So It Goes
In the grand tradition of downer Unpublishable essays, Andrew opens up about his mental health issues following the birth of his child.
My son and wife both came within a whisper of dying during his birth. I was there and had an interminable moment when I really thought they both might pass, as did many of the other medical professionals in the room.
My son is nine months old now, and doing great, as is my wife. But as I transition from the first hectic months of parenthood to something resembling a sustainable rhythm, I’ve come to realize that moment of horror is, at least for now, a gigantic stone making ripples in the pond of my life.
I mention this because I haven’t written for Unpublishable in almost a month and a half (sorry, Maggie!). In fact, I’m experiencing a career-defining case of writer’s block at the exact moment I set out to do more freelancing.
The reason is this: every time I sit down to write about anything — outdoor gear, news, my fifth attempt at a McSweeney’s piece — I end up veering into matters of life and death. This is not a topic readers are expecting when they open up a backpacking quilt review or a humor essay.
“The Fireside 20-Degree quilt features 950 fill-power down, 7d face fabric, and I feel like the eight days I spent with my son in a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit shaved ten years off my life.”
Not gonna fly with very many editors.
My son Alistair shortly after being transferred from our small rural hospital to a NICU in Reno, Nevada.
Want to know something strange? I don’t finish TV, movies, or books anymore. I have series finales of about a dozen shows left to watch in my Netflix queue. Good luck figuring that one out, algorithm.
Three pages remain in four or five different novels on my bookshelf. Recently on a long flight, I tried to watch a thriller about two women bandit-climbing an abandoned radio tower, and even this exquisite silliness was too much for my central nervous system to take.
I quit halfway through and watched Mad Max: Fury Road for the umpteenth time because while it isn’t exactly relaxing to watch Charlize Theron kicking the collective ass of desert fascists, I do find it soothing.
Anyway, my tick of not finishing media first showed up during the height of the pandemic but became exacerbated after my son was born. It drives my wife absolutely crazy, but it’s far from the worst thing that sprung from my son’s difficult birth.
“Don’t Panic” in large, friendly letters
People say, “I never knew what love was until I had a child of my own.”
In addition to being wildly disrespectful to the human experience of childless people, I believe this trope is the province of young adults with very little life under their belts. I’m neither young nor inexperienced at life, and the powerful love I feel toward my son is not a shock to me.
But the panic attacks I started having after his brush with death and subsequent NICU stay were a shock. Here’s a brief and uncomprehensive list of silly non-issues that have caused them:
Returning a rented breast pump to the hospital.
The smell of disinfectant/hand sanitizer.
A bottle nipple fusing shut and not delivering milk effectively during a feeding.
My wife yelling for help in the middle of the night after experiencing a dizzy spell while changing a diaper.
Mild traffic in the very small city of Reno, Nevada.
The drafting program I use that adds a pleasing typewriter clack and “ca-ching-shwooooop” sound effect every time I hit return no longer being supported in Google Chrome.
Trying to come up with an idea for this Substack.
The deadlines that blew by for other projects while I was trying to come up with an idea for this Substack.
Cuddling Alistair in the NICU.
I’ve always run hot, mentally speaking. My anxiety meter is perpetually cranked up to somewhere between “whoa, simmer down, bruh,” and “Dante’s Peak is about to explode, and nobody will listen to Pierce Brosnan* about it.”
But panic attacks are a new one for me, and honestly, the thing I hate most about them is how they take me out of commission, and temporarily remove me from usefulness as a husband and father. They make me feel weak, and boy, if that isn’t a whole new essay on the pitfalls of modern American masculinity, I don’t know what is.
This is probably a good moment to pause and say yes, I am in therapy for all this, both the regular talky-talk kind and something called Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), wherein I have to briefly focus on my traumatic memories while experiencing bilateral stimulation. Apparently, it helps me unpack and repack my suitcase of traumas, so to speak.
It is not, as you might imagine, very much fun, and it costs me a pretty large chunk of my precious and continuously dwindling emotional and physical energy reserves. But it does seem to be effective.
Interlude
This is turning out to be a real downer of an Unpublishable, huh?
Palate cleanser! Here’s a joke I heard recently.
It was so hot over the summer that my friend Bob simply evaporated.
He will be mist.
Mist, ya’ll.
To be okay
As I wrap up, I want to piggyback off of Maggie’s last Unpublishable essay, the one where she talked about how mental health is an ongoing journey with detours, false starts, and backslides, and doesn’t fit neatly into the three-act structures that make up the bulk of human storytelling.
It’s a concept Maggie and I have talked about a lot during our friendship and professional association, and never have I felt it more acutely than in discussing how profoundly my family’s brush with death affected me. Recently I came across this little gem from a therapist friend, and while I reflexively dismiss any self-help meme I see on social media, this one seems to have some merit:
“You aren’t supposed to exist as if things didn’t happen to you. Feel without trying to forget.”
When I first realized I was in serious mental trouble over this whole thing (I had a total meltdown because I couldn’t find our cat anywhere in the house, he was behind the blinds, watching birds), my initial goal was to get over it as soon as possible. I defined that as talking about the birth and NICU without getting upset, watching reruns of House without bursting into tears every time a baby shows up onscreen, falling asleep without sneaking into my son’s room and putting my hand on his chest three or four times a night to make sure he’s still breathing, and painting and writing at the same level and output as I was before he was born.
These are no longer my benchmarks. I recently and finally realized I might never be able to share our story without getting a hitch in my voice. It’s likely I will spend a long time skipping forward in books and movies when a child is in peril. Already a lifelong insomniac, restful sleep might be out of reach for a while yet.
Maybe I’ll never find out how The Walking Dead ends. Maybe it will be a while before I really paint again.
Obligatory titular Vonnegut reference
So it goes.
Your author, Alistair the baby, and Meriwether the Cat, on the first day home from the hospital, nearly two weeks after birth.
I’m slowly coming to terms with all that, and my new goal is to be okay, eventually, which I define as being able to acknowledge that some upsetting things happened but that I am not currently being menaced by an apex predator, and there is no need to introduce buckets of adrenaline and cortisol into a situation that involves me looking for a parking place at Lowes.
Feel without trying to forget.
It seems like a plausible goal, and like strong medicine — widely applicable in these troubled days.
Alistair nine months later. Killer eyes. Looks good in a sweater. Teeth incoming.
FOOTNOTE:
*I have no good reason for this extremely untimely Dante’s Peak reference