Chapter 3 #2
I turn off the computer. In the bathroom, I splash water on my heated cheeks. I open the mirrored medicine cabinet. Behind my deodorant and the Tylenol is a little amber bottle of benzos. June prescribed them the last time I had a psychotic episode and we had to regulate my meds.
How many would I have to take to no longer be here?
(I would only be putting the punctuation on a sentence already written.)
I open the cap, look down at the pills.
With shaking hands, I punch a number into my phone. “June?” I say, when she answers the emergency line. “I need help.”
For seven years I’ve been asking myself the same question: Why did I leave?
Instead of crossing the Brooklyn Bridge, I could have just started walking north. I could have thrown myself into Adam’s arms in that bubble of lucidity and said, I need help. I could have rushed into a hospital and begged someone to get rid of the voice in my head.
In hindsight, I now know that what I experienced wasn’t actually clarity.
I made a rash choice, convincing myself it was for the best, and now they’ve all moved on without me.
When that hurts too much to think about, I remind myself that the path to stability has not been an easy one, and that even if I’d gone back to our apartment in Washington Heights, there’s no guarantee I wouldn’t have also tried to kill Molly.
I remind myself that not all stories end happily.
I am in the dentist’s office when I see the Time magazine article, two years out of date, about Andrea Yates. There is a picture of her with her husband, Rusty, and four of her five children. It is the kind of photograph that you take at Sears, with a blurry blue backdrop and frozen smiles.
A flash of memory: being hugely pregnant and watching on television as this blank--faced woman was led away by police. The irony is not lost on me—-this is one of the last coherent recollections I have before giving birth.
I also remember being in the taxi, just before the terrorist attacks, hearing a radio reporter talk about Andrea Yates’s competency hearing, scheduled for that morning.
In a strange way, it was the day my world and Andrea Yates’s world collided.
The Time article is the result of over forty hours of interviews with Rusty Yates, Andrea’s husband.
He told the reporter that Andrea had been skittish that day, putting out bowls and milk and Sugar Pops in the kitchen.
He saw her take her morning dose of antidepressants.
He was in a rush; he worked for NASA and had a space--shuttle design meeting that morning.
The first child to die was the one Andrea called Perfect Paul, her three--year--old, who never misbehaved.
She washed his hair so that the soap wouldn’t get into his eyes, and she held him underwater until he stopped moving.
Next, she drowned Luke, age two, and John, age five.
Mary, the baby, was given a bottle to keep her busy while her mother was drowning her siblings.
The last child was Noah, seven. He saw his sister floating facedown in the bathtub and asked what was wrong with her.
When he ran away, Andrea chased him through their home, forced him into the tub, and held him down as he struggled.
Later, Andrea would tell the police that he came up twice, gasping for air, but she was stronger.
She carried Mary to the bed where her other brothers already lay and positioned their arms around her, like she was a doll. She left Noah floating in the bathtub.
When Andrea Yates was in jail, she said that nothing could stop the voice she heard reminding her she was a terrible mother. She told the doctors that if they shaved her scalp, they would see the number 666, the mark of the Devil.
I close my eyes, forcing myself to remember filling the tub for Molly’s bath. I remember Evie holding her, soaking wet, looking at me as if I were a monster.
“Georgia?” a voice says, bringing me back to the dentist’s waiting room. “We’re ready for you.”
I look up at the hygienist, smiling in scrubs with dancing cartoon teeth. They are meant to be silly, but they look sinister.
“I . . . I have to reschedule,” I mutter, slipping the magazine under my coat and fleeing the waiting room.
In the car, I finish reading the article. During her retrial in 2006, Yates was found not guilty by reason of insanity, because she exhibited severe postpartum psychosis leading up to the murders.
Postpartum psychosis.
Before giving birth, I had been warned about the baby blues. When I could barely function, I’d been told by midwives and doctors and psychiatrists that I was showing symptoms of new motherhood, of anxiety, of depression.
But I have never heard these two words before.
The librarian is a man with curly black hair and a neat beard and kind eyes. I find him tucked in the stacks between animal husbandry and cookbooks. “I’m sorry to bother you,” I say.
“No bother at all,” he says, looking down at the spine of the book he’s shelving. Plant Injuries. “We can assume these are not fatal. How can I help?”
“I was trying to find information about a psychological condition.”
“Ah.” He leads me around the corner and gestures to a shelf with a gap in it, like a missing tooth. “This is where the DSM--IV usually is. It’s a manual of mental disorders—-”
“—-and I already looked there.” I gesture to a table in the distance where the open reference book lies, along with my coat and my purse.
“What is it you’re researching?” he asks. “I can do a little digging for you.”
I take a deep breath. “Women with postpartum psychosis who kill their babies.”
He doesn’t even blink. Then again, I imagine when you’re a librarian, people ask you strange questions. “Like the woman with the kids in the bathtub . . .”
“Yes, Andrea Yates,” I say. “I’m trying to see if there were others.”
The librarian tilts his head. “Are you a journalist?”
“No,” I reply.
“Researcher, then,” he offers.
I think about that. “Yes,” I agree.
“Okay, then, Ms. . . .”
“Georgia,” I interrupt. “Just Georgia.”
When he smiles, it lights his eyes, like sun through a jar of honey. “I’m Edward. Let’s see what we can find.”
In 1985, Debra Lynn Gindorf crushed an entire box of Unisom into powder.
She put some in juice and gave it to her three--year--old daughter.
She mixed more into formula for her infant son.
She put the rest into a glass of Southern Comfort.
When she woke the next day, the children were dead and she was not.
She tried to kill herself again and failed before turning herself in to the police.
In November 2004, Dena Schlosser told her husband she wanted to give her children to God. The next day she cut off the arms of her ten--month--old and was charged with capital murder.
Ann Green, a pediatric nurse, killed her newborns in 1980 and 1982, and in 1985 she was found trying to smother her third child.
Sharon Weisensale drowned her two--month--old daughter in 1984. Chanda Smith drowned her three--week--old daughter in 1984. Sharon Comitz drowned her one--month--old son in 1985. All three were suffering from postpartum psychosis. All three were convicted of third--degree murder.
Sheryl Lynn Massip drove a car over her six--week--old son in 1987. She told a jury it was because the voices in her head told her to put him out of his misery.
Angela Thompson, who drowned her nine--month--old son in 1983, believed he was the Devil.
Most of the articles that Edward prints out for me are from the 1980s, the ’90s, the early 2000s.
But I also read about Catherine Zalis, who smothered her five--month--old infant daughter with a pillow in 1928.
She was sent to an asylum, received electroshock therapy, and was released.
She divorced her husband and raised her two remaining daughters at her parents’ house.
She eventually managed the eighty--acre family farm, teaching her grandchildren how to fish in the creek and pick berries, how to knit and embroider and make paper dolls.
After a long, productive life, she died at eighty--six.
I don’t realize I’m crying until Edward lightly touches my shoulder. “Are you all right?”
I had been so sure that there was something singularly flawed in me. But I am not the only woman who has experienced this. Far from it.
And yet, my story is different.
I ran away from my baby because I was afraid I’d murder her. Did that make me a terrible mother, or a good one?
Edward pulls a pristine white handkerchief out of his pocket. “It’s clean,” he promises, and presses it into my hand. I wonder what kind of man carries handkerchiefs in 2008. Maybe one with a life as carefully curated as mine.
He sits down beside me. “You’re right. The DSM--IV doesn’t list postpartum psychosis. It’s not considered a diagnosis, only a symptom of something else—-like bipolar disorder or major depressive disorder, or schizophrenia—-with the caveat that the symptoms started after childbirth.”
The cases I’ve been reading about are only the tip of the iceberg. For each one that Edward found, there must be ten more. And that doesn’t include the women who, like me, managed to outwit the voices telling us to kill a child.
Edward looks at the photocopied pages. “The term is used legally, in cases where a mother is arrested for infanticide. It’s just not a clinical disorder.”
I wonder if some dormant bipolar gene in me was triggered by giving birth? Or was I always bipolar, and only experienced a psychotic break in the liminal exhaustion after having the baby?
Does it matter?
It does, I think. Because maybe if doctors were willing to describe this more explicitly, there would be fewer pages scattered in front of me.
That night, I find an online forum for women who have experienced postpartum psychosis.
Most of the women posting had symptoms just a day or two after giving birth.
Like me, they had thoughts that cycled, zips of energy that made sleep impossible or unnecessary, and imaginary voices they couldn’t banish.