I dragged my two-week-old to the clinic for her first checkup. My husband couldn’t come per Covid protocol. The receptionist handed me a dumb questionnaire to fill out, which I thought was weird because I wasn’t the patient. Since having her, how many times did I cry per day, feel miserable, how often was I able to see the funny side of things, in the past week had I felt panicky for no good reason, had there been difficulty sleeping due to sheer unhappiness, was hell hot, etc. I checked all the dumb, little boxes that applied and did so modestly because I knew this was mostly a routine, performative thing like, “Look, we also care about moms!” 

The pediatrician was sending us on our way after a successful appointment when she turned to me, held up the dumb piece of paper, and said that I’d failed the EPDS with flying colors.

I gave her a dismissive laugh, motioned to my perfect baby and told her how much support we had at home, how normal this ought to be for a first-timer. Behind sad, normal eyes, she circled a few national and suicide helplines and said to call if things stayed bad. She cinched my waist in bright red mover’s tape and shipped me off as a cautionary tale: “Fragile. This side up. Please handle with care.” 

I spent whole days and nights googling what was happening to me, because I had apparently surpassed the timeline and intensity of whatever “baby blues” other mothers prepared me for. I wasn’t even sad really, not at first. I was anxious, but that’s not the word. I was out of control. Not psychosis but really on the verge.  Someone mentioned to me postpartum OCD and I thought it was a made up thing. Turns out it’s not a made up thing.

A devastating tic took shelter in my head, ransacking, not giving a care that I was eating lunch or enjoying the birds. A carousel of horrifying images, the same four scenes over and over. If I ever got too cozy-in-love with my infant daughter, we’d run it back, an infinity loop. I’m not going to delve into much sensory detail, and as a writer who deals almost exclusively in details, this is me in rare, whitewashed form. But I’m not trying to write a good story. The important thing for you to know is that she was being hurt. Hunted. Abused. Misused. And I, as her keeper, had to sit there and take it. 

I’d talk to a friend and it would just start — a bad boomerang, a continual plunder — and I’d have to nod my head and smile pretending I was hearing a thing anyone was saying.

My silky newborn would look up at me and grin tenderly as I fed her a bottle, but I’d have to break her gaze to wish all the blood away. I’d slice the veggies for family dinner and halfway through drop the knife in a triggered defiance, suddenly unable to distinguish between cherry tomatoes and little girl eyes. 

Poor Ryan didn’t waste anymore time. He waited exactly thirty seconds for my car to clear the driveway before calling my doctor as I was en route to a postpartum checkup. He got ahold of the front desk and frantically pleaded that my wife’s on her way and her name’s Chandler and would you make sure she’s okay. The nurse told him sweetie, we will, unconvincingly. He snuck into the pitch-dark nursery several evenings after that and found me standing, holding her in a cradle, hunched, hushing through quieted sobs an already asleep baby.

I can see now that I must have been shushing myself whose quieted sobs would only get louder until they turned to despairing, nonsensical groans. What in God’s name, he must have thought. I swayed her side to side and silently slapped my hand in the air towards her wall of many books. There’s so many, I cried. There’s no way we’ll get to them all. He helped me lay her safely in the crib and took me out of there like it was the last time I’d kiss her warm forehead this side of heaven. He tried his best to understand.

“I don’t know what there is to understand, Ryan! If we lose her, I’m not sure what I can do. How I can be here. What am I supposed to do? I don’t want to know this world without her. What are we gonna do with all her goddamn stuff? We won’t keep it. I don’t want another fucking baby!” 

I don’t think I’ve known sorrow like that. A misplaced sorrow like that. I had started to grieve in real time the death of my girl who, one wall away, was dripping in happy, peaceful, healthy, innocent life. What would we talk about when she was gone? Would we talk or would we just sit there and hate. My broken instinct followed that seductive and tormented road all the way to its end which, consequently, seemed also to be mine. I was a shell of myself, unrecognizable and seemingly irreparable. If there was ever a time for my husband’s gift of groundedness in the beautiful present to come in handy, this was it. 

He talked to me about how the enemy steals joy and does so in sneaky ways that feel as real as life. He reminded me that however safe she is under my clipped wing, I don’t have the power of flight.

He encouraged me that my fear isn’t insane, that it’s just manifesting in insane ways. He broke it to me that as long as we live, we may continue feeling out of control because we are. And that the glory of keeping something alive, having anything delicate in our care is one long, insufferable game of faith. His annoying enthusiasm nursed me back to the knowledge that though all our days are numbered, we don’t have to mourn them yet. That he’d rather go broke hoarding memories than waste away a rich man memorializing. That in every blessed second we have her, we will stop and breathe her in, blue in the face reading books. 

. . .

I’m not sharing any of this for pity or for advice or for any other reason besides the companionship that sometimes sharing brings.

And I sure can’t tie this up well, but I thought I’d throw out a few things that do not cure but have helped me see the other side — apart from a husband who means it when he vows for better or for worse. We decided therapy’s in my future to tease through my obsession with death and my abusive, long-standing relationship with loss. Until then, three things: 

1.Good friends who keep showing up knowing they’ll get nothing in return for awhile. When I was in the throes of this, one of them said to me, “I‘ll be on my way over and I can bring you In-and-Out. Or I can bring you a salad. Unless you just want a greasy burger, but I can definitely also bring a salad. I’m planning to fold your laundry and sweep your kitchen, but I can also do none of that and just sit there. In the same room or a different room. I can cry with you unless that’s not helpful, in which case I won’t cry.”

And you know what, that catered type of care ministered deeply to my soul when I didn’t know what I wanted or needed. Her choices gave my aimless, splintered days direction. 

2.I have not needed medication, but it had entered our conversation. If you’re there, you are not weak or broken. Hormones play an incredible factor in all this and they play out so differently in each body. Sometimes we need a little nudge getting regulated back. So far, CBD capsules (with a bit of THC) have been helpful for the daytime. CBD gummies formulated with melatonin have been helpful for nights.

3.When those detailed pictures of her being harmed came again and again and again, I imagined Jesus and I imagined his face. At first, I just tried to think them away and then I tried to replace them with a good, clean image (didn’t work). 

This was too large and too painful, too dominant and real. Instead, I thought of an exercise that I learned from a spiritual counselor years ago. When the hard thing has come and invaded your space without warning, bring Christ there. Make him watch and then watch him. As he saw her — a purity spoiled, a sinless spirit stolen, her unblemished skin skewered and flayed — he winced. He did not wail with me or shield my eyes from the horror or assure me it was fantasy or console me toward hope or take it away. He screwed his face up and his neck recoiled like he hated what was happening, and then he held out his hands like, “Give her here.” Seeing what I saw was not too big for him but it also wasn’t too small. That’s important. He believes his kids. He clips his wings to be with us but miraculously still can fly.

Gosh, there’s so much going on. So many important things to write about, wield about, to care about. What is it today? An exposé on another crooked GOP lawmaker? The overdue overthrow of American Evangelicalism and a reinstitution of faith? Deaths of despair impossibly trending upward post-pandemic? A motion to ban teachings on Critical Race Theory? The worsening crisis in India? Vaccine equity? 

Adam Grant in his NY Times piece describes the blah we’re all feeling, a more technical term, ‘to languish’: “It wasn’t burnout — we still had energy. It wasn’t depression — we didn’t feel hopeless. We just felt somewhat joyless and aimless. It feels as if you’re muddling through your days, looking at your life through a foggy windshield. And it just might be the dominant emotion of 2021. 

In psychology, we think about mental health on a spectrum from depression to flourishing. Flourishing is the peak of well-being: You have a strong sense of meaning, mastery and mattering to others. Depression is the valley of ill-being: You feel despondent, drained and worthless. Languishing is the neglected middle child of mental health. It’s the void between depression and flourishing — the absence of well-being.”

I think this has much to do with our being microcosms functioning at macrocosmic levels. Ants drinking from a firehose of crucial information, leaving our own hills to die, perpetuating a plague of destitute colonies all over. With too much shit to bear, we say grace as an extension of grief, a prolonged numbness. Our unadulterated joy is a privilege, offensive even. So many are unwell — try to be sensitive, won’t you? We’ve learned to keep our joy under wraps as some sort of signal that we care. 

Sometimes it’s good just to say something unimportant. Something silly. Our first hummingbird of the season, for instance, has found its feeder. He’s been back everyday since. Its tiny body like an uncatchable star, its tiny, excited wings like the most miniature fan. Its tiny beak, like a twig, lapping up a sugary nectar from its new red glass bulb. 

The Wisteria my husband planted is finally climbing its trellis, peering into the guest room window. Our mint is doing brilliantly in this Maytime humidity. We ought to prune her, but you almost don’t want to! Our girl felt rain touch her skin for the very first time. We sat out back and listened as it hit like pellets in the gutter. Then I held her out, like Rafiki with Simba, just enough for the afternoon storm to touch her legs. She wriggled a bit but wasn’t upset. I massaged the drops into her pudgy thighs like lotion, let her toes the size of corn skim the dew off the grass. 

It’s nothing really to write home about, but it isn’t silly, is it? A momentary bond with the world behind us and before us. The presence of being, of meaning, of mattering. It’s tempting to bow with our small, selfish triumphs, handing them over in reverence to a despair that’s far bigger than us. But I think we’ll see that our capacity for caring enlarges when we tend again to our hills, making no apology when we drink from a spout our size. Please, for the sake of flourishing, reclaim your understated joy.