Every house has its finest piece of furniture: the heirloom bed your Aunt Bonnie gave you, the Chippendale table; in mine, it’s my medicine cabinet. My medicine cabinet is huge, handsome, with painted angels and delicate scrollwork rimming a mirror of finest glass. Open it up. Inside this antique are bottles filled with all manner of modern pills—Prozac in sleek, bicolored bullets; shining orange Klonopins; little lithiums in a dazzle of white. I take these pills every day, to keep my mind intact.
I have mental illness. That’s an unfortunate phrase, mental illness, as old fashioned as the cabinet that houses my cures. I wish for a different descriptor, something both mythic and modern, like chemical craziness, like brain bruise. My particular form of illness is called obsessive-compulsive disorder, with a dash of depression thrown in. Years have gone by when my whole head was hot, when hospitals have been a haven. I had my first hospitalization when I was fourteen, because I could not stop cutting myself. I no longer cut. Now I count, in increments of three. I count to keep planes from falling out of the sky, to keep the moon in orbit. I count for luck and safety.
My red-headed husband and I did what married people do: we got pregnant. I will never forget the test I took. Six in the morning, standing in the half-dark bathroom, watching a blue cross swim up on the white test wand, yes. The cross was a warning and a wish. I closed my eyes and said, “Go.”
I did not want to have a child. Before she came to me, and before I came to love her, I dreaded the thought of motherhood, all those hours spent on the playground or in Chuck E. Cheese’s. I had heard women talk about “baby lust” and knew I possessed not a drip, not a drop, the drive towards procreation almost absolutely absent in me. My husband wanted our first. Motherhood went against my nature, which is brooding and acerbic and self-consumed. Plus there was my wayward mind, an issue. “And what about your illness?” friends said to me. “How will you mother when you struggle so much with anxieties and depression?” These are good questions. I’d spent my adolescence and young adulthood in mental hospitals, and then one day I swore I’d never go back. And I did not. I have not. I found my place and people. But still, the symptoms come, no matter what my will or situation. So here’s my question: Should a woman who is mentally ill become a mother? Are mental illness and motherhood by nature mutually exclusive? Was this a mistake, and a selfish one to boot?
My doctor, the one who has treated me for more than a decade, was definitive. “It is dangerous for you to have a baby,” he pronounced. “You have too many periods of instability.” Still, something in me said go.
Months went by. My belly bulged. Sometimes people asked me whether I was worried I might pass my bad genes on to my child. I didn’t mind that question even though, when I think about it now, it seems crude and unkind, assuming, as it does, that genes are both omnipotent and simplistic. My genes are difficult genes, different genes, but I’m not sure they’re bad. After all, the same genetic structure that drives me to check and tap also spurs me to put words on a white page, to garden until the yard is a riot of reds, yellows, and delphinium blues each summer. My genes, like everyone else’s I think, are both flower and thorn, little twisted things on their cones of chromosomes, such surprising, complex shapes.
These shapes, however, can be difficult to hold. Illness, without doubt, is a challenge. There has been a lot of talk about the contemporary female dilemma of juggling two balls, motherhood plus career. But there is a third ball here, and it has been overlooked: mental illness. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, one out of eight women will suffer a serious depression in her lifetime. Mothers with toddlers are the most psychiatrically symptomatic group in the United States, and a woman is a much more likely to experience psychosis after the birth of a child than she would be otherwise. The challenge of having children for many women, then, lies in keeping three bright balls in the air, and one of those balls is burning: there is the child, the job, and the mind, which, I imagine, is shaped like a sphere, shadowy, full of fire, holes, and roots.
My baby was born one month early, in a bad way. My water broke, full of green gunk. There was an infection, an emergency. I was sliced open and torn up. The little girl was gorgeous.
The first few months of motherhood were so easy, it was a dream! The baby slept all the time. She was well-mannered and pinkish. I thought, “Why did I ever worry about this?” The baby had a soporific effect on me; as soon as she was in my arms, I just wanted to doze. I occasionally worried that she was autistic, because she seemed to be so much in her own world, but mostly, for me, early motherhood was more powerful than any pill in its calming, centering effects.
Soon enough, though, things changed. The baby got an attitude. She started to stand up and refuse food. Winter came. The sun set earlier and earlier, sinking down like the lopped-off head of a golden eel, and then gone. My symptoms returned. Whereas in the past, however, my obsessions had usually focused on light switches and numbers, now they focused on the child. I began to count her calories. I spent hours calculating kilos. Worried that she was losing weight, I bought a scale. Then I worried that the scale was inaccurate, so I bought a second scale. I got the idea in my mind that the baby would eat better in darkness. I don’t know why I got this idea, but I started insisting on feeding her with the lights out. My husband came home one day and found us in her nursery, scarves over all the windows, a tiny silver spoon, just shining.
In the eighth month of motherhood, my doctor increased my medications. I went back to work and that helped. However, every day, driving to work, I had to pass the hospital where I spent so many years. The hospital took on a new meaning for me. It wasn’t just about illness anymore. It was about separation. I pictured myself in the hospital and my daughter alone at home. One day, I parked the car in the lot and stood at the entrance for a while. Truth be told, it is quite likely that at some points during my daughter’s childhood I will have to be admitted. My medicines don’t always work. My illness augurs abandonments big and small. But then again, is not abandonment intrinsic to mothering? From the very moment we expel our children from the womb, we abandon them. No one is perfect. It occurred to me, standing at the entrance to the hospital, half in, half out, that my very desire for perfection, for complete control, for counting every calorie and shining every spoon, put my mothering at risk far more than any hospitalization such symptoms may cause. I decided to dance.
I went to a dance studio at the corner of our street. Maybe I was not in my right mind. Maybe I was. “I’d like to learn to tango,” I said. When I was very young, I had seen a woman tango, and the image stayed with me, her limpid form, the simple spine visible beneath her black bodice. Tango requires flexibility, spontaneity, exactly what obsessive-compulsive disorder was not, and exactly what one needs to manage motherhood.
My instructor’s name was Armand. He had an oiled black pompadour and slick shoes. “Doublestep, doublestep, doublestep,” he’d cry as he whooshed me across the floor. Armand taught me the intricacies of tango and milonga, the drag and sweep, the circle and swirl. In the center of the circle I pictured my brain, my red-hot head, which I was dancing around, letting it flame and seize without me. Dancing was my meditation. Through it, I learned not to control my mind but to bypass it completely.
As a new mother, especially a mother with mental illness, tango has been an indispensable tool. There are many times when I am caught in the snarl of my own obsessive symptoms, my child’s needs, and the regular, daily demands of life, and to navigate these currents, one needs a swashbuckling step. Let me be specific. My daughter is a year old now. I no longer worry about her food. Lately, I have been concerned with a particular pattern of stars only I can see in my ceiling. I keep needing to trace this pattern with my eyes. My brain is bad, so bad! Some people say OCD is purely neurological, a tic-like illness similar to Tourette’s. I believe this. My brain seems to have the hiccups; it seizes and cramps. All day I need to count the stars in my ceiling. The worst part is, my daughter needs me, and I need numbers. “Mama, mama, mama,” she calls, but I’m stuck, and then I say to myself, “Drag left, uncurl,” and I picture myself doing it—uncurling—swirling between the stars, back down to where she waits, to where we live, together.
I take tango lessons twice a week for one hour. It’s a spiritual practice for me, a meditation through movement. I know I am extreme; most mothers go to a gym or to a therapist for support, but I believe the difference with me is one of degree, not kind. What mother doesn’t have to dance between her own needs and tugs, her child’s cries, her dreams, his desires? What mother doesn’t come at this most complex of projects with a handicap of some sort, somewhere? You tell me, what mother is perfect? To my daughter I say this: I am sorry. I am so far from being able to give you all that you need, but know one thing. You have my whole effort. You have my whole heart, for whatever it’s worth. I love you.
Yesterday, this girl I love did something very strange. We were in her bedroom and she began to knock on the wall, for no reason I could see. I thought, “Oh god, she’s going to turn out like me.” To distract her, I put on a tape. It was Peter, Paul, and Mary singing about lemons. I sang too. The words wooed my daughter, and she, for the first time after a mere twelve months on this blue planet, began to dance. Tap tap. Tap tap. But these were not obsessive taps. These were good taps. Strong taps. Foot taps. Hand claps. She has beautiful rhythm.