beware the haunting prose

Last night I skimmed through this alluring little book. It was a first novel, filled with haunting, delicate prose. The topic was motherhood; post-partum depression in particular. I shouldn't have picked it up. I should have walked away. Instead, like the ingenue in a horror flick, I flipped through and read the end. Somehow, knowing that this fictional woman survived post-partum depression would insure what? happiness, success, safety for my own children? It looked good. Our heroine was at her daughter's naming ceremony, describing the rabbi and her husband, tired but surviving. Then, next chapter, she's alone with a crying baby. The author, in her beautiful prose, describes the desperation a mother can feel in excruciating detail. The baby is dry, she won't accept the breast, she won't settle, until finally the mother has made a terrible, fatal mistake. I guess I should warn about possible spoilers for this unnamed novel at this point. The mother, carrying her dead child, drowns herself in the family pool. The book ends with her young son, returning home with his father, running towards the pool with his water wings.

I felt sick. I still do. Does every mother feel those desperate moments? Those moments of "please, I don't know what you need?" Those moments of, "Just let me alone--I can't think?" I suppose the difference is knowing when to put the baby down in a safe place and get a drink of water or pee or scream. Or persevering enough to just hold on for one more minute, one more minute, the tears now streaming down your own face, until finally the little one is calm and smiling or blissfully asleep and you wonder what all the fuss was about.

Sometimes at night, after we've finally gotten the boys settled, I miss them. E especially, with his vibrant life-force, seems like a candle going out when he's asleep. I call it, "The Elvis Has Left the Building" feeling. Something is extinguished and the world seems emptier. At first, it is a relief, but sometimes, that feeling lasts only for a minute or two and I want that commentary, that energy, to return and fill up the spaces around me. With F, it's the feeling I get when I lay him down after he's fallen asleep in my arms. I wish so often that I had more time just to hold him and cuddle.