If you’ve been reading my work or listening to my babbling these last several months, you know that I’ve been very, very dizzy for a very long time. I’ve been debilitated. I’ve had to re-evaluate my priorities and then, like, cross a few more priorities off of the essentials list. I couldn’t do a lot of what I loved— writing, parenting, dancing in ways that embarrass my friends and offspring—or, rather, I had to modify my definition of doing those things, a process that was profoundly hard and moving and greatly informed by the many wise disabled and chronically-ill thinkers I know and would like to know.
But a solution has arrived, and its name is Lexapro. I learned that people with a disorder that sounded a lot like my dizziness responded well to SSRIs. I asked my doctors for one. Then, every member of my family got the gnarliest flu I have ever encountered, and I barely had a coherent thought or walked around the block for two weeks.
But, a month later, after taking the Lexapro and doing daily balance exercises (okay, mostly daily), I am a changed person. I’m not never dizzy, but I am rarely “in bed all day dizzy” or “I’d love tell you what happens next to Wilbur the pig, kiddos, but E.B. White’s words are swimming on the page” dizzy.
Today, for the first time in almost 8 months, I hiked the hill (okay it’s basically a mountain) near my house that, before this, was my weekly ritual with a friend—something that kept me tethered to my body, to the nature I often forget exists around my urban neighborhood, and to one of the people I love most and best. Until a few weeks ago, I couldn’t really exercise. Now I’m back with my boy Cody Rigsby on the Peloton complaining about people while moving to remixes of remixes of Kelly Clarkson songs.
I fucking did it. It was wild. I was alone, I needed to do it for the first time alone. At the top, I pumped my fists at no one, and then had to pull my ear bud out and tell some dudes sitting on a bench what I’d accomplished, how unwell I’d been. They were happy for me, but one annoyingly suggested that I continue to push myself a bit more, every day. I couldn’t tell if that was providence shining its good advice on me, or just, like hiker-bro energy I didn’t need.
I just finished reading a primo contribution to the mother-horror genre, Julia Fine’s The Upstairs House. It’s a delightful, harrowing, sometimes heart-stopping post-partum ghost story about a woman with a newborn being haunted by The Runaway Bunny author Margaret Wise Brown and her less-successful mentor/lover Michael Strange. Fine does such an excellent job describing the angst of those early days alone with a baby — the sucking of flanges as you try to increase your milk supply, the feeling that you are not loving this person in the way you are supposed to, the sensation of falling out of the world— that adding a super-natural element into the mix is seamless. None of it makes sense, being desperately alone and unmoored while people keep telling you are doing “the most important job in the world,” that you might as well be seeing things. I won’t tell you more, just read it.
I don’t think I could have read Fine’s book when it came out, when my children were younger. It would have been too close, too soon. I wasn’t out of my own haunting then.
Now, my almost six-year-old, my baby, and I are going on a trip. She is sketching out her outfits for each planned activity — a matching sweat suit for the plane, her yellow clogs and Frida Kahlo purse for “Party Night,” a shirt and pants that both feature hearts, plus a fanny pack, for our “Outdoor Adventure.” This morning she stumbled out of her bedroom and went right to the art table née dining-room table to work on a fit for a picnic with a friend. I could not think of anything more delightful than watching her do this, and witnessing her own delight with herself and her ideas.
When she finished her first stage performance last week (she was Perdita in a 30-minute adaptation of the movie 101 Dalmatians that mostly consisted of the director loudly whispering children’s names and their entire lines off-stage, NO BIG DEAL), she walked out of the theater and said “I’m so HAPPY for myself!”
Taking this child, who I finally know how to be with, in quotable times and harder ones, on inter-state travel, sharing an unfamiliar bed with her, making sure she pees every 90 minutes, is so far from my first few years of parenting her, it is almost unrecognizable.
The other weekend, my husband went out of town and I took care of the kids, something I couldn’t have imagined that I would have been capable of doing a few months ago. Just in case I wasn’t well, we lined up many avenues of care. But I didn’t need most of them. I felt good, in my body and as their mother.
As I drove them home from my father’s house after my triumph of a weekend solo, going 80 miles per hour while they both slept in back, singing loudly to Carly Rae Jepsen, feeling like a fucking phoenix risen from the ashes, I noticed something flapping in the wind on the hood of my car.
It was my keys — which I had just spent $300 replacing from the last time I lost them — tucked into the bottom of the windshield where I’d tossed them, like a fucking dumb dumb, while packing up the car. My heart sank, not just because I thought I could lose them forever before I had a chance to find a place to pull over, but because the version of myself who had so been crushing it just minutes ago could not weather such stupidity.
Is pushing myself more every day a one-way ticket to the bad place, or maybe even how I got so sick to begin with? Or is it something light and nice and good, like carefully planning your outfits on a journey to you can be your most fabulous self?
I pulled over. I wiggled across the passenger seat and reached around front to grab the keys. My kids kept sleeping, their little snores punctuating the music I now turned down as a sort of self-reprimand. Were they congested? Would we all get sick again? Fuck, if we were’t human.
Also, this:
I have found the perfect post-bedtime activity for when my husband is out (every Tuesday night, I take Thursday nights) or I’m ignoring him (this is healthy people): Watching Sort Of on Max and applying nail stickers. Y’all, these are so much cheaper and less time-consuming and less probably-giving-you-hand-cancer than a gel manicure and if a lady who left her keys on the hood of her car can do them, so can you. I did do my nails almost nightly in highschool, though, so I have my 10,000 hours.
Stuff I’ve been making:
My podcast, Mother Culture! Follow us on Instagram, listen to this fabulous most-recent episode on parenthood and psychedelics or our latest Movie Club episode on the great Tully, also a sort of post-partum ghost story, with guest
.
I got to interview the incomparable
about Whiteness and parenting and I think it turned out quite well!
Car keys replacement costs are so unfairly painful
Congrats on conquering the hill, rekindling a love with Cody and giving me a new show rec. The thing I may love most about this post is the reminder that ignoring your husband on a regular basis is normal. Xo