Postpartum Madness

Since my baby girl was born, I have been a twenty-four-hour sentry. The psychology books I consult describe my behavior as hypervigilant. I stand over my child, listening for a break in her sweet breathing. I hold my breath until I see her back rise and fall again. 

Late at night, I wake my husband and tell him that I hear mice scurrying within the walls. It’s an invasion, I whisper-scream. My husband says I have dreamed about my parents’ house. Yes, that’s it. I’ve mixed up the decrepitude of my childhood house with the solid home I have made with him. 

In another dream, I place my drowsy baby girl inside the microwave with the solemnity of an offering. She has spent too much hypnotic time in her windup swing. I am a failure because the swing is the only way she will fall asleep. 

The baby swings in the kitchen. The microwave menaces me as I tend to her. I crank the swing again. Back and forth, back and forth. The motion is brisk at first. As the baby’s eyes finally flutter, the swing winds down. The microwave is a silent witness. I am dream-waking as I open the silverware drawer. The desperate jangling of cutlery jolts my baby awake. But she’s back asleep in seconds and I take out a steak knife. The long, jagged line I have grazed on my arm is the despondent color of red. I stop short of the blue-green tributaries of blood flowing through my wrist. 

It is just anxiety, my husband tells me. He means to be reassuring. But I curse my genes. I curse my brain chemistry. I hear the hissing sound of my neurons short-circuiting. The mice in the wall are scurrying; they communicate that I do not deserve the beautiful baby, the devoted husband. I do not deserve love. And most tragic of all—I am a mother who does not know how to love her baby. 

Anxiety is transient. Panic dwells. Anxiety is a response to a perceived crisis. Panic comes out of nowhere. It is the mysterious onset of death—a sudden eclipse. Panic carves out grooves in the brain. A therapist tells me that no person can physically sustain panic for more than ten minutes. The heart will burst, I think. Time it, he says unhelpfully. I try to tell him that the aftershocks of a panic attack rumble forever. Bam, Bam, Bam—the tremors assault me in waves. Bam, Bam, Bam, I do not trust myself. 

I rock in front of the television on my own power, breastfeeding the baby with what little milk I have. The nurse in the hospital told me to hold the baby like a football. I imagined tossing my tiny girl across the room. 

I hear on the news that a mother in South Carolina let her car roll into a lake with her toddler boys strapped into their car seats. The boys drowned. My husband fiddles with the microwave as he prepares dinner. I clutch my baby. Save me from myself, I whisper. 

I drive alone to the grocery store, intending instead to continue west clear across the country until I am standing by the rough Pacific. I will be a wild-haired woman holding a bottle of champagne by its neck. The air is the blue-green of my veins. 

My husband will report me missing in a shaky voice. In short order, I will be found in a roadside diner, hunched over a plate of cold eggs. My freedom is sad. I will desperately miss my baby. This sequence of events happens in a flash of images as I sit in the grocery store parking lot, hands gripping the steering wheel at ten and two. 

My mother, her mother, and almost certainly her mother’s mother had postpartum psychosis. Words matter, my husband tells me. Please, you are not psychotic. He is pleading with me. These are your hormones, he says. Neither of us is convinced of that. 

The mice wake me up again. It feels like the middle of the night, but I have been asleep for less than an hour. I want to die, I tell my husband. I knock over a lamp as I try to get out of bed. I have confessed to him that I washed down more than the standard dose of Sominex with white wine. “Take Sominex tonight and sleep. Safe and restful sleep, sleep, sleep.” The old commercial jingle is a wriggling earworm. The ditty winds as tight as a tourniquet around my brain. Do I need to call an ambulance? my husband urgently interrupts. He is crying. 

The mice are armed with tiny guns. I am terrified that their miniature bullets will burst through the wall and penetrate my brain. I tell this to the psychiatrist my husband has brought me to. I dry heave in his office. My husband places his hand firmly on my thigh as if he intends to hold me down. I am afraid this doctor will take my baby away from me. Instead, he prescribes an antidepressant with a clonazepam booster—no more Sominex and white wine cocktails. 

A couple of weeks later, the mice have put down their artillery. The microwave is just a microwave. We have a new lamp. My husband says there is nothing to forgive and gently kisses my forehead. We all sleep through the night for the first time since the baby was born. 

Judy Bolton-Fasman is the author of Asylum: A Memoir of Family Secrets, published by Mandel Vilar Press. Her essays and reviews have appeared in major newspapers, including the New York Times and the Boston Globe, essay anthologies, and literary magazines. She is a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, a Best of the Net nominee, and a Best American Essays 2024 nominee. She is the recipient of several writing fellowships, including Hedgebrook, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Mineral School. More at judyboltonfasman.com.    

This essay first appeared in Dorothy Parker's Ashes.