Playing House (6 page)

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.

The first word my daughter said was “Papa.” The second word my daughter said was “Papa”: this is
Papa
with a difficult
p
, not an easy
d
, not
Da-da
, everyday baby mumbo jumbo; my daughter was not speaking mumbo jumbo, she was speaking significance, the thing closest to her heart, Papa first, Papa second, and then, third, “Lila,” which is the name of our thirty-pound sweet Shiba Inu dog, who somehow managed to take up a place on my child’s tongue before me, the mama. “Ma ma, mama, maaa-ma,” I’d say to my girl, and she’d grin back, a chip of white tooth erupting from her red gum, and refuse me. “Papa,” she’d squeal. Her world, right from the start, was all about dad and dog with me on the fuzzy periphery, waving my arms around and insisting that I be seen.

Maybe I’m overstating it. My daughter loves me. She blows me
besitos
, the Spanish term for little kisses, and in grocery stores she occasionally puts her plump arms around my neck and rests the scrumptious pad of her cheek against mine, so it’s like we’re dancing then, waltzing one on one. My husband, Benjamin, tells me I’m being oversensitive. “Of course she loves you,” he says, but we both know she loves him best. In any case, I tell myself, I deserve it. I am, after all, a modern mother, and my husband is, after all, a modern father, and this is just what I said I wanted. Two years ago, on September 28, the Clearblue test wand turned clear blue, and I made my husband, a chemist, swear on his hops vine that he’d be as active a parent as he is a gardener. He is a great gardener, spending hours in the spring sun coaxing dahlias and delphiniums from the ground while I hunch inside, staring at my computer screen, worrying over words. “We can’t have this child,” I’d said to him, waving the test wand in front of his face, “unless you swear you’re in it with me fifty-fifty.”

“Forty-sixty,” he’d answered.

“No,” I’d said. “It’s fifty-fifty or nothing. I’m not doing sixty percent of the parenting. My career is just as important as yours.”

“I mean,” he’d said, “I’ll do sixty percent, even seventy. You do forty, or thirty. I’m shortening my hours at work once the baby is born.”

Very cool, I thought. I bragged to my friends about how cool my husband was, a real feminist who’d put his money where his mouth was; who, literally, would swallow his salary and swaddle the baby; who would, he promised me, walk his talk. All throughout the pregnancy I suspected he’d renege, but he didn’t. Clara was born by C-section after a two-day labor, and I was so wiped out and drugged up that he was the first to hold her. It was he who insisted with a touching and slightly irritating enthusiasm that we take
every
class the postpartum unit offered, from feeding to first aid to bathing. Once at home, it was he who got up with the baby five nights out of the seven, he who took three weeks paternity leave while I scooted back to my office after just seven days, my cesarean scar still oozing. I was determined not to fall prey to motherhood, as though motherhood were a maw. My vision of motherhood comes, of course, from my own mother, who was more or less devoured by her children—she had four of them in close succession. My own mother never had a paying job, she drank cocktails with pitted olives speared with frill-topped toothpicks, and wept in frustration in the vast master bedroom from the hollowness of her life. I could not allow such a thing to happen to me. This wasn’t the fifties; this was the nineties, and feminism, far from reappropriating the dignity of motherhood, had taught me to try to escape it, even though my ovaries were silver sacs stuffed with human eggs, and my heart, well, even while my heart, in a secret corner, could not wait to feel the flesh of my flesh, close against me.

I gave birth; he got up nights. I went back to work as a psychologist and a writer full-time; he went back to work as a chemist half-time, and something not-so-strange but difficult happened. Clara started to like my husband more. This was the first problem, and it was piercing. When the baby was nine months old, she began waking in the middle of the night from nightmares. Of course, we can’t be sure they were nightmares, and if they were, I can’t imagine what a nine-month-old’s demons would be—maybe vague watery dreams of sharks and falling, of smothering skin. She’d scream out. We’d both bolt upright in bed. It was always dark then, with maybe a crescent moon clamped against the sky, or stars salted generously; the baby screamed. “I’ll go,” I’d say, throwing off the covers. “No, I’ll go,” he’d say, throwing off the covers. And then there was the night I heard it. “Papa!” she screamed. What happened next is obvious. Papa leapt up, ran to her room, and Mama lay alone, listening through the monitor to sounds of cooing and comforting, not made by me. Not my sounds.

I smelled a skunk on our front lawn. I remembered as a child wanting to touch a de-scented skunk in a pet store, the thick stripe of white icing on its furred black back, the delectable snout. I wanted to touch my daughter, my baby girl; it would not be too much to say I ached for it, but someone had usurped me, at my insistence. I thought of all the other times, in all the other ways, she clamored for him first. It was he who had to put on her shoes, to brush her hair, to bathe her.
Papa papa papa
. But the night of the skunk was when I fully realized how the modern mother, freed from the burden of primary-care giving, gains a lot and loses a lot, in language and in love.