That night I lay in bed, one of Ross’s arms anchored across my stomach, and stared at the ceiling. I was coming to terms with an awful realization. It was so obvious: I’d spent all my time worrying about the wrong thing. In all the years leading up to having kids, I’d been focused on the logistics of a Navy career, the deployments, the moving, finding work and homes, and pulling the kids out of school over and over again. What I’d missed, what I should have been weighing, were the risks that came with my history of depression, both in terms of its effects on me as a parent and in the potential for passing it on to my children. What had I done? What kind of person was I? I felt like the answer to that was swelling and scabbing over on my forearm and all the bandages in the world couldn’t hide it.
In the week that followed, I made an appointment with the midwife to get back on medication. The simple act of sitting in the waiting room, where I filled out a standard questionnaire on how I was recovering from childbirth and had to circle the 9 on the 1 to 10 scale for “Feelings of sadness or depression,” was so excruciating that twice I nearly got up and left. By now, the sarcastic drill instructor in my head was on a near twenty-four-hour roll. You fucking wimp, are you seriously about to cry again? Lock. It. Up. It took one question in the midwife’s gravely accented voice—“So! How are vee do-ink?”—for me to dissolve in sobs.
“Not so goot, eh?” she noted matter-of-factly as she got out the prescription pad. “Vell, das okay. It happens.”
Here we were again: same medicine, same dosage. I was lucky, at least, for that, not to have to do the whole adjustment dance again—a little high, a little low, too much nervousness, not enough appetite, a chemical landing signals officer trying to talk down my wobbling brain—while caring for a newborn at the same time. Still, it felt like being handed the water wings that I couldn’t seem to shed in the deep end of life, now with the added worry that I was passing incremental amounts of the medication to my baby through my breast milk. Again I took refuge in the suggestions of studies and the knowledge that, practically speaking, Sam was very clearly better off with the medicated me than the gibbering me hiding behind the furniture and cutting herself.
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It took a while for the clouds to clear in my head, and while the medication did its work, I turned to the perplexing task of sleep training Sam by blending two completely opposed theories of parenting. On the one hand, I was reading about attachment parenting from Dr. Sears, and on the other, structured, scheduled feedings and naps that promised to make me “Babywise.” Both were books given to me by other Navy wives, both came with warnings that the other side was nuts, and both offered dire diagnoses of how current cultural problems could be traced back to poor parenting in the earliest stages. I figured I could read everything and come out somewhere in between, but often when I heard Dr. Sears and the Babywise team squaring off in my head, it wasn’t just two schools of thought about sleep training, it was the two warring halves of my heart—keep him close, so close, snuggled up to me at night breathing his sweet milky breath in little puffs near my shoulder and never let him go, versus lay him down in his crib, let him grump and cry himself to sleep a bit, drift off on his own terms, in his own bed, in his own room with the door closed and only the crackly little radio monitor connecting us.
Ross and I chose putting Sam in the crib, mostly on the advice of one haggard father who had just managed to extricate his nearly four-year-old son from the family bed with much crying and angst all around, but sometimes it felt like walking out into the middle of a field and laying my son down on a rock with the wind whistling around him and then walking away. It was that hard at first. I imagine most mothers feel some version of this when they negotiate the terms of sleep with their new babies, no matter what approach they take, but I couldn’t help casting my mind out into a crazy loop of the future, like someone fly-fishing.
My thoughts snapped in a bright, improbable arc out over the sparkling eddies and I saw Sam all grown up, taller than me and giving me a quick, dismissive flip of a wave as he backed his beater car out of whatever driveway we were calling our own and peeled off for college or, God forbid, the military. Yale, the Navy, touring the country with some weirdo band—it was all the same, it was him leaving, and if I do things right, he will do this someday. He will leave, and I know it will feel familiar, the deepest echo of this ache of loss, the saddest, and somehow the proudest too, because I will have raised him to do this.
CHAPTER 17