Gotham Girl Interrupted Read online

  In my case, with my elder daughter, Olivia, I’d been dilated to five centimeters for a good four weeks before going into labor. I’d hoped this hadn’t been hard on her. Honestly, it was like walking around New York with my purse just wide open! Who knows what could have gotten up in there? Or she could have just rolled right out down Broadway.

  As I beheld her perfect little noncorncob head in those first moments after delivery, it also occurred to me that I needed to completely apologize for eating all those off-limits unpasteurized cheeses and sushi that I’d had before I’d even known I was pregnant. Or the immense volume of salt I’d ingested because I had constant terror-based dyspepsia for all nine months that only things like salt and vinegar potato chips and greasy bacon could remedy. I definitely needed to apologize for that.

  I said a sheepish “I’m sorry” and thanked my then-husband for not letting me name the baby after the anesthesiologist who had slipped me some eleventh-hour good stuff. For once, my husband had stuck to a plan. I also apologized for throwing a handful of tampons at the same poor man after labor number two. They’d bounced off his forehead. Nevertheless, he didn’t deserve that. He’d been trying to find me sour apple Jolly Ranchers and other lady items anywhere near the hospital.

  Another pie slice in the sacred wheel of maternal guilt, besides pie itself, was breastfeeding. I know people always describe breastfeeding as this beautiful, private moment between mother and child, but for me, there was nothing private about it. It was deeply and unbendingly public.

  From the very first moment in the hospital when the nurse remarked that I didn’t have very latchable nipples (What are those anyway?), breastfeeding was an all-access, live-streaming titty fest. I could have streamed it live on Twitter and it would have been more exclusive.

  My daughters were both gigantic babies. They might well have been born lumberjacks complete with flannel—in case you couldn’t tell from the number of f-bombs I dropped earlier in this chapter. At eight and a half pounds each, they had voracious appetites. And as much as I wanted to be an overachiever in this realm of motherhood with all the other smug, self-satisfied moms in their fucking Eileen Fisher blouses and their Boppy pillows, my body just couldn’t keep up with the little ladies. I tried everything, but it was neither natural nor easy. Yes, there are whole industries designed to make you feel shitty about this one particular slice of motherhood. I’m not whining for a participation ribbon, but I don’t think any mom should ever be made to feel guilty for supplementing with a little formula—be it SimilInfalackiform for your little one or Prozinaxipro for you because your hormones are on Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. Breastfeeding’s not a foot race. And even if it were, there’d be no one right way to run it. It’s more like a dance marathon, and sometimes you will have to change up your moves.

  Nevertheless, you say to yourself and to your wee one while they’re still gloppy in your arms, “Okay little person, we’re not going to know if I’m a good parent for another oh…thirty-odd years, and even then people with solid parents and totally happy childhoods have their issues. You might really get irritated with me during the teen years. Or you could turn out to be a complete wastrel, but I am going to love you regardless and we’re just going to try to keep things interesting so that life always holds some curiosity and joy.

  I hereby commit all future earnings to the swear jar. I promise out loud not to be one of those annoying moms who give out boxes of raisins for Halloween. It’s going to be all chocolate, all the time. And no cheap candy-corn filler. I promise to give you the Heimlich maneuver should you ever accidentally choke on a Tiddly Wink when you are twelve and long past the ages of doing such silly things. And if your little heart is ever broken by anyone, any boy, any girl, or any circumstance, I promise to stand up for you like a lioness and help put things back together and comfort you. If you are ever lost, I promise to come find you—even if you are lost in Antarctica and I don’t like the cold. And even if I’m bad at boundaries, I’ll do my best to stay back so you can forge your own path. I promise if I ever get to the end of my tether, to give myself a time-out (possibly with some Xanax). I will try not to embarrass you at too many school functions, except I will probably make big signs for sporting events that say things like “Go Dragons!” and cheer louder than all the other parents to the point where, from the basketball court, you tell me to sit back down and shut up. I promise to support whatever dreams you end up having even if they seem like long shots and as long as they don’t involve too many tattoos because needles are sucky and you might change your mind about your various life narratives over time. Because this is the sacred long game, I whisper to my cheeky monkeys. It’s where you come to grips with the fact that any truly worthy, long game is made up of many, many shorter games, scrimmages, and adventures. It’s like an epic Broadway show with multiple musical interludes, different story arcs, unsavory characters, mean girls, meaner moms, unexpected heroes, rap battles, and a twist or two that none of us saw coming. There will, of course, be some poignant, happy-resolution montages coupled with farcical missteps, some offscreen quibbles, downright Fight Club scenes, and intermissions, so we just need to pace ourselves; am I right?

  To give a little more context I wasn’t just a mindful parent; I was a manic one. I was so worried about my daughters’ lives not turning out totally great. I’m the crazy mother who drove 1,800 miles from New York to Disney World in a blizzard so that her daughters could ride in teacups. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone else or do it again—although, we did have the Magic Kingdom almost entirely to ourselves, which was great. There were no lines to the rides because of the flurry of cancellations, we had free run of the hotel, and we got to meet all the princesses. I was a feisty mother and I wasn’t going to let the fucking universe with its shitty winter weather ruin my kids’ jolly holiday. Sometimes the universe screwing with you feels personal and so you have to defy it. Did I need to do that again now?

  After both births, I’d said I was sorry to the girls, in advance, for all the confusion that was about to ensue, but I never anticipated having to apologize for seizures or the anxiety, depression, and consequences they would bring.

  Even with becoming a mother, I’d hoped to retain a sliver of myself. It felt selfish but necessary. Sleep deprived with scarcely a minute to feel the hot droplets of a shower on my face, I was desperate to save any small piece of “the-me-before-them,” to remember my most favorite words and expressions like perspicacity or journey proud, to be able to complete at least one single thought from start to finish, or to come up with a moderately creative idea. With every pressure that parenthood brings, it would be easy to become a shrieking dishrag of a woman if I didn’t try to preserve some fragments of the chick I’d grown up with.

  Still, the sense of guilt that gripped me on a molecular level after that first seizure was a doozy. The single thing to which my unconscious mind resolved was, “I’m sorry.” I still have no memory of it, but when Jacqueline arrived at our house with the ambulance in tow, Sophie, my younger daughter, had helped me to bed. Apparently, all I kept repeating as I clung to her was how sorry I was. I couldn’t stop apologizing—even in the middle of a grand mal seizure, with a concussion, a black eye, and a bloody lip, I was just so sorry. If I could have uttered it softly into a tin can and sealed it, preserved for all of her lifetime, I would have.

  I’d always imagined better for her, for all of us. When you have children there is an unspoken agreement that you won’t die on them, at least for a stretch of meaningful time; even if you secretly wish for it in a fleeting moment, this is mostly just a desperate wish for sleep.

  In the days after my first seizure, I’d decided that this little “event” was an isolated incident. I had been simply doing too much hip-hop yoga, not drinking enough water, and stressing out about having no ideas for any wretched new reality shows that would surely write themselves if we just cast them with horrible enough people. It was one of those m
oments where I’d decided that I was not going to let this seizure thing become a thing.

  Still, I was in this awkward place of not knowing what I didn’t know. I had always been a healthy person—a tad high strung and neurotic but healthy. My friend Helene and I would do wheatgrass shots after booty class until we were completely high on wellness. I drank overpriced Kombucha teas. I meditated. I was doing all the right things—on paper and in practice. I’d even worked on a raw-food cookbook project—a mistake of incredibly farty proportions. But the seizure shook me. Healthy people always suspect the sick: she wasn’t looking after herself, or she wasn’t eating right, or she must have been drinking. All of the above had been true at different times of my adult life—but not lately.

  And I didn’t know what I really wanted to know yet. Before my diagnosis, I’d come home from the hospital and simply Googled the word “seizure,” which came up as an electrical discharge in the brain presenting in a variety of forms.

  As I read on, it felt like there was a whole laundry list of new rules and trauma-prevention factors to consider now. If you’ve never witnessed someone having a grand mal seizure, it definitely breaks all the mom contracts. Like crying at your desk at work. If you really want to terrify people around you, a grand mal seizure has the same effect.

  There are two parts to the grand mal or tonic-clonic seizures that I tend to have. The first part is the tonic moment where all your muscles stiffen and air being forced past your vocal cords causes a sharp cry or scream. At that point, you typically lose consciousness and fall to the floor. You might bite your tongue or the inside of your cheek. After the tonic phase, the clonic part kicks in. With this bit, your arms and legs begin to jerk and spasm rapidly, sometimes bending and relaxing at the elbows, hips, and knees. If you are having trouble breathing from vomiting or if the seizure lasts too long, your face might turn blue. As the body again relaxes, you might lose control of your bladder or bowel. It’s frightening even for the initiated.

  For my part, I’ve been told I shake in spasms, all the while opening my mouth like an anaconda unhinging its jaw and making the frightening noises of a Japanese horror masterpiece. Yes, it sounds terrible, but just to paint a picture of how I roll, there it is.

  Oh motherhood, it’s a protracted state of conflict. You’re never enough at work. You’re never enough for your mate. You’re never enough for your kids. I’ve never done big, scary drugs other than the ones that are mass-produced by pharmaceutical companies, but I’m told meth makes you feel like such a confident, laser-focused badass. Like you can manage everything with a satisfying, effortless brilliance. Suddenly your life is a spectacular performance art piece. You can lift refrigerators with your pinky finger. Above all, you are finally enough. I can understand wanting this feeling. My seizure had made me feel so much worse than being not enough. And I was still in denial about the whole thing. I was stuck at the corner of guilt and shame.

  They say that if you experience guilt, it’s a sign that you hold yourself to a higher set of expectations or standards and that with shame it’s the opposite. I can’t speak for other mothers and their modes of self-care, but I’m going to throw off the philosophical straitjacket here and say that I feel guilt because I do want things to be better. I want tuned-in but not helicopter parenting for my kids; I always wanted a stable home in one place and an interesting life for them. One where they could have it all, whatever “all” turned out to be for them. Guilt doesn’t paralyze me; it propels me.

  My guilt doesn’t stem from any deep-seated kernel of unworthiness. I have always believed in myself the way I believe in my daughters. I was raised in the age of Enjoli. For the uninitiated, Enjoli was the iconic drugstore perfume of the late seventies and early eighties. Ten-year-old little girls everywhere grew up singing the jingle into a hairbrush like an anthem in their bedrooms with the male voiceover coming on at the end to say “the eight-hour perfume for the twenty-four-hour woman.” It stood for second-wave feminism that said a woman could and should have it all—from the boardroom to the bedroom. But damn if it wasn’t overwhelming.

  I also came of age with books like Women Who Run with the Wolves. They had been part of the feminist canon under which I’d grown up, so I had embraced a certain amount of my own mischief and acting out to get by. Nothing too extreme—mostly just general mouthiness.

  The more I thought about how our world might explode with uncertainty because of my seizure, the more it sank in: I’ll take the wheel of guilt and wanting things to be better over the wheel of shame any day. I reject the latter wheel and chore chart—wholeheartedly and unreservedly. Motherhood is so fraught with ambition, desire, and socially unacceptable appetites, it creates these currents that women so often struggle to quell or channel just to stay functional and survive. Maybe the upside of guilt is guilt. Owning it, taking care of oneself in the face of it, and then letting it go: maybe with meds, maybe with mischief, and maybe with other mothers. If anything, what my seizure made me realize is that forgiveness was key in the face of the cultural, social, educational, pharmacological, industrial maternal guilt complex. The myth that you’re somehow not enough because you might be a sick mother was horseshit.

  Maybe I was not so lost after all.

  6

  Oh, the Pie-rony…

  I DON’T KNOW ABOUT YOU, but when a crisis hits, I am often knocked back by the unexpected vastness of the ordinary. Like finding a perfectly formed paper clip in the twisted metal wreckage of a plane crash, it can be something as insignificant as an everyday household word. In this case, the word was garage.

  In those initial days home after my first seizure, yes, I was felled by a noun, not even a verb. I’d attempt to say the word garage and instead the word yard would burst forth. In my head, I knew I meant to make the sounds that make up the word ga-rage, but they just weren’t there. A second later, the word garbage would trip off my tongue and only after that would I get to garage. It was as though I could physically feel a set of invisible hands inside my brain kneading through different words and actions like a big ball of dough.

  Not only was my word retrieval way off, my brain still felt like I’d tried to vape the sun. Everything was too bright—the daylight, darkness, my shoes. The motion of life felt like driving in a very fast car or like being pummeled in the face by an action movie that unfurls so quickly your eyes can barely keep pace with all the cuts.

  “Why is the world shouting, again?” I’d ask the kids. The sound of life in all its forms was just too loud. Even the little beings, like snails and crickets, proved deafening. I’d also morphed into what would later be described as an unpresidential word salad. I was a panhandler for words for common things like coffee cup, Scotch tape, and socks. My inner monolog was set on pause or the tape had gotten snagged in the reels.

  There were moments where I’d be completely fine but then falter. “Just put the plates in the…thing where you put the dishes before putting them in the thing that washes them,” I’d tell my daughter.

  “You mean the sink?” she’d say, giving me the side eye.

  “Sink? Are you pranking me? Is that really a word?”

  “Yes.” Cue look of ten-year-old alarm. “Sink is a word, Mom.”

  “Huh, well, I’m going to look that up, missy.”

  It was exhausting work that had me saying all the wrong things and doing all the wrong things out of order and backward, and only realizing it after with a kind of uneasy chagrin. I’d put my clothes on inside out. Pants were impossible. I’d brush my teeth and then squeeze out the toothpaste after rinsing the brush. Can we roll that tape again? I’d search my head for the right words. I knew they were there, I could sense them like hidden books on the shelves of my mind, but I had no retrieval power. With each mental grab, my hand would pass right over the correct phantom volume only to miss it. I’d read that temporary cognitive delays after a seizure were fairly common, but it was unsettling.<
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  I’d been given a supply of antiseizure drugs with vague instructions not to stop taking them, which given my hippie upbringing, clearly meant don’t even start taking them. I didn’t want to feel any foggier than I already did. Plus, pharmacological continuity marketing was not my bailiwick. I told myself, there was nothing really wrong with me. My seizure had been a one-off after all. An aberration. I’d probably been overtired or dehydrated. It wasn’t hubris so much as a low-lying fog of fear creeping in close to the ground.

  I don’t think I had a full understanding of my brain injury at the time. Not only was my language off, so too was my execution and sequencing. I was continually getting things wrong like thinking of the object that is a spoon and going over to get one in the totally wrong part of the kitchen—all while knowing full well that spoons were in the silverware drawer on the opposite end of the room. I couldn’t tell anyone about this as it might impact the girls—especially Sophie because she’d already seen enough action during the seizure itself. How could she ever not be scarred by it? I had to at least pretend I knew what I was doing or laugh it off—if actually caught in the act of being wrong or seeming ridiculous.

  I’d combed through other similar cases online during my more coherent moments. There would be these sessions between a speech therapist and a stroke patient dealing with expressive aphasia. The therapist might ask the patient to say the word chair and the patient would respond with table. The therapist might then say, “Great, let’s try it once more. Can you say the word chair?” The patient might falter and repeat the word, “Table. Table. Table!” and then start to sob out of sheer frustration, because he knows what he needs to say, but he simply can’t say it. He can remember the days of the week, sing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” and count to a hundred, but he still can’t say a simple word like chair. I recognized this.