Tag Archives: depression

Dispatches From The Dark Side

1 Feb

Trigger warning for talk of suicide

If I was writing about almost any other health issue, I wouldn’t hesitate to post this.

If I had diabetes, or cancer, or liver failure, you wouldn’t feel strange reading this.

If I started out by saying, “I went to the hospital last night because I had the flu,” no one would think twice about this. No one would call it oversharing. I wouldn’t feel ashamed or embarrassed.

But I didn’t go to the hospital because I had the flu.

I went to the hospital last night because I wanted to die.

I mean, I say that, and that’s how I felt, but the truth is that I didn’t really want to die, did I? If that had really been my intention, I would have just done it. I wouldn’t have talked about it, wouldn’t have told anyone, and certainly wouldn’t agreed to go to the hospital.

Intention is tricky, though, slippery, even, all tangled up with impulse, drive and desire; I don’t think I’ll ever understand what it is that I actually want. It’s like peeling an onion, folding back layers and layers of truths and semi truths, never able to really get to the core of how or why I feel these things.

I’m not writing this because I want your pity, or comfort, or advice (although you can offer them if you want to).

I’m writing this because I want to be honest. I want to be like someone who paints their self-portrait and doesn’t spare any details; I want to show you my pimples, the dark smudges under my eyes, the crease that bisects my forehead, evidence of a lifetime of squinting because I didn’t want to wear my glasses.

I’m writing this because I don’t want to be embarrassed or ashamed anymore, and for some reason saying these things publicly makes them easier to bear. It’s like racing to tell all of your darkest secrets before your ex-best friend can betray your trust; you get to keep some kind of control over the situation. Sort of.

I’m writing this because I want to talk about it, and this is the only way that I know how. I’ve developed this online voice, this sort of character that’s both me and at the same time an amplification of me, a louder, brasher, more combative version of myself. It’s easier for me to write about this in this character; I would never be able to look you in the eyes and say these things.

I promise that we don’t have talk about this in person. The next time we meet, we don’t have to refer to what’s written here.

But right now I do want to talk about wanting to die. If you’re not up for that, I totally give you permission to stop reading right now.

I wish I could tell you why I want to die, but I can’t. The truth is that I have a good life, maybe even the best. I’m married to someone that I love a whole lot, someone who loves me in return. My son is amazing; I’m not even sure that there are words to describe how great he is. I enjoy my work. I like where I live.

On paper, I should be very happy.

But still, I want to die.

I can’t tell you why, but I can tell you what it feels like.

It feels like all of the days ahead of me are grey and blank and empty. Not empty in the sense of possibility, but empty in the sense of being hopeless.

It feels like wearing a shirt that’s rough, scratchy, uncomfortable, and that shirt is my skin and I can’t take it off.

It feels like discovering that all of my favourite foods suddenly taste like cardboard, but I eat and eat and eat anyway because I need something to fill all that empty space.

It feels like standing in direct sunlight, feeling in on my back, my shoulders, my head, but never having my brain think sun. All it can think is heat. Like there’s this distinction, this appreciation that I can’t make anymore; everything is broken down to its most basic elements. Nothing is good or beautiful – everything is awful and dull in its own way.

It feels like the life-support system in my brain failed, and no one bothered to install a back-up. So now the ship is going down and the lights are flickering and we’re running out of oxygen and everyone is panicking.

It feels like being tired all of the time, like never being able to get enough sleep. I just want to sleep.

I do things. I go out, and I spend money on things that I used to enjoy, in my former life, the life that, on the surface at least, is nearly indistinguishable from the one I live now. I don’t enjoy anything anymore, though, and spending money that on things that don’t make me feel better only adds another layer of shame and guilt onto what I’m already feeling.

At home, at night, I feel trapped. The lights are too bright, the air too dry. I can’t sleep. I can’t read. I can’t watch TV. I can’t write. I can’t talk. I pace and pace and pace, trying to get rid of the prickly, irritable energy that’s building up in my veins, in my bones. I think that I could feel better if the apartment was clean, if the dishes were done and the bathroom sink scrubbed, but I don’t know where to begin, so I pace some more.

I just don’t want to feel anything anymore. I don’t even want to feel the good things. I just want to go to a place that’s beyond feeling.

And I know that suicide is selfish. But I also know that if I was dead, I wouldn’t care about anything anymore. I wouldn’t have to feel guilty about the people that I’ve left behind.

But I can’t help imagining Theo, what it would be like for him if I were to die. How he would cry and cry for me. How he would never be able to understand that I wasn’t coming, not ever. I think about how I would break his heart, think about the fault lines that I would trace along that tiny, powerful muscle, cracks that would break over and over for the rest of his life and never, ever heal.

I don’t really want to die.

I just want to sleep and sleep and sleep forever.

But it sort of amounts to the same thing, really, which is why I went to the hospital last night. Because I love Theo and don’t want to leave him. Because even if I couldn’t feel anything anymore, I would still find some way to miss him.

I live in a big city, so there’s a special hospital just for head cases like me. It even has two sites, one downtown and one in the west end. I went to the one downtown.

They lock you into the ER waiting room. There is a sign on the door that says AWOL Flight Risk. I wanted to take a picture, but I didn’t think they would like that.

There was a woman screaming in a room at the end of the hall.

There was a young man in a suit brought in by two police officers.

There was an unconscious woman brought in on a gurney. Her feet were bare.

There was a girl on the bench next to me, lying with her head on her mother’s lap. Her father was there, too. He said,

“You said that at the last minute something told you not to jump. What was it?”

But she didn’t answer.

While I was there, two code whites were called, which means that there’s a violent patient somewhere in the hospital. One of them, according to the man on the intercom, had a weapon. Both calls sent the ER staff into a flurry, running for doors and phones and elevators.

And I thought, I don’t belong here. I am not having an emergency. These people are having emergencies. I am someone who is fine, only a little sad sometimes. I am coping. I get up every day, go to work, take care of Theo. I am fine. I just have to be stronger, better, less self-indulgent.

And I wanted to leave, but I didn’t.

Finally it was my turn to see the doctor. She was young, kind. Her outfit wouldn’t have looked out of place in my closet, and I coveted her glasses.

She listened to me, took a few notes. Recommended a few things. She said that her main prescription was to try to prioritize things that make me happy.

I’m not sure how easy that will be to execute, but I like it anyway. I’m strangely pleased that instead of having me try another pill, a different pill, she handed me a piece of paper telling me to prioritize my own happiness. It seems like something that would happen in a book, or a movie, and I’ve always wanted to live in a book or a movie.

So how do I feel now?

Raw, I guess.

The same, I guess.

Maybe a little more hopeful, so that’s a start.

I still can’t stop reading Anne Sexton’s Wanting To Die.

I still can’t stop reading Ted Hughes’ book Birthday Letters, or poem his Last Letter.

But maybe I’ve read them a few times less today than I did yesterday.

I am trying to find some happy way to end this post, but I can’t think of any. I want to offer you some kind of hope. Then again, if I had cancer, or diabetes, would I feel that same urge to comfort you, to take care of you? Maybe. I don’t know.

I will leave you with this, one of my favourite quotes from the Bell Jar. It’s as true for me now as it was for Sylvia Plath when she wrote it more than 50 years ago.

“Don’t you want to get up today?”

“No.” I huddled down more deeply in the bed and pulled the sheet up over my head. Then I lifted a corner of the sheet and peered out. The nurse was shaking down the thermometer she had just removed from my mouth.

“You see, it’s normal.” I had looked at the thermometer before she came to collect it, the way I always did. “You see, it’s normal, what do you keep taking it for?”

I wanted to tell her that if only something were wrong with my body it would be fine, I would rather have anything wrong with my body than something wrong with my head, but the idea seemed so involved and wearisome that I didn’t say anything. I only burrowed down further in the bed.

I would rather have anything wrong with my body than something wrong with my head.

But since I do have something wrong with my head, I’m glad I’ve got all of you to listen.

For anyone who is in a state of mental health crisis, here is a link to the Mental Health Crisis line. You can also call Telehealth, if you’re in Ontario. If you are experiencing any kind of depression or are having suicidal thoughts, please, please call one of the numbers above, or else contact your doctor or local mental health crisis line.

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What It’s Like To Live Here, Part II

25 Jan

You start to think about hitting rock bottom, what that means, what it would feel like.

You picture it like this:

You’re walking through the woods, along the same path you’ve taken a thousand times before, and suddenly the forest floor gives way beneath you. You fall, for what seems like ages, until you hit the ground. You look around and discover that you’re in some kind of underground cavern. The walls are smooth, the hole you fell through far out of reach. There’s no way you could ever get out on your own.

It’s awful at first, but soon, surprisingly soon, you get used to it. You sleep a lot. You tell yourself stories. You sing, or talk, or shout, just to hear the sound of your own voice. For a few hours each day the sun climbs high enough for you to see it, its rays filtering through the grasses and leafy undergrowth on the surface, throwing strange patterns on the floor.

Sometimes your friends come by. They call to you, but you can’t make out what they’re saying, because they’re too far away. They bring you things: food, books, a blanket. Useful things. Things that would have mattered to you in your old life, in the world above. They don’t seem so necessary anymore, though. You’re not cold anymore. You’re not hungry. You don’t read. That’s not your life anymore, you’re beyond wants, beyond needs. You just lie there, sleeping and singing.

Depression is easy in many ways, often easier than happiness. It doesn’t require much of you, doesn’t ask much of you. All that it wants is for you to suffer, but after a while that suffering feels familiar, comforting almost. Depression is the place you come always back to, and though its landscape is ugly, the colours muddied and muted, it feels strangely like home. Though its’ terrain is bare and uninviting, you know every inch of it, and you derive a sort of satisfaction from that fact. After a while, depression starts to feel normal.

Happiness, by contrast, begins to seem garish, the colours offensively bright, the people too loud, too smiling. While depression saps your energy gently, quietly, happiness is exhausting in a different way.

The other problem with happiness is that it never seems like a real place. You know from experience how quickly the landscape can change around you, melting and shifting like objects in a Dali painting, slowly but surely transforming itself back into that place you know best.

Happiness can’t be trusted; it’s tricky, elusive, and undependable. Depression, whatever else you might say about it, is as regular and predictable as a Swiss clock. Depression, whatever else you might say about it, is honest. It tells you how awful the world is; it doesn’t spare you any gory details.

People tell you not to listen to depression. People want you to think that depression lies.

“Who are you going to trust?” asks your depression, “Some stranger on the internet, or me, the thing you’ve known for almost your entire life? Come on now, be reasonable.”

You want so desperately to be reasonable.

You tell your therapist that you think you need to develop some coping skills. This is the kind of terminology they use, right? Coping skills? You hope that by saying this, you sound like someone who actively wants to get better, someone who’s trying her hardest.

Your therapist tells you that she thinks you already have them, those magical coping skills. You leave her office thinking, what the fuck does she know?

Then you remember what life was like before you felt any kind of ability to cope. You remember crying, publicly, humiliatingly, your sobs coming in huge, heaving gasps that left you unable to breathe. You remember being unable to get out of bed. You remember the world ending, over and over again, all day, every day.

You thank whatever god is out there that you’ve developed coping skills.

Then you get angry, because even though you’re coping, everything still really fucking sucks.

You call your mother and tell her that you’re having a tough time.

“Think of one thing that you’re grateful for everyday,” she tells you. “Write it down.”

After you thank her, politely, and say goodbye, and tell her that you love her, after you’ve hung up the phone, you think, fuck gratitude.

What has gratitude ever gotten you?

Probably lots of things, maybe everything, but you don’t care. You don’t feel like considering that right now.

You don’t feel like considering anything, or anyone. You just want to be left alone, forever. Seeing people makes you feel as if you have some kind of obligation to get well, but you don’t want to have any obligations anymore.

You imagine that at rock bottom there are no obligations.

You start to avoid people, your friends, your family, the strangers who smile at you on the street. You tell yourself that you don’t need human interaction. You tell yourself that you don’t want it.

Then one day you’re crossing the road, and there’s a policeman directing traffic. He motions to you to wait halfway while he lets a car go by, then puts his mittened hand on your back, in the space between your shoulder blades, and says kindly, “Go ahead now, honey, it’s your turn.”

For some reason that one small act is so nice that you think you might cry.

It’s winter, always winter, and you know that this year, spring is never going to come. Fuck logic. Fuck science. Where you live, those things don’t apply. You know that there won’t be a spring in the same way that birds know to fly south in the fall, the same way that spiders know how to build a web. You know it more surely than anything you’ve ever known. You know it in your very bones.

You haven’t hit rock bottom. Not yet. If you did, that would be the real emergency. People would be called. Help would come. You feel guilty about how badly you want help to come. You feel guilty about how appealing rock bottom seems, sometimes. You feel guilty about just about everything.

You fall. And you fall. And you fall. And sometimes you snag a passing tree branch or a rock jutting out into space, and sometimes you even start to pull yourself back up, just a little. But the branch always breaks, and the rock always crumbles. And then you go back to falling.

You wonder how long and far a person can fall.

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My Life As A Tree

14 Jan

Have you ever seen a kudzu vine? They’re all over the south, their bright green leaves waving gently in the hot, humid air. At first you’ll think that they’re kind of pretty, but once you realize that they’re capable of, you’ll never look at them the same way again.

They’re an invasive species, the kudzu vines; native to Japan and China, they were introduced to America to help prevent roadside erosion. They spread quickly – statistics show that they’re taking over the American South East at a rate of 150,000 acres annually. Kudzu will grow nearly anywhere, on anything, and its advance seems impossible to stop.

Once kudzu starts to take over a field or a forest, it slowly but surely replaces all existing vegetation. It starves the trees and undergrowth by cutting them off from sunlight; once the kudzu has done its work, all that remains is a swath of green, leafy vines, still in the shape of the things they have killed.

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Sometimes I think that kudzu is the most accurate metaphor for depression that I can come up with. Not just because, at times, it feels like I’m overwhelmed with depression, suffocated and blinded  by it, but also because sometimes I wonder how much of my actual self has been choked off, starved to death. I wonder how much of the me under there is already dead.

Like a tree that’s been covered by kudzu, I don’t look very different from the person I was. I maintain the same shape, the same colour. Outwardly, I’m indistinguishable from someone who isn’t living with depression. And if there are subtle signs that something is wrong – a funny look in my eyes, or a slump to my shoulders – well, those things are easily written off or ignored. With enough effort, I can pass as a person who doesn’t long to spend her days sprawled out on the couch watching re-runs of M*A*S*H, eating chocolate and sobbing.

I am a person who used to be happy. I am a person who used to look forward to things. I am a person who used to laugh, frequently.

It’s not hard to see how much being depressed has altered my life.

What I really wonder, though, is how much of the self I used to be is still intact. When depression first claimed me, I thought that it would be a matter of a few pills and then I would be back to my old self. Now, after years of fighting what Winston Churchill referred to as his “black dog”, years of thinking of it a disease, a medical condition, something that I could recover from, I wonder if it’s possible that the depression is me.

Certainly my life, my choices and my very self have been warped and shaped by depression. At this point, it seems impossible to separate who I really am from all the grinding misery, sadness and negative self-talk that my brain has put me through. When I think about the bad decisions that I’ve made, the not-so-great life choices and the hurtful things that I’ve said, I wonder who or what I’m supposed to blame for them. It seems ridiculous to say that depression didn’t play a part in the fact that I chose to lie in bed, crying and reading trashy novels, instead of doing any homework for basically all of 11th and 12th grade. But it seems just as ridiculous to say that I, myself, the non-depressed, rationally-thinking person who lives somewhere inside of me had absolutely no control over the situation. Surely, at some point, that part must have lacked the will-power or the desire to do what it knew was right.

On especially bad days I begin to believe that I let myself become depressed. I believe that I didn’t fight hard enough or long enough or well enough and, through laziness or lack of discipline, allowed depression to consume me.

Blaming yourself for feeling bad is a slippery slope that never leads anywhere good.

I often think about getting well. Most days it’s the only thing I think about. The truth is, though, that I don’t even know what well is, or what it looks like, let alone how to get there. If I’m being honest with myself, the way that I’m living now feels normal, because it’s the same way that I’ve been living for over half my life. I don’t remember who I was before all this started, and I don’t remember what it was like not to feel like this. I don’t remember what it’s like to get up in the morning and not dread every single thing that has to happen to me before I can finally make it back to bed again.

Someone said to me recently, accusingly, that my problem is that I don’t want to put the necessary work into getting better. The funny thing is, they’re right. I don’t. I’m too tired to do any kind of work. It’s bad enough that I have to get up every day and drag myself through yoga and parenting and writing; I don’t want to have to do any extra work on top of that. Thinking about having to work in order to get well makes me feel exhausted before I’ve even started. Of course I want to get better, but maybe the truth is that I don’t have the energy to do that right now.

It doesn’t help that I don’t really know what people mean by work. Do they mean endless doctor’s appointments? If so, check. Therapy? Check. Medication? Check. Buying self-help books that I’ll never read? Double-check. And, I mean, it’s not like these things are totally useless (except maybe the books), but they’re not really fixing anything, either; mostly they just keep me afloat until the real help arrives. Except that I’m not sure what the real help is, or if it even exists.

The other night, as I was reading through decade-old journal entries, I was struck by how little I’ve changed. I mean, my circumstances have changed, certainly, but the sadness and fear and naked self-loathing I found scrawled on those pages haven’t. Not really. I might be better at hiding those things, better at handling myself in social situations, but truth is that I’m still just as miserable now as I was when I was twenty.

Ten years is a long time to be that miserable.

I also found a quote that I’d copied from Margaret Atwood’s short story, The Sin Eater, which seems just as fitting now as it did then. It’s part of a conversation between the narrator and her therapist, discussing coping skills for her emotional problems:

‘Think of it as a desert island,’ he said. ‘You’re stuck on it, now you have to decide how best to cope.’

‘Until rescued?’ I said.

‘Forget about the rescue,’ he said.

‘I can’t,’ I said.

I can’t forget about the rescue, either.

Because it’s not a nice desert island that I’m stuck on, not one of those tropical ones where you befriend the wild animals and make bras out of coconuts. My desert island is some craggy mass in the North Atlantic, maybe off the coast of Nova Scotia. It’s grey and miserable and wet here, and everything edible tastes like cardboard. It’s always cold, even in the middle of summer. The wild animals are mean, ugly and prone to biting.

The worst part, though, is that the mainland is so close that I can see everyone I used to know going about their daily business. I can even hear them as they talk about all the things that I used to care about. And I’ve tried to get back there. I’ve built boats, dozens of them, to try to cross that narrow strip of water; you can see them there, lined up on the shore of my island, with names like Zoloft and Psychiatry and Therapy painted on their prows.

Nobody ever taught me how to build a boat, though. My crafts are hopeful, but never seaworthy.

Can somebody please send me instructions on how to build a boat?

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What It’s Like to Live Here

9 Jan

You feel like Miss Havisham, trailing around in your shredded, filthy wedding dress, pacing through the same rooms over and over, past the mouldering wedding cake and the long-dead flowers. And as much as you want to blame someone else, you know that you’ve only yourself to blame – not for the fact that he jilted you (although of course you wonder), but because you can’t seem to move past this one defining point in time. Your whole life will be the moment you realized that he was never coming.

When you cross the street, safely, at the crosswalk, you think about what it would be like if the cars didn’t stop. You wonder what would happen if you were hit, what that point of contact would feel like. You don’t take any risks, because you don’t want to get hurt, and you certainly don’t want to die, but still you wonder. And the wondering scares you.

You lie down to take a nap and spend an hour trying to find the cool spot on your pillow.

You start to think that reincarnation might exist, because you don’t understand how you could have done enough in just one lifetime – half a lifetime, really – to make your synapses misfire this badly. You decide that you must have been a terrible person in a past life.

You pick up the phone. You pick up the phone. You pick up the phone.

You don’t call anyone after all.

People ask how you’re feeling, and you try to explain it, but you can’t. Everything you say seems totally unrelated to you the moment it leaves your lips. You wrestle with words, trying to figure out how to describe this place to someone who’s never been there, but all the petty little nouns and adjectives you’ve collected over the course of a lifetime choose this exact moment to fail you. You feel so frustrated that you want to break something.

You pick up the phone and dial the doctor’s number but there’s no answer. It’s just as well, because you had no idea what you were going to say anyway.

You feel like you’re in limbo, somewhere between the ledge you just jumped off of and the place where you’ll hit rock bottom. You wonder if there’s anything you can do other than flail your arms helplessly, or if you should just try to enjoy the free-fall.

Friends offer help, but you feel too embarrassed to accept it. You realize how ironic it is that that embarrasses you, but vomiting your feelings all over the internet somehow doesn’t.

You finally get angry because none of this is fair, even though you know that fair has nothing to do with it. And somehow anger is easier than anything else you’ve been feeling lately.

Your anger quickly burns out, and then you’re right back to where you started.

You repeat all of the above, ad nauseam, for what seems like forever.

In case you were wondering, that’s what it’s like to live here.

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(I am getting help, I promise – it’s just taking some time)

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Is This A Crisis?

3 Jan

This morning I misunderstood something my friend Audra said, and ended up saying something that I shouldn’t have.

She very gently pointed out what I’d done, and I apologized.

Over. And over. And over.

By the end, I wasn’t even apologizing for what I’d said; I was apologizing for annoying her, for always being wrong, and for just plain being myself. This, amid protestations from her that it was fine, that she wasn’t upset, that she hadn’t communicated clearly in the first place.

Finally, I said, “I’m just awful, and I’m overwhelmed, and I’m not doing enough to help myself because I don’t know how.”

All of that was true, even if I hadn’t meant for it to come out like that.

She asked if I wanted to go to the hospital. I balked and asked why. I didn’t see any reason to go to the hospital – I was fine, just having a bad day. Well, a string of bad days, really. Maybe a bad month. But certainly nothing more than that!

“I think it’s a perfectly reasonable thing to do in a crisis, love,” she said. “I feel like you’ve been in a crisis for a bit now.”

But how can I be in a crisis when I seem perfectly fine to everyone else? How can things be that bad if no one else has noticed?

What does a crisis even look like?

When I asked Audra, she said, “Like, I feel like you’ve got the brain equivalent to not being able to breathe, you know?”

Yes. That is exactly what it’s like right now.

Maybe a crisis looks like weeks and weeks or maybe even years of not sleeping.

Maybe a crisis looks like letting my son watch Fraggle Rock after dinner so that I can pass out on the couch behind him, because I can’t stay awake for one more second.

Maybe a crisis looks like waking up shaking and sweating at night and not knowing why.

Maybe a crisis looks like not being able to focus on any one task long enough to complete it.

Maybe a crisis looks like not allowing myself to eat, or have fun, or relax until I’ve finished my work as a pathetic attempt to motivate myself, and the beating myself up when I can’t get anything done.

Maybe a crisis looks like never being good enough, never being smart enough, never having enough hours in the day.

Maybe it looks like my hands shaking as I try to make a cup of tea.

Maybe it looks like crying alone at my desk for no discernible reason.

Maybe it looks like taking everything way too personally.

Maybe a crisis is all of these things taken together; maybe its more than the sum of its parts.

Maybe this is a crisis.

I don’t know how to get out of this. I’m trying all of solutions that I know, like medication, therapy and yoga, and none of them seem to be doing much good. I feel like I’m doing my best, but I’m not sure how to proceed if it turns out that my best isn’t good enough.

I’m scared.

To be honest, I’m not even sure why I’m writing about this publicly. Maybe because it’s easier than talking about it face to face with anyone; maybe I’m hoping someone else will tell me that they’ve been here, and that’ll make me feel less alone, or make me feel like I’ll be able to come out the other side mostly unscathed. Sometimes it feels like talking about my depression on here was like opening a Pandora’s Box, and now I just can’t stop. Often I worry that I’m being awful and attention-seeking. I tell myself that I’m helping combat stigma, but is that true? Or do I have other motives in place?

Is all this negative self-talk part and parcel of my depression? Or am I just being rationally critical of myself? After years of living like this, how do I untangle my actual self from the disease? Or is it just a part of me, part of my personality now?

It’s taking every ounce of my self-will not to apologize for writing this, for annoying you, for being a bad person. Even writing that is a sort of apology; it’s a compromise that I’ve made with myself, a way of showing you how bad I am without actually saying the words I’m sorry.

Is there even any point in getting help? Sometimes it seems like the hope that things will get better is even harder than the depression itself; not only do I feel rotten, but I also have to deal with the disappointment of each successive doctor, medication and therapy not working.

I don’t know what to do.

But I think that this might be a crisis.

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Happy New Year

1 Jan

Last night, Matt, Theo and I got all gussied up to ring in the new year – me in a sparkly dress and flower crown, and the boys in their adorably dashing kilts. Early in the evening, we made our way east, crossing the Don River and heading to a friend’s place in Riverdale, where we spent the night sipping champagne and nibbling delicious hors d’oeuvres, as befits the status of classy people such ourselves. We also sang, cuddled, debated about The Hobbit and witnessed an adorable toddler sleepover. Then, around one in the morning, we woke up our sleeping toddle, packed him into his stroller and headed out into the cold, snowy night.

The streetcar service along Broadview was intermittent (to put it nicely), so we ended up having to walk up to Broadview station, which meant that by the time we made it to the Yonge & Bloor subway station, where we had to change lines, it was nearly two. The platforms were filled with a rowdy crowd of people heading home from their various New Year’s activities, and, once the train arrive and we all boarded, Matt and I found ourselves squarely in the middle of a large, loud, drunk group of people. Which was totally fine, and, really, the only thing you can expect when you’re riding the subway at two o’clock in the morning on New Year’s Day.

The subway doors slid closed, and we were all waiting for the train to start up when suddenly voice spoke out over the PA system:

“Aaaaaand here’s the announcement none of you has been waiting for: this train is now out of service. Everybody needs to exit the train. Come on, now, everybody off.”

There was a lot of grumbling (and a few outright rebellious shouts) as we made our way off the train, and I heard a TTC worker say,

“Don’t blame me, blame the drunk girl who – ”

He cut himself off, perhaps suddenly realizing that people could hear what he was saying.

As the train we’d just disembarked pulled, empty, out of the station, amid shouts of “FUCK ROB FORD!” and “YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK”, I went up to the TTC employee standing at the head of the platform and asked if he knew when service would be restored. It was late, after all, and I wanted to get Theo back to sleep as soon as possible.

The man just shrugged.

“It’s hard to say. We have a power off situation at Summerhill, and who knows when power will be restored?”

Now, when the TTC says that they have a “power off situation”, that can mean that the power is, in fact, off, or it can be a euphemism for a whole range of events and situations, including people jumping or falling in front of trains.

Luckily, we didn’t have to wait long before another train arrived and, the power apparently having been restored, we boarded the train and headed home.

By the time we’d gotten off at Summerhill station, I’d nearly forgotten that it had been the scene of the power outage. After all, the delay had been so short that clearly no one had been seriously injured or killed. I remembered the TTC worker’s words about the drunk girl, though, as we came up the stairs and found a young woman sitting on a bench surrounded by five police officers.

She’d obviously been out somewhere nice. She was wearing a short red skirt with tall black boots, and her long brown hair was arranged in an artfully dishevelled wave. She looked young, maybe in her early or mid twenties. She was crying, hard. So hard that she couldn’t answer the questions the cops were asking.

“We need to know why you did what you did,” one of them said, not very kindly.

She just sobbed and shook her head.

“I don’t know, I don’t know.”

“Where do you live?” asked another.

The girl just buried her face in her hands and cried harder.

“Where do you live when you’re here in Toronto? Rosedale? Parkdale? Come on, now.”

She shook her head again and didn’t, or couldn’t answer. She was more than just upset, or sad; she was terrified. And not one of those police officers had a kind word or look for her. In fact, they seemed more irritated or angered by her antics than anything else.

I don’t know what she did to cause the police to be called, and likely I never will. Did she threaten to jump? If so, why were there no paramedics or health professionals there? Why was her only help a crowd of big, burly, intimidating policemen? Why, instead of trying to calm her down, were the cops using their power to frighten her even more?

Of course, maybe she really did do something bad enough to warrant five police officers (although if that were the case, you’d think she would have been in handcuffs or something). Maybe I misread the situation completely, or else I was just projecting, or my mind, in an attempt to make sense of what I saw, was doing some other weird thing that psychologists have a fancy name for. I don’t know.

But I do know that she was scared. I know that I can’t stop thinking about her today. I know that, above all, I hope that she’s okay.

I know, too, that I wondered last night, and am wondering still, if I should have done something. Should I have gone and sat with her? Offered help? Told the cops to back off? It’s hard not to wish that I’d done something. It’s also hard to admit that part of the reason I did nothing was that even I, a bystander, was intimidated by the policemen, with their uniforms and their guns. This is not the kind of person that I want to be.

Happy 2013, everyone. Please be safe, and don’t forget be kind to each other and to yourselves. Let’s make this year better than the last one.

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Winter

30 Dec

I am not a winter person. Given my choice of the seasons, I’ll pick summer every time. I love the heat, and I even love the humidity. I like it when stepping out my front door feels like walking into an oven. I like the sun, the warmth, and the long evenings that are perfect for picnicking or taking your kid to the park or drinking sangria on patios with friends. I love lying in the grass and reading for hours on end. I love summer.

Winter is a tough time for me. It’s not just the fact that it’s so cold that, after coming in from a long walk, I have to stand in a scalding hot shower for fifteen minutes until I feel warm. It’s not just the fact that my muscles ache because the cold makes me tense up, makes me walk around hunched over in a desperate effort not to freeze to death. It’s not even the fact that it’s already too cold for me, and I know that it’s going to get colder still. It’s more than that, and it’s subtler than that. It’s the light, both the dim, chilly quality it assumes this time of year, and its waning quantity, meaning that we only get to see the sun for a few paltry hours every day. Even though we’re past the solstice and, logically, I know that the days will be getting longer from now until midsummer, it still, somehow, feels as if the days are growing shorter and darker as we head into January.

These days I feel as if I’ve lost the capacity for joy. I’ll catch myself mid-laugh and realize that I’m faking it, and I’m faking it so well that I’ve nearly got myself convinced. In the same way that it’s sometimes hard for me to believe that spring will ever come again, it’s also hard to believe that anything will ever make me feel good or happy again. I have these thoughts, like, hey, maybe at the beginning of my life I was handed out a finite number of good experiences and now, in the winter of my 30th year, I’ve somehow managed to spend the last one.

Part of it might be the fact that everyone seems to be making their year-end posts, tallying up all their successes and bundling them together into one neat little blog post package. I thought about doing one of those, but I know that I won’t. Every new year always seems to me to be like a fresh, white sheet of notebook paper, but by December 31st it’s so marked up, so wrinkled and worn, so covered with revisions and smudges and holes where I rubbed the eraser too hard that I can’t make sense of it anymore.Rather than dig through my year to find material for a year-in-review post, I just want to throw the whole thing out, baby, bathwater and all. As 2013 approaches, 2012 is still too close to give me the perspective I would need, and all my hurts and failures feel too fresh for me to be able to dissect them. Even my successes seem slippery and hard to pinpoint. The other day, as I was watching the hundreds of comments going up on the article I wrote for the Good Men Project, I messaged my friend Audra and said, “Is this what success is supposed to feel like? Because I feel awful.”

Sometimes succeeding feels just as bad, just as anxiety-inducing, as failure does.

Mostly I just want everything to be over. I don’t mean that I want to die or anything like that, but just that I’m so tired of trying to guess what’s coming next. I’m so tired of trying to figure out what to do next, how to take my next step, or which direction I need to go. I want all of my experiences to be over and done with so that I can sift through them and sort them into boxes labelled “good things” and “bad things.” Then, once I’ve done that, I’ll be able to sit back, write a life-in-review post, and judge whether, when looking at the big picture, the scale tips more towards happy or sad.

I’m so tired. So goddamn tired. The worst part is that I can’t even begin to imagine when I won’t feel like this. Maybe next year? Or maybe when Theo’s in grade school? High school? When he moves out? I can’t help but feel like it’s partly my fault, or even mostly my fault, for not sleep-training him, for breastfeeding for so long, maybe even for choosing to have a kid in the first place. I love my son, but I don’t think I can function like this for much longer. Then again, what would not functioning even look like? Will my legs just give out one day, my knees buckling under my weight, and I’ll have to lie on the ground until I’m rested enough to get up again? How do these things work?

If you asked me what I needed in order to feel better, what it would take to make me feel happy, I wouldn’t even be able to tell you. That’s what’s hardest about all of this: feeling as if it’s whatever it is that’s going to save you is totally beyond your control. If there is something that can save you. If that something, should it exist, ever manages to find you.

Sometimes I think that all of the little things that happen throughout my day, the meals, the conversations, the rote interactions, are nothing more than activities designed to get me from one minute to the next until I can finally lie down in my bed at night and sleep (or not). When seen this way, a life is nothing more than a string of days, days made up of pointless experiences meant to propel you through time. I mean, of course my experiences aren’t meaningless. Or maybe they are. I’m not sure.

I’m trying to think of some kind of life lesson to put in here, some kind of moral to this story, but I’m coming up totally dry. Maybe you can try to find your own moral, because sifting back through this mess of feelings seems like so much work. Everything seems like so much work, to be honest. I feel as if I’ve been sucked totally dry of any and all will or ambition or desire.

The winter here is beautiful. The snow, and the quiet, and the bare trees are beautiful. There’s a hush this time of year that you never feel in the summer, and I know I would miss it if I never felt it again. I don’t hate winter, and I don’t even necessarily need for it to be over, like, right now. I don’t even think I would like to live somewhere that was hot and sunny all year long. I just need something to pin my hopes on, something to look forward to, something to hold out for. I need something to focus on when everything seems so dark and cold that I don’t think I can stand it for one minute longer.

I just need to know for certain that spring is going to come.

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How We Talk About Mental Illness

10 Nov

Jared Lee Loughner was sentenced yesterday. In August of this year, he pled guilty to 19 of 49 charges, including first degree murder, after going on a shooting rampage in Tucson, Arizona. His actions left six people dead and injured twelve others, including former Representative Gabrielle Giffords. Yesterday he was given a sentence of seven consecutive life terms in prison, with no chance of parole. Jared Loughner will spend the rest of his life in jail.

I remember this shooting vividly. It happened on January 8th, the day I was admitted to the hospital on bed rest at 34 weeks pregnant. I spent two weeks in the high risk antenatal unit, with only books and my computer to fill long hours spent in an uncomfortable hospital bed. Because I spent so much time online, I followed the shooting and its aftermath intently, metaphorically holding my breath as I, along with so many other people, waited to see if Gabrielle Giffords would live after taking a bullet to the head during the attempt on her life.

That’s what the shooting was, after all – an attempt to assassinate Giffords, whom Loughner hated for many reasons, chief among which was that she was a woman. In fact, he’d said repeatedly, both online and in person, that women should not hold positions of power. That was why he’d shown up there that day, why he’d brought a 9 mm Glock 19 semi-automatic pistol to a public meeting held in a supermarket parking lot  – because he couldn’t stand the idea of a female member of congress. The thought chilled me, as I’m sure it did many other women.

I’ve continued to keep up with Loughner’s legal proceedings, in part because of the mixture of fear, fascination and revulsion the shooting inspired in me, and partly because, in my mind, this event is somehow bound in the circumstances surrounding Theo’s birth. There was something so strange about sitting in a hospital, doing my best to ensure that a healthy new life came into this world, while someone else worked equally hard to take another life, or rather, several lives, out of it.

I’ve read a lot about the shooting.

I’ve read about Gabrielle’s amazing recovery, and her struggles to regain her mobility and independence.

I’ve read about Christina-Taylor Green, the nine year old who was among those killed.

I’ve read about the other victims, and how this tragedy has impacted their lives and the lives of their families.

Mostly, though, I’ve read about Loughner. How at first he was declared unfit to stand trial after a federal judge ruled that he was mentally incompetent, saying, “At the present time, Mr. Loughner does not have a rational understanding of these proceedings.” How he was given a diagnosis of schizophrenia, and was found to suffer from delusions and disorganized thinking. How, when he finally was deemed fit to stand trial, he was so drugged that he could barely talk. How he still resists being medicated, and has to undergo forcible treatment at the hands of prison officials. How he often doesn’t really seem to understand what happened that day, and has stated in court that he believes that his assassination attempt was successful, and that Gabrielle Giffords is now dead.

It’s pretty clear that Mr. Loughner is seriously ill.

I’ve been reading some of the victim impact statements today, and I’ve been surprised at how some of the victims talk about his illness. Take, for example, what Mark E. Kelly, Gabrielle Giffords’ husband, had to say:

“You tried to create for all of us a world as dark and evil as your own. But remember it always: You failed.”

I found this jarring, to be honest. Let’s be really clear here: I think that Loughner’s actions were, indeed, evil. I know that a mentally ill person’s “world” or mind or whatever term you want to use can certainly be called dark. However, it bothers me that Kelly would refer to the delusional world that Loughner lived in as evil. It also bothers me that Kelly seems to believe that Loughner had some kind of agency over his actions, as if he wasn’t driven by the illness that gripped him body and soul.

Another statement that I read said the following:

“We’ve been told about your demons, about the illness that skewed your thinking.

It’s a painful saga, a tale of missed opportunities and lack of support, of the appalling absence of attention to your behavior. Your parents, your schools, your community –- they all failed you.

That is all true, but it is not expiation. It is not enough. There are still those pesky facts.

You pointed a weapon at me… and shot me… three times.”

While the victim, Ashleigh Burroughs, acknowledges that Loughner was ill, she seems dismissive of his “demons”, demanding, instead, that he answer the “pesky facts” – as if he hadn’t already tried to answer them, only to come up with nonsense, jumbled facts and recollections of the day that are flat-out untrue.

I am not here to criticize Kelly or Burroughs, and I am certainly not here to diminish what they went through. They’ve seen and experienced things that I hope to never, ever encounter. I am not saying that how they are dealing with this is wrong, or that what they said is wrong. What I’m saying is that the way that we, as a culture, talk about mental illness is fucked up.

The things is, this hits close to home for me, because mental illness is something I’ve struggled with. Still do, in fact.

It’s not something I really talk about, ever. I’m deeply uncomfortable even as I type this out, but I want to share this with you, so that maybe you’ll understand where I’m coming from.

When I was in high school, things were tough. I felt sad and hopeless, frequently without any concrete reason. I cried, often, both at home and in public. I wonder, now, if my social isolation lead to this, or if my isolation was a product of how miserable I was. Chicken or egg, right? Certainly both lead to a sort of vicious circle of being alone, then being sad because I was alone, then having no one want to be around me because I was so annoyingly, unendingly down on myself and finally ending up, once again, alone.

When I was sixteen I told my mother about how I felt, and she took me to see our family doctor. He gave me a prescription for Paxil and referred me to a therapist. I hated therapy and stopped going after a few months; the medication didn’t seem to do much, so my doctor increased it, and then increased it again. I couldn’t sleep at night, and I was exhausted all day, sometimes napping on my desk during class. I couldn’t concentrate, and often left my homework unfinished because I was too tired or unfocussed. My grades started to slip, and my teachers grew frustrated with me. One even recommended that I be removed from the special arts program that I was part of. I went from being an A student to barely pulling Cs and Ds and the grownups in my life tsked, shook their heads and told me that I would have to work harder. I failed grade 11 math the first time, and then, the second time around, desperate to pass, I cheated on a test. I got caught. I was suspended. My doctor increased my medication. I didn’t feel any better.

In university, things were initially easier. I had lots of friends, and I was once more getting As and Bs. I forced myself to complete my assignments, working in the computer labs late into the night. My concentration improved, and I tried to be less of a perfectionist with my work – even if I thought something was badly done or incomplete, I submitted it. I turned in every single  assignment on time. I figured that what I’d been lacking in high school was gritty determination; I decided that I could push my way through anything. I thought that if I didn’t succeed at something, it was because I hadn’t tried hard enough.

Then, in third year, things got tough again. I had to leave school due to my financial situation, which was hopelessly snarled after three years of monetary incompetence and inattention. My mood grew worse and worse, and the university clinic doctor frantically tried medication after medication, hoping something, anything would work. Nothing did. I finally received an official diagnosis from him of dysthymia, a mood disorder marked by chronic depression. I started to feel like the future was endless and blank, and that I had no way of getting myself out of this hole. I talked about suicide. My doctor had me hospitalized.

I have literally never told that to anyone other than my mother and Matt until now.

Things got better after that, although I’m not sure why or how. My hospitalization was nearly ten years ago now and, although there have since been some serious dips in my mood, until I was hit with postpartum depression I’d managed to steer clear of that dark place. I even totally went off any kind of medication for seven years, encouraged by a hospital psychiatrist who told me that I wasn’t really depressed, that there was nothing chemical about it, I just had bad coping skills.

I stopped thinking of myself as someone who was living with depression; I told myself that I was just moody, or easily upset. If I had to put a name to what I was feeling, I called it anxiety, which seemed easier and more socially acceptable. Calling what I felt depression made me feel like I was making excuses for myself, and it made me feel like a freak. I refused to us the term mentally ill to describe myself. I went back to my philosophy of pushing myself hard, and then harder when things were difficult. For a while, it worked.

Then Theo was born, and everything went dark, and I couldn’t get out of it.

As part of the postpartum depression program I participated in at Women’s College Hospital, I had to have a monthly meeting with a psychiatrist. My family doctor had put me on Zoloft just before I joined the Women’s College program, and it was up to this psychiatrist to figure out whether or not I was on the correct medication, and what the right dosage was. I gave her as complete a medical history as I could, and then immediately asked how long I would have to be medicated.

“Well, let’s see,” she said, looking back through her notes. “It looks like you’ve had two, maybe three major depressive episodes in your life. You’ll need to be on the Zoloft for at least a year, but I would recommend that you stay on it for five.”

I was shocked. The medication was supposed to be temporary; I wasn’t sick, just fucked up on hormones. I’d thought that I would only be taking Zoloft for a few months, until this whole postpartum depression thing cleared up. That was how it was supposed to work, right? When I told her that, she just smiled.

“I think your old doctor’s original diagnosis of dysthymia was correct,” she said, “and, based on what you’ve told me, I think it’s likely you also have generalized anxiety disorder. This isn’t going to go away once your hormones settle down.”

So here I am, nearly two years after the birth of my son, still medicated and still struggling with my mood. I’ve more or less come to accept this, though. I am a person who is depressed. I am mentally ill.

This is hard to talk about, and what makes it harder is the way our society views mental illness. In the media it’s portrayed as frightening and dangerous, or else as funny and laughable, but rarely as something normal, rarely as something that so many people live with every day. We throw around words like crazy, insane, or psychotic when we’re talking about people whose actions we disagree with. In spite of strong evidence to the contrary, we view it as something made up, or an excuse not to get work done. We want people to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, and we don’t believe them when they tell us that they can’t. We marginalize and mock the people who need us the most.

Mental illness is deeply stigmatized in our society, and will continue to be so until we do something about it.

When we believe that Loughner had agency over his own actions, rather than being controlled by a serious illness, we contribute to that stigma. When Mark E. Kelly refers to the world view of a schizophrenic as evil, he contributes to that stigma. Hell, the fact that we even use words like “evil” or “demons” to describe mental illness contributes to that stigma.

The tighter we hold this stigma, the longer we continue to have beliefs about mental illness that are untrue and have no basis in scientific fact, the harder it is to talk about it. And the harder it is to talk about it, the more people will go untreated. And the more people who go untreated, the higher the risk of something like this happening again.

Which is why I’m talking about this now.

Edited to add: I certainly don’t mean to imply that all those who are mentally ill lack agency over their actions, or even that that those who do lack agency do so all of the time. I also don’t mean to say that someone who is gripped by mental illness will suffer from it forever. I don’t really know how to talk about this, and I acknowledge that I am probably missing a lot of information, and communicating badly. I apologize for that, and for any offence that anyone might take from this.

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Postpartum depression (or, hey, let’s do some oversharing!)

22 Aug

I wanted to start this post off with something very dramatic like, when Theo was six weeks old, I was contemplating suicide. That has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it? Edgy, yet thoughtful. The problem is, it would be a lie – by the time Theo was six weeks old, I’d gone way past contemplation and was firmly into planning territory. It’s just that “planning” doesn’t have quite the same literary panache as “contemplating”, you know?

It would be pills, I decided: the percocets I had left over after my c-section, and some sleeping pills that’d been sitting around since before my pregnancy. I would have to do it while Matt was at work, but close enough to the end of the day that Theo wouldn’t have to be alone with his dead mother for too long. I would get some formula, I decided, and sterilize some bottles – that way Matt could feed him immediately, because Theo would likely be hungry by the time I was found. I would write a note, a good one.

Planning things out step by step like this made me feel better; it made it seem as if I had some kind of control over my life.

I didn’t want to die because I hated Theo. In fact, I loved him ferociously. I wanted to die because I knew that I was totally and utterly incapable as a mother. I wanted to die because I knew that if I lived, if I had to continue to be Theo’s primary caregiver, then I would continue to fuck things up horribly. I wanted to die because if I did, someone else would have to step in as his mother, and whoever it was would surely be more competent than me.

At that moment I sincerely believed that even random people I passed on the street were more qualified to raise my son than I was.

I tried to tell people how I felt, tried to convince them that I was an unfit parent, but no one seemed to believe me. They dismissed my worries as normal, and told me that every first-time mother felt the same way. I knew that what I was feeling was far from normal, but I didn’t know what to do about it. I thought about running away, packing a suitcase full of warm weather clothes and boarding a plane, but that seemed crazy. Suicide, however, seemed totally logical.

Although I’m referring to what I went through as postpartum depression, my anxiety and fear had been around for most of my pregnancy. Here I’d gone 27 years only having to take care of myself (and often doing a pretty poor job of it), and now suddenly I was 100% responsible for this tiny life inside of me. It seemed like that should be enough to drive anyone around the bend.

Was I eating enough, I wondered? Was I eating the right things? Did I need more iron? Was I getting enough omega 3 to ensure healthy brain development? I started carrying around a list of fish, rated from highest mercury content to lowest. I would whip this list out at restaurants and do a few quick calculations in my head – had I already ingested any potentially mercury-laced fish this week? How big of a portion could I have? It didn’t seem fair that Matt didn’t have to change his life at all while his son gestated, but I had to watch every bite that went into my mouth.

And then there was the alcohol. See, I hadn’t known I was pregnant for the first few weeks, and I’d had maybe two or three glasses of wine, total, in that time. Midway through my pregnancy I became convinced that my child was going to have fetal alcohol syndrome. I hadn’t even given birth yet, and I’d already ruined my child’s life. How could I be such a selfish, terrible person?

By the end of my pregnancy I’d become incredibly paranoid about everything, so it was almost with a sense of relief that I greeted the news that, at 34 weeks, I had to be hospitalized and put on bed rest. Here I would be in a place where I was eating a doctor-approved diet, where I would be hooked up to a big, clunky machine twice a day in order to monitor my son’s heart rate, and nurses were only the press of a button away. After months of fretting over taking care of myself and the baby, suddenly I could put myself in someone else’s hands.

And then Theo was born, at 36 weeks, via c-section. I’d thought that once he was out of me, once I could hold him in my arms and know for certain at any given moment that he was alive and well, things would be better. It wasn’t like that, though. I held him briefly in the operating room while they stitched me back up, but then they whisked him away, concerned about the grunting he was doing (a sign of laboured breathing, they said). Matt went with him, and my mother went off to call my grandmothers and aunts and uncles. I sat alone in the recovery room and waited, wanting only to hold my son.

They brought Theo back to me and let me try to nurse him, but he wouldn’t, or couldn’t. He started grunting again, so they took him away again, this time across the street to Sick Kids for an x-ray of his lungs. You need to prepare yourself for the fact that he might end up in the NICU, the nurse told me. I knew that wasn’t the end of the world, but still, it was scary. On top of that I’d read so many things about how the first few hours of a baby’s life are critical for bonding and creating a breastfeeding relationship – would missing this time with him have an effect on the bond we had?

The thing was, I was already having doubts about our mother-son bond, even that early in the game. When I’d been pregnant, I’d felt like Theo and I had intuitively understood each other. He would kick, and I would ascribe meaning to those kicks. I would rub his feet as they poked my ribs, and I felt like he just knew that my actions meant, baby, I love you. But once Theo was born, I realized that he was a total stranger. I didn’t know what he thought or wanted at all, and he didn’t give a shit about my feelings.

That first week things went from bad to worse. I couldn’t get Theo to latch, and every attempted nursing session was a nightmare. His weight dropped down to 4 lb 12 oz, which, while still within the range of normal, seemed frighteningly low. I felt like I’d failed at having the birth I wanted, had failed at properly bonding with my son, and was now failing at providing him with even the most basic necessities, like food. I couldn’t believe that they actually trusted me enough to let me take my kid home a few days after his birth.

There was something else, too. During my c-section, I heard my doctor say to his intern, look at this, here’s why he was breech. I asked him what he’d found, and he told me that I have a bicornuate uterus (like a cat! he said brightly). This means that instead of having one large chamber, my uterus has two smaller ones. Theo’s head had been stuck in one of the chambers and he’d been unable to flip into the proper position.

Of course, as soon as I could, I googled bicornuate uterus. Wikipedia had the following to say:

Pregnancies in a bicornuate uterus are usually considered high-risk and require extra monitoring because of association with poor reproduction potential.

A bicornuate uterus is associated with increased adverse reproductive outcomes like:

  • Recurrent pregnancy loss: the reproductive potential of a bicornuate uterus is usually measured by live birth rate (also called fetal survival rate).
  • Preterm birth: with a 15 to 25% rate of preterm delivery. The reason that a pregnancy may not reach full-term in a bicornuate uterus often happens when the baby begins to grow in either of the protrusions at the top. A short cervical length seems to be a good predicter of preterm delivery in women with a bicornuate uterus.
  • Malpresentation (breech birth or transverse presentation): a breech presentation occurs in 40-50% pregnancies with a partial bicornuate uterus and not at all (0%) in a complete bicornuate uterus.
  • Deformity: Offspring of mothers with a bicornuate uterus are at high risk for “deformities and disruptions” and “malformations.”

So here I’d been worrying about stupid things like omega 3 and iron while, deep in the dark recesses of my body, my own uterus was secretly working against me. This whole time I’d been afraid of the wrong thing – I was like France, setting up the Maginot Line, while all along the Germans were planning to attack from the opposite direction.

I was clearly (biologically, even) not meant to be anybody’s mother.

The first few weeks of Theo’s life were awful. I’d always been a bad sleeper, and now it was worse. Theo wriggled and grunted in his sleep, and it kept me awake. Every little sound that came out of him made all of my muscles tense up, making rest nearly impossible. Whenever I complained about how tired I was, people would say, sleep when the baby sleeps, as if that was some great revelation. As if it was something that I couldn’t come up with on my own. Breastfeeding continued to suck, and I began to dread feeding time. I would push it back by 5, 10 or 15 minutes, as if that made any difference. My days were lonely, boring and frustrating.

It was the carrier that finally pushed me over the edge. See, we live on the third floor and our building doesn’t have an elevator. I’m not strong enough to drag our stroller up and down the stairs. So, whenever we went out, I used a carrier for Theo. And whenever he fell asleep in the carrier, he grunted with every breath.

I asked everyone about the grunting – my mother, my sister-in-law, friends with kids. Everyone assured me that it seemed totally normal. Then, while obsessively googling “grunting” “breathing” and “baby carrier”, I found one lone site that said that grunting was a sign of laboured breathing (which I already knew), and prolonged grunting could mean that the baby’s blood oxygen level was low. Which could lead to many health complications, including brain damage.

The thing is, I’d known something was wrong. I’d known. I’d asked everyone and yes, they’d reassured me, but why hadn’t I trusted my own instincts? Because I stupidly and selfishly wanted to be able to leave the house, that’s why. If I was any kind of good mother, I would have stopped using the carrier as soon as he started grunting. I would have stayed home until Theo was old enough for the grunting to fix itself. But I wasn’t a good mother. I was a terrible mother. Not only that, but I was a clear danger to my child.

When I read that part about the brain damage, I handed my sleeping son to my visiting mother-in-law, went into the bedroom and cried for three hours. How could I ever undo this? How could it ever be fixed? It wasn’t as if I could just have a new kid and start fresh, having learned from my mistakes. A baby wasn’t like a paper that you could crumple up and toss in the garbage. I was stuck with my sad, damaged kid, and would be stuck with him for the rest of my life. He would be a constant reminder of what a terrible person I was.

If I’d been home alone at that moment, I likely would have killed myself then and there. But I wasn’t alone, so instead I confessed everything to my mother-in-law, hoping she would call the CAS and have Theo taken into protective custody (or, at the very least, have me arrested). Instead, she convinced me to go to the doctor.

And I did go to the doctor, and joined a program at Women’s College Hospital specifically for women with PPD, and I went on medication, and saw a therapist. All of that helped, but I think what helped the most was seeing Theo grow up and realize that no, in fact, he wassn’t brain damaged. He’s a totally normal, lovely, happy kid. And these days I’m mostly a totally normal, lovely, happy mom. And we have a pretty decent bond, I would say.

I still have my moments of fear and paranoia. I still occasionally freak out over little things (just ask Matt – I make him do all my baby-related googling now). I will probably always be a somewhat high-strung parent, but I can live with that.

What makes me sad is that I will never get those first few weeks of Theo’s life back. They will always exist for me in this cold, dark haze. I will never be able to think of Theo as a newborn without associating his early babyhood with that terrible time in my life. And that sucks. It sucks big time.

What also sucks is that I feel like I can’t talk about my experience with PPD. I often dance around the issue, saying “I had a tough time at the beginning,” or, “things were really hard for me”. I’ve never said, “being a new mother made me suicidal”. Well, not until now.

But I want to talk about it. I want to share my experience so that maybe someone else will think, hmmm, maybe I’m not bonkers and/or a terrible mother, maybe it’s my hormones. I want to feel like I’m not the only one who went through this, and I also want other women to feel like they’re not alone. I want them to know that things will get better, that they should talk to their doctor, or call a suicide hotline.

Most of all I want them to know that they are, in all likelihood, fantastic mothers.

Theo and I a few hours after his birth

For anyone who is in a state of mental health crisis, here is a link to the Mental Health Crisis line. You can also call Telehealth, if you’re in Ontario. If you are experiencing any kind of depression or are having suicidal thoughts, please, please call one of the numbers above, or else contact your doctor or local mental health crisis line.

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