On that particular evening, I was holding three facts in my head, and their overlapping borders were emitting a toxic funk that made it hard to concentrate. First, my children were going to be twenty months apart, just as my brother and I were nineteen months apart, meaning I had replicated not one but two of what I considered to be my mother’s more questionable choices (the first being marrying a man who works a dangerous job requiring him to be gone a lot). Second, it was now January 2012 and our decision about whether or not to stay in the Navy after Ross’s commitment was up was fast approaching. My hoped-for revelation about how I could embrace military life had so far not shown up, while Ross openly spoke of hitting the twenty-year retirement mark. Third and finally, that old feeling was back, the depression, underneath the fatigue and the nausea, not just a little bit of “the blues” but the Real Thing, the big black cloud with its landscape-altering storms in tow.
More than anything, the return of the depression had me spooked. I hadn’t taken antidepressants when I was pregnant the first time because there had never been a need. I had assumed this time would be the same, and that I’d have a leg up knowing that I should be vigilant in the weeks following birth. Every visit with my obstetrician so far had been completely routine, so much so that I had begun feeling guilty even considering bringing up the issue of persistent, crushing sadness and apocalyptic thoughts with no identifiable source. I sat outside myself in the waiting room and looked at the other mothers, many of them teenagers, some struggling to work out advance payment plans for their deliveries, and thought, Who am I to be sad with my beautiful, healthy son and my husband with a job that pays for my care? Who am I to feel lost and lonely and worried that I won’t be able to cope?
I had been tending a few green shoots of friendships, and one was with Diane, an architect from the Midwest who had a quiet voice and an earnest way of cutting to the emotional heart of a conversation. She had two young children as well and was working from home for a firm out of state. I felt comfortable confessing to her that I was doing something as potentially delusional as writing a book, and we found a lot to talk about in the struggles of parenting toddlers while trying to carve out time and space to do creative work. I took solace in the book club Diane invited me to join, a group that limited itself to ten members and extended invitations to new people only when someone else relocated. I’d heard it referred to among other wives, mockingly, as “the super exclusive book club,” and when I heard that it was also standard practice among the group to rotate hostess duties for a sit-down dinner as part of the meetings, I figured I’d never get in. But then one of the members moved to Japan and Diane put my name forward and no one balked, so I figured it was finally time for me to learn how to host a decent dinner. All the members were military wives, but only a few were from TOPGUN, meaning we all had common ground, but not enough for the meetings to wander too far into shop talk or gossip. We actually stuck to the book and our conversations were lively and long. For me, it was like a welcome return to the days of grad school, and those nights we spent unraveling narratives and spinning connections between our own lives were often one of the only things keeping me afloat.
After more than a year in Fallon, I found another friend, Mikayla. She had just moved into the house behind mine and was having withdrawal from leaving her East Coast job as a hospital administrator. Mikayla was skeptical of wives’ clubs and rolled her eyes at a lot of the TOPGUN hype, which made me like her immediately. She also had a habit of using casually affectionate nicknames for everybody, like “buddy,” “homey,” and “friend.” It reminded me of Stella and of my days as Roxy. When Mikayla got pregnant with her first baby a few months after I’d gotten pregnant with my second, I envisioned us turning into the kind of best friends who would raise their babies together—we even talked about how nice it would be to cut a hole in the back fence to make it easier to pass back and forth between each other’s houses.
In January, about four months after I met Mikayla, I convinced her to come to her first TOPGUN SSG meeting with me. I was having a rare burst of energy and hopefulness and had decided that if I went to more of the scheduled social events, I might be able to beat back the darkness gathering in my head. Once there, we watched, glumly sober and pregnant, as everyone else enjoyed Mardi Gras–themed appetizers and industrial-strength hurricane cocktails. Sadly, not even stone-cold sobriety was any help to us in figuring out why the evening ended the way it did. Somehow the meeting’s agenda devolved into misunderstandings, failed attempts at clarification, even greater confusion as old grievances joined the mix, and then a perfect storm of shouts and tears and scattered exits. When we finally managed to extricate ourselves, Mikayla sat in the front seat of my car for a stunned beat before she laughed and said, “What the fuck was that?”