The polarity of decisiveness

There is power in your yes and no.

Felicity colored this image of a butterfly and titled it “The Hope Butterfly” in early spring, 2020. I photographed it, because I needed the visual reminder that hope existed and I’d rediscover it if I just held on long enough.

I sat in the bathroom furthest from the fray, where nine other women chattered and pieced together cherished photographs they archived in order to remember. My need for seclusion was this: I was waiting to find out if I was pregnant, or not.

The two minutes between test and result were excruciating. My breath caught in my throat. My heart thudded. My mind emptied of thought as if it were weightless and I might fall to the floor in a heap of shock. All this, I knew, meant that I didn’t need to see the pregnancy test to know the answer. Still, I waited.

No one carried an inkling that I huddled in the closet-sized corner of the upstairs in the renovated home that had become a popular retreat house for paper crafters in Michigan. Once the two blue lines appeared, I slid against the wall, then crumbled to the floor, heaving and sobbing.

This was a terror I’d never known, a type of helplessness I could not easily evade. Now I knew a human was growing inside my body, but it was the very worst surprise news I could have received at the time. The reason was that I already felt that I was collapsing into myself on a daily basis. My threshold of tolerating noise and chronic sleep deprivation and postpartum aches shriveled moment by moment.

Joey, our fourth baby, was only six months old when I learned I was pregnant again.

This was not okay. Yet it was supposed to be. I was told from a young age that children are always a blessing (they are) and that every human life holds inestimable value (it does). In the moment I held the pregnancy test in my hand, I could not reconcile these truths with my visceral reaction, which was to flee, to save myself.

Postpartum depression never appeared as a topic of conversation when I prepared for childbirth. In fact, it became an afterthought, a fleeting mention from one of the nurses who handed me discharge paperwork in the hospital before Ben and I would leave with our new baby. Looking back, I wonder if the comfort of the nurse trumped discussing such a troubling possibility with a new mother.

No one wants to admit to the unfortunate taboo of a psychological break. The way we think determines much of how we choose to act, the beliefs we adopt, and how we interact with our environment. The problem of pregnancy concerned me because of the awareness that I could no longer hide my mental fragility: my thoughts were bleak (“Life is never going to improve”), my behaviors mimicked my thoughts (I could not smile, spoke curtly to everyone, and withdrew into my inner world instead of reaching out).

Two weeks after Felicity’s birth in 2010, I laid with her little newborn body, skin to skin, on our family room couch. As soon as Ben returned home from work, I fell apart - rambling about my ineptitude at mothering our new baby daughter, wailing as I held her close to my chest, “I can’t do this! I don’t know what to do with a baby!”

Obviously this was indicative of postpartum depression, though I did not recognize it at the time. The dread and sense of inadequacy waned shortly after that, but would return vengefully within two weeks of giving birth to each of my subsequent children. And each time, its magnitude and force struck me a little longer before it faded.

So I held out for the time when the mood swings would dissolve, as I knew they eventually would, not giving a second thought to the why behind the intuition that I was not quite myself. But after Joey’s birth, I could no longer conceal the radical, sometimes violent rages that erupted after the children were in bed and Ben and I sat, side by side, in our otherwise vacant family room.

Because I hadn’t fully recovered from the macabre thoughts, dark mood, and irate outbursts, the discovery of a fifth pregnancy only exacerbated my dread. I would plummet into this headspace again, so soon after I’d only begun to claw my way out of it. There was no time to regain my sense of self, of stasis, so I panicked.

And postpartum depression collided with perinatal depression in that instant in the bathroom when I saw the two blue lines.

I found myself revisiting old questions I once resolved, which only begged more questions, esoteric and vast, that I quickly understood could not be answered. There were so few solutions to an expanse of problems and inner turmoil, which compounded the weight of my mounting anxiety and despair about not just being a mother, but living in this way, indefinitely.

During my formative years, every presenting problem corresponded with an immediate, clear resolution. Life existed in binary planes, the either/or rather than the both/and. It was intolerable to clasp two paradoxical realities, so my family of origin exiled one in favor of the other. To me, this was how one survived hard times: just convince yourself that this, too, shall pass or all things happen for a reason, and it will assuage your tension.

But this time, curled alone in that upstairs bathroom in the Michigan retreat house, it was obvious to me that I would not emerge from this experience by clinging to old platitudes. Instead, I would need to challenge myself to return to the questions of my youth and accept that some of them may not be fleshed out so easily, if at all. In fact, I might have to surrender the idea that the questions themselves - why, what if, how could it be - would ever form a definite conclusion in my life.

Maturity, I came to embrace before that day, involved sitting with the interior strain of feeling both relieved and anxious when we received Sarah’s autism diagnosis. Of noticing the grief I felt, followed by genuine happiness, when a friend would explain that her parents cheerfully took their kids for a weekend, when I often had to wrestle with mine to volunteer for a few hours a couple of days a week.

Still, the only concept that consoled me for the duration of three solid years of wishing my life, as I knew it at the time, would end was this: the polarity of decisiveness. The yes. The no. The power in my yes and my no. The fact that every moment, I was either accepting or rejecting some notion or conversation or action or thought.

Reading these words from Kerry Egan’s book, On Living, ratified my burgeoning reckoning that I could say yes, and I could say no - not only could, but did. Every day. I determind what I did and didn't do, what I would and wouldn’t tolerate:

Life is a million choices, and every choice is a choice not to do something else…

This grounded me and revived a sense of agency, and the knowledge that I could alter certain aspects of my life pulled me out of this furious tempest inside of me. I began to stop myself when thinking hopeless thoughts, redirecting them not to platitudes but to honesty: that maybe I couldn’t change my circumstances, but I could take a nap. Or a shower. Or enjoy a cup of chamomile tea.

And these, I knew, would not transform my entire life, but they would sustain me, at least to manage this moment of this day. This was how I reclaimed my life, bit by bit - by the little yeses and nos I granted myself. Because it was really about permission for me: permission to feel, to take up space, to be incensed or aggrieved or depleted, to fall apart.

What I had never done, and quite possibly what had led me to postpartum depression, was that I had never permitted myself to challenge the status quo, the collective consciousness of my family, the religious convictions that shielded me from admitting that not everything can be settled or rectified. Some hardships must simply be lived, endured for a time, so that they can nestle themselves in the history of my life, which I hoped - still hope - will convert to my legacy.

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What I’m currently reading:

This is how reading operates for me: I hear about a book somewhere, then (usually) check it out at my local library. If another book is referenced inside, and I find the idea or insight profound, I will subsequently check out that book. Well, a friend of mine (who also happens to love memoir - Hi, Mary!) recommended Paulina Porizkova’s memoir, No Filter, which referred to Kerry Egan’s book, On Living.

Two things prompted me to read On Living: one, Kerry Egan is a hospice chaplain, and (as you may know) my former writing and speaking niche happened to be in the spirituality of grief; two, the title appealed to me, because we don’t often think of working with the dying as focusing on living.

And I wanted to incorporate that idea into my own memoir about living, about life.

Egan’s book is a collection of essays, in which she relays stories of encounters with the dying hospice patients she built relationships with, and the lessons they imparted, sometimes pleaded with her to share in a book. Egan’s ability to reflect and interject her own story about drug-induced postpartum psychosis threads the concept that we don’t have to wait until we are dying to begin the task of living.

Both living and dying well, as Egan desribes so aptly, are about learning to live in the gray. And that is precisely what I am attempting to portray in my own memoir. Even if you do not “feel” like delving into the heartache associated with loss and grief, Egan’s On Living is well worth the read, because its focus isn’t on the dismal act of passing but on how we learn to live in the midst of what is uncertain and unresolved.