After our wedding, we briefly honeymooned in Hawaii. I got pregnant quickly thanks to a sinus infection and a powerful dose of antibiotics that rendered my birth control useless. Less than a year after our wedding, Sophie was born.
I took four months off to be with Sophie, the maximum amount of pregnancy leave the company offered. For the first time in my life, I was completely, wholly blessed, and I believed David felt that way, too. Mothering Sophie was the most natural, exciting job I’d ever had. As long as I paid attention, Sophie let me know what to do next. I soon came to recognize her hungry cry versus her sleepy cry. I marveled at the miracle of every new kick, yawn, and gurgle. Even with the crazy hours of new motherhood, I hummed with happiness.
Meanwhile, David took on a new seriousness in his role as provider. He worked longer hours, but he also seemed to relish parenting, taking Sophie on long walks, bathing her, and even pitching in with diaper changes. His eyes lit up when he first saw her after a long day of work. I thought he was as happy as I was.
We’d been married a year and a half when I learned that David had never stopped sleeping with the girlfriend he’d had before me.
I’d gone back to work at my job as a television reporter when Sophie turned four months old. I worked nights so I could be with her during the day, and then switched off child care duties with David at 4:00 p.m. The work, which once captivated me, had become a crude reminder of the world I’d brought my child into. I stepped over a crack baby in an abandoned house; I interviewed an adolescent girl who’d started doing heroin because it numbed her to the pain of sexual abuse. I carried the residue of my reporting home with me to my sweet, untroubled baby girl and found I had to force my job from my mind completely before I could enfold her in my arms. I did not want to taint her with any of the outside world. She would know it all too soon as she grew into womanhood.
One evening I was at the TV station putting together a story on Cesar Barone, a Portland-area psychopath who had finally been convicted of a series of brutal murders in the early 1990s. One of his crimes had stuck with me for years, the random, senseless killing of a Tuality Valley midwife who was driving home late at night after helping deliver a baby. Barone had peppered her car with gunfire, tried to rape the wounded woman, and then dragged her onto the road, where he shot her in the head.
The file footage detailed his early criminal history, starting at the age of nineteen, when he raped his seventy-one-year-old neighbor and then strangled her in her bed. The courtroom video of him showed no remorse, no inkling of feeling or compassion for the families of the people he’d brutalized. Chantee Woodman was another of his victims, a twenty-three-year-old whom he abducted, assaulted so brutally she was unrecognizable, and then shot in the head. Another victim, Margaret Schmidt, was sexually assaulted and strangled in her Hillsboro home. There was also Betty Williams, fifty-one, who died of a heart attack as Barone began sexually assaulting her at her Portland-area apartment in January 1993.
The women he victimized were so unassuming—just driving home from work, reading a book, puttering in the kitchen. He was a monster who had remained at large for years before he was finally arrested. How many others like him were out there? I recorded a voice track, finished the editing, and then delivered the story an hour early. “I can’t take this anymore,” I said to the eleven o’clock producer. “I’m going home now.” He looked at my face and must have known I’d hit the wall.
“Thanks for your good work, Sheil,” he said. “Get some rest.”
I drove home from work cold and depressed. The house was empty. I opened the door to Sophie’s nursery and found it pitch-black inside. Holding her would give me the sense that everything was okay again, but she wasn’t in her crib.
“David, where are you? Where’s Sophie?” I dropped my purse and my briefcase on the nursery floor and ran through the house flipping on lights. “David? David, honey. Where are you?” Halfway down the hall, I stopped running. Suddenly, I knew where he was.
He was with Jane.
I knew about Jane from the phone bill. I’d seen a number on that month’s bill come up over and over again—fifteen- to forty-five-minute phone calls, always at night, always while I was at work. Frantic, I had called the number, heard her voice, and placed her immediately. I’d met her once, while David and I were dating. Although I’d hung up without confronting her, I cornered David the evening I found the bill, during my dinner break.
“Are you having an affair?” I asked him, holding the phone bill in my hand.
He rolled his eyes. “What are you talking about?”
“Jane’s number. It’s all over the phone bill.”
“She’s just a friend,” he said. “Do I need to ask permission to have friends?”
I was embarrassed to be “that wife,” the controlling kind of partner who doesn’t allow her husband any breathing room. I accepted his explanation and apologized.
Now, three weeks later, I felt my cheeks go red and heat rise up underneath my sweater. I would not let him turn me into a stereotype I loathed—the jealous woman. I would not suffer the indignity of sobbing, of the puffy face and the stuffy nose, the pinched look of defeat. I stiffened against the shock and the crushing blow. As I sat down, the velvet couch I’d bought for the family room felt like an ice block on my legs.
Sophie. Where’s Sophie? I let several minutes go by before I picked up the kitchen phone and called his number. “You’ve reached Mica Construction,” the recorded message intoned. I slammed the phone down. Maybe I should go to her house. Maybe I should interrupt them during sex. I walked in circles in my kitchen, then the living room, still too stunned to cry.
I turned on the TV. I called his phone again. I turned off the TV. I opened the packed fridge and stared past all the food into the bright light. Outside, normal families slept, cuddled with their loved ones. I was not normal, not now, not after this. I’d ignored my earlier inclination that something was wrong, and now every instinct in my body told me he was cheating. And he had our baby daughter with him. I felt like vomiting.
Nothing would ever be the same again. I called again and again and again. After several hours of pacing downstairs, my body shivered from cold and shock. I dragged myself upstairs to my bed and undressed. I couldn’t cry, couldn’t get up to put on pajamas; I couldn’t even stand to walk to the bathroom and brush my teeth. I crawled underneath the comforter like a wounded animal.
David finally tiptoed into the house two hours later. He stood in the doorway of the bedroom, holding Sophie in his arm like a football. I hadn’t slept, couldn’t stop the images of him at Jane’s house from firing through my brain. Sophie was wrapped in a pink embroidered blanket David’s mother had given her. The look on his face said everything he would never admit to. I turned on the light, surprising him.
“Jesus,” I said, holding the sheet to my breasts. “Zip up your pants.” I could see his red boxer shorts.
“This is not my fault,” he yelled, startling me, holding Sophie with one arm while he fumbled with his zipper. His words sounded hollow and unconvincing, probably even to him. “It’s your fault. You’re never home.”
Sophie cried anxious, high-pitched wails. She needed to be changed and fed. I rose from the bed, awkwardly aware of my nakedness. I took her in my arms, walked into the nursery, and locked the door behind me. I leaned against the door, my neck and shoulders so tight I could not move.
Sophie. I took off her wet diaper, anger rising again when I saw the rash on her bottom. She stared at me, hiccupping and sniffing, before she finally calmed down. I changed her and snapped the buttons on her sleeper, my heart still pounding.
She gulped as she breastfed, hungry and still upset by the yelling. She cupped my breasts with both hands, eyes shut tight, need rising until finally she burped and fell asleep on my chest.
I sat with Sophie for what felt like hours, rocking her in the dark. My thoughts replayed every instance David had been tardy or elusive or refused eye contact when we spoke about his whereabouts. It was painfully familiar. My freshman year of college, I’d popped into a local pizzeria for a slice and saw my father sitting at the bar, holding hands with an unfamiliar blonde woman. By then, I’d heard rumors of his cheating, but it had never occurred to me that he would cheat outside my home town, so close to my school, or with someone who appeared to be half his age.
I hated the way my father blushed, how he stammered and avoided my eyes as he offered up a flimsy excuse about why he was there. I hated how his hands shook as he attempted to introduce me to the blonde woman, who was blinking like a doe about to be shot. I left before she could open her mouth.
I knew I wouldn’t be able to tell my mother what I’d seen. It would only wound her further. I now carried the extra burden of my mother’s suffering, a lifetime of confusion and misplaced blame over the real problem in our home, a serial cheater. Depression is often referred to as anger turned inward; my father’s first affair happened just before her mysterious breakdown. I would not, I vowed, become my mother.
Sophie’s weight on my chest was the only thing that kept me from spinning into the ether. The two of us were in the same position when the sun finally rose—trapped. I half expected the bright, cheery star might not choose to rise on such a dark day. My body felt dull and heavy, as if it had endured its own death, still breathing, not yet crying.
Two days later, David and I still hadn’t spoken, other than terse cell phone calls about the business of Sophie’s day care, her naps, the number of times he’d changed her diaper while I was at work.
I was going through the motions of a life interrupted: at home in the kitchen, preparing for another night shift away from Sophie, zipping breast milk into little bags, the humiliating ritual of mothering from a distance. I knew Sophie had refused the bottle again and again. David had insisted we keep trying. Now, I believed it was because he didn’t want me coming home on my dinner break at all, ruining his plans. David interrupted my ruminating, walking through the side door in time to take over his afternoon shift with Sophie. His hair was mussed by the wind, and his eyes were as blue as I could remember seeing them. He dropped the architectural plans he was holding and took three large steps to pull Sophie from her bouncy chair. He held her high in the sky with his big hands, her eyes widening with delight, legs kicking through her romper. David tucked her in close to him like a quarterback, preparing to run the ball, one long arm holding her head and her body. He’d held her that way first in the hospital, endearing himself to me.
I was dressed for work, but the red suit and high heels I’d put on didn’t feel like a power suit at all. In fact, it complicated the vulnerability I felt at that moment, watching the man I loved, and now also hated so much, with our child. I sat on the kitchen chair and wept in front of him, the barrier I’d carried for days breaking into a thousand tiny pieces.
“David,” I said, “I can’t bear this.”
He came to me, putting his hand on my shoulder while he balanced Sophie with his other arm.
“It won’t happen again,” he said softly. “I didn’t even sleep with her.”
I bristled. “How can you do this, David? How can you stand here, after what I saw, and lie to me? It’s worse than the affair. Really, it’s despicable.”
His eyes softened. “I promise you, I did not sleep with her. I couldn’t do it; I couldn’t go through with it.” He opened the tray to Sophie’s infant seat and snapped her in her safety belt. “You must believe me.”
I looked for something to trust, some telltale sign that he was changed by the affair. I tried to lock on his eyes, to make him say it again while I stared straight into his soul. Sophie whimpered. His eyes darted away from mine to hers. “There, there, sugar,” he said, unhooking the safety belt and lifting her from the chair. He bounced her in his arms as he soothed her. “It will be all right. It’s going to be all right.”
Several weeks later, my sister Diane came to Portland, visiting for a weekend retreat with a Buddhist teacher. She sat in the passenger seat of my car while we drove through darkening skies, and I told her of the affair.
“Why don’t you leave him?” she asked.
I loved her for her straightforwardness. “It’s not so simple, Di,” I said defensively.
We were headed to the grocery store to buy supplies for dinner. On the way out the door that morning, David had agreed to shop for the chicken and vegetables, but I knew he’d forget, that it would slip his mind and we’d be left without anything to eat.
I found a parking spot and turned off the ignition. “I’ve played this scenario a thousand times, Diane. I’ve imagined myself alone, as a single mom, with Sophie, no relatives nearby. My closest friends are childless. The station needs me to work late, or worse, to leave on a breaking news story. Who do I call? What do I do?”
“You make a decent living,” Diane said. “More than most single women. You hire help.” Grocery carts clanked behind us, the hum of a Safeway parking lot at 6:00 p.m. Large gray clouds hung over the red neon sign. There would be rain again tonight. I wanted to get in and out before it started to pour.
“He’s trying, Di. I think I see him trying. And he loves Sophie so much.” My voice trailed off, unconvinced of my own reasoning.
“Does he love you?” she asked bluntly. “Does he work to make a true partnership? Is he responsible, honest? Does he elevate you?”
I took the keys from the ignition and gathered my purse. “I can’t say. Jesus, I really don’t know anything except it’s starting to pour.”
David showed up at home an hour later, stomping the rain from his shoes, carrying nothing but his drenched briefcase. As soon as he spotted Sophie, he dropped his briefcase on the hardwood floor, scooping her up from her blanket and smothering her with kisses. Diane kept her eyes trained on him, looking for some acknowledgment or an apology for his failure to do what he promised.
David avoided making eye contact. “Hey,” he said.
“Hey.” My sister exchanged a knowing glance with me about David forgetting the groceries, his unpredictability, and his aloofness. Sophie cooed with delight. Diane shook her head. My emotions were caught between the disdain Diane felt for David and the gushy love Sophie displayed. Every time I thought of Sophie without David, a loss so profound moved through my body that I thought it must be intuition trying to tell me something. I tried to channel some of the gutsiness I used at work, but failed. In this house, with Sophie, I was soft, vulnerable, and not at all ready for an abrupt transition away from David.
David beamed at Sophie, touching her head so tenderly I had to turn away. This was the type of love I’d hoped he might show me one day. I knew now it wouldn’t be possible. Sophie returned his affection with the telltale grimace all parents recognize. David laughed. “I’ll change her,” he offered.
I pulled the salad from the refrigerator. The chicken smelled done. David slapped his forehead on the way to the nursery. “Oh, the groceries. I’m so sorry, honey; I totally forgot.”
Diane rolled her eyes, turned, and left the room.
Somehow, we made it through the fall, a blur of work and diapers and me concentrating on the small, magical accomplishments Sophie made every day. I found my purpose in the simple acts of mothering, strapping on the baby pack in the morning and only taking it off for her naps.
We took long, lovely walks together through the park, with Sophie cooing in a tone so delightful it made me smile just to hear her voice. I loved to change her diapers, to bathe and talk and sing to her. The two of us shared as much communication as I needed at the time. Mothering taught me just how much capacity my heart carried. Even though I was sleeping only six hours a night, I woke easily and enthusiastically, eager to see what new accomplishment Sophie might take on during our days together. She was bright eyes and beautiful sounds by now, babbling early and often and pushing herself up off chubby arms to rock back and forth on her haunches, preparing to crawl. I talked or sang with her throughout the day until my dialogue was drowned out by her happy noises, “ba, ba, ba,” and “da, da, da.” At six months, she had an enormous appetite, with two early teeth to help her chew everything from squash to small bits of chicken and steak. At Thanksgiving, her eyes lit up when she tasted mashed potatoes and gravy for the first time. I kept reading ahead in the baby book to try to keep up with her not-so-minor miracles. The more I loved Sophie, the less I needed of David. The more I concentrated on Sophie, the less I needed to address the pain of my marriage. It was the only defense I had, or so I reasoned. Did I know I was compartmentalizing? Probably. Did I ever imagine it would turn out so disastrously? No, never.
We spent Christmas vacation at my parents’ new home in Utah, a sprawling, beautiful house with dozens of windows framing a view of the Great Salt Lake. A series of snowstorms kept the snowplows humming throughout the day. More than two feet of snow was already piled on the front lawn, making perfect conditions for cross-country skiing. My mother assured us Sophie would be fine. “Go, go, have fun, you two. I’ve done this a few times, you know.” David and I exchanged a glance, his more hopeful than my own. We were still being cautious with one another, tentative and polite. But David had never owned up to his affair. And I still mistrusted him.
David and I loaded up our skis and drove in silence to the mountain. Settlement Canyon was such a special place for me. Growing up, I’d spent hundreds of days riding through the passes there. The canyon was the place where I was first kissed. It was where our high school cheerleading squad hiked to light the “T” before the homecoming festivities. It was a place teeming with memories of a more innocent time.
The city had installed a new, heavy gate made of steel, with a small opening for bikes and pedestrians at the entrance to the canyon. Most of the locals were irked by it; people in my hometown were hunters and outdoorsmen who would have preferred to drive their trucks through the canyon, shooting at game. The gate kept out motorized vehicles, and the wildlife had flourished. The snow was untracked in front of us. David headed out in front of me, making long, strong strides with his skis. I followed behind in his tracks.
Because he was raised in Canada, the cold temperatures suited him perfectly. When the temperatures dropped below twenty, David’s cheeks grew rosy and his ears got bright, but his hands or feet never got cold. An hour into our ski, I started to feel the sting of frostnip on my fingers and toes. “We should probably turn around,” I said. “I’m starting to get really cold.”
David’s bright expression drooped, his hat slightly lopsided on his head. “Really?” he asked. “Can’t we just go a bit farther up the road?”
I didn’t want to disappoint him. We’d had such a hard time the past few weeks, and seeing him happy again, looking so relaxed and healthy, made me happy as well. I wanted to bottle that look, that feel, and take it back home with us. I wiggled my fingers inside my mittens. “Okay,” I said, “another half hour or so?”
He nodded appreciatively and then skied toward me to offer a huge hug. “Thank you, honey.”
We started off up the road together, but David soon pulled out in front. I followed behind in his fresh tracks. His long arms reached out gracefully, his legs moving powerfully between each stride. The snow crunched against our skis, but other than that there was virtually no sound. The mountains were quieted by the snow, blanketed by a cover of powdery white layers. The sun dropped slowly behind the western mountains; I started to shiver, even as I skied faster to try to create more heat.
Suddenly, David stopped in his tracks ahead of me. “Shhh,” he said.
I tried to look for what he’d seen that made him stop so abruptly. The trees were empty. A trail of rabbit tracks took off from the left of us. The setting sun cast long, spooky shadows on the deep ravines and gullies; there was nothing moving as far as I could tell.
David pointed to the grove of aspen trees to our right. “There. Do you see it?”
I strained my eyes, my toes numb from cold, my nose stinging from exposure. “See what?” I asked, wishing more than anything that I could turn around and ski as fast as I could home to the safety and warmth of my parents’ home.
“See?” he said. “Right there.” His glove pointed to three o’clock. I squinted harder.
There it was, camouflaged perfectly in its perch, a great horned owl staring out at us, with the biggest golden eyes I’d ever seen on a bird. Its eyebrows were slanted narrowly at us, its head cocked, mottled brown wings tucked to its side.
“Shhh,” David said. He clicked himself out of his skis and slowly, tenderly, took baby steps toward the owl. The owl fluttered its wings, turning its head abruptly to keep its eyes on David, preparing for its escape. Its prominent ear tufts seemed calculating and alert.
David took another step, then another, his weight placed so tenderly he barely made a sound in the snow. He was within a couple of feet of the bird. I’d never seen anything like it. The bird startled me with a deep hooting sound: Hoo-h-hoo-hoo-hoo. The sound echoed through the canyon. I caught myself gasping out loud.
From somewhere deep in the tree grove, a loud raspy screech returned the call, the owl’s young crying for its mother. The owl looked again at David and then lifted off, its beautiful wings spanning nearly sixty inches. It soared so fast, so precisely, I lost sight of it almost immediately. It was one of the many times David took me to the extremes of his world: places of profound beauty and magic, with little miracles that came along only when I gave up any sense of control. David caught the look of ecstatic gratitude on my face and smiled.
There would be other adventures we shared that would not end so magically. David’s insistence at hiking “off-trail” in the Columbia Gorge left him covered in poison oak boils, big red oozing sores that took weeks to heal. Somehow, Sophie and I escaped the allergic reaction to the same poisonous plants.
In Hawaii, again “off-map” at David’s insistence, we circled a weedy, scrappy patch of the island for three hours, until I was so tired and pissed off we didn’t speak for two days.
On another day, after a long mountain bike ride, we bolted from the hot confines of his truck to take a dip in the Columbia River. We came back to find his truck, our bikes, and my luggage stolen. He’d left the keys in the ignition.
At the time, I reasoned that David had more than his share of bad luck because he lived larger than most people. No risk, no reward. David’s nature was that he would go to the end of the road and inevitably want to go further, like an Alice in his own wonderland. Truthfully, I too was curious about what was on the other side. I craved the intensity David yearned for during those wild explorations, and his moods, when high, were contagious. Holding onto the high of euphoria was impossible, and it made our inevitable fall that much harder. Two weeks later, back home from Salt Lake, I was driving home from the television station to have my dinner break with David and Sophie. A heavy rain turned to slush on the windshield, and then, just as quickly, into fat, sloppy snowflakes. Rushing home for dinner was my way of trying to hold things together—not because I feared losing David so much, but because I didn’t want Sophie to lose David. Would he stay in her life if we divorced? I could not say yes for certain. I couldn’t accurately plot the course of David’s day, let alone what might happen if we divorced. There was still so much about him I didn’t understand.
I sat with the engine running in the driveway, watching the wipers wash over the flakes one, two, three times. We were doing better since the affair—weren’t we? The wipers thumped a steady beat to Fleetwood Mac, something from the Mirage album, the one with the album cover of Stevie Nicks and Christine McVie sandwiching Lindsey Buckingham, both women attempting to capture something that was already gone. The music sounded tired, as if the band was going through the motions. I clicked the radio off and went in through the side door.
David was standing at the front door looking out on the falling snow. I set my briefcase on the kitchen counter and came from behind to hug his big back. I truly wanted to make it work.
“Hi, sweetheart,” I said. “Where’s Sophie?”
“She’s asleep,” he mumbled, staring straight ahead into the darkness. “I put her to bed early.”
I checked my watch. “But it’s only six thirty. I really wanted to see her.”
He stared out the window, not acknowledging me. “She was cranky.”
I weighed my options. If I told him how important it was to keep Sophie up so that I could see her before bedtime, I’d have another fight on my hands. He was defensive about everything these days, especially Sophie’s care. “Isn’t it gorgeous?” I said instead, looking out at the snow.
“What?” he turned abruptly, revealing a pen and paper in his hand. “What’s gorgeous? I can’t see anything gorgeous because I can’t hear myself THINK in this house. I can’t sit down in this house and read a book. I can’t even bear to look out the window because all I see and all I hear are those GODDAMN CARS!” His voice rose to a pitch that scared me. The blood vessels in his neck bulged, and his eyes darted to the window. There were no cars outside.
I was stunned. I began to speak and then stopped myself, not knowing how to gauge this level of anger. I’d seen David upset before, but never like this, never about something so bizarre. We were a block away from a busy street. This was a side street, not a busy boulevard! It was a total overreaction, reminding me of something else that had changed recently. He had a heightened hypersensitivity to sound, to bright lights, to smells, to clothing that wasn’t organic cotton.
“What do you mean, the cars?” I pointed toward the street. “I don’t know what you mean—David, are you okay?”
He pointed his pen to his yellow pad. “This, these cars! I’ve counted every car that has come along in the last two hours. Twenty-seven cars! Twenty-seven fucking cars, with their bright lights and fucking loud engines racing to their fucking homes going forty miles per hour. I can’t THINK!”
His face was red and splotchy, and he smelled of sweat. Two hours. For two hours, he’d worked himself into a frenzy over traffic.
“If it bothers you, we can move,” I said softly. “Again.” Even as I said it, I didn’t totally mean it. But it seemed crucial to calm him down. Three moves, two years of marriage. When we first married, we’d both sold our homes, mine a quaint Victorian, and his beautiful bungalow, to buy a larger home together in Laurelhurst, one of the most coveted neighborhoods in Portland. But it was too loud, he said, too disruptive to his sleep. Now this one was wrong, too, the house I loved most, with its plantation-style roof and a sweeping deck that opened onto a beautiful garden, with an apartment below for friends and family who visited. The house was wrong? No. A surge of defiance rose up through me.
“This is not about the cars, David. It is not about the neighborhood. This is about you. You need help.”
He dropped his pen and paper on the hardwood floor. “Fuck you,” he said, coldly. “What I need is a beer.” I watched him stomp out the door and through the slush.
You need a coat, I thought instinctively, and then I caught my own reaction, protecting him even as he abandoned me, again. I stood at the doorway, frozen, unable to speak or move.
The next morning, David rolled over lazily and cradled me in his arms, as if nothing had happened. I felt my back stiffen against him. I’d brought Sophie into bed with me that night, so exhausted I’d hoped lying with her, rather than rising every time she cried, might make us both happier. My body lived in two worlds: the harmony I felt with Sophie, and the growing disconnect I felt with David.
As I cradled her, I felt a longing for David, the other half of us.
“Look, I’ve been a jerk lately,” he whispered. “I’m really sorry.” He curled his arm around both Sophie and me. “I am so grateful to you for bringing me Sophie. I have never loved anyone or anything as much in my life. I will try harder for us.” He moved into me breathing, our two bodies connected by this third life, this amazing force between us. His lips touched my spine, soft kisses down the arch of my back, my arms.
My throat tightened as I turned to kiss him back.
In the months that passed, David moved in and out of our marriage as if it were a pair of jeans he could wear or put at the back of his closet. Weeks would go by when David was fine, joyful even at the prospect of spending time at home, gardening, or remodeling a bathroom or kitchen. We made love, ate our meals together, and called one another several times during the day. “I’m just thinking of how lucky I am,” he said one day. “And how lost I’d be without my family.”
Each time it got better, I thought, Okay, we’ve made it. We’re past the tough part. I hung onto those moments of connection, building a case for staying the way Sophie built a pyramid of colored wooden blocks. She was patient, positioning each block so carefully her eyes never left the structure, even as she reached for her next block. It was only when she was smugly satisfied with her work that she swung her arm through the pyramid, crashing it to the ground.
David’s sense of self-destruction seemed just as impulsive. A phone call or conversation could set him off, his anxiety building to a point that it twisted his face into a new position. A dark, foreboding sense surrounded him, physically and emotionally. He walked around with a hunch, burdened by this mysterious weight, a weight I could neither tap nor explore.
My life could be so much worse, I rationalized. I love my job. I love this house. Our daughter is healthy. I should be grateful. I look back on those years, wondering along with everyone else how I stayed for so long. The only answers I can come up with involve my own stubborn sense of optimism and my cowardice. I believed David during the good times, when he told me his family was the most important thing he’d ever had. And given what I now know about how difficult it is to cope with the destructive and alienating thoughts of bipolar illness, I’m in awe of David’s capacity for holding his life together as long as he did. I was coping, too, during those difficult years, so that Sophie might grow up in a household with the one man who would always love her unconditionally.
The symptoms of unipolar and bipolar depression are such that caregivers can feel enormous frustration in attempting to support a person who seems uninvested in recovery. Many family members report loved ones sleeping as much as twenty hours a day, refusing to participate in household chores, and canceling social engagements. People with mental illness may stop attending to their own grooming, causing frustration and embarrassment for other family members.
More than forty million women are the primary caregivers for a sick person, very often the man they married. In The Caregiving Wife’s Handbook, Dr. Diane Denholm advises caregivers to avoid assuming roles and jobs because someone else thinks we should and to realize that sacrificing yourself completely will not make the sick person well. Also, Denholm advises that the caregiver should never accept abusive or dangerous behavior.
During the acute phase of David’s mental health breakdown, loved ones and friends would often call to ask how he was doing. Very few people recognized the emotional and physical toll I was under as I cared for our daughter, kept a household afloat on one income, and managed the emotional heartbreak of witnessing David’s deteriorating physical and mental health. I am most grateful for the friends who did not judge, but who listened.
The mental health of the caregiver is also at risk during the time of acute care. Denholm advises taking care of yourself first, by eating well, exercising, and arranging assistance in order to get needed sleep. Denholm says if you become depressed, feel excessively guilty or angry, or fear becoming abusive, it is time to step away from your role, if only temporarily.