A Really Good Day(48)
When I turned to Google, I found out I was one of many women who suffer from the disabling, intrusive, obsessional thoughts of postpartum obsessive-compulsive disorder. Mothers with postpartum OCD do not spend their time scrubbing their houses clean (oh, how I wish that were the case). They share common ghastly, unspeakable fantasies. They imagine stabbing their babies, drowning them, throwing them out of windows. In extreme cases, these thoughts cause mothers to avoid their babies, for fear of harming them. Fortunately, those who suffer from this awful disorder don’t harm their babies; tragically, they are at high risk of suicide.
The syndrome, luckily, is very responsive to treatment with SSRIs. I was on Zoloft when I had my fourth child, and I never once thought about killing him. Or least no more than any other parent does.
My firstborn bore the brunt not just of my postpartum OCD but of my inexperience and lack of confidence in dealing with it, and this pattern was repeated throughout her childhood. Besides my husband, who was an adult when we met, she has lived the longest with my untreated shifting moods, and benefited least from my efforts to stabilize them. And so I am on high alert for any sign of emotional pain in her.
I stared at the photograph of the horrible mark on her neck for a while, fighting tears. Then I sent this text:
Hey honey. Are those new tattoos on your throat?
The sub-text to this text? DON’T HURT YOURSELF. DON’T HURT YOURSELF. DON’T HURT YOURSELF.
She didn’t reply.
So I sent this text:
We love you honey. And we really want to hear from you. Please call us.
Subtext: I CAN BE AT THE AIRPORT IN FORTY-FIVE MINUTES.
She didn’t reply.
“One of us needs to get on a plane,” I said to my husband. “The last flight’s in an hour.”
He pointed out that it would take me nearly that long to get to the airport.
That’s when the phone rang.
My husband resisted my attempts to pry the receiver from his fingers. He listened for a few minutes and then wordlessly passed me the phone.
“Look at the geotag,” my daughter said.
“What?” I said.
“On the photo. Read the geotag.”
“Print shop 1 AM,” I read.
“Print shop,” she said.
“Print shop?”
“I’m in the print shop. What is in the print shop?”
“Prints?”
“Ink, Mom. There’s ink in the print shop.”
“You made a tattoo with print shop ink?” Stealing! Also, toxic!
She texted me another photograph. It was of her hands, stained blue.
“I’ve been working for hours on my final prints. I’m covered in ink stains.”
“It’s…an ink stain?” I whispered.
“You really need to chill.”
I wonder if I would have been more “chill” if this had happened last night, between Microdose Day and Transition Day. Would I have been better able to manage my anxiety? Would I have hesitated before rushing to the decision to hop on a plane? Still, a month ago, I might have been on my way to the airport by the time my daughter called. But who can know? I think perhaps the only conclusion to be drawn is that freaking out about your kids is normal, and even the most microdose-mellowed mama is still a mama. And a Jewish mama at that.
* * *
* ?Name changed to protect the guilty. You know who you are, “Maxine.”
Day 22
Microdose Day
Physical Sensations: A slight tingling about ninety minutes after dosing, a flash of something that feels almost like dizziness. A tender stomach.
Mood: Irritable when I woke up, but that passed after I took the microdose.
Conflict: None.
Sleep: About six and a half hours.
Work: Productive, if a bit scattered.
Pain: Minor.
Though my mood is fine today, I’ve been wishing that I wasn’t taking LSD. Not because the protocol isn’t working, but because there’s another drug I wish I could take. Remember that back in the first chapter I told you that I’d taken MDMA six or seven times? It wasn’t in my glorious clubbing days. I didn’t really have any glorious clubbing days.*1 I started using MDMA about ten years ago, with my husband. Though I know it will make some people dismiss me as an unrepentant, drug-addled idiot, I’m not about to stop being completely honest with you now. We credit the strength of our marriage at least in part to our periodic use of the drug. Neither of us has ever taken the drug recreationally. We’ve never even been to a rave. We use MDMA purely as marital therapy.
We were inspired to try MDMA by a pair of guest lecturers I’d invited to speak to my seminar on the War on Drugs at UC Berkeley. Alexander Shulgin, known as Sasha, was a Bay Area pharmacologist and chemist who specialized in synthesizing and bioassaying psychoactive compounds on himself and on willing subjects. Known as the father of MDMA, Sasha Shulgin was not the first to synthesize the drug: the credit for that goes to the pharmaceutical company Merck. But Sasha was among the first to ingest the chemical. According to the story that he told my law-school class, he and some friends were on the Reno Fun Train in 1976, heading up to Tahoe for a weekend of gambling and carousing. His companions were drinking alcohol, but instead of joining them, Sasha drank a vial containing 120 milligrams of MDMA. He described the feeling like this: “I feel absolutely clean inside, and there is nothing but pure euphoria. I have never felt so great, or believed this to be possible.”