—
The scene of the turning point makes my skin crawl, but it would be disingenuous to edit it out. It is of a quiet house at midnight, my mother newly gone, Sam sleeping but bound to wake up again in another forty-five minutes, Ross, newly home from work-ups and getting ready for bed, and me, ostensibly on a quick trip to the fridge for some water, crouched instead in a ball between the arm of a chair and the wall in our darkened living room. I was trying my best to hide, like when I was a kid playing hide-and-seek in the dark with my brother, and I’d picked a good spot to stop for a moment and quietly lose my mind. I tried to remember the lyrics to a Matisyahu song about asking Hashem for mercy and being thrown a rope. My eyes leaked tears and my arms and body shook with the effort of keeping all sound inside, especially the wobbly moan that kept trying to come out. I hadn’t slept more than an hour at a time in weeks. When I did sleep, I had nightmares about losing Sam in the grocery store or the airport, or a strong gust of wind blowing him out of my arms and over a cliff, or wolves breaking into the house and eating him. My bones ached, my breasts were sore, and my hair was starting to fall out. This is normal, I told myself, this is normal, this is all hormones, suck it up. I felt like a pressure cooker whose little counterweight was hissing and clattering and on the verge of spewing its contents all over the walls. I couldn’t stop myself. In one awful, jittery burst of movement, I hacked repeatedly at my left inner forearm with the fingernails of my right hand until the flaring pain of the cuts crescendoed over all the other noise in my head and became one bright clear note of red.
The calm that followed lasted about two cool, silent minutes. Then the dread and the humiliation came (Stupid, so adolescent!), and I knew I’d have to find a way to bandage my arm, and that it would be hard to hide. I wished immediately that I could erase what I’d done. This is not a moment for the scrapbook. This is not a conversation you hope to have with your husband.
“Ross? I need to tell you something. I did something and I can’t hide it and it was stupid. And I’m sorry. I wish I didn’t have to tell you but I need you to hold me accountable for getting some help.” Accountable. All the articulate words suddenly decided to show up when they were too late to do me any good.
“What? What did you do?”
“I may have . . . cut myself a little. It’s stupid. It’s this thing I used to do when I was younger. I’m not doing this very well.” Stupid, stupid, stupid. I wanted us to skip over this part and just focus on the getting-help part.
“Doing what? What do you mean? You cut yourself?”
“Yes, okay? Being a mom. I’m not keeping my shit together. At all. I’m not holding it together right now.” I wanted to hug him, I wanted to punch him, and I wanted this writhing, pinned-bug feeling of neediness and vulnerability to go away immediately. This was ugly and I hated that he was seeing it.
“Where is it? Let me see.”
“No. Absolutely not. That’s not important.”
“Let me see it. Are you okay?”
I couldn’t let him see it. Ross knew about my depression and had been wonderfully supportive over the years about helping me make sure I could get my antidepressant at each new duty station. He’d seen some crying jags and some wall staring, but nothing like this. This is not fair to him, I kept thinking, to have to suddenly know how to deal with this. But another voice, quieter, angrier, insisted, This is not fair to me, to have to rely on other people for help, to try to explain myself when I’m at my absolute worst.