1986: The Rise from the Earth, Part I
Wherein I mourn the blood that blossoms in the toilet bowl and refuse sanitary napkins from the nurse in the university infirmary though my underwear is soaked with blood. The nurse tells me she's not going to change the sheets until I agree to wear the sanitary napkins. I've made my bed and, well, I can lie in it. Her sentences are sharp, slicing through the air, devoid of the usual softness of that clichi. In this clipped, unyielding voice, she speaks often about choices -- to sleep or not to sleep, to fight the sleeping pills meant to sleep me through this part until the part when my parents arrive to take me home. I've had my first manic episode though no one knows it yet. The consensus so far is that this unusual behavior may be the result of experimenting with drugs or brought on by lack of sleep, neither of which are unusual for a second-semester college freshman. There is an authority to the nurse's voice like a wall that my slippery silver mercury mind leans against gratefully, but she doesn't understand, and I can't explain. I am pregnant and I am dying. I'm not sure if I say it out loud. It's a poetic declaration that I refuse to surrender. Until today, when the blood tells me that I'm miscarrying, that I'm losing the baby.
"It's your period," the nurse says. Clearly, I have said something out loud. She waits outside the open bathroom door, her back turned to me. Suicide watch precludes closed doors. "I'm not going to say it again," she says, though she just has and she will. Her smile is more unfriendly than her regular face, which is reassuringly and determinedly expressionless. I return to lie in the bed to bleed out my phantom baby. Outside the window, students walk along the trimmed paths, backpacks slung over their shoulders, on their way to class in the gauzy beginnings of the spring light that's come to swaddle the remnants of cold winter air. I bleed and wait for the public safety officer on night duty who, for the past several nights, has sat by my bed and talked about God, His goodness, His greatness. I don't think I believe in God, but the phantom baby is close to something bigger than myself, something spiritual. The public safety officer is a tall, thin black man with high cheekbones set in an angular face and an orange-ish Afro that escapes the sides of his public safety hat as if it is flying away like the angels he speaks about. The night shift begins when everyone else goes home. When he returns home in the morning, his family -- he has a wife and three children, he tells me -- has already left for the regular daytime world. He lives an opposite life that I can relate to. Together, I imagine, he and I exist outside of time. We are transcendent, like the child my mind has conceived on the heels of first love. "God loves you," the public safety officer says, and when I tell him that I'm losing my baby, tears run over the sharp bones in his face and he holds my hand, laying long, spindly fingers across my own short ones soon to be fat from medication. "I'll pray for you and your lost child," he says.
He knows there is no lost child. The nurse told him in one concise, chiseled sentence as she headed out the door, explaining the thick pad placed between my body and the mattress. But he was generous, willing to respect my hallucinated pregnancy, this excess of feeling. Beyond the hot blood zing of mania, the rush of psychosis to make signs and symbols out of every dull scrap of life, did the excess of feeling have something to do with a desire to create life? Or did it have more to do with a desire to grow up? Something in me wanted to go beyond myself the way this man with real faith seemed able to, crying for me, a crazy girl yearning wildly, recklessly, for a tangible tragedy, blood she could see. At eighteen, when I couldn't see into my future, when I couldn't see much of anything except myself, the possibility of having a child, the idea of it, felt powerful.
1998: The Rise From the Earth, Part II
Wherein the nurses at the psychiatric hospital tell my family I've been restrained because I smeared menstrual blood on the walls of my room. Several weeks into my second hospitalization for bipolar disorder, I've been restrained several times. When this happens, my arms and legs are belted to a gurney so that I can't move in any direction. I have a memory of being upside down as mental health workers secured my arms and my legs, but I don't think that really happened. I don't remember smearing my menstrual blood on the walls of my room either. What I do remember is that I believed I was miscarrying again. I bled and years of anger and sadness were focused to a sharp point of grief that became the loss of the second phantom child I believed I was carrying. Again, an excess of feeling, a bursting of love in my head bursting for so many things, but the biggest explosion, the one that seemed the most palpable was for this lost child. (Years from my first love, the father of this child depended on the direction of my nostalgic hyperbole on any given day -- yes, yes, that one-night stand during that year of temping and too much drinking, he's the one.)
Who was this imaginary kid? The pattern of delusional pregnancies are rich material for my therapist but beyond that, and beyond assigning importance to random men, or perhaps behind, or next to these things, there was something about the idea of being pregnant, even in my psychotic fantasies, that was empowering. It was mine, more than mine. In a funny way, it felt as though I were escaping my body, transcending it. But there was no escape, except for the blood on the walls translated into a child, and maybe my body, its blood coursing at that point for over ten years with various life-saving medications -- psychotropic drugs, SSRIs, mood-stabilizers -- had a hunch that down the line when the question of real children came up, so to would the question of the inheritance of these spooky genes. You might not be able to do this pregnancy thing, my coursing blood might have been saying, rehearsing fearfully. Prepare yourself. Practice this loss.
2001: The Rise From the Earth, Part III
Wherein Tegretol reduces the efficacy of the birth control pill by 3%. This information is provided in the Drug Interaction section of the pharmacy pamphlet that accompanies Tegretol prescriptions. It is also provided in the Drug Interaction section of the pharmacy pamphlet that accompanies birth control prescriptions. In 2001, I'd refilled my Tegretol prescription approximately forty-eight times (Tegretol was fairly recent, after ten years of Lithium and a month of Neurontin) and my birth control pill approximately eighteen times. I never once read these pamphlets. Over the years, I'd grown accustomed to leaning on the hard wall of authoritative voices like the nurse's in the college infirmary. I leaned willingly, eyes closed. I'd been taking medication for fifteen years and I never investigated my own illness, grew suspiciously sleepy the second paragraph into the books dedicated to exploring the mystery of bipolar disorder, never researched the medications that ran through my blood. I assumed that hard wall of voices, the they (who were "they" exactly?) to whom I had gratefully turned over the reins, would intuit and intervene if there were a problem, and no one -- not my gynecologist, not my primary care physician, not my psychiatrist, not my therapist -- mentioned that Tegretol decreases the effectiveness of birth control pills and I never asked. It didn't occur to me. At thirty-two, an age when many of the women I knew were trying to get pregnant, some turning to fertility treatments, I found myself accidentally pregnant.
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