When I was a little girl, I used to think that my life was a movie, and I was performing for an audience. I constantly had this sense of being watched, and I imagined that behind the scenes of life, there was an audience looking up at a big screen with me in the center. I imagined that in this movie of life, the audience would be born and would die in the theater as they watched my life play out before them.
I don’t remember when I realized that this wasn’t true, but at some point I graduated from that idea onto one in which the only audience was a future version of me, looking back on those moments in my memory. Sometimes, even now, if I sit in silent contemplation, I can almost feel the presence of what I have decided is Future B, looking back on present me in her memory.
Having experienced a lot of trauma in life, it can often feel as if the things that have happened to me are far too absurd to be real and true. Instead, it feels like maybe my life is being orchestrated by someone or something far bigger than me. Someone with a great sense of humor. In some of my therapy sessions, I find myself laughing incredulously as I realize that the things I am explaining actually happened to me, and are not some plot to a drama TV series I watched last week.
Take for example, the time that I was accused of murder.
In the final days of my father’s life, I was by his side. Years previously, he had designated me as his healthcare representative, and him being incapacitated meant that I was the one to make his healthcare-related decisions. My father was 45 when I was born. By the time I came around, he had already lived a life raising two other children well into adulthood. As he laid in the hospital bed, a shell of his former self, my sister, who is twenty years my senior, found it very difficult to cope with being out of control of the situation. My dad was dying– he had end stage liver failure and had contracted an infection that festered until it got into his blood. The rest of his organs began shutting down as his body struggled against the infection. His prospects were looking bleak.
At the time, I was in nursing school, and already had a few years of CNA experience under my belt. Death was no stranger to me. I had seen multiple residents at the nursing home slowly decline as they approached their dying days. I understood it enough to know that my dad would have wanted to die peacefully and comfortably. He would not have wanted extraordinary measures taken. He would not want his life artificially prolonged, forcing him to suffer longer as we delayed the inevitable. While this made perfect sense to me and the healthcare team, my sister struggled a bit to understand.
Immediately, she became hostile towards me. Any time we would end up visiting at the same time, she would yell that I was conspiring with the staff to starve my dad to death. Mind you, my dad was unconscious and had a gurgling quality to his breathing after she force fed him an Ensure milkshake. She accused me of forging the documentation that stated I was his healthcare representative. These paranoid insinuations continued and became more frantic as my dad edged closer to the end.
He stabilized enough to be moved out of the hospital and into a nursing home. I happened to work at the nursing home, as it was the only one in town. The day my dad died, I was planning to visit him. I woke up around 9 a.m., and dilly-dallyed around, probably lounging around on my phone. I was procrastinating. I finally decided that I was going to make breakfast and then I would go see him. As I sat down to eat my eggs and toast, my phone rang. It was the nurse on shift on my dad’s wing. She told me that she hated to be the one who had to say it, but my dad had passed away. She encouraged me to come up and say my goodbye’s before the funeral home came to get him.
I rushed to the facility, and I helped the CNAs perform end-of-life care, which includes cleaning the body and dressing them in new clothes before covering them with a sheet or blanket. Afterwards, I sat and held his lifeless hand, coming to terms with everything that had led up to that moment. The nurse told me to take as much time as I needed, and to come find her when I was done so that she could call the coroner to pick up dad’s body. The moment I felt ready, I opened the door to find the nurse with her fist posed to knock.
“I think I’m ready for you to call the coroner,” I told her.
“It’s too late,” she said. “Someone else already did.”
I stared at her with an open mouth, completely confused by what she meant.
“Your sister called the coroner and told them we were ‘hiding a dead body.'”
In that moment, I couldn’t help but let a laugh escape me. It felt absurd, like she was joking. The look on the nurse’s face assured me she was not, in fact, joking.
In the hallway, just beyond the nurse was the county coroner and sheriff. They took me into an empty room to talk with me. They informed me that my sister had called them to tell them that my father was dead and she felt I had something to do with it. They asked me questions about when was the last time I saw my dad. He died on a Sunday, and the last time I had seen him was after my shift on Friday. I stopped by around 2 p.m., telling him goodbye and giving him my love.
Thank God the sheriff and coroner had their wits about them. They looked at my dad’s records and saw that he specifically came to the nursing home for end-of-life care. His prognosis was poor, and it was well known that he may not have much time left. They realized that my sister’s claims were completely unfounded, and that was that.
Planning my father’s funeral was absolute hell. My sister fought me on every last detail, even though in the end, it was all out of my own pocket. The GoFundMe she started collected around $250, and she said since it was such a small amount, she might as well keep it rather than contributing to funeral costs. Any chance she got, she would continually accuse me of orchestrating my dad’s death. After we buried my father’s cremains, I blocked my sister’s number and Facebook. I haven’t looked back since.
So imagine my surprise when I see her name appear on the board used in my Emergency Department to track patients. My stomach dropped, and I immediately felt panic approaching. Adrenaline racing, I went to tell my charge nurse that the person who just arrived was my sister and that it was of utmost importance she not know I was there. Just as I was telling her this, I happen to make eye contact with a man in the hallway. And wouldn’t you know it that man was my sister’s husband. He immediately began calling my name, so I swiftly walked out of his line of sight, ignoring him. I contacted my hospital’s security, unsure what my sister was capable of. I gave them a quick debrief of my relationship with her and my fears. The assured me they’d be nearby and prevent anything from happening.
I managed to avoid her for the rest of her stay, but the entire time she was there, I had a hard time concentrating on my work, paranoid myself that she would somehow find a way to make my life hell. Fortunately, she was seen and discharged, sent on her not-so-merry way after being there for hours.
About a week after my sister made a surprise visit to my department, I was at work once again. My husband sent a string of text messages, each one more frantic than the next. There were wasps trickling into our apartment. Yellow jackets, to be more specific, and they were becoming more frequent as he killed them one by one. With an 8-month-old baby in the house, he feared that the wasps would swarm or become aggressive. I was trying to focus on work, but his texts kept coming. He called our emergency maintenance line, but no one was willing to come out on a weekend. My daughter was acutely aware of her father’s stress, and she became extremely fussy and hard to console. I felt powerless at work, knowing I had to stay because I couldn’t afford to miss any of my shifts, as well as being unable to help my husband.
As my daughter napped upstairs, my husband quarantined the kitchen, where the wasps were coming into the apartment, from the rest of our home. He began investigating, trying to understand how they were getting inside. He found an electrical box outside that had an entrance into the brick wall of our building. As he looked, wasps were coming in and out of that entrance at an alarming rate. He also tracked down exactly where they were entering our kitchen. The wasp colony was growing at an exponential rate, and they began to run out of room in the walls. As a result, they began chewing through the drywall to expand. They did this until they reached the caulking that connected our kitchen counters to the walls. It wasn’t obvious at first, because our counters are cluttered with kitchen utensils, pots, and pans. But my husband saw debris and eventually even watched as a wasp stuck its little head out of the crack in the caulking and made it’s way onto our kitchen counter, confused.
At work, I felt like I was living in a nightmare. There was a wasp infestation so severe in my apartment that they were CHEWING THROUGH MY WALLS to get into my home, where my husband and 8 month old were residing. Thankfully, our apartment manager and maintenance team responded promptly on Monday morning. They sent a pest control man out at noon, and he dusted the colony, taped up their entry points, and said that their demise would be prompt and inevitable. Slowly, the amount of wasps entering and exiting the hive dwindled. We haven’t seen one inside the apartment since.
At the same time as the wasp fiasco, my daughter was going through a bottle strike. During my 12-hour shifts, she refused to drink even a drop of milk from a bottle, sippy cup, spoon, or any other source my husband could think of. I pumped dutifully during my shifts, bringing home fresh milk, but I began to feel defeated, as if something were wrong with my supply. I tasted the milk that my husband had been trying to feed my daughter and it was acidic. It tasted like pure vomit. It was no wonder she wouldn’t drink it. We fell down the rabbit hole, researching high lipase milk. It didn’t make sense though. We were 8 months into our breastfeeding journey, 5 months into her taking bottles while I was away at work. Why did she suddenly hate my milk?
I scheduled my daughter a doctor’s appointment, hoping that we could find some answers. When there, the doctor asked how nights were going. I mentioned that she was still waking up 2-3 times per night for feeds. The doctor looked shocked, stating that by 8 months old, my daughter should be more than capable of getting through the night without a feed. She confidently told me that if I weaned her at night, she would be so hungry for my husband that she wouldn’t be able to resist a bottle. I was hesitant, but I’m not a doctor, so I took her word for it. I felt a sense of dread, knowing that sleep was going to be harder to achieve if I wasn’t able to rely on the crutch of breastfeeding to soothe my baby girl. I knew in my heart that she wasn’t suckling for nutrition, rather for comfort and closeness. It felt wrong to take that away from her, yet the severity of the bottle strike was bad enough that I knew something needed to give.
My husband began waking up with my daughters on my work nights. It turns out that she settles far better for him than she does for me. She doesn’t expect any milk from him, so she will wake briefly, and promptly go back to sleep. There also was the added bonus of me getting quality sleep. For the first time in 8 months, I was getting stretches longer than 2 or 3 hours. I was going to work a new woman, in a better mood than I have experienced in months. I had more energy and hope for the future. It dawned on me just how much the sleep deprivation has been playing into my depression.
The problem was, my daughter didn’t take the milk right away. It took another 3 or so weeks before she would. Turns out, she was working on a couple of teeth. Now, about 2 months after her initial strike, she will chug a 6 ounce bottle with no hesitation. I guess my milk wasn’t the problem after all.
Exactly 1 weekend after the wasp-pocolypse, mother nature decided to dump an egregious amount of rainfall over the course of a couple of days. My postpartum depression was at an all-time high, and I had just had a conversation with my psychiatrist that maybe it was time to explore medication options that aren’t necessarily safe for breastfeeding. She reminded me that a happy mom is far more important than whether or not my baby is breast or bottle fed. I knew that she was right, yet I felt as if I were mourning. As the thunder shook my apartment and the rain slammed against the window, I fed my daughter, wondering if this would be one of the last times. She slowly drifted off to sleep, and I cried over her. I had this feeling that somehow I am going to sully her perfection. She is so pure and precious and perfect, and I felt as if I was not worthy of being her mother. She was so unaware of everything swirling around in my mind. It felt like a scene from a movie, with the rainfall and my internal conflict.
Friday of that week, our apartment complex’s parking lot began filling with water. It was slow at first, but within a few hours, it had completely flooded. Thankfully, my husband and I had the foresight to move our cars to higher ground before the water completely overtook where our cars had been just hours previously. Saturday, I woke up to a beach-front parking lot. There were children playing in the water (gross), and a man who had gotten his boat out was showing off his ability to traverse the flood. Our entire city was overtaken with flooding, some homes more affected than others. Thankfully, water never entered our apartment (though we moved all of the most important and sentimental things we own to the 2nd floor just in case), and we never lost power. However, I had to miss work yet another weekend, having no PTO and a lot of fear that my manager is going to get sick of me.
Monday morning, I recieved an email that made my heart sink. The company that owns our storage units sent a statement:
“Unfortunately your unit might have been impacted by this historic flood that was beyond anyone’s control.
We want to do something meaningful to help so we are providing you with a non-cash credit of $132 for your continued occupancy.
We have chosen to do this because we value you as a tenant and recognize the hardship caused by this extraordinary event.
No action is required on your part.
Thank you for your continued business and understanding.”
I hadn’t even thought of our storage units during the flooding. I was so concerned with missing work and what was going on at home, that it hadn’t even crossed my mind. We had two units. One was full of things that Josh and I didn’t have the heart to get rid of but didn’t have the space for in our apartment. The other unit was the one I procured after my father’s death. He had an apartment that I had to clear out within a matter of days. I didn’t know what to do with his things, so I rented a storage unit and moved all of his belongings into it. A lot of it was furniture and things that aren’t necessarily that important, but there were some sentimental things in there too. Two storage units, gone.
Our city set up a dumping site for items impacted by the flood. The next Friday, Josh and I rented a U-Haul, put on our gloves and got to work. My neighbor graciously offered to watch our daughter while we dealt with the storage units. Under the scorching sun, we loaded every last thing into the U-Haul, then transported it to the dump. We said some tough goodbyes, and marveled that the first time we ever left our daughter alone was to do something so hard. We decided the next time we have anyone watch her, it will have to be for something happy and fun. As I left the storage unit in the massive U-Haul, I couldn’t get a good angle to see the road. I backed up to try and realign myself, and wouldn’t you know it, I backed right into one of the units. I cursed myself, feeling like of course this would happen.
Life has been slamming us with one punch after another. Again, I simply have to laugh incredulously when I take a step back and look at the big picture. I beat myself up about my mental state. “Why am I so depressed and anxious?” Oh, I don’t know, maybe because the universe is sending the four horsemen of the apocalypse to your home. During all of this as well, my maternal grandmother (whom I was not close to) died. My sister (not the same one who accused me of murder) was understandably distraught, so I did my best to put my own shit aside and be there to support her. It sucks though, feeling like I can’t reach out. I don’t want to be a burden, and she already has enough going on. I am really good at rationalizing my isolating behavior.
This post is going to be one of many in which I reference my postpartum depression, but I’m also working on one that exclusively dives into the thoughts, feelings, and actions I’ve been struggling with in the past few months. It’s been tough to navigate, but I’m a tough woman. I know I am going to get to the other side. Despite all that life has thrown my way, I am surviving. I’m showing up for my husband and my daughter every day, and sometimes, I’m even showing up for myself. It is a slow-going process, and I have to take it day by day, or else I will get overwhelmed.
I wonder what the audience is screaming at the big screen right now. What do they see that I can’t because I’m too close? I often wonder if I’m on the right track, or if I have strayed far, far away from the correct course. I can see the figs from Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar rotting away as I neglect all of life’s various possibilities. I can only hope that the fig I chose to pursue will not fall away, too.
