The first inkling my husband had that I was thinking about suicide was when he checked my blog. He was in Little Rock, on the first leg of a tour that was supposed to take him from Arkansas to Alaska, back to Denver and over to St. Paul, Minn., a circuit more suited to a professional indoor lacrosse league than to a literary novelist. I’d been distracted and irritable when we spoke on the phone, but not necessarily any more than you’d expect from someone left behind with four children. The suicide essay definitely came as a shock.
I had begun my blog two months before, imagining that it would act as a journal, a way of taking notes on my life, and at the same time be a sort of marketing tool to remind readers that I still existed in between novels. Almost immediately I discovered in myself a confessional impulse, a compulsive need to haul open the tattered edges of my emotional raincoat and expose the nasty parts lurking beneath. I blogged daily, chronicling everything from what my youngest son ate for dinner (one spaghetti noodle, one pat of butter, and all the green, blue and pink frosting off a very large cupcake), to the Supreme Court’s dramatic shift on sentencing guidelines, to the various side effects of the medications I take for my bipolar disorder. As soon as I read something interesting, as soon as I heard something moving, as soon as one of my children said something funny, I posted to my blog.
The entry that greeted my husband on that day was a well-researched commentary on suicide rates among people with bipolar disorder. I informed my readers, among them my husband, that what I have, the milder form of the disease, has a 24 percent suicide rate. Then I wrote, “It does not help to know that one’s mood is a mystery of neurochemistry when one is tallying the contents of the medicine cabinet and evaluating the neurotoxic effects of a Tylenol, topomax, SRRI and ambien cocktail.”
The readers of my blog had no way to determine the intentions behind my entry. Was it some kind of public service announcement, designed to help people understand the seriousness of mental illness? My husband had an easier time realizing it was a cry for immediate and urgent assistance. He, however, felt entirely powerless, sitting in a hotel room 2,000 miles away with no way to intervene and nothing to do but wonder whether he should be cursing or blessing the phenomenon of the blog. He called, he made plans to come home, but it was my girlfriends who responded with the most confidence, perhaps because they had so much less at stake than he did in my stability. They formed themselves into a kind of telephone round robin, refusing to let up until I called my psychiatrist, who immediately diagnosed a problem with the dosage of my medication.
Without their help I’m not sure what the outcome of that dark and frightening night would have been. Because they read that blog post, the problem was diagnosed and solved very quickly. I have never attempted suicide, and did not then. But when I wrote that entry I was certainly engaging in what psychiatrists call “suicidal ideation.” I went so far as to plan the funeral, even deciding whether my children would attend (the older ones should, the younger should not), although I managed to keep myself from doing that online. This, the most dramatic emotional collapse of my career as a person with a mental illness, happened out in the open, in front of 1,862 people according to my site meter, and with the comment line open. The letters poured in, overwhelmingly ones of support and compassion, and even identification.
A couple of weeks before, I was interviewed about my blog by a reporter for the New York Times. I tend to approach giving interviews with the same sense of circumspection and restraint as I approach my writing. That is to say, virtually none. When asked what I made of blogs like my own, blogs written by parents about their children, I said, “A blog like this is narcissism in its most obscene flowering.” I uttered those words lightly, almost but not quite in jest, but I believed them.
As debates rage about whether bloggers are journalists, whether they need shield laws to protect sources, whether they brought down Dan Rather and are going to take over the media world, on the other side of the blogosphere the diarists and memoirists and mothers are coping with a different set of ethical dilemmas: How much of themselves should they expose online, and how easily should they indulge their urge to confess? In my case, blogging about suicide might have crossed the line.
My blogging has been cathartic; my self-exposure served some kind of purpose, but there is no doubt that it exacted a cost. One of the problems was that there are a whole lot of people huddled under my particular dirty raincoat. There is my husband, a gracious and good-tempered man, and one who has himself wrestled with the self-exposure business. More important, because they are more defenseless, there are my children, two boys and two girls, ranging in age from not quite 2 to 10 years old. I have always used my children as material in my fiction, and even occasionally in essays, but never with the immediacy demanded of a blog. My daughter shouted at her father, “You like being mean to us; you’re nothing but a hatred machine.” Half an hour later, it was in print online. The children are not allowed to read my blog — they are still young enough that I can monitor their computer use with relative ease. Frankly, at this stage they are far more interested in Gaia online and Muffin Films Web sites, but there will surely come a day when they will Google themselves, find my blog and both be furious with me for having stolen their lives and humiliated at the extent to which I have laid open my own. I told the New York Times reporter that blogging was “payback for driving back and forth to gymnastics all week long,” but I don’t really believe that. As much as I despise carpool, I wasn’t trying to exact some kind of complicated revenge for having been forced to spend too many hours in a minivan.
At the same time, I was becoming convinced that all this blogging was having a deleterious effect on my writing. It was more than the hours I was spending posting to my blog, reading my comments page, reading other blogs, and checking my site meter. As a novelist, I mined my history, my family and my memory, but in a very specific way. Writing fiction, I never made use of experiences immediately as they happened. I needed to let things fester in my memory, mature and transmogrify into something meaningful. The fictionalized scene I ended up with was often unrecognizable from the actual event that had been its progenitor.
But in the months I had the blog, I was spewing as fast as my family was experiencing. My initial idea, that the blog would act as a kind of digital notebook, was not panning out. Once the experience was turned into words, I found that it was frozen. The fertile composting that I count on to generate my fiction was no longer happening.
In the introduction to the collection of her New York Times columns, Anna Quindlen wrote about the challenges of “Living Out Loud,” writing life as it is happening. If producing a regular column is living out loud, then keeping a daily blog is living at the top of your lungs. For a couple of months there, I was shrieking like a banshee. I realized in the wake of my online suicide note that for the sake of my family and my fiction, I needed to turn down the volume a few notches. I needed to give up the blog.
At the same time, the experience of writing about my daily life, about my reactions to contemporary events and politics, about my children and husband, was satisfying, not merely therapeutically, but creatively. I enjoyed attempting to rise to the literary challenge; I even took a sort of pleasure in occasionally failing. While I did not want to continue blogging, I did not want to give up that part of the experience.
I hope to strike a balance with this column. Here is an opportunity to give shape to my musings, to capture some of the immediacy of blogging, but also to force structure on my thoughts, to search for meaning in, rather than just express, emotions.
My children — Sophie, Zeke, Ida-Rose and Abraham — will still find themselves subjects of my columns as they were subjects of my blog. This is inevitable, I’m afraid. I was once on a panel with a novelist who claimed that while she stole liberally from her parents’ lives and those of her friends, she never wrote about her children because that “wouldn’t be fair.” I’m sure my children will one day envy that mother’s scruples. At this point in my life and my children’s, I experience so little that is entirely separable from my identity as their mother. Mothering consumes not just the bulk of the hours of my day but the majority of my emotional and intellectual energy. Were I to declare that part of my life sacrosanct, I would have much less to say. I want to write about being a mother and about them precisely because they are such a large part of who I am. But I will no longer be writing about them just because they have said something amusing, or because they happen to look cute in their matching pajamas. I can’t promise not to invade their privacy, but I can promise to do it more thoughtfully, and, I hope, to more meaningful an end.
Cold comfort to a 7-year-old, I know. While my son Zeke knew that I was in a fragile emotional state during the period before I wrote the suicide post (it might have been the constant crying that gave me away), he was not aware of the extent of it until he overheard someone discussing what I wrote. He did not react then, but I knew there was something wrong. I sat him down and explained what had happened, that I had been taking the wrong pills and that my doctor had fixed my medicine. I asked him if there was anything he was afraid of. He looked at me, his deep blue eyes full of unshed tears, and said, “I am afraid you’re going to kill yourself.”
The same exhibitionism that allowed me to write the post in the first place allowed me to make the mistake of talking about it within his earshot. First I hugged him, then I told him that I knew why he was afraid. I told him what a good doctor I had and how careful we were now to make sure nothing like this ever happened again. I also told him what to do if he ever became frightened: He should talk to his father, call one of his grandparents or, if he was really scared, call 911. This is a child who once called the police because his older sister changed the television channel, so I am confident he will be able to act in a crisis, but I am also adamant that he will not need to. I promised him that I would never, ever hurt myself. A rash promise, perhaps, but I do my best not to break my promises to my children. And I don’t intend to start with this one.
The pro-choice and anti-choice world is abuzz with debate and discussion about Frances Kissling’s 7,500-word essay titled “Is There Life After Roe: How to Think About the Fetus.” I found the article fascinating for a variety of reasons, not least because it is aligned in many ways with my current thinking about abortion.
I had a second trimester abortion. I was pregnant with a much-wanted child who was diagnosed with a genetic abnormality. I made a choice to terminate the pregnancy. It was my third pregnancy, and I was very obviously showing. More important, I could feel the baby move. We had seen him on the ultrasound; I have a very clear memory of his two tiny feet, perfect pearl toes, footprint arches, round heels. This was, for me, a baby, not a “clump of cells” as an older woman, steeped in the arcane language of the early feminist movement, called him. He was my baby, and I chose to end his life.
Let me be very clear here. I support absolutely the right to abortion. I give financial support to Planned Parenthood, to NARAL. I am fanatical on this issue. I believe that every woman is entitled to choose when and if to end a pregnancy. I also believe that to end a pregnancy like mine is to kill a fetus. Kill. I use that word very consciously and specifically.
I have no regrets.
I made a choice based on my own and my family’s needs and limitations. I did not want to raise a genetically compromised child. I did not want my children to have to contend with the massive diversion of parental attention, and the consequences of being compelled to care for their brother after I died. I wanted a genetically perfect baby, and because that was something I could control, I chose to end his life.
This decision was not without its terrible costs. I mourned this baby’s death. The night before the termination I lay awake, feeling him roll and spin within my body. I wept for the death of the baby inside me, and I also wept for the death of the “fantasy baby,” the perfect baby I lost when the amnio results came back. I was catapulted into a six-month depression after the abortion, a depression that ended only when I got pregnant again. On Yom Kippur I wrote an essay about what I had done and read it before my congregation. One of the lines in that essay asked how I could apologize for being so inadequate a mother that I would not accept an inadequate child.
Everyone knows now how early a fetus becomes a baby. Women who have been pregnant have seen their babies on ultrasounds. They know that there is a terrible truth to those horrific pictures the anti-choice fanatics hold up in front of abortion clinics. When I was wheeled into the operating room, I begged my doctor to make sure my baby felt no pain before he was torn out of my womb. I knew the grim truth of a D&E (dilation and evacuation) — I knew he would be dismembered — and I wanted him dead before this happened. My doctor told me that he would make sure my baby felt no pain. You see, all this is horrible, and grim, and terrible to think about. But contemporary women know the truth about abortion, and those of us who remain firmly committed to a woman’s right to choose need to accept and acknowledge that truth, or we risk losing our right completely.
I talked yesterday to my brilliant friend and role model Lynn Paltrow, a woman who has devoted her life and career to pregnant women and their rights. Lynn represents women who have been charged with various offenses because of drug use when pregnant. Lynn said something truly brilliant, I thought. To be relevant to the contemporary world, to be valid, the pro-choice movement must listen to pregnant women. We must listen to the woman and value her words. A woman who is unwillingly pregnant, whose pregnancy at, say, 10 weeks, is nothing more than a source of desperation, of misery, knows one truth and we must respect it and honor it. A pregnant woman whose 4-month-old fetus has Down syndrome knows another truth, and we must respect that, too. A pregnant woman whose batterer kicks her in the stomach, trying to end her baby’s life, knows another truth. Respecting the truths of these pregnant women allows us to deal in shades of gray, to liberate ourselves from the straitjacket of the black and white.
I know why the feminist movement (of whom I am a proud member) has been so wary of using the language of fetal life. A senator who uses the phrase “partial-birth abortion” is exploiting a rare procedure to attack our broader right. I also know a woman who had two “partial-birth abortions,” or D&Xs (dilation and extraction) as they are more accurately called. My friend Tiffany is a carrier of a terrible genetic abnormality. In addition to other defects, her babies developed with no faces, with no way to eat or breathe. They were doomed. The only way to extract them without hurting her chances of ever having another baby was through a D&X.
Tiffany named her children. She mourned and mourns their deaths. She is the face of the “partial-birth abortion.” If we listened to women like Tiffany, we could acknowledge the value of the babies they lost, and defend absolutely their right not to carry them full term, not to force themselves and their babies to undergo the trauma of a doomed birth.
Listen to the pregnant woman. Value her. She values the life growing inside her. Listen to the pregnant woman, and you cannot help but defend her right to abortion.
I must have brought this on myself. I don’t know how else to explain why the polling place I got assigned to was a hotbed of incompetence and outrage, while at the ones down the road things proceeded calmly, without incident.
Things began well enough.
It is bitterly cold in Denver, so cold that this morning when one of the Election Protection volunteers spilled her cup of coffee it froze within moments of hitting the sidewalk. I grew up in Montreal and New Jersey but after 12 years in California I have gone lamentably soft. On the way over to the polling station I kept bemoaning the the fact that I was going to spend election morning standing on a Denver street corner looking like an oversized marshmallow in my white Election Protection windbreaker, size XL, worn over the top of my puffy down coat. Once I got out of the car, I was just grateful for the extra layer.
The voters waiting inside, in the overheated Knapp elementary school, were in lines snaking down the hallways. One of the first I spoke to was a hulking young man, Ulysses. He’d been there since long before the polls opened at 7 AM, but he said he who didn’t mind the wait. he was just thrilled, at age 18, to be casting his first ballot. It was P. Diddy who inspired him. Vote or Die.
Some of the other voters were not so sanguine. One man stormed out of the school, cursing the precinct workers, cursing the government, cursing everyone who stood in his way. By then the wait was pushing an hour, the voting booths were empty because the poll workers couldn’t manage to process the voters and get them behind the curtains. Instead, they were scrambling through voter registration lists, flipping past people’s names, incorrectly sending them on to different precincts, and generally exhibiting a kind of incompetence that was terrifying to behold. They were new to their jobs, some had never done it before. There were three precincts voting in the school, and two moved smoothly. It was only Precinct 221, staffed by a handsome guy with a shock of messy blond hair, and a woman whose sour frown had worked permanent creases into her cheeks by 7:30 AM, that was having problems. These two were just in over their heads, and unable to deal with the ever-lengthening line of disgruntled voters. After my fellow Election Protection volunteers and I had seen many — far too manyinfuriated voters, I ducked in the other door of the school and found Bunny, the election judge for Precinct 444, a small woman, who oozed informed competence, like a Girl Scout troop leader or a museum docent. I told her what was going on, and asked her to check it out for herself, maybe give the poor schlubs at 221 a hand. Bunny and her team were stationed at the other end of the long elementary school corridor. Now she headed down past walls decked with children’s drawings and essays in tortured cursive to to check out what was going wrong.
By the time I got back outside where I belonged, we had another problem on our hands. An absentee voter had never received her ballot. The poll worker had no idea what she should do. The absentee asked me to come inside with her and help her request a provisional ballot.
Which I did. That’s where my problems started.
I don’t care what the City Attorney’s office tells you, I was sweet as pie. A veritable baklava of a nonpartisan volunteer. I spoke softly and patiently and gently. Not aggressive at all. I suggested that they allow her, pursuant to Colorado law, to file an affidavit regarding her missing and then vote. They’d never heard of this procedure. Then I suggested they call someone about the affidavit. No go. Then I suggested she be allowed to file a provisional ballot, always a last resort since who knows if and when those will be counted. This went down okay with the handsome poll worker, and I bid him and my now much cheered voter goodbye.
I don’t think it was the poll worker who reported me to the city attorney. Maybe it was the Republican poll monitor. I’m betting whoever it was didn’t like me. But by the time we managed to deal with having been reported to the City Attorney for “aggressive protection,” and moved our signs a few feet farther away to comply with the 100-foot rule, we were on to another mini-crisis. This one was the closest to voter intimidation, although it didn’t result in someone being preventing from casting a ballot. I took an affidavit from an enraged voter who, while she was casting her ballot in precinct 444, overheard a poll worker complain about all the election materials offered in Spanish and wonder why “people” don’t just learn English. Incidentally, and perhaps not entirely by chance, this little act of bigotry took place in a bilingual school, where the children’s essays decorating the walls are written in Spanish, many of the children whom I watched took their leave from their parents in Spanish, and the door to the girls room had a big sign on it that said “Muchachas.”
There was one woman whose vote I could not help to cast. She showed up in a sweatshirt far too light for the bitter cold, with a spangled hairnet covering her thinning white hair, and she was limping from a blood clot that had worked havoc on her knee. She’d been registered to vote, years ago, but had not done so for a long, long time. She was inspired by this election, she said, and wanted to know if she could cast her ballot. Alas, Colorado has a provision that allows a voter to be struck from the rolls if she fails to vote. She had come out today for nothing.
By the time my shift was over, I felt confident that I had done something, that my trip to the mountains had been worthwhile, that at least a few more voters cast ballots because of the presence of Election Protection today. I have few illusions about my activities; I know that for every citizen whose vote we protect there are others, perhaps even more numerous, who will once again be left in the cold. But I can go home tonight, hand my son back his diagram and tell him that, even though I didn’t have to use it, I still struck a blow for democracy.
As I walked out the door Monday morning to catch my flight to Denver, my 7-year-old son handed me a drawing he had just made: a diagram, he informed me, displaying the most vulnerable part of a man’s body. Just in case.
I have come from Berkeley, Calif., where neither my vote (registered via absentee ballot two weeks ago) nor my presence at the polls particularly matters, to the swing state of Colorado, to work for Election Protection. I am doing my bit to make sure that at least a couple of the estimated 4 million people who were disenfranchised in the last election get their chance to vote.
That astronomical number of voters, according to People for the American Way, one of the groups making up the large coalition that makes up Election Protection, were denied the right to cast their votes, some because of technical glitches like faulty machinery or poorly designed ballots, others through outright chicanery and voter suppression efforts.
So here I am in Denver, and I’m spoiling for a fight. Don’t get me wrong. I am here because I know that the very presence of election monitors deters election fraud and voter intimidation. I know the best-case scenario is a smooth election with no attempts at voter suppression, where every individual is allowed to exercise his or her right to vote, even those for whom English is not their native language, say, or whose skin color is a shade or two darker than John Ashcroft’s.
I know this, but goddamn it, I have flown 1,300 miles, I have a diagram of the most vulnerable part of a man’s body, and a part of me will be very disappointed if I don’t see some action.
I am not alone in my truculence. I’m surprised that the barren assembly room at Mi Casa Resource Center for Women, where the final volunteer training is taking place Monday night, is so cold, considering the fact that it is full to bursting with angry, righteous people, most of whom, I’m willing to bet, wish they were in Ohio or Florida, where things might get woolly.
Oh, we’ll take Colorado, because it’s going to be close, and it has a crucial Senate race going, and at least some history of voter suppression, but you can tell that the guy in the boiled wool Tibetan hat, and the overwrought older man who asked what to do if the cops try to haul away a voter in handcuffs, sort of wish they were someplace else. Someplace where the Republican Party has hired “volunteers” (at 100 bucks a head) to challenge voters at the polls.
(On Monday Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell instructed county election boards to bar all such challengers from the polls, pursuant to two federal district court opinions calling the constitutionality of these challenges into question. Tuesday, the Sixth Circuit overruled.)
We’re informed by an earnest young woman wearing a silly black and white Election Protection smock that this is a nonpartisan organization, one whose tax-exempt status depends on the neutrality of its purpose, and all us pissed-off people have to be very careful not to say who it is we are so angry at. There is a wave of uncomfortable laughter.
This training session is at a center started by former Head Start mothers whose mission is to “advance self-sufficiency for primarily low-income Latinas and youth.” I wonder if Karl Rove is on their donor list. We’re all here to make sure that every voter gets to exercise that right, and since the disenfranchised in this country have traditionally and primarily been people of color and the poor, it’s not hard to figure out that we share a party affiliation, or at least a political affinity.
Considering all the righteous indignation in the room, and the helpless disorganization of the poll assignment process, people are behaving themselves pretty well. There’s a general tone of niceness, which I think can be attributed to our common cause. One pretty young woman with long, dark hair and cheeks reddened by the chill wind tells me happily that she’s getting married in two weeks, in Mexico, on a resort an hour south of Playa del Carmen. There will be 100 people at her wedding.
Another man, a dapper older gentleman wearing a green watch plaid jacket and a varsity scarf and sporting a finely carved cane over one arm, tells me that he campaigned for Adlai Stevenson in 1952. The only overt hostility in the room comes in response to one or two of the more ridiculous questions — “What if a blind person comes to the polls and wants me to go into the booth and help them vote? Can I go inside with them? Should I take off my Election Protection T-shirt?” There are hundreds of us waiting for our assignments and our T-shirts, and a few can’t help from grumbling when earnest questions keep the organizers lecturing for too long.
After a few hours I have finally been assigned my polling place — I’m due at the Knapp School at 6 a.m., heaven help me — and received my snazzy Legal Volunteer windbreaker. I’m all jazzed up and ready to go tomorrow. My shift lasts until 10 a.m., and then I’m going to do some get out the vote work. I can’t tell you for which party, though. Because I work for Election Protection, and we’re a nonpartisan organization.
More to come.
