my Oxford English Dictionary.
AND THEN IT was Clara’s birthday. She’d dispensed with the pacifier and instead sucked on her littlest left finger, the one that had healed to a smooth stub. She had thin dark hair, and her eyes were fully brown now. Her cheeks had filled out. She could take two or three steps on her own, and could say “Mama.”
We had the family over in a housewarming/birthday celebration, and Annie brought the garbageman, who she was now seeing seriously. I welcomed him in with a smile. I was still taking the lithium, and it dulled any judgment. It allowed me to live in the suburbs. It disguised most of the pain.
Of course Seth and Linda came to Clara’s party and stayed the whole time. Linda stood at the sink and cut grapes into quarters. Seth let Clara smudge his glasses with her fingers.
Kelsey and Jeanie came with presents, and stayed longer than I would’ve expected. My dad, they said, had to work, but he sent his regards. My mother showed up late with a Barbie dollhouse, a giant magenta choking hazard that said “Awesome” and “Totally rad” when you closed the oven or opened the closet. We put it in storage in the garage.
After the party, Ben and I bathed Clara together, and lotioned her all over, and brushed her hair. I dressed her carefully in her pajamas and turned on her sound machine and let her choose two books. All of her books made me cry now, because they reminded me that she would one day have to learn about the world, and the world wasn’t what I wanted it to be for her. There were floods and diseases, there were hurricanes and fires, but mostly there were cruel people, selfish people, people who didn’t care what kind of legacy they’d leave.
We said goodnight to her lamp, to her stuffed doggie, to her sleep sack and her mobile with the colorful felt fish. We said goodnight to Grampa and Nana, to Aunt Annie and to Daddy and to Solly, to the garbage trucks and the birds in the sky. We said goodnight to all her toes and her belly button, to her ears and her eyes and her one special finger.
I kissed her on each cheek, then on the forehead, and I laid her in her bed and I turned off the light.