Gotham Girl Interrupted Page 5

  To grow up in California is to grow up with a patchwork system of beliefs. The afterlife and God might very well be a big nothing, so you hedge your bets with spirituality and hope it’s all worth it. Now I found myself challenged to even defend the “s” word. It was an existential conundrum, the banality of it all. I was disappointed.

  Of faith and religion, Christopher Hitchens once wrote, “Faith is the surrender of the mind, it’s the surrender of reason, and it’s the surrender of the only thing that makes us different from other animals. It’s our need to believe and to surrender our skepticism and our reason, our yearning to discard that and put all our trust or faith in someone or something. That is the sinister thing to me. Out of all the virtues, all the supposed virtues, faith must be the most overrated.”

  In the wake of my divorce, I had needed a placebo: literally anything to believe in and make myself feel better. Neuroscience hypothesizes that when it comes to brain activity, emotional pain looks a lot like physical pain. Bad breakup? Have a sugar pill and feel amazing. It turns out whatever you firmly believe in will actually make you feel better.

  Naturally, I chose something super complicated to believe in, something that would elevate my sense of purpose. After all, didn’t someone somewhere on TV once say that the moral high ground has quite a lovely view? I chose Catholicism. It fit all my requirements:

  1. I wanted to feel righteous and rightness. I was devastated by the end of my marriage, and I was not going to do what Nora Ephron tells us all to do when she says, “You are not your divorce.” I was going to persist in being an idiot and own the fuck out of it and out of martyrdom. Catholics are great at that, I reckoned. I fit the bill.

  2. I also wanted a boyfriend, one with a moral compass stronger than all the other boys I’d known in life, one who had the same sense of soul-crushing guilt I’d learned from the Irish phalanx of my family. Plus, I was terrified of being outnumbered by the kids. Chances were a Catholic lad would exercise a degree of compassion toward my children, as he would have grown up with heaps of siblings and so wouldn’t be terrified of my sassy, heathen daughters as other childless rubes might be.

  3. I wanted a religion that partied. Go communion wine! I wanted dinner parties with amazing food, an earthy Cabernet Franc, and marathon conversations like the kind I’d had when I was married. The kind of dinners that ended with all candles melted down to the nub and geraniums wilting somewhere on a porch.

  4. I also wanted a Thomas Merton approach to belief. Merton was this very cool Catholic monk who managed to harmonize aspects of Buddhism and meditation with all the glorious guilt and neurosis of the Catholic Church. I wanted a little God but without all the dogma, if that makes sense. I certainly didn’t believe in any of that Secret nonsense, which was all the rage in LA at the time, especially with their scary sweating rituals. Pass. I already had hip-hop yoga for that part of my day. In the end, Saint Monica’s was only a few blocks away and seemed a perfect fit for my little spiritual walkabout. It worked for a time.

  Up until my first seizure in 2010, I was the healthiest person I knew. No surgeries. No chronic anything except sadness after the divorce. Nary even a head cold! To be honest, I’d been spending so much time trying to live my best life in earnest with kale juice, mindfulness, and yoga, I hadn’t given much thought to mortality—except that maybe after single motherhood, death might feel like a well-deserved nap? What was I supposed to do with this grim Hitchens confirmation? The idea that it was just lights out gnawed at me. Faith wasn’t just overrated, it was a completely sinister ruse. I couldn’t make sense of what I’d seen and felt during that first seizure. Was the big white light all just some neurochemical hallucination—an acid trip of the brain’s own making? If so, did it serve any kind of adaptive evolutionary purpose? Maybe it provided much-needed distraction in the middle of dying. Maybe it was our brains’ own way of coping with the transition from being alive to being dead?

  I started reading different accounts of seizures and NDEs. I came upon this passage by Dostoyevsky who had recorded more than one hundred of his own seizures over the course of two decades: “The air was filled with a big noise and I tried to move. I felt the heaven was going down upon the earth, and that it had engulfed me. I have really touched God. He came into me myself; yes, God exists, I cried. You all, healthy people, have no idea what joy that joy is which we epileptics experience the second before a seizure.”

  I recognized this! This same split-second joy, these words, and this ecstatic feeling right before my first seizure, had it been a glimpse of God? Still, there was all the inky blackness and the void to reconcile. It bothered me. They say a bee’s brain contains roughly a million neurons. By comparison, human brains contain about one hundred billion. The idea of neurodiversity holds that there is profound value in how each and every individual’s brain is wired. Was I wired for a flash of the divine now and then? One so bright, it knocked me flat? I tended to think I was no more special than a bee. Still, I was irritated because I expected the universe to be slightly more creative than just lights out. Thwack, you’re dead, you poor, dumb but very environmentally necessary bee.

  The betrayal I’d felt during my first seizure was one of utter disconnection—a disconnection from a hope of more or a story of more. Hope takes a crapload of work and narrative invention to maintain. Hope can often be easier to hang onto in stories than in everyday life. Stories of origin, reckoning, salvation, and redemption reside much more easily with hope than the practical daily requirements of food, clothing, and shelter. These things take so much energy on their own I wondered if hope was even worth the trouble.

  The flip side to hope, faith, and God suddenly feeling like a big nothing was that all at once, life started to feel like a big everything. If this was all you got, this one, single life, then there’s a big everything out there to experience, so best to love, fail, take risks, make crazy-ass mistakes, and do what gives you joy because all you have is now. I know it sounds self-help-ish and obviously “YOLO,” but coupled with my scary seizure, it was oddly freeing. Suddenly, I had permission to do whatever the fuck I wanted.

  I’d grown up to become a fairly obedient but neurotic white girl. I’d wanted to believe in everything: Gods—new and old, the Buddha, witches, the tooth fairy, ghosts, cosmic justice, specialty causes like Hobos for snow leopards, and nice, non-probing aliens like E.T. I liked the idea of the unseen world and all its secret powers and invisible mechanics. I’d always loved that there’s a “possible” out there, but the inscrutability and uncertainty of “God’s plan” was so damn annoying.

  Interpretation is how we batten down the hatches and secure the storm of our experiences. We tend to reach for any fixed point that might anchor us. I badly needed a mooring after the first seizure. I wanted my goddamn white light.

  Writing had always been a mooring for me. When my big life failures left me with a bleak but unflinching skepticism that there is no God, no cosmic point to human beings, I could frame that disappointment with a story, or at the very least a joke. Everybody suffered, and once you figured that out, and only when you dropped the whiney questions like, why is this happening to me? could the more interesting questions such as, what makes joy? be asked and partly answered.

  Still, all those hours and years wasted after the divorce. All those Monday-night adult classes I took to become a good Catholic, learning the books of the Bible and the Lord’s Prayer, never mind dealing with communion, not swearing, and being less morally jerky. If nothing really mattered, not even what people think about you or how you made them feel when you’re just gone, why be good? Why hold back?

  Go ahead, read Ayn Rand and be a complete shithead. Eat, drink, and smoke what you want; tell those asshole kids to get off your lawn. Live every day like a Russian oligarch. The universe doesn’t really have your back, so screw that hipster nonsense. The universe has a very low balance in its fuck account. And if anything, it’s s
aving those dwindling fucks for Mother Teresa and the Dalai Lama. I never knew that Thoreau was an asshole until that New Yorker article 150 years after his death. All this time I just thought he was an admirable hermit. Didn’t Nietzsche say morality is just part of the herd instinct anyway? Who wants to be a damn goat? I suppose you could be a lamb or sheep. They’re more adorable, but damn if they don’t get slaughtered a lot.

  But it’s not as simple as all that. Thinking about Ayn and Nietzsche, it’s hard to have your gratitude toward God or the universe for the good things you have in your life not curdle into resentment. My personal theology was turning out to have more inconsistencies and plot holes than a sci-fi movie made by twelve-year-olds running around the yard with their iPhone 8s.

  Was it Max Planck, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist, who said, “When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change”? I can’t remember, but I believe there were three big tectonic shifts that needed to happen in my person:

  1. I probably needed to rewrite my point of view and unlearn a number of small certitudes that signified I was an adult and actually in charge of anything. I hadn’t been in charge that morning of my first seizure. I had no control over my brain that day, so I shouldn’t feel too terribly bad about it.

  2. I also needed to go back to being a student. When you’re a student, you actively seek to have your paradigms challenged, dismantled, and even smashed now and then. You want to be wrong. You want criticism more than ever because you worry more about learning than about what other people think of you. My whole paradigm for parenting and the perfectibility of our children had gone out the window with the divorce. But if dying in my kitchen in plain view of my kid wasn’t a good enough excuse for living, I didn’t know what was. I needed to be okay with not being okay and learning things as though I never knew them to begin with—which was (conveniently) how I felt after this first seizure—like a beginner. Like a student.

  3. I would need to stay funny, and in my postseizure crisis of faith, I realized something about the whole white light phenomenon that Leonard Nimoy was always harping on. It wasn’t a white light. It was white lights plural. That’s what I was seeing: a pointillist conspiracy of a million white lights, that tornado of stars I’d been caught in, that was my white light. And the strange religiosity I felt in the wake of my seizure had also been experienced by Joan of Arc and St. Teresa of Avila—thanks Google. But those ladies hadn’t fared too well, so a sense of humor seemed both highly appropriate and necessary.

  I also wasn’t afraid of death (as much) anymore—whether or not it was a mere neurochemical process or a passage to a divine realm. Don’t get me wrong, I was still very much afraid of pain and suffering, but more than anything, my seizure left me curious about the brain. And I confess, I did feel a kind of yearning to flirt with the moment that we perish. I didn’t want to go there again or have another episode anytime too soon, but what was it that St. Augustine said? “Lord, make me good…but not yet.”

  5

  Angry Mothertrucker

  FUCK. I was lost…and things were a mess.

  What do mothers do when there’s a mess? They clean up. They straighten. They vacuum. (I love my Dyson!) Mothers know the life-changing value of “the reset.” On film and TV sets, it’s the same deal. You’re always telling the cast and crew after a botched take, “Okay, everybody safely back to one!” which means everybody grab your props and get back into position, and let’s try it all again. Similarly, my whole world had been reset. With every new seizure, the scene was suddenly filled with deadly sharp corners and even harder edges. All our modern furniture was a concussion risk that needed to be foam padded. I wasn’t allowed to drive—which is probably for the best. With little to no sense of direction and a periodically tenuous grasp of reality, I wouldn’t want me on the road either. I couldn’t swim and there would also be no more hot yoga. I couldn’t even cook a normal dinner on the stove as I might seize and set myself or the house on fire. Sigh. By age forty-two, I was supposed to baby-proof our home all over again, but this time I was the baby.

  I know it probably sounds inconsistent, but I had such a palpable distrust of my brain, my memory, my sanity, and my body to even just stay standing upright. And for a writer, I became a wildly unreliable narrator. I was always on edge that I would seize again.

  Worst of all, I had scared the crap out of my brave, little, resourceful, smarty-pants kid, and I had no idea how to make up for it. My ten-year-old regarded me now with fear. Her face, not yet even spotted with adolescence, conveyed worry and a premature maternal wounded-ness that left me insisting, “Hello, I am still the mother here!” I agonized that her heart had been broken too soon in life—by the divorce and now by epilepsy. If I dropped anything in the kitchen or the bathroom, a dish, or a hairbrush, she’d immediately call out from the next room in this stricken voice that, as a parent, just hollows out your ribcage. It’s this telepathic/telekinetic sense of your child’s heart and your own heart both darkening and caving in on themselves in unison.

  The shrinks all say that children are constantly changing, disappearing overnight and then resurfacing as entirely different people each day. New moods, new cells, and even changeling character traits appear in the span of twenty-four hours that served their resilience. Still, a child should never have to worry about whether her parent is all right. I needed to protect both girls from whatever this was or wasn’t.

  So, I decided right then and there, I would lie about the whole seizure thing. I was going to be a big, fat, skinny liar. I would lie to my colleagues, to the other mothers, to my family, to my ex-husband, and to the FedEx guy. No one would be served by the minutiae of maybes and fears that this little neurological event of mine might stir up.

  Like many before me, denial would continue to be my core strategy until I had a lock on what was really going on with my brain. This would give the girls and me not only time to process but also some much-needed privacy. The divorce had never afforded us this luxury. It felt entirely too public with the cast of rotating attorneys and disclosures and “ding dong, the bitch is dead.” There’s always a bad guy in every split—even in no-fault states. (Raises hand. Yes, it’s me. I’m the snarky, vitriolic, wicked bitch of the west. What can I say? We’d built a whole life together. I didn’t want to get divorced.) So, the privacy and safety we’d known before things all fell apart had been a warm bath. I needed that more than ever postseizure.

  Denial of my diagnosis would also give me a chance to figure out an “upside” to all of the guilt I was feeling. It had found its way deep down into my Cracker Jack subconscious. There had to be a prize at the bottom of all that sugary goodness and I wasn’t leaving without it.

  If there is one great equalizer across all mothers of all ‘hoods, of all socioeconomic backgrounds, ethnicities, cultures, religions, and ambitions, it’s guilt. There are whole industries built around it. You could make a veritable wheel of it like the chore charts your mom used to hang on the fridge that said things like “Empty the dishwasher,” but this chart would top them all. Guilt, over both the sacred and the profane aspects of motherhood, is a universal force—like gravity or dark matter.

  Let’s start with the profane things I might have said as my little sea monkeys sallied forth from my uterus and out into the cold, cruel dystopian world. They say you forget the pain, but really you don’t. It might have gone a little like this: “Oh my fucking God, you fucking [insert cruel descriptor for husband], you did this to me, you fucking fuckwad!”

  Or, since it was a teaching hospital, there was a group of young, terrified residents in attendance, there might also have been a little of this: “Why the fuck are all of you standing at the end of the bed cheering for my va-jay-jay? And I don’t care if you’re learning—you, on the end there, stop looking so horrified! You too, [insert expletive for husband’s name]. And no rearview mirrors! Who the fuck ever thought that was a good
idea?”

  Or, if things weren’t going exactly according to plan with the epidural I’d requested, there might also be some: “Oh, fuck…please, please, just push her back in and then please, please, give me a fucking C-Section!” (Repeats string of nonsensical expletives, knowing all the while the guilt is just a rain check arriving later, COD.)

  Then, there were the wishes, prayers, and pleadings that happened in those last moments before she was out that might have gone something like this: “Oh fuck, I wasn’t made for this! And how is our daughter not going to end up with a corncob head? Lord, please don’t let her have a corncob head, or worse, a corncob brain, and even if she is corncobby in any way, shape, or form, don’t let me be so shallow that I still don’t find her completely exquisite. Oh, fuck!”

  Then, “Good grief, her head is the circumference of hipster artisanal bologna! What if my poor hoozie stays like this forever? What if I lack the appropriate prostaglandins to make things normal again? Oh fuck, please God, or Gaia, or whoever the hell’s in charge anywhere, just get her out of me! And pretty please, can I please, please just not poo on the table in front of all of these nice people?”

  But from the moment you gaze down at their goopy little heads, that’s when the sacred takes over and you realize what you’ve known all along: you are going to be apologizing to your child in advance for the rest of your life for all the things that will invariably go wrong. For all the little awkward and terrifying moments to come, you know you need an overarching damage waiver to protect all parties involved.

  Even in your arms right then, you know that the extra-crispy hospital blanket is not nearly soft enough for their perfect, little Winston Churchill cheeks. And then, you realize that, way before this moment, there are all these instances coming in the future that you are going to need to account for as well—like when you make the wrong call at the class campout when her wrist is really fractured but instead you believe that one doctor-dad who says it’s just a sprain and so no reason to cut the trip short. We’re all just renting this life, so it just feels like you need to inspect it for dings, dents, and scratches before getting too far down the road.