I bet my grandmother and my grandfather didn’t have to sit down at the kitchen table and have a family planning discussion. For all I know he just hit his woman over the head and dragged her into the house. How else would you explain twelve children? Whenever we ask our grandmother why she had so many she always says:
If other women were doing their job they would have twelve too!
Nobody ever asks for a clarification, purely out of fear of having a sex ed conversation with a 86 year old. Well one thing is clear - I am obviously doing something wrong. Most likely birth control, but hey – to each their own. Before Leila was born we were thinking it would be nice to have four kids, but realistically we knew it would probably be three. That is one of the reasons we had Leila and Liam so close together – I knew that if I was going to have a third I will need a bigger gap in between and at the same time I didn’t want to get pregnant being “advanced maternal age”. Third child was always a possibility… well, that is until Liam was born and I fell into a rabbit hole called PPD.
I always thought of myself as somewhat moody, but that? That was beyond moody. It was just pure dark and cold. Chinese people call depression the flu of the soul… The Western culture prefers the term cancer of the soul. I don’t know which one is more accurate, but mine was treated with an urgency of a heart attack… After 2 weeks of crying and practically wishing a bus would hit me so I wouldn’t have to feel or deal with my own thoughts I finally went to the doctor. Well, it was strongly suggested I see one, so I did.
You don’t need to be severely depressed to start crying when you see that your doctor’s name is listed under Psychiatry… I remember taking the elevator and thinking is this me? Am I officially that person? Have I crossed the line? Will calling myself crazy never be funny anymore? And why can’t I stop crying? I am not even sad, dammit!
For some weird reason I was relieved my doctor’s office didn’t have a couch. Everything looked very… functional – two chairs facing each other, no clocks, a tissue box, white blinds and a picture of some sort of travel destination. The only slightly concerning thing was a “PPD for Dummies” on one of the bookshelves, which later she offered to me… I guess it’s like when you go to the dentist and they give you a small goodie bag with a cheep tooth brush and a travel-sized toothpaste. A shrink gives you the book… cause the toothpaste would be weird, I guess. She sounded smart. I sounded crazy.
In less than an hour I was prescribed and given a three month supply of Zoloft. No other treatment options offered or discussed. I remember the doctor saying something about how depression is like diabetes – the only way to get it under control is with a help of medication. I never had or known anybody with diabetes, so I took her word. Plus I didn’t care…. I really didn’t. I just wanted it to stop. I am pretty sure if she said we need to cut your left ear off for it to stop I would have said yes. It was too exhausting being me. Everything was difficult from the minute I woke up. I was shattered. I suddenly understood why depressed people slept so much… sleep was as close to death as I could get without actually dying.
So there I was… every morning religiously putting a little white pill on my tounge… all in hopes of some magic… a cure for my darkness. I didn’t know if I should pray when I took them and always wondered what were the chances that they gave me a placebo? It just felt too easy and simple to get a three month supply of a mind-altering pill, no? Could a pill really change my way of thinking? Would I feel anything? Will I be dizzy? Drunk? I mean what does happiness feel like anyway?
