It Sucked and Then I Cried: How I Had a Baby, a Breakdown, and a Much Needed Margarita

CHAPTER ONE

Let the Anxiety Commence

My husband has great hair, but even more impressive than that, he has impeccable taste in socks. And then there’s his soft skin, pale white and scented with aftershave, always tempting me to press my nose in an ugly way to the side of his neck. He is a good person, someone who genuinely cares about other people and wants to see other people succeed. He loves his friends and his family, he doesn’t cheat on his taxes, and he usually lets me have the last bite of ice cream. Most important, he has gigantic, bearlike hands, perfect for opening stubborn pickle jars and for holding me tightly when I’m freaking out.

His name is Jon, and together we had a baby.

I had wanted to be able to say that since our first date, a late breakfast at a dirty diner in Los Angeles a few years ago. I remember looking across the wobbly table, over a plate of bacon and buttered toast that I was too nervous to eat, and knowing that I wanted children with eyes like his, a piercing pale green. That afternoon after I said good-bye, after I kissed him gently next to the large swath of eyebrow that starts on one side of his head and continues uninterrupted across his forehead, I called my father and told him to write this name down: Jon Armstrong. Because he was the man I was going to marry.

A year later we eloped on a cliff at Yosemite National Park. It was a sudden decision, an idea we tossed around for barely a month, and we kept it secret from everyone we knew except his mother, and my mother, and my father. There was no way I could get married without telling my parents as I had put them through sufficient heartache already by leaving the Mormon faith that they had brought me up in, voting Democrat, and regularly reading Noam Chomsky. The best way I can describe the dynamic between me and my parents is that they would rather have me addicted to porn than donating money to the ACLU.

I remember calling my parents to let them know what we were doing, and I was a little nervous that my mother would freak out and try to talk me out of it, or maybe even hang up. But both of my parents were surprisingly thrilled that I was getting married. They thought it was the most responsible decision I had made as an adult, probably because it meant that they no longer had to be embarrassed that their youngest and wildest child was living in sin. Although, because I was not getting married in a Mormon temple, I was still throwing wrenches into their plans for me as a child, the biggest of which was that a non-temple wedding meant that I would not get to be with them in the hereafter and would instead end up in the part of Heaven reserved for thieves, murderers, rapists, and people who own autographed copies of Bill Clinton’s head shot.

My parents have always loved Jon, sometimes more than they love me, and not just because it was mostly his idea for us to move to Utah to be closer to them. He is the more conservative one in our relationship, the one who is always turning down the radio, and I’m pretty sure that they think he saved me from living a long, lonely life by myself. Not because I don’t have many great qualities, and I’ll just go ahead and trot those out right now because my skill set is impressive. I have very nice elbows, not too pointy or too round. I can boil water. I can also parallel park a small car. Sometimes I am a nice enough person that I let someone else win at Scrabble. See?

My parents were worried that I’d end up a bitter spinster covered in cat hair because I inherited many of the annoying qualities of their own brothers and sisters. I can be loud and say inappropriate things, I will always laugh at a fart joke, and I often don’t look in the mirror before I leave the house. But I am most like my aunts and uncles in that I have to take a lot of medication to prevent myself from throwing rocks at people. I suffer from chronic depression, and in the years before it was diagnosed I was a miserable human being who routinely wrote bad poetry about being misunderstood. I was a sophomore in college when it was finally treated, and I instantly became a much more bearable person, albeit one who had to pop a pill once a day to connect certain chemicals in my brain.

There are many people in my life who are embarrassed that I can freely admit this about myself, that I have to take pills to be happy, but before the pills I had tried a few of the other options that are out there for people like me:

I ignored that weird, sad feeling.

I substituted bad thoughts with thoughts of unicorns.

I exercised until the pain in my legs seemed far worse than the pain in my heart.

I overate to drown the sorrow.

I prayed that God would give me the will to get over it already.

Surprisingly, none of these things worked, and when I found myself on the brink of dropping out of college, my parents finally agreed to send me to a professional. After one week on an antidepressant I was a changed person, and I remained on that drug for the next seven years, right up until Jon and I got married. I stopped not because marriage had miraculously cured me of the grumples, but because I wanted to have a baby, had been jolted awake in the middle of the night for over a year by my biological clock screaming, HEY! IT’S ME AGAIN! WHERE ARE THE BABIES?

I wanted babies, so I stopped. At least, that’s the medical term for what it’s called, stopping. But I think they should call it Reenacting That One Scene From That One Movie Where That Guy Is Trying To Stop Using Heroin, and he’s having a nightmare while he’s awake that a dead baby is crawling across the ceiling, and he’s all, oh God, oh God, please, please, make it stop, and the dead baby is twitching its rigor-morted head from side to side as it gets closer and closer, and then that guy throws up a hamburger.

Withdrawal from an antidepressant feels just like that, and in the first few months that I was off of my medication, I wanted to go back on almost every day. I needed the pills, because otherwise I did a lot of yelling and tossing things through the air, and sometimes Jon was an accidental target. Without my pills I was wildly irrational, and when we did not get pregnant THE FIRST MONTH WE STARTED TRYING, I was convinced that it meant I was barren. I saw the single line on the pregnancy test and fell into a giant wad on the floor because all I could imagine was years and years of fertility treatments that would never work, and if they did work it wouldn’t be until I was sixty. And then we’d have quadruplets. And they’d all have fourteen toes. Because I wasn’t good enough.

So we tried again the next month, and because I am a perfectionist driven to the point of madness with the need to be good at everything, I forced my husband to have a ridiculous amount of sex. One night after he had moved 7,800 pounds of boxes from a moving truck into our new house, I didn’t even let him sit down to catch his breath before I had shoved him onto the bed and jumped on top of him like an alley cat might attack a discarded cheese sandwich.

I’m ovulating, I told him as I tried to pry off his shirt.

That’s very sexy, and all, he said as he held his arms at impossible angles so that I couldn’t get his clothes off. But did you see what I just unloaded off that truck? IT WOULD TAKE AN ACT OF GOD, WOMAN.

But I didn’t hear that. I heard: You are ovulating, and I don’t love you.

Because I am insane.

Two weeks later I took a second pregnancy test. I had promised myself that I was going to wait longer, just to give my body a little more time, but when Jon got up early one morning, I could only lie there alone for five minutes before giving in. I needed to know so that instead of having to experience all that torturous hoping, I could just go back to what I did best, being sad and worried about what it will be like to raise quadruplets in my sixties.

So I ran and got Jon, and we were like two ten-year-old kids digging through mom’s closet to find Christmas presents. The second pink line on the test showed up within about four seconds, before I could even set it down on the countertop in the bathroom, and Jon and I nearly killed each other with hugs and screams and flailing, gangly arms. It was exactly like I had fantasized it would be in that I really did want to call every single person I knew, but the feeling itself was a single point of light swallowed almost whole by a vast space around it, like holy shit, we’re going to have a baby! And at the same time, HOLY SHIT. WE’RE GOING TO HAVE A BABY.

Instead of getting into bed and going back to sleep after the 4 AM pregnancy test, we talked feverishly for three hours about what we were going to call our work in progress. It was a discussion I had waited my entire life to have, one that I had practiced hundreds of times before in my childhood with Barbies and Cabbage Patch Kids and a goldfish I accidentally boiled because I thought it would rather swim around in warm water. I know I’d much rather be warm than cold, why would my pet want anything different? Except once I put him in the water he started swimming in delirious circles, and then tried to JUMP OUT OF THE BOWL. TWICE. I sort of just stood there and watched him, like, fish is crazy! Until he turned upside-down and floated to the top. Maybe I won’t repeat this story ever again, at least not until I have proven that I know better now.

I had hundreds of ideas for names, most of them stolen directly from the cast of The Dukes of Hazzard as there was no other show on television that has more accurately captured the spirit of my Southern upbringing, where my mama knew everyone’s business and my cousins routinely took each other to prom. If my kid wasn’t going to have my last name, he or she could at least look at their driver’s license and be reminded of their maternal Tennessean heritage, one where wearing shoes to the grocery store is totally optional by law.

But giving a child the name Bo or Luke or even Rosco is way more generous to your offspring than naming your daughter after a character in a Western no one has ever seen whose most defining asset was that he shot a lot of people. That is what my father wanted to do, wanted to name my sister Mangus, even though that word sounds like a brand of cold sore. My mom didn’t let this happen, but she did agree to let him name her September. Even though she was born in January. And my brother’s name is Ranger. After a box of cigars my father saw at a truck stop in Arkansas. I guess this is one of the very few confounding things about my parents, that they are the most conservative people on the planet, and yet, the names of two of their children make them seem like Berkeley hippies who regularly dine on organic tofu.

Jon wanted nothing to do with a Bo or a Luke because he knew too many of those who had communicable diseases, and the act of calling our child one of those names would force him to lose four teeth. Which, okay, fine, we both had to agree on this, so I let him list his favorite names: SnigSnak, Qranqor, Styrofoam, KidNation, Frontline (after the television show or the flea medication), One (or First, or Premiere), Palette, Alphamask, Format (for a boy), Formatte (for a girl), Profile, Tweeter, Peavey. Possibly Wrench if the baby came out with an interesting nose.

While all of these ideas were teeming with originality and flair, two very important qualities in a baby name, we couldn’t help but think that what our work in progress needed was something more Utahn. You cannot live in Utah and give your baby a boring name that some other baby in Wisconsin might have, and we couldn’t get over the nagging feeling that someone in Wisconsin was naming their first-born child Alphamask as we lay there debating.

So in the tradition of the Utah Baby Name, we took an existing name and tweaked it into an unrecognizable mass of nonsense. It was not uncommon to meet people in this state who had names made up entirely of random letters just thrown onto either side of what could be, if you squinted hard enough, an actual word, like Aaronica or Ondulyn or Claravid. I threw out Fonzie which Jon transformed into Fawnzie, which when taken to its logical Utahn conclusion ended up being Fawnzelle. And so, our work in progress was called: Fawnzelle La Bon Marché Armstrong, if she turned out to be a girl; Fawnzel Le Bon Marché Armstrong, if he was a boy.

The middle name represented the European flavor we wanted to inject into the name, and even though I took four years of French in high school and two in college, the only French word I could think of other than croissant was Le Bon Marché, so it stuck. And I know that there is a good chance that I assigned the wrong gender to that word, but it didn’t matter if it’s a le or la because we were in Utah and no one would know the difference.

My family was horrified when I told them that I might actually do this to my child, and my sister, WHOSE NAME IS SEPTEMBER EVEN THOUGH SHE WAS BORN IN JANUARY, threatened to not talk to me again. This from a blond-haired, blue-eyed woman who named her two Aryan twins Noah and Joshua, after Jewish prophets. I am obviously the insane one in my family.

I thought I had prepared myself for the onset of nausea and fatigue and bloating and complete emotional instability of pregnancy by going through the agony that I did when I stopped taking an antidepressant, but during the first few weeks of pregnancy I could barely sit up straight without feeling the thump thump thump of my heart in my ears as it signaled the march of acid through my digestive tract, and it could not have possibly sucked more. It wasn’t morning sickness, because the morning was over there in the front yard carrying on with its day while I was in the back of the house with my head in the toilet because some cosmetic company tried to jam every single smell of nature into one shampoo bottle, and then lie and call it an essence. Those delicate little jasmine berries they add to make my hair smell like a fresh-cut flower reached out of the bottle while I was washing my hair and cut off my face with an axe.

Perhaps the worst smell I encountered during those first few weeks was the aroma of hand soap. I could not wash my hands without becoming hysterical, and the only reason we had any hand soap in the bathroom at all was because we needed to find a replacement soap, and that would involve walking into one of those bath and beauty stores, a veritable reservoir of insipid soap smells, a place where you can actually see the fragrance in the air, and for a pregnant woman that would be like walking into a gas chamber. Jon would often come back from the bathroom with hand soap stench on his hands, and it made me wonder whether or not he was intentionally trying to kill me. I know he was just practicing good personal hygiene, but it came down to a choice between his wife spontaneously gagging or having moderately dirty potty hands, and there I was, giving him permission to walk around with potty hands. Isn’t that at the top of the list of what every man wants from his wife?

I blamed all those prehistoric women in caves who should have collectively decided that being nauseated like this and having to carry the baby at the same time is a raw deal. They should have put someone in charge of making some changes. And because they hadn’t I decided I wasn’t going to feel sorry for them anymore that sometimes they woke up in the middle of the night to find that a wild boar had eaten their cousin.

I cannot possibly forget what it felt like to be nauseated in my fingers and toes. The dizziness worked its way from the middle of my head down through every part of my body, and instead of feeling pregnant I just felt angry. I was mad that Jon could drink a beer and I was still able to smell it in his hair two days later. I was mad that a list of basic things that were a part of my daily life were forever going to remind me of the sensation of dry-heaving, like the smell of fabric softener, or the texture of chocolate pudding, or the way certain notes played over each other on the soundtrack to some of my favorite shows. Certain characters on some of my favorite shows would forever make me sick whenever I heard their voices, in particular a certain designer on a DIY home improvement show who glued things to walls that ought not have been glued to walls. Anyone idiotic enough to sign up for a reality television show probably deserves every injustice of life, but there are few sins in this world so evil enough that they warrant the punishment of having two tons of goose feathers hot-glue-gunned to the bedroom walls. And then there’s that one episode where she wrapped a room in cardboard and made sure that even if the homeowners didn’t want the walls of their guestroom covered in CARDBOARD, that there was no possible way they would ever be able to remove it because of all the nails and glue and tape and concrete she used to seal it to the drywall. That woman’s face will from now on remind me of the inside of a toilet.

One thing no one ever told me about was that once I became pregnant I would experience a constant urge to go pee. I had no idea that during the early stages of pregnancy my bladder would spontaneously sprout its own holding tank, a reservoir of urine, so that God forbid I ever ran out of pee at any given moment I’d have at least a spare gallon standing by. Was that supposed to come in handy?

Going to the bathroom allowed me about thirty seconds of relief, a short half-minute of feeling like I didn’t have to pee, and then once that minute ticked over into its second half my bladder would start billowing with the urge to go again. Given the era of technological innovation we live in, it wasn’t terribly inconvenient for me to sit on the toilet all day long, as I had a laptop, a wireless Internet connection, and not one shred of dignity. However, venturing outside of the house was entirely problematic, as being any farther than an arm’s length away from a bathroom triggered a battle of wills: my will vs. my bladder’s will, and anyone who has ever challenged the will of an internal organ just trying to do its job knows that the internal organ always wins.

When I was at home I was peeing, and when I was away from home I was thinking about trying not to think about peeing. I dreamt about peeing. I even started asking pregnant strangers if they knew what I was talking about, which was dangerous for a couple of reasons. One: the only way I knew these women were pregnant was because they looked pregnant, and I was taking a huge risk in assuming that their giant bellies were filled with humans and not just a whole bunch of Oreos. Two: at some point my luck was bound to run out, and someone was going to knock me in the jaw when I walked up to them and asked them how often they used the toilet.

I picked up a few books and pamphlets here and there on the topic of pregnancy to see if I could find insight into this pee thing, because when coupled with the nausea, the inability to go more than ten minutes without a bathroom break was starting to give me second thoughts, like, this is not at all what I signed up for! and what the hell have I done? In my darkest moments, like the night I sprayed the backyard with staccato chunks of orange shrimp tikka masala, I wondered why women aren’t equipped with tidy ctrl-z options, like, undo eating that Indian food or undo biological urge to procreate. There were countless mornings when I wished that I could have ctrl-z’ed the gel I put into my hair.

Nothing I had read up to that point in my pregnancy had done anything to make me feel better about the fact that I was facing months and months of ongoing discomfort. In fact, everything I’d read had the following wholly infuriating thesis statement:

Be careful and don’t gain too much weight!

I am here to tell you that the last thing a pregnant woman in her first trimester wants to think about is how much weight she is gaining. Do you have any idea what else she has to worry about? According to the four books I had sitting on my nightstand, the list of things I had to worry about ran the gamut from not mixing certain household cleansers to not touching lunch meat with my bare hands else risking the possibility that the baby would be born with three ears. And if I touched a piece of sushi each of those three ears would be covered in scales.

What’s even more annoying is that all those books began with a foreword in which the expert talked endlessly about how they planned to calm all the worries of an expectant mother, and then they spent the entire book detailing everything, real or imaginary, an expectant mother should be wary of. And every other sentence said something like, Be careful and don’t gain too much weight! Always with the exclamation mark even though the word weight is already its own exclamation mark.

I will give them that it was hard not to think about the weight gain when I could feel my thighs separating at the joints. It was hard not to think about it when I could look at an entire chocolate cake and project manage in my head how I would get the entire thing down my throat