When I first started writing this weblog I didn’t think it would last long. I’d put down what advice I had for people trying to get started, and when that petered out, I’d stop. Things evolved, as they tend to do, and now this weblog in all its glorious messiness is the way I keep in touch with my readers. Or at least, the readers who are comfortable in front of a computer.

I’ve reviewed books and movies, written about pov and plot and dialog and editors and a hundred other things. I’ve answered questions. To promote my own stuff I’ve given away piles and piles o’ books, not all of them mine. I’ve commented about subjects raised on other weblogs. There have been a couple kerfuffles, but in the greater scheme of things, none of them have been of any real importance. I have made a lot of friends, and a couple non-friends, in the internet sense of such things.

Sometimes I have used this space to tell the family stories that I wanted to record for posterity. If you come here with any regularity you know about the Mathematician and the Girlchild, the puppyboys and the cats. You have heard some of my best stories about my father. I have written a little about my career as an academic, about linguistics, about teaching. Almost everything personal I’ve written about has been positive, upbeat, funny, with the clear exception of the topic of depression and anxiety disorders. Those I would categorize as public service announcements.

I have never written here — I have never written anywhere — about my childhood, and an observant reader will have noticed that I never mention my mother, who died when I was fourteen. There are a lot of reasons for that. The biggest reason is just habit. For the first ten years after my mother died, the idea of talking about her was impossible. Eventually, after a lot of time and therapy, I got to the point where I could recite a short-short narrative: My mother was an alcoholic, and she was abusive, and she committed suicide when I was fourteen.

Those three facts are the cornerstones of a much larger, more complex story. The mathematician knows most of it, but I’m not sure how much; there’s an odd thing that goes on when it comes to sharing this kind of information. It has to do with a bit of childhood magical thinking. Kids believe that their thoughts can be contagious, in a way. As a kid I was sure everybody around me, teachers, other kids, the clerk at the bakery, knew about what was going on in my house and about my mother. I just assumed they all knew and judged, and when she died and I found out that 98% of people had not known. Except then, of course, they all did.

For a long time my thinking went like this: no reason to mention my mother or my childhood. No reason to draw attention to myself. It will sound like a ploy for sympathy, or worse, it will come across as some kind of excuse for mistakes or failures. So I rarely told anyone, unless I was compelled to. All this was, as you may have guessed, pre-therapy.

When my father was dying I finally did go to therapy, and I was lucky to get a really good therapist. That’s where I started to unpack the fourteen years of luggage I was dragging around with me, and I began to see some patterns and underlying issues. I still wasn’t ready to talk to people about my mother except in the three-pronged way I mentioned above, and then only rarely. Then, at some point in my thirties I realized I had completely fallen back into the magical thinking. I assumed a good friend, somebody I had known for a couple years, did know about my early history. But the fact was, I had never told her, and she didn’t know. I was actually shocked to realize that this was true for quite a few people in my life.

A person who has a lot of facial scarring from a car accident knows what people see when they look at her. The fact that they never raise the subject doesn’t mean anything; of course they see the scars. Some part of my mind simply cannot absorb the idea that when people look at me or talk to me, there are no external scars for them to see. There is no outward physical sign of the years I spent with my mother.  I keep forgetting that something so elementally important and formative can be invisible.

I got past this stage in my forties after a lot more therapy. Since then I do talk about my mother sometimes, mostly to close friends, especially ones who had similar childhoods.

A final word: this isn’t earth shattering stuff. Worse happens every day all across the country and the world. Some of it may be upsetting, but for the most part you’ll have heard it all before. Just not my version, which is all this is meant to be.

After I wrote about my grandmother and the sewing basket, it occurred to me that I had never told anyone that story. Not the Mathematician, not a therapist, nobody. Which means I am the only person who could tell it, because my parents and my grandmother are dead. Does this make it somehow worthy of telling? Ah yes, I’m looking for a way out.

Maybe I should tell you something neutral. Something not-so-awful. Thus my query to the keeper of memories, my subconscious: do I have to start with the really, really bad stuff?

It’s odd the way the subconscious seems to make decisions behind the scenes and then suddenly, without any apparent warning, opens a door and shoves something into the forefront. Because after I asked this question, I got a flash memory of my first communion dress.

Anybody who grows up Catholic — especially those who go to Catholic school — knows what a big deal the first communion is. For the kids there’s a whole week of preparation (or at least there was when I was seven) — including first confession, after which the sisters threw us a party with cake and icecream to celebrate our newly scrubbed and squeaky clean souls. And then the first communion itself. After that there’s supposed to be another party, this one at home. Hosted by your family.

I lived in fear of people coming to our door, people I knew, who would see all. But in this case, I didn’t have to worry much, because it would only be family, who were well aware of my mother’s habits. But there was still the matter of the dress.

Second grade girls like to play bride, and here was an opportunity to dress up in white, and make everybody watch. I was a kid who hid in the corner for the most part, so that had no appeal to me. I’d walk up the aisle in my white dress, because it was expected of me. The issue of how I’d get the dress was more complicated. I could ask my older sister, who had a couple years as a novitiate under her belt, but no money. My father wasn’t cheap with us, but the idea of him going shopping for a fancy dress, that was almost funny.

In this period of my life I have very few concrete memories of my mother, but my first communion dress outing is one of them. The day before the ceremony she emerged from the bedroom wearing makeup and heels, her hair a perfect helmet and announced we were going shopping. This is the only time I ever shopped with my mother, as far as I remember, and it was an experience so odd that I dreamed about it for years.

We ended up in a small storefront on Lincoln Avenue which seemed to be filled with round racks of nothing but communion dresses. One of those opportunistic shops that come up like mushrooms and fade away again.  There were maybe six mothers in that store with kids in tow but for some reason I remember the noise most of all: the squeak of the hangers as they were pushed back and forth, and the Lincoln Avenue traffic. — it was May and the door was propped open. But I don’t remember any conversation at all.

My mother started riffling through the dresses  with ruthless efficiency, her scarlet red lips pursed as she turned over labels and examined hems. Then she pulled out a dress and announced it to be The One.

What I remember about it is this: it cost thirty-five dollars, an amount that shocked and frightened me. I knew more about household finances than most seven year olds. I knew, for instance, that we paid a hundred dollars a month rent on the three bedroom flat above Byron’s Photography Studio (just around the corner from the first apartment, on Larchmont). I knew that the telephone bill came to about eight dollars a month. And here was my mother, spending thirty five dollars on a dress made in Italy, satin and lace, that I would wear only once.

It made no sense to me then, but as an adult I finally figured it out. My cousin Mary, the eldest daughter of my mother’s sister, said something that made it all fall into place.

“You know we thought you were rich,” she said. “You were always dressed like little princesses. Drove my mother nuts.”

Aunt Nancy had six kids, a rocky marriage, and a drinking habit somewhat less destructive than my mother’s.  She also had a deep and abiding hatred for her sister.  Sibling rivalry is not the right word for what went on between them. My mother was the elder, prettier of the two, and she tortured her sister for all their childhoods.  I understand aunt Nancy’s anger toward my mother because we experienced her in much the same way.  And there’s also the simple fact that Nancy, despite some very rough times, despite her dependence on alcohol, remained generous and loving, even toward the daughters of her despised sister.

My first communion was another way for my mother to sneer at her sister and twist the knife, this time by means of imported lace and satin.  We were strictly working class and I imagine my father was not happy about the cost of that dress, but to my mother it was worth making him mad to see her sister’s face. My guess is that only another drink could get the taste of bile out of aunt Nancy’s mouth. 

But none of that made an impression on me. My six cousins were there, wild and unruly and truly thrilling, the perfect buffer. The adults sat together eating and drinking in the other room  where children were not welcome. We ran around the neighborhood until  Uncle Jim loaded us all into his car and took us off to the Lincoln Park Zoo. By the time we got home again, my mother was passed out in the bedroom.

Aunt Nancy has been gone about five years now, but I think about her quite often and with great affection. I wish I could have talked to her as an adult, one woman to another, about my mother.  I think the sister she knew and the mother I knew were actually the same person, something that happens very rarely.

At one point in my life I was a full time faculty member at a high powered Big Ten school, with administrative, teaching and research expectations. I had graduate students writing doctoral theses under my direction, and others who I advised. I attended conferences and gave papers two or three times a year, I wrote articles, I edited volumes of articles, I published two full length books. All of this between the years 1987 and 1997.

During that same period I had a baby, and two years later, I went into treatment for secondary infertility. After four losses over a two year period, we decided to stop trying. We had a healthy, bright kid, and we counted ourselves lucky to have her.

When the Girlchild was about three, I started writing fiction more seriously. I joined a group of writers, we met every other week and I worked hard on a series of short stories that eventually became Homestead. At one time I was writing Homestead, Into the Wilderness, and English with and Accent simultaneously. I was up for tenure that year. At that point the turn down rate in the humanities (at UM/Ann Arbor) was more than 70 percent, so I also went on the job market in anticipation of not getting tenure. My first short stories were published. I got an agent. I got tenure.

In graduate school my PhD advisor called me a force of nature. At UM, my colleagues nodded in approval. Normal people asked in all seriousness how I got so much done. I would crack wise in response. I don’t do windows. Sleep is highly overrated. In fact both of those things were true. We didn’t have a lot of money, but we did have household help once a week for a few hours. And I got very little sleep. Insomnia was my self diagnosis. I went back to the reproductive endocrinologist who had treated me for secondary infertility and he checked me over. I was thirty seven at that point. He mentioned some possibilities: early onset menopause. Sleep apnea.

On winter break we drove from Ann Arbor to Lake Placid, so the Mathematician and the Girlchild could ski (or better said, he could ski and she could take ski lessons). I was going to use that time to do research for one of the historical novels. I had an appointment to meet with the archivist at the Schuyler mansion. There was a huge amount of snow, and it was very icy. Driving south on the North Road near Glens Falls, I hit a patch of black ice and drove into a cliff face at about fifty miles an hour. The car (three months old) was totaled. I walked away with a sprained wrist and a lot of colorful bruises from the airbag and safety belt. You be glad of that airbag, one of the rescue people told me. Or we’d be scraping you off that cliff face. We had to rent a car to get home. The Mathematician drove the whole way. I kept falling asleep and jerking awake in a sweat.

Shortly after that, I began to develop a driving phobia. If there was any snow, if the road was wet, it was almost impossible for me to get on a highway or freeway. Once I got on, I would be tense to the point of lockjaw until I got off. Many times I took an exit and then realized that I was nowhere near where I needed to go, but in my panic I had convinced myself that it was the right exit to take.

We left Ann Arbor and moved to the Pacific Northwest. I had a new faculty position, the Girlchild had a new school. The Mathematician brought his job with him. My driving phobia got worse. It got so bad that more than once I almost caused an accident. I found it hard to concentrate, I was forgetful, I lost things constantly.

I went to the doctor. He asked me to fill out a depression evaluation. Which I flunked. I can’t be depressed, I told him. I’m running as fast as I can, all the time. He suggested a therapist. I went home and wept for a day. Then I went to see a therapist. It took a couple months for me to see what was going on.

The first big revelation: You can be depressed and be productive. A-type personalities may slide deeper and deeper into depression going a hundred miles an hour and leaping buildings in a single bound. Which makes you harder to diagnose, my therapist told me, and it also makes other the kind of depressed person really mad. The guy who crawls under the covers and is immobilized.

Insomnia, forgetfulness, difficulty concentrating, weepiness, these are signs of depression.

But I wrote three books, I told her. I wrote dozens of articles and reviews. I got tenure. My daughter is healthy and well adjusted. My marriage is solid.

You lost four pregnancies and went through two years of medical hell, she told me. You went up for tenure in a Big Ten crucible. You had a near fatal car accident. You started sliding into depression during infertility treatment and down you went.

Looking back now it’s obvious, but back then it wasn’t. Back then it would have felt like whining or self indulgence.

One clinical definition of depression is anger turned inward. Sometimes there’s no logical place to put your anger. Sometimes directing your anger where it belongs is something you can’t let yourself do. It took a long time and a lot of therapy before some of that began to shift for me. After six months or so I went on medication as well.

You hear a lot of talk about people being overmedicated. Maybe that’s true. Maybe doctors are too ready to hand out SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) but then there’s no blood test to tell them exactly what’s out of whack with your brain chemistry, and so they err on the side of caution. Because when depression hits bottom and the bottom gives way, it’s much harder to pull off a save. A doctor doesn’t hesitate to give insulin, doesn’t worry about the next big expose article and fad controversy. But depression meds — that’s fair game. It’s an easy target. Rise up in outrage, all ye who have never missed an hour’s sleep, or lost a loved one to suicide.

I started medication on a Monday. They told me it would take a couple weeks to kick in. I wasn’t really expecting any change because at that point I still didn’t really credit the idea that I was depressed. I was a preoccupied insomniac with a work ethic. Everybody had an acronym in those days. I was a PIWE, as were so many other academics.

And then about ten days after I started taking meds, I was walking down the street on a warmish morning in late January. Thinking about dinner or the parent-teacher meeting coming up or whether or not to give a pop quiz — really, I don’t remember. But I do know that I looked up and it struck me very suddenly that the world was in color.

Sometime over the last seven or eight years, all the colors had leeched out of the world, and I hadn’t even noticed. Now suddenly it was all there again. How was such a thing possible? And where were my sunglasses? It occurred to me that the person who wrote the Wizard of Oz screenplay understood something about depression. Dorothy leaves gray-scale Kansas and opens the door into Technicolor Oz.

Within six weeks my driving phobia had pretty much disappeared, and I could merge onto the highway without breaking into a sweat. I started sleeping normally. I stopped getting weepy for no reason.

Why am I telling this story today, you’re wondering.

I’m telling this story because today I realized that at some point or another I started down that old depression slide again, and I’m picking up speed. Insomnia, inability to concentrate, irritability, anxiety. Time to go back to the therapist, back to the doctor, fill a prescription, start talking. Time to turn up the color.

A few months ago I heard that the husband of a former student had committed suicide. I don’t know what was up with him, if had been clinically depressed, if he had been diagnosed and treated, or if he had never found his way to the person who asked him the right questions. So this is also something of a public service announcement. Some things you may not know, from All About Depression:

• Major depression is the leading cause of disability in the United States
• Depression affects almost 10% of the population, or 19 million Americans, in a given year
• During their lifetime, 10%-25% of women and 5%-12% of men will become clinically depressed
• Women are affected by depression almost twice as often as men
• The economic cost of depression is estimated to be over $30 billion each year
• Two-thirds of those who are depressed never seek treatment and suffer needlessly
• 80%-90% of those who seek treatment for depression can feel better within just a few weeks
• Research on twins suggests that there is a genetic component to the risk of developing depression
• Research has also shown that the stress of a loss, especially the death of a loved one, may lead to depression in some people
• Up to 15% of those who are clinically depressed die by suicide.

If you need help, get it.

Related articles

• Spotting Depression When Infertility Issues Occur