Wilderness Interface Zone

This is a long post. Also, emotionally, it’s perhaps overfull and addresses subjects like pregnancy and childbirth from a standpoint I held over twenty years ago.  The “mental illness” storyline continues. Part one may be found here.

I spent the next five hours in the basement with my husband trying to find him in whatever place it was that he had gone.  I don’t think I’d ever heard such despairing, angry, tormented and tormenting words.  I asked if he was having a bad reaction to a medication.  He scoffed.  “What difference does it make what I say?” he said.  I understood that to mean that it didn’t matter what I said.  As I told him later, “I could feel that the connection between us had gone quite cold.”  I recognized his response to the question as a non-answer and guessed that that line of inquiry would take us nowhere, so I returned to the two he’d asked earlier.  “You asked me two questions upstairs: Did I ‘think you were unintelligent,’ and did I ‘ever even like you.’  I said that I thought you were brilliant and that I loved you. Did you believe my answers?”

“After twenty years of being snubbed by you, I don’t believe them,” he said. I had to move fast to mentally outrun the pain such words could have inflicted. After all, this wasn’t about me; it was of highest importance that I not snatch his wildly shot arrows from the air and stick them in my chest.  He said that I had begun cutting him out of my life years ago, going all the way back almost to our beginning together. He ticked off what to him were irrefutable examples of my mistreatment. I listened, setting my mind on staying as calm as possible, trying to quiet unquiet impulses toward fear, humiliation, even panic. Our household is a language-rich environment. The deep-running, highly metaphoric, playful, intricate and intimate language he and I had developed during our marriage had been one of the most powerful wellsprings we’d tapped to help us overcome tremendous obstacles, including the birth of our special needs daughter. Over our two decades together both of us had developed a rooted faith in the efficacy of good words.  As I sat there with him in the basement, listening to the torrent of accusations and seemingly unstemmable agony, I wondered if there was any language at all by which I could reach him now.

My thinking turned back to the journals. What was there to lose?  “I’ll be right back,” I said and hurried upstairs to find volumes from the early years of our marriage.  I brought three or four down to the basement, not remembering exactly what was in them but knowing they contained years and years of my love for him and the children. I sat down and read to him for at least two hours. The following is a sampling of entries I read from my 1989 – 1991 journals. Warning: extreme lovey-doveyness follows.

July 20, 1989. I haven’t kept a journal since August 1988.  I was living in Provo, which I still am, and I was seeing a lot of a young man named Mark. We were both thirty-two years old.  On November 19, 1988, in a room warm with candlelight and sweet with the smell of hot wax, he knelt down before me on both knees and asked me to marry him.  We were married in March 1989 in the Provo Temple. What a garden we had discovered together, and how we had both changed!

The rest of March passed, then April, and at the end of May the time was right and we felt it necessary that we try to conceive a child that we might begin to fulfill the commandment given to us in the temple, “Multiply and be fruitful.” Also we were conscious that we had married relatively late in life and so were compelled by time and mortality, along with that holy charge, to allow those most obedient particles of us a chance to cross wildernesses to each other and fuse their histories into a new present and begin preparing the body of the first child of our marriage.  I was a careful vessel those days, guarding the path as carefully as I could, but in June I began to be disappointed, thinking there was no child.  I had barely given up my expectations when I noticed a change.  My breasts became quite enlarged and tender beyond any swelling they’d ever had before. A test confirmed we had, indeed, conceived.  When the woman who did the test told me the results were positive, a wave of emotion seized me and I nearly cried. But I was too proud to cry in front of someone I didn’t know and I saved the tears till later when I told my husband he was a father (for as far as we were both concerned, conceiving made us parents instantly.) He burst out with a joyous, “I am?!?” and we held each other for a while, until he had to return to work. Nearly two months have passed since the conception.   I was frightened at first and shocked by the extraordinary changes in my body. I needed more sleep, and at first that was the only outward sign of my pregnancy, but I became increasingly more emotional until I hardly recognized my own soul; I developed aversions to foods and colors that previously pleased me; I was sometimes sick. The emotional upheaval was a torment to me.  I had always thought my stability to be the most attractive feature of my being, but now I was always crying and I felt robbed of my reason. My poor husband.  Resentful as I was of this incredible change, I only garbled it and made my sorrows infinitely worse.  I continually turned to him for help, but I was a bewildering creature and he didn’t know what to think.  Still, he held me at night and I often woke in the morning to find myself encircled by his arms.  Such patient tenderness helped smother my fears, among them the belief that I was undesirable company.

This is a summary of the events that have occurred during the last few months.  From here on I hope to provide a record of our experiences during the gestation of our first child, and with more detail, for I mean to write when the dew is yet on the grass so that I won’t find myself in the evening saying of the dew, “I remember that it was beautiful,” but otherwise knowing nothing …

Yesterday, for instance, I kept myself to the house, because I felt ill in the morning and was a jungle of emotions.  I watched television during the day and was frequently moved to tears by a startling array of stimulants. I cried during an episode of Magnum, P.I., and my heart broke at the announcement that a commercial airliner had crashed in Sioux City, Iowa.  When I thought of my husband, I was overcome by unnamable feelings, like a flower must feel for the sun when it slips behind some clouds during the day, for he was at work, and as though stripped of my independence, I longed for him to be with me. I began to wonder at all these uncharacteristic stirrings; I was surprised at myself.  And then it came to me that my pregnancy was making it possible for me to feel emotions I had never felt before in my life, and that they really were my emotions, and not intruding waves of passion artificially imposed upon my otherwise rational soul. I was these feelings now, and they were a different place, or places, where I was standing.  It was a though my senses were heightened and I could see colors outside the usual spectrum to which my eye was confined.  This new understanding gave me pleasure and freedom.  I no longer resented the weepiness and the sorrows.  I was happy I had them, that I was them.

When Mark came home from work I told him my revelation.  He put his arms around me and hugged me, and later said how smart I was to be able to figure that out, and so soon.  His praise pleased me; I was happy the remainder of the day, and even this morning have been filled with peace and delight.

July 27, 1989. Since my acceptance of my state I have been far happier.  The skies of my heart are clear; there’ve been no more storms. I still tire very easily and if I push myself too far I get very sick. But these days I cheerfully accept and guard the boundaries of my capabilities, and if I get my naps and eat when I should my health and alertness are near normal. Both Mark and I are very cheerful and easy with love for each other.  How many times during the day does he rest his forehead against my cheek, or embrace me, or bare my spine and tickle me with a barrage of kisses along that very sensitive chord of my life.  His face is a sun of happiness, radiant and clear.  We exchange dozens of little love jokes during the day.  Our home is a peaceable kingdom, if somewhat unkempt, because I still cannot bring myself to go into the kitchen and clean it up or spend a couple hours ironing …

Sometimes I experience brief periods of light melancholia in the afternoons, and when I do, visits to either [of our] gardens for both disperse it. But in spite of these shallow spells, a deep pleasure seems to be descending on me. Witnessing Mark’s joy, which is even more consistent than my own, multiplies my own hopes and keeps me well.

August 15, 1989. … A convexity has begun to form between my breasts and pelvis; already, I’m finding my clothes to be restrictive and uncomfortable. I am proud of this bulge; I can barely wait till I can feel the child for certain under that great dome of my flesh. How grateful I am to be pregnant, to have my womanhood come fully upon me with such promise. I gave all this up a long time ago when it looked to me that I should never marry, since so few people, it seemed to me, knew how to marry, and they writhed in the intrigue of sterile relationships, unable to make whole their hearts. This kind of paralysis looked to be all around me; I, too, had fallen into its habit more than once.  … God showed me another soul who through his own desire to sell all he had had come to the same place [as I had]. This man loved me and held me, and we entered into covenants, and in the wreathes of these covenants, we conceived a child.  … We two are as fortunate as any of the blind Christ restored sight to, or any of the others he healed.

August 17, 1989. Last night we had a full lunar eclipse.  Mark wasn’t here–he was out wrangling with [a friend's] troubles–though when he arrived home near ten in the evening he burst in on [another friend] and I and excitedly inquired as to whether or not we knew the eclipse was in progress.  [My friend] and I had been checking every little while, and had seen nothing; Mark, on the other hand, had been out in Orem and had seen everything.  When [my friend] left, Mark drew me to him and said that he’d been disappointed when he realized the eclipse was on and we weren’t able to watch it together because he was in Orem with [his friend]. He says things like this–little nods to our marriage–which never cease to touch me and remind me of something, something often forgotten in the course of daily work and preoccupation–that we have given each other a different context in which to consider the workings of the world–and of the planets. And then, each event alters the context, and if we do well, life becomes more wholesome and gracious.

… Day by day we become more sanctified; we strive to understand well enough that we may repent for the better way; we are amazed by the blood of the law, which nourishes and cleanses those parts not gangrenous or dead, and by which everything else living and being is animated.

September 28, 1989. … Sometimes little anxieties arise about actually raising up a child, but they are less frequent these days as the anticipation (and my girth) magnifies.  I look at my relationship with Mark to see how it will be with the child; I see nothing to terrify or prophecy misfortune or unhappiness. Mark and I grow more graceful in our marriage, and while his work is sometimes an unwelcome intruder in our home, with all its intrigue and drama, we are all right and happy in our covenant.  Mark continues to gain weight … he likes to come home at night.  I think he is very handsome, especially as his confidence increases and he takes more into his hands …

November 26, 1989. It has been a pleasure to have Mark here so much, working beside me in the kitchen and sleeping beside me in our bed … Things haven’t changed much in our marriage–we still feel deeply grateful to each other and tenderness and playfulness rule the house. We’re growing more settled, and as I’ve learned to rest in my pregnancy, we’re quite peaceful. Life has become so simple, we have so much fun, and we agree on so many things important to us both.  To say we’re happy doesn’t really capture the whole of it. We feel blessed beyond our greatest hopes. We could neither of us have imagined life could be this good for either or us or both of us together.  Our thankfulness is part of the atmosphere of the house.

January 8, 1990. I suppose we can say we’ve moved, but some of our belongings remain in the other apartment, and much cleaning remains to be done.  We sleep and eat in the other apartment now and it’s only moderately disheveled; Mark has forbidden me to do any more lifting and carrying and has slaved away at the cleaning, but I’ve set up the household here and done what I could.

… He holds me close at night and doesn’t neglect me; he tells me how precious I am to him; he strokes my belly, inside which the little frog (as we call the baby) squirms and kicks, and he does everything within his power to see to my well being.  When he cleans the oven in the upstairs apartment, which he has forbidden me to touch, he spends hours and comes back with oven-cleaner burns, and he’s tired and dazed, but he stills cuddles me to him and tells me I’m the one thing he never feels disappointment in.  He speaks to me as an equal; we discuss the world together.

January 16, 1990. Mark and I both look forward to starting our family and shaping it and being shaped by it for the better. We so want children to whom we may be good teachers and companions, and who will themselves increase happiness in the world. … And as I cannot imagine–could never imagine–a more wondrous creature for a husband than Mark is, I have profound trust in his ability as a parent.  The children will have one of the most gentle-loving fathers they could hope for, a constant spring of strong good sense and sensibility.  How remarkably things have turned out so far; how promising they are.  How grateful I am to Mark for marrying me …

January 29, 1990. Last night Mark sat in the rocker and I sat of the floor against his knees while he stroked and played with my hair and brushed my neck and face with his hands and lavished many kinds of soothing and consoling attentions on me …

October 3, 1990. It’s been a very long time to let precious detail go, but now that my womb is empty, my hands have been full. Saul was born on March the eighth …. It didn’t seem to be all that difficult.  I remember Mark fixed to the side of the bed, looking neither to the right or to the left, but intently and calmly offering me his faithfulness and any physical support I needed.  The midwives were very impressed with him and have showered him with praise since.

… There was much concern for Saul’s well being since the pushing stage had taken two hours … He was put in an oxygen tent for a little while.  Mark followed Saul’s every move and held his hand while he was in the oxygen tent. He said Saul was clearly rooting for food in the tent.  At one point, when the nursery cleared out for a moment, leaving Mark alone with his new son, he gave Saul a blessing …

Anyway, Saul was back in my arms for his first meal in about 45 minutes, and after all the phone calls, etc., had been made, we all settled down for some sleep.  I laid Saul down between my knees in a nest of blankets and kept watch over him.  This I did for two days following, after we were home and safe.  I didn’t even want to sleep.  I wanted to monitor every meal, every breath, every movement. I loved him with a manner of love I never knew existed, and also my feelings for Mark changed and intensified.  To my mind, his behavior, his devotion and protective instinct had been heroic. During those earliest days he took time off from work to care for us since there was no one else we felt comfortable enough with to have in our small apartment.  Every day, several times a day, he would exclaim how beautiful Saul was and thank me for what I’d done.

January 18, 1991. I am proud of [Mark's] courage in our marriage, and I am grateful for his tenderheartedness, which has a depth to it that I have never seen in any other man. He is handsomely intelligent, or perhaps it’s that he’s intelligently handsome …

April 15, 1991. Mark’s vacation has come to and end now.  We have had such a good time playing and working together. We chase each other around the house and “get” each other–that is, attack each other by tickling–and we roll in laughter and joy.  Saul is learning to join in on our gettings, either by marveling and laughing as he watches the chase or by throwing himself into the ruckus.  Admittedly, he has been somewhat ill at ease with Mark’s constant presence and attentions to me, but he has adjusted his own behavior voluntarily and has not expressed his irritation with Mark’s affection that he used to.  He has even begun to go to Mark for comforting, and now that he is walking and waxing in emotion, those opportunities come tumbling one right after another.

And so I read these entries and everything in between, year following year, on and on until Mark interrupted.

“Stop,” he commanded.  I did.  “What are you doing?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Where is this going? I know what happens after this–a spiraling descent into misery.”

“You asked if I thought you were unintelligent and if I ever really liked you.  I said that I thought you were brilliant and that I’ve always loved you. I’m reading this to provide evidence to support my answers.  Do you believe them now?”

He paused. “Those are your words written in your voice, so it’s the truth,” he said, his tone slightly softer.  “You can’t fake that.”

During the remainder of the time in the basement I conceded to several of his points.  Insight gleaned from raising a special needs daughter who suffered debilitating anxiety attacks during the early years of her life suggested that trying to correct my husband’s “wrong thinking” would bring us all to no good. In his contracted state, he needed his prospects opened, if it could be done–not me telling him how wrong he was about me.  When he came to, he’d correct himself.

Here’s the thing about what is popularly called mental illness. Even though, as Mark put it later, he “had never been so wrong,” in his shattering words I still saw tints and glints of meaning toward which my mind turned its attention.  No language, no matter how badly intended or mistaken, is devoid of meaning, relevance and effect.   Wrong words attended to closely can prompt a listener’s inner eye to focus to a deeper depth of field and see matters from different, often revelatory angles.  So even in broken language can be found bright slivers of truth. These can point to unexpected prospects and unperceived pathways. In this case, one of my concessions was that I would find work at a college or university in order to support the family, because, as he said, providing for the family’s survival “was over” for him.  I did not feel quite the same degree of certainty he did about life as he knew it coming to an end, but clearly, until we figured out where we were and what was going on, I needed to do something to make our financial future more secure.

By the end of the ordeal we both felt exhausted.  Though the tension was far from dissolved, we emerged from the cave together, Mark with some enthusiasm restored for the future; me, hopeful that we had relieved some of his anguish. I took care of my special needs daughter–her feeding was hours overdue and her diaper had long outworn its usefulness–and assured my son, who’d also felt the zinging of Mark’s fiery arrows and so had worried for my well being, that I was safe and sound.  Mark went to bed and fell into a deep and lengthy sleep, which is exactly what I hoped he would do.

To read part three, go here.