How am I? This was my response to a dear friend who just e-mailed me after 6 months of being absent and unreachable in another country:
Maya Rose…
I’m finding the second child immensely easier than the first. I don’t worry constantly about Maya dying, for example. If she sleeps 5 hours without a feeding I don’t feel panicked. I don’t spend time debating things like cloth diapers vs. disposable, I just take the nicely folded disposable diaper out of its package, put it on, listen to her poop in it some time later and barely feel a twinge of remorse when I mummify it in a Diaper Genie pail and send it to fill a landfill somewhere. After 50,000 years or so, it will be oil and probably worth a fortune, and the George W. Bush of that future will thank me.
The doctors had decided NOT to check for down syndrome and the like with an amnio and I just couldn’t stop thinking about all the problems, including losing the baby before a year if she had some other genetic anomalies associated with cleft lip, and I just wanted, literally, to die. I know this is really selfish of me — depression is inherently selfish — but I couldn’t beat it. I started taking Zoloft and it has been a huge blessing to me. I know that probably sounds really funny but it was terribly hard to admit that I couldn’t take the pressure. People loved to tell me, “God won’t give you more than you can bear,” but I just wanted to scream, “It’s not your fucking child that might die,” at them. Marti, of course, remained relatively calm throughout the whole thing, and Maya was born perfect with just a tiny cleft on her left side, so in the end it was all just doctor-induced stress. I spent the first week of her life deliriously happy that she was going to live, that she wasn’t disabled, etc. etc. I am still pretty happy but I am continuing with the Zoloft. It helps me with that radio station that plays in my head, K-FCKD, and I am a bit ashamed that I couldn’t have started taking it earlier and spared my family some pain. It’s nice to be able to get up in the morning and fix breakfast for Ben without spending the first hour talking myself through it. I’m sure it’s nice for him too…
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