Dropped Threads 2 (14 page)

Debonding

Faith Johnston

A year ago my husband played seven games of racquetball with his twenty-one-year-old son. Then he drove home, grabbed a pillow from the bedroom and flopped on the living room couch to watch a football game. It was there that I found him hours later. His death was a fluke, a sort of accident. If only he had not been so competitive (he won all seven games). If only he had recognized the symptoms of heart distress (a bottle of antacid was open beside the sink). If only I had been home.

I have a cousin who has been widowed twice. Her first husband was killed in a construction accident. Her second husband died in his sixties, after a series of strokes. Someday, she says, she will draw up a list—the advantages and disadvantages of a sudden death versus a long lingering death. She is a very crusty lady but a sympathetic one, and in the early days after my own husband’s death she phoned often and sent me cheery e-mails. She had been out for a walk on a lovely day. She had been to a quilting convention. Life goes on, she seemed to be saying. God is good.

And of course, she’s right. We are a resilient species. Even at the moment of finding my husband’s body, I had begun the process of reconciling myself to the hard fact of his death. My poor darling, I thought, your life has been stolen away; you will miss so much. But at the same time I told myself that he didn’t know, that he hadn’t a clue, that there were worse deaths than falling asleep on your living room couch. I still go back to those thoughts, to that night, over and over again. Perhaps that is one of the disadvantages of a sudden death: the tendency to get stuck in that moment, like a car mired in the mud, its wheels spinning. There’s no going back, but there’s no going forward either.

It was New Year’s Eve. I had just arrived home from four days with my own children on the West Coast. All the comings and goings, the logistics of supporting a blended family of five children, so daunting at first, had become almost routine. The children were in their twenties and living on their own. We had been married eight years and considered ourselves extraordinarily lucky.

That luck had changed. I was no longer the woman who had found love again in her forties—a sort of fairy tale we like to believe. (“Do you mind,” said a friend, “if I tell your story to my family studies class?”) Now I was a widow, and I didn’t like that word at all. I felt that I had been thrust into old age prematurely.

My apartment block is full of widows, doughty women who always have a cheerful word when we meet in the elevator or the laundry room. How do they do it, I wondered, year after year—all those dinners eaten alone? “Widows,” I said to my daughter, “widows everywhere. Did you know that widowers are seven times more likely to remarry than widows?” She told me I was being morbid and bought me a copy of
Rolling Stone
with a cover photo of Courtney Love, topless. “She’s a widow, too,” she said.

But I wasn’t convinced. It was so clear to me, in those early days, that the best of my life was over. The future seemed entirely bleak. There was the money to travel, to do whatever I wanted to do, but I was sure there would be no pleasure in anything, so what was the point? I thought of the grandchildren yet to come, of taking care of them by myself, half the pleasure lost. I felt a new kinship with all the lonely people in the world. I thought of a friend, childless, widowed in her forties, who tended to latch on to men who treated her badly. I had listened to her sad stories but never really understood. Now I did. There are times, I have discovered, when even a scrap of attention is better than nothing at all.

It was as if I had crossed an invisible line into a new world in which I had more in common with the panhandlers I met on my walks than with my friends who were still in pairs. I was needy not for money but for attention, for love, for hope. I was not depressed in any classic sense. I read late and slept eventually, I had the energy to go for long walks, and I took up again all the activities that were mine alone and had not involved my husband. Still there was a lot of time left, a lot of life left. What would I do with it? Get a job? Buy a house and start a garden? Keep a cat? None of these ideas appealed to me. I had just retired from teaching and had no need, no desire, to reconstruct that phase of my life.

“You must learn to become good company to yourself,” a wise friend advised. Yes, I said to myself, take your own interests more seriously. Don’t be ruled too much by the need for companionship. But emotionally I seemed to have reverted to adolescence. I bounced around as if on a bungee cord, one minute up, soaring, the next minute entirely glum.

There was a man I would often meet in the mornings when I jogged down the crescent and into a park along the river. He was a slight, bony man with blue eyes, who smiled and said hello and then was off and on his way. He had a jaunty sort of walk. I could imagine him crossing a desert with the same self-assurance, stepping out briskly, wearing his Tilley hat and carrying a newspaper, his springer spaniel following obediently behind. My husband was that sort of man, happy with his routines, energetic, optimistic. I wondered if this man had a wife. Already I could picture the two of us, in our housecoats, sharing the Saturday papers.

Then one day, in the same park, I met a blond woman in a pink shirt throwing a stick for a springer spaniel. The wife! My heart sank, all my fantasies dashed in one blow. But later the same day, I ran across the same pair and realized that it wasn’t the right dog at all—far too shaggy and ill kept. There was still hope! I blush to tell you this story now, it’s so ridiculous. But there it is—that’s how I felt. I wanted a replacement, and even a small grain of hope was enough to set me off.

I’ve been writing in the past tense as if I have come through and become a more sensible person, but that’s not the whole truth. I realize more and more that I am the same person I always was—cool on the surface, but willing to follow my romantic heart wherever it leads me. At twelve I fell in love with the paperboy (and he wasn’t the first!). I have never broken the habit of loving men; I’ve never seriously thought of trying. If the man in the Tilley hat should happen to be single, and if he should one day break his stride and invite me along, I cannot imagine saying no. But in the meantime, I’m not holding my breath.

When you live alone, work comes easily. For play and growth you need other people—close friends who love you despite your annoying quirks (isn’t that what husbands are for?). If you knew me, you would say I have many such friends, but still they are not enough. The married ones are busy with families and careers. The single ones have developed their defences. We approach one another warily, fearing excessive demands on our time, fearing rejection. How easy it is to appear needy and ridiculous!

Developing intimate relationships in middle age is daunting, but what is the alternative? Burying myself in books? Becoming a counter? I fear becoming a counter. It seems to run in the family. One of my grandmothers (widowed early) counted the buds on her rosebushes; an old cousin (also widowed early) counted her slights, tallied them up in a long list. Someday others, too, would know what it meant to be alone. Then they would be sorry for neglecting her—and I, of course, was one of the culprits. May I not become a counter.

How will I find that balance of work and play that nourishes us all, whether we are young or old? I don’t know yet. It seems that everything in my life has changed, that every relationship is in the process of realignment. It is not a simple matter of replacement, after all. No person can replace another. Perhaps, someday, my husband will become one of my many ghosts, a missing piece of myself, but only a small piece, one I can live without. Meanwhile, I must make every effort to look forward, for I know that if I look back, I will spend the rest of my life loving someone who is dead.

A year after my husband’s death, there is a belated New Year’s dinner at my sister-in-law’s house. Everyone in my husband’s family is there, happy to be together again. The feeling of caring and congeniality goes far beyond the usual command performance.

A year ago on this day, we were planning a funeral, and a few nights before that my husband’s youngest son smashed his fist into a brick wall when he learned of his father’s death. None of us will ever forget that night, but we do not speak about it—it’s rather like the war. I was born during the war, but growing up I never heard a thing about it. I’d like to ask my stepson about his father’s last hours. What did they talk about? What was my husband thinking? Was he happy? We’ve had many private conversations in the past year, but I have never dared ask these questions.

The oldest son takes his father’s place at the head of the table and carves the ham. When we play cards, he is the scorekeeper. There is no debate about any of this—no discussion at all. It’s as if his father were still present, guiding his behaviour. But the appearance of normality is deceptive; our common link has been broken, and we are into something new, into forging a new set of relationships, and though I am not sure what my place in this family will be, I am determined to stay. I had often viewed my stepfamily as a burden, but now I see it more and more as a blessing. Is it possible that in the past year I have grown in wisdom?

I know only that my loneliness and despair are subsiding. I still cannot look back, but I can live fairly comfortably in the present. The merry-go-round of life may have dropped me off, unceremoniously, back where I started, thirty years ago, but I’m not the only one. Like other women whose lives have been filled with people but who are now alone, I am standing here waiting to choose my horse, ready for another go.

    
In memory of Barry Boothe, 1944–2000

Mother
                    Interrupted

Sarah Harvey

Good mothers don’t want to drop their newborn babies on their heads. I understood that. At thirty-one, I wasn’t young, stupid or inexperienced. I had a seven-year-old son I adored. I had wanted a second child, albeit for some fairly dubious reasons, and now I was terrified of her and even more terrified of myself. How had I come to be standing in my kitchen on a perfect autumn day, contemplating infanticide?

It was 1981, and I had been married for eight years to a man I had come to loathe and fear. Isolated from my friends and unwilling to confide in my family, I decided to have another child, since being a mother was the only thing that brought me any joy. My husband was out of work, and we had run out of money and moved in with my parents, whom my husband detested (the feeling was mutual). My daughter was conceived in my parents’ four-poster bed while my mother played duets with my son on the grand piano downstairs. Mozart, as I recall, something cheerful and sunny to herald the beginning of what would become a nightmare pregnancy. At five months, I went into labour and was told by an obstetrician that if my baby was born, it would die. Left alone, hooked up to an IV, watching a machine that monitored my baby’s heart, I struggled with fear and pain and a powerful desire to rip the IV from my arm and run—away from my husband, my children, my future.

When the contractions finally stopped, I was sent home with strict instructions to spend the rest of my pregnancy lying down. I could forget about working in the garden. Even lifting a full kettle of water was forbidden. I read a lot of biographies that spring and summer—other people’s lives being infinitely preferable to my own—and worried about the significance of every passing twinge and pang. I did my best to look after my son, although I failed to play an adequately animated Robin to his Batman. When I was eight months pregnant, he broke his arm in a fall from our backyard apple tree—he was Superman that day—and I cringed when a nurse asked me what I had been doing when he fell. “Lying on the couch,” I replied. “Reading a book.” When the labour finally began, one day after the due date, it was swift and, if not painless, certainly the most fun I’ve ever had in a hospital. I was elated. My daughter and I had both survived, my son was happy to have a baby sister, and I could go home and carry on doing what I did best.

A month later, I was wondering what would happen to the baby (and me) if I dropped her on her head. Would I be arrested? Would my son be able to visit me in prison? Would I be able to get a full night’s sleep and eat a good meal? As the days wore on and my anxiety deepened, I became utterly unable to care for Fiona—I couldn’t nurse her or even be trusted to prepare formula. I cried every time she cried, and even changing her diapers exhausted and repulsed me. A picture of me taken at the time shows a woman I barely recognize—gaunt, unsmiling, standing next to my frowning husband, grimly clutching a crying baby and wearing the ugliest apron in the known universe. I felt no connection with the baby in my skinny arms, only unendurable anxiety, paralyzing shame, unfathomable depression and enormous guilt. Adrienne Rich says that “the first knowledge any woman has of warmth, nourishment, tenderness, security, sensuality, mutuality, comes from her mother.” If that was true, my little girl was out of luck.

By the time Fiona was two months old, I was, to put it kindly, a basket case. Well-meaning friends talked about the “baby blues” and predicted I would “snap out of it” as soon as I found my bootstraps and pulled on them. Nevertheless, I sank further into the squid-ink darkness of my depression. My chronically optimistic mother, who was by then looking after both children, agreed with my husband, for the first and last time, that I needed help. When I became incoherent—about the same time dehydration and weight loss gave me the skin of a ninety-year-old and the body of a twelve-year-old—my father, a doctor, quietly had me admitted to hospital under the care of a psychiatrist who was also a family friend. From her accent and her interest in my relationship with my father, I assumed she was a Freudian, but by that point, I was beyond caring who looked after me and where. I would have accepted treatment from Satan himself as long as he gave me something to help me sleep. Preferably all day. Preferably somewhere far away from my crying baby.

I ended up in the local psychiatric facility, and I got my wish—round-the-clock drugs and no baby. I missed my son, but there were routines to learn and group therapy sessions to attend. I learned that you didn’t have to get dressed, but that self-loathing increases exponentially with every day that you don’t get out of your pyjamas. I learned the secret of pouring tea from cheap metal teapots, a skill that remains useful to this day. I learned the fine art of lining up for meds. I learned which patients were harmless and which were likely to pounce on you as you came out of the shower. I learned that hospital dietitians can be capricious and cruel. I learned that clothes are important even in a mental hospital. I learned that if you reveal something right away in group therapy sessions, it encourages others to speak and you can then be silent. I learned that everybody, from the anorexics to the schizophrenics, from the chronic alcoholics to the guy whose wife had just left him for another woman, thought there was something
really
wrong with a woman who couldn’t look after her children.

For the first few days, I lay in bed, sleeping or weeping, waiting for the next round of medication or a visit from my husband, who vacillated between bewilderment and rage. He spoke often about how difficult his life was. The psychiatrist informed my family that I was suffering from an “agitated depression.” She told me to get out of bed, get dressed, eat something and prepare myself to have Fiona stay with me until I had bonded with her. Then I could go home. “How will I know when we’ve bonded?” I asked. “You’ll just know” was the enigmatic reply. The thought of my baby in a mental institution propelled me out of bed and down the hall to the nurses’ station, where, in an effort to fatten me up, I was fed oddly flavoured protein drinks of a peculiarly viscous consistency. In the evenings, while Fiona slept and everyone else watched television, I managed to complete an Icelandic sweater with an intricate cream-and-black pattern. Why I was allowed to have knitting needles in a psych ward remains a mystery to me, but there I sat, night after night, knitting and purling, counting the stitches, counting the rows, counting the minutes until my next pill.

One evening, a particularly tough female patient glared at me and said, “You’re one of them innaleckshuls, aren’t you?” It was the first time I had heard the word “intellectual” used as a pejorative, and I dropped a stitch in my rush to deny it. I was curious, however, about what had tipped her off, since I hadn’t exactly been dazzling my fellow inmates with my wit and erudition. “It’s your pants,” she replied. “Only innaleckshuls wear that kinda corduroy.” She wandered off, and I laughed for the first time in a month. That day at lunchtime, I took the next step toward freedom: I ate solid food. An unfortunate episode with some parsnips masquerading as french fries set me back a few days, but I persevered and was soon enjoying such delicacies as Jell-O with canned fruit cocktail and soggy tuna casserole.

When Fiona, ten weeks old and by far the cutest resident of the ward, disappeared from my room one morning while I was in the bathroom, I was as frantic as any “normal” mother of a missing child. As I searched the ward for my tiny daughter, it occurred to me that I must love her, after all. Why else would I care where she had gone and who had taken her? Why else would I feel that my heart was about to explode? When I finally found her asleep in the arms of the old fellow in the next room (no bonding problems there), I knew that I was prepared to eat whatever was put in front of me and spill my guts in group therapy if that’s what it took to get home.

Two weeks passed, then three. I was eating and sleeping and missing my son, who hated visiting the hospital. I went home on day passes and took my meds. Only one person, an elderly pediatrician, told me not to worry so much about bonding with my baby. No one suggested there might be a hormonal component to my condition. No one asked me about my miserable marriage. No one informed me that postpartum depression often disappears with the simple passage of time and the judicious use of appropriate antidepressants. No one told me I was a good mother. After I’d spent a month in the hospital, my bond with Fiona was deemed sufficiently strengthened, and I was allowed to go home. I was calmer (and heavier) when I left the hospital but still terrified, this time of losing everything I loved.

In the months following my release, I cared for my children with a passion bordering on the paranoid, certain that one day they would denounce me. I imagined Fiona standing in her crib in her pink OshKosh overalls, pointing a pudgy finger at me:
“J’accuse.”
But every bedtime story, every trip to the library, every messy meal, every new word, every sandcastle, every card game, every swimming lesson reinforced my sense that I could be a good, if not particularly patient, mother. I began to enjoy my children again and enjoy myself with them. My confidence grew, and two years after Fiona was born, I left my marriage, taking the children with me.

The years that followed tested my resolve on a daily basis. What I lacked in patience I made up for in tenacity. My somewhat perverse sense of humour became my greatest asset in the struggle to raise two children alone. When I made tough decisions, I knew that no judgment could ever be as harsh as my own. My son’s teenage years were particularly arduous—for both of us—but when I ask what he remembers about that time, he says, quite simply, “You were always there.” Not “there for me,” just “there,” which was often all I could manage. People sometimes ask me if I have forgiven myself for abandoning my children. I ask them if a mother with pneumonia should have to forgive herself for seeking medical attention. I was sick, I received the treatment deemed appropriate at the time and I eventually recovered. End—and beginning—of story.

Because of me and in spite of me, my children are amazing individuals who continue to challenge, educate, infuriate and delight me. My son has no recollection of my temporary absence from his life. My daughter is mystified and somewhat annoyed at the suggestion that we may not have bonded, since all evidence points to the contrary. In the two decades since my “lapse” in mothering, I’ve come to see that terrible time as a pivotal point in my life, an event that shocked me, defined me and ultimately inspired me to choose the possibility of joy over the certainty of despair. Every day I wear a ring inscribed with the words
Amor Omnia Vincit
—Love Conquers All. Most days I believe it.