The Other Mother Read online

  Dedication

  To my mother, Marge, and my daughter, Maggie, who together

  taught me everything I needed to know about being a mother

  Warning to Women with Postpartum Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

  Women with postpartum OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder)—having intrusive and disturbing thoughts, sometimes about harming their child—are advised NOT to read the first-person stories until after they have recovered. Women with OCD often “borrow” from others’ intrusive thoughts—that is they read or hear of someone else’s intrusive thoughts and then they start having those thoughts as well. If you suspect you have OCD, speak to your medical professional about this and, if necessary, receive treatment before reading any of the stories in this book!

  Understanding Postpartum Psychosis: A Temporary Madness, Teresa M. Twomey, JD

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Warning to Women with Postpartum Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

  Prologue

  Part I

  Chapter One

  Daphne’s Journal, June 11, 20—

  Chapter Two

  Daphne’s Journal, June 18, 20—

  Chapter Three

  Daphne’s Journal, June 25, 20—

  Chapter Four

  Daphne’s Journal, July 7, 20—

  Chapter Five

  Daphne’s Journal, July 8, 20—

  Chapter Six

  Daphne’s Journal, July 10, 20—

  Chapter Seven

  Daphne’s Journal, July 23, 20—

  Chapter Eight

  Daphne’s Journal, August 1, 20—

  Chapter Nine

  Daphne’s Journal, August 7, 20—

  Chapter Ten

  Daphne’s Journal, August 8, 20—

  Chapter Eleven

  Part II

  Laurel’s Journal, June 11, 20—

  Chapter Twelve

  Laurel’s Journal, June 18, 20—

  Chapter Thirteen

  Laurel’s Journal, June 25, 20—

  Chapter Fourteen

  Laurel’s Journal, July 8, 20—

  Chapter Fifteen

  Laurel’s Journal, July 9, 20—

  Chapter Sixteen

  Laurel’s Journal, July 10, 20—

  Chapter Seventeen

  Laurel’s Journal, July 23, 20—

  Chapter Eighteen

  Laurel’s Journal, August 1, 20—

  Chapter Nineteen

  Laurel’s Journal, August 2, 20—

  August 8, 20—

  Chapter Twenty

  Part III

  Edith’s Journal, September 6, 1971

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Edith’s Journal, September 29, 1971

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Edith’s Journal, October 3, 1971

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Edith’s Journal, November 2, 1971

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Edith’s Journal, November 7, 1971

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Edith’s Journal, December 9, 1971

  December 10

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Edith’s Journal, December 10, 1971 (cont.)

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Edith’s Journal, December 10, 1971 (cont.)

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Edith’s Journal, December 12, 1971

  Acknowledgments

  P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*

  About the Author

  About the Book

  Read On

  Praise

  Also by Carol Goodman

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  “Can you tell me when you first thought about hurting your child?”

  “It was a few days after we’d come home from the hospital. I was carrying her down the stairs . . . there’s a steep drop from the landing and when I looked over it I suddenly had this . . . picture in my head of myself lifting her over the banister and dropping her.”

  “And did you ever do anything like that? Deliberately drop her . . . or hurt her in any other way?”

  “No! It was just a thought. I’d never hurt my baby . . . in fact, I did everything I could to make sure I didn’t hurt her . . . to keep her safe.”

  “What exactly did you do to keep yourself from hurting her?”

  . . .

  “Ms. XX?”

  . . .

  “Ms. XX, what did you do to keep your child safe?”

  Part I

  Chapter One

  She’s crying again.

  I don’t know why I say again. Sometimes it seems as if she’s done nothing but cry since she was born. As if she’d come into this world with a grudge.

  “We’re almost there, sweetie,” I call to her in the backseat, but she only cries louder, as if she can recognize my reassurance for the lie it is. The truth is I don’t know where we are or how far we are from our destination. The last time I looked at the map app on the new (cheap, pay-as-you-go) phone, it showed our location as a blue dot in a sea of endless green. As if we’d fallen off the map of the known world. When we crossed the river there was a sign that said WELCOME TO THE LAND OF RIP VAN WINKLE. I feel as if I’ve fallen asleep and woken to an unrecognizable world—only who sleeps with a crying six-month-old?

  “Do you want your ba-ba?” I offer, even though she just finished a bottle half an hour ago. I root around in the diaper bag on the passenger seat but find only an empty bottle. Hadn’t I made up two at the last gas station? Or had I been distracted by the woman in pressed corduroy trousers and Burberry jacket who’d eyed me microwaving a bottle with that Why-aren’t-you-breastfeeding-don’t-you-know-bottles-will-rot-your-baby’s-teeth-and-lower-her-IQ look. She was holding the hand of a toddler who had an iPhone in his other hand, his eyes glued to the screen.

  At least it won’t rot her brain, I had it in mind to say but instead out popped, “Isn’t it hard traveling with kids? We’ve been driving for hours! My husband’s away on business and I’m relocating for a new job.”

  Burberry Jacket eyed me up and down as if she didn’t think I looked very employable. In my ratty old sweatshirt, grimy jeans, greasy hair pulled back in a sloppy bun I suppose I didn’t. I should have left it at that but I had to add, “—as an archivist at a private library.”

  Her eyes widened, either because she was impressed or thought I was crazy. The latter, most likely, from the way she clutched her electronics-besotted son closer to her. Archivist. How stupid could I get? She’d remember me. When she saw my picture in the paper—

  It won’t be in the paper, I told myself for the hundred and seventh time (I’d been counting) since we’d left. I’d made sure of that.

  I drove away from the gas station repeating all the reasons I didn’t have to worry: I’d ditched my old phone and bought a new one with cash. I didn’t tell anyone except Laurel about the job and Laurel won’t tell. I haven’t passed a car in the last fifty miles. I’m in the middle of nowhere, just me and a crying baby—

  She’s stopped screaming. I’m not sure how long it’s been since she stopped. Since Chloe was born I sometimes lose little bits of time like that. Mommy brain, Esta, the leader of the mothers’ support group, called it. It’s a hormonal thing. I angle the rearview mirror to see Chloe’s face but the car is so dark I can’t see her at all. I don’t know how to find the dome light and there are no streetlights on this country road to illuminate the interior. It’s so dark and quiet in the car it’s almost as if she isn’t there.

  Of course she’s there, don’t be ridiculous, I tell myself, but already I can feel the thought taking root in my br
ain. Bad thoughts, my mother would say, stick like burrs. You need something to make them go away. A couple or six shots of whiskey is what she used. Sometimes when she got home late from her job at the bar I’d hear her muttering to herself, Leave it! like her brain was a dog who’d picked up a piece of garbage on the street.

  Leave it! I’d tell myself on all the sleepless nights I lay awake imagining that Chloe had stopped breathing or that she had been stolen out of her crib. If you keep going into her room, Daphne, Peter would say, she’ll never learn to sleep on her own.

  Leave it! I say now. She’s in the car seat. She’s just sleeping. But I can’t leave it. Instead I remember a Schuyler Bennett story that had been one of my favorites in college, the one called “The Changeling.” Like many of her stories it was borrowed from an old piece of folklore. In it a woman who believes her own baby has been stolen by fairies carries the changeling through the woods to leave it on the fairy hill. She waits all night, listening to the sickly wail of the child, until at last at dawn she sees the fairies come and leave a healthy baby in its place. She lifts the plump but strangely quiet baby into her arms and carries it home. The baby seems to grow heavier and heavier in her arms until at last when she comes out of the woods she looks down and sees that what she carries is a log of wood and she knows that she has given up her own baby to the fairies and brought home a changeling instead.

  Maybe you’d feel better, Peter had said, after skimming the story from the book on my night table, if you didn’t read such morbid stories.

  Now I can’t shake the idea that when I reach the house I’ll find an insensate lump of wood strapped into the car seat—or nothing at all. Maybe I left Chloe at the Quickie Mart. Maybe—the thought makes my mouth go dry—she was never in the car at all. I try to reassure myself by going over the details of leaving the house, carrying her out to the car . . . but all I can see is me sitting in the car, writing in my journal, getting ready to go in to get Chloe. I can see myself getting out of the car, going up the front path, but then the picture goes blurry, like a film out of focus. Mommy brain, like Esta said, hormones—but when the film comes back into focus I can see myself walking back down the path holding Chloe’s car seat. I can see myself putting her in the back of the car. So it’s ridiculous to think she’s not in the car.

  Still, I call her name. There’s no response.

  Because she’s asleep, I tell myself, not because she’s stopped breathing.

  Leave it! I tell myself.

  Once I get an idea in my head, though, it’s very hard for me to let it go. Intrusive thoughts, Esta said, get worse with stress, and I’ve certainly been under a lot of stress these last few weeks. Hiding what I was doing from Peter, applying for the job with Schuyler Bennett without him knowing, then worrying that she would call and tell me she’d changed her mind, she didn’t need an archivist after all. Hadn’t it been too good to be true? The ad had appeared on the library job site as if it had been left there just for me. Archivist wanted for author, must love books and be willing to relocate. Room and board included. And when I found out it was Schuyler Bennett, one of my favorite authors, it really had seemed too good to be true—

  Usually that’s because it’s not true. Peter’s voice is so real in the car I almost believe that he’s sitting in the passenger seat next to me. That he’s been there all along. I can even hear what he’d say next. You have to be realistic. No one’s going to give you a job with your background—

  But then I see the sign. WELCOME TO CRANTHAM. POPULATION 4,300. A half a mile later there’s a sign pointing to the village center. After the sign for the village, Schuyler Bennett had said, you’ll pass the entrance to the hospital. The turnoff for the house is a mile up on the right.

  I see why she mentioned the hospital. The entrance is the most noticeable landmark I’ve passed in an hour. Two brick pillars and a wrought iron arch with the name Crantham spelled out in large black iron letters. The Crantham Retreat for the Insane, it was called when Schuyler Bennett’s father was the head doctor there in the fifties and sixties. Of course it’s not called that anymore. Now it’s the Crantham Psychiatric Center.

  Don’t worry, Schuyler Bennett had said when she mentioned the hospital’s proximity to her house, they take a very genteel class of patient there these days—celebrity rehabs, anorexic teenagers, overworked executives. You don’t have to worry that any serial killers will get out and make their way over.

  I had laughed, knowing that was exactly what I’d be thinking about from then on.

  The turn comes up so quickly, I almost miss it. The only sign is a mailbox with a number on it, no name.

  I cherish my privacy, Schuyler Bennett had said. I ask that you not divulge any details about the job to your social circle.

  Social circle? Ha! Who would I have told? The other mothers in the support group? I’d told Laurel, but she hadn’t paid attention. No one knows where I am. As I make the turn into the narrow, unlit drive that climbs steeply upward it occurs to me that if I drove off the side of a cliff right now no one would know what had become of us.

  Not that I would do that. I would never drive off a cliff, plunging Chloe and me to our fiery deaths.

  Leave it! I tell myself.

  We climb steeply up through deep pine woods, the trees so close they brush the roof of the car with a whispering sound. At the top of the drive is a stone house with a tower. It looks like the castle in a fairy tale—or in one of Schuyler Bennett’s stories.

  I pull into the gravel drive. A light has come on in the doorway and I can see the silhouette of a woman behind the glass. For a moment the outline, with its stooped back, looks like the cardboard cutout of a Halloween witch, but then as the woman comes out the door I see it’s just that she has a limp and is leaning heavily to one side with a cane. She’s much older than her last author picture but still I recognize her as Schuyler Bennett, come out herself to welcome us.

  I turn quickly to check on Chloe. In the light from the door I can see her clearly, her face sticky with tears and formula, sound asleep in the car seat. After my morbid fantasy of her being gone I’m almost surprised to see her and for a moment she looks like a stranger. Then I feel a swell of relief followed by the familiar pang of guilt, as if imagining her gone were the same thing as wanting her gone.

  I turn back around and roll down the window. Schuyler Bennett sticks a crooked hand in and says, “You must be Laurel.”

  I can feel a hysterical response bubbling up to my lips: Yes! That’s who I must be! But all I say is “Yes, that’s me.”

  Daphne’s Journal, June 11, 20—

  It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

  That’s what I said in group today and Esta said there are no supposed-tos here.

  “Supposed-to is society telling us what motherhood should look like. Most of you are here because you didn’t measure up to that supposed-to. We’re here to say to hell with supposed-to!”

  She actually pumped her fist and there was a smattering of applause and a chorus of yeahs—practically a cheering session for the sleep-deprived postpartum crowd. It all made me feel just exactly how I felt in third grade when I asked during a dental hygiene lesson if there was some other way besides brushing to remove the gooey white stuff that collected between my teeth and Miss Dubovsky led the class in a round of “Brush! Brush! Brush!” (She could have told me about flossing instead!)

  Chastised. That’s how it made me feel. Since this is my journal—Esta suggested we keep a journal in which to write down all the things we’re afraid to say out loud—I may as well tell the truth. So there, Esta, your little motivational speech made me feel chastised.

  But then one of the other mothers—the blond Valkyrie in $300 True Religion jeans who looks like she was doing Pilates during delivery—said, “I’m with Daphne here. I didn’t think I’d be spending my baby’s first few months feeling homicidal.”

  “Can you tell us whom you’re feeling homicidal toward?” Esta asked, blinking a
t the Valkyrie. I noticed she hadn’t fobbed her off with a slogan, but then the Valkyrie didn’t look like she was used to being fobbed off.

  The Valkyrie didn’t answer right away. She crossed one long leg over the other and I noticed that her toenails were painted bright red. Who had time to get a pedicure with a baby at home?

  There was a palpable tension in the room. So far all anyone had admitted to was feeling a little blue and maybe “even a little angry” at our progeny when they kept us up all night and spit up in our hair and cracked our nipples with their insistent hungry mouths. But then she smiled, cool as a cucumber, and said, “Right now I’m feeling homicidal towards whoever designed these fucking chairs.”

  We all moaned in sympathy. All our backs hurt. We could all agree on that.

  AFTERWARD WHEN WE were all heading to our cars Valkyrie sidled up to me and said in such a casual aside I wasn’t sure she was talking to me, “I was going to say I feel homicidal toward my husband for signing me up for this loony-tunes circus.”

  I hid my gasp with a laugh. “My husband signed me up too,” I admitted in a conspiratorial whisper. “He’s been so worried about me he even offered to babysit.”

  She snorted and rolled her eyes. “Please. Make him pay for a babysitter next time.” She gestured to a young girl wheeling a white-bonneted Orbit stroller (the same one I’d seen advertised in Parenting for over $700) along the shaded edge of the parking lot. “That way we can have a playdate afterward.”

  “How old is your baby?” I asked, cucumber cool myself. A playdate! I wanted to jump up and down. Valkyrie wanted to have a playdate with me! I hadn’t felt so excited since Todd Brill asked me out in the tenth grade.

  “Four months and still screaming through the night, the little bitch.”

  This time I wasn’t able to hide my gasp. I’d never heard anyone call her baby a bitch! I really didn’t know what to say to that, but then she was already taking long-legged strides across the asphalt toward the keening cry of the baby, calling, “Here I am, here’s Mommy—” And then, in an altogether different voice, to the babysitter, “Has she been crying this whole time? Why didn’t you come get me?”