WHEN MANDO RETURNED FROM DALLAS on Thursday, he walked in the door and enfolded me in his arms. I rested my head on his shoulder and took in the familiar, comforting scent of his collar, of the man I’d loved for more than half my life. I missed him terribly when he was gone, and I was thankful to know he missed us too.
“I’m so glad you’re home. I love you.”
“Me too,” he said with an exhale, his eyes tired. “That flight was brutal. You guys doing okay?”
After he had unpacked—a process that took only a few short minutes because of his expert systems—I told him that I freaked out while he was gone. Those were the comically inadequate words I chose: I freaked out. I gave him the summary of events and then a summary of the call with the nurse. Like many parents, Mando and I often conversed in the language of Summaries, a pidgin developed for those short on time and patience, exceedingly useful for the overcommitted and for volunteer scorekeepers who can’t talk during the game.
A fuller description of what I’d experienced on The Night I Couldn’t Turn Off the Lights remained inaccessible to me. I could offer only this to Mando: I freaked out.
Anyway, there wasn’t time to explain further. Eli had a game. Life was happening.
When I first met Mando on a hot August day in 1998 on the wide stone steps of Norlin Library at the University of Colorado, I was a premed student, enrolled in a collection of courses that had me culturing antibiotic-resistant bacteria and studying dissected cadavers. I was a girl with a goal.
It’s plausible, then, that Mando’s memory of what happened next is accurate. He claims that he saw me on campus a week after our initial meeting and greeted me with an enthusiastic, “Hey, Julie!”
I stared at him blankly and said, “Do I know you?” (I have no memory of this conversation, increasing the possibility of its veracity).
Overlapping social circles wound us past our lackluster meet-cute: we were young and dumb, but it turned out we were perfect for each other, Mando’s evenness a complement to my excitability. We started dating a year later, and not long after that I abandoned the med school track as a result of the circulating horror stories about the course workload for organic chemistry and Mando’s job prospects.
Though my prehealth classes didn’t lead to a medical degree, they did have a lingering side effect: I have precisely enough medical knowledge to be a hazard to my own mental health.
Living in a world where so much can (and does) go wrong is a minefield for a perfectionist who prioritizes meeting expectations, who loves an equation that yields consistent results. I like to entertain the belief that if I make all the right moves, I’ll win the game. But that’s always been impossible. I know there are no moves to ensure, with total certainty, that I can have a life of happiness and protection, that I’ll have a healthy, satisfying marriage, that my children will stay on the straight and narrow. I know there’s no way to sidestep pain and loss, but it hasn’t stopped me from trying.
In the days before Mando’s return, I’d tried everything I could think of to pin down precisely what had gone haywire in my brain. I moved through my days in autopilot mode, experiencing the mild dissociation of the anxious: there, but not there. I felt wired and edgy, and my body sent unexpected panic signals at regular intervals throughout the day. But small, intervening moments of normalcy helped me convince myself that the situation was controllable. Denial is a girl’s best friend.
That week I quit caffeine cold turkey, reasoning that it was making me jittery. I took naps in the afternoon, passed out on the couch in the fetal position while the boys sat at the coffee table doing their homework. If I didn’t call The Night’s event a panic attack, if I didn’t say that something was wrong, if I just waited and drank less coffee and rested a bit more, then perhaps this would sort itself out.
I didn’t have a clue as to what was really happening inside my brain. It wasn’t until I read The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel A. van der Kolk, months later, that I understood. Our body has a “window of tolerance,” in which the rational and emotional portions of our brains are balanced. The amygdala is the emotional part of our brain, the more primal of the two: its ordinary job is to be “a quiet background presence that takes care of the housekeeping of the body, ensuring that you eat, sleep, connect with intimate partners, protect your children, and defend against danger.” But if, for example, a patient (me) is in a state of hyperarousal and exceeds that window of tolerance, the alarm system of the amygdala becomes overly sensitive, causing the person (me) to feel highly reactive, panicky, and disorganized.
I was in a state of intense hyperarousal, and my on-fire amygdala was Cruella de Vil behind the wheel, driving like a bat out of hell and making zero stops. The rational part of my brain, the part centered around the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, was left in the dust.
The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (rational) and amygdala (emotional) have no direct connections in our brains, but they’re bridged by the medial prefrontal cortex, which is the brain’s center of self-awareness. Self-awareness, in this case, refers to interoception (Latin for “looking inside”), which is an ability to observe our inner experience.
To calm my amygdala and stop hearing alarm bells from every corner, I needed to slow down and become self-aware. I needed to pay attention to my emotions, to feel what I was feeling in both my mind and my body, in spite of its awful discomfort.
But in my experience, motherhood creates major hurdles to attending to one’s own needs. Slowing down, connecting to our inner lives, making space to examine our own emotions: these aren’t behaviors that are easily balanced with parenting children, particularly young children. We begin early by denying our own need for sleep, responding instead to cries in the night. But the primal focus on the needs of others outlives its usefulness. It’s the reason my friends and I will rush our children in to the urgent care to rule out an ear infection, but we ourselves will cough, hack, and bladder-leak our way through the entire month of February until finally going in to find we’ve developed walking pneumonia.
Mothers are many things to many people, often at the center of the wheels of their families’ lives. And it’s a gift to be needed, to be seen, to know that our lives are interconnected to the lives of our people. But if we love our lives and people and we listen to even a handful of the messages about what it means to be a good person or a good partner or a good parent, then we may begin to believe we can’t stop turning, cannot possibly stop perpetuating the revolution of the lives at the periphery of our wheels. Slowing down ceases to register as an option. After all, I’m bound to these people by love and proximity and the thousands of tiny tasks that fill our days together. I love, therefore I do quickly warps into I do, therefore I am.
I filled Eli’s water jug from the fridge, paying close attention to the level so as not to spill it all over the floor. I was looking at the water—not at Mando—when I said,without emotion, “I was just really scared that I was going to have another reaction and you were gone and there would be no one there for the kids if something happened to me.”
My words diminished the experience: “Just scared.” That’s all, Julie? You were just scared your life was coming to an end that very night?
Mando stopped his movements to look at me, concerned but focused.
On paper, he should’ve been the more fearful of the two of us, having experienced more than his share of loss in his life. Mando’s mom, Becky, had died tragically when he was sixteen. They had been driving as a family on I-25 South from Colorado Springs to Pueblo when a car shot across the wide grass median and crashed into their minivan, killing Becky and injuring both Mando and his sister, Gina, who was only thirteen at the time. The impact of the accident showed all over Gina’s life—understandably so. But Mando was a little more like his mother—remarkably tough, exceedingly resilient—and his response to nearly any situation was to stick to the facts.
“The nurse told you what happened after the shot won’t happen from being outside and getting regular allergy symptoms?” he asked.
I pulled the jug away from the fridge and nodded as I screwed on the lid, making sure it was secure. “Well, yes.”
“Okay,” Mando said, nodding as he grabbed energy bars from the pantry and dropped them into my oversized purse. Okay translated to Well, glad that’s settled.
“The thing is, I still feel stressed out,” I told him. Trying to describe the intensity of what I’d been experiencing since that night remained out of reach.
Eli emerged from his room at that moment, needing help with his belt. Nolan started telling me something that happened during a school assembly while Eli struggled to get on his damn cleats. My conversation with Mando was cut short by the chaos of leaving the house.
So we left it there. We abandoned this completely inadequate, unfinished discussion of my basest, most primal fears. We left those tender, exposed parts of my heart lying unprotected there on the counter next to Eli’s water jug, which we forgot to put in the car.