Dear Adele,

I am in a slump.  A plateau of lowness that won’t let up.  I can’t think of anything witty to do for a Q & A.  I’m exhausted and sleepless.  I want to try new medication, but you’re breast feeding–and you LOVE breastfeeding, my god–so I don’t want to switch.  I also don’t want to switch because I DON’T WANT TO BE DEPRESSED ANYMORE, OKAY?  I’ve been on and off medication since forever, and I don’t understand people who don’t need medication to get themselves living their lives, who don’t need a few glasses of wine to take the edge off, who don’t have anxiety attacks in the middle of the night, who don’t get hyper upset over being unable to find a jewelry store to replace a battery in a digital watch.  If you’re one of those people who do not get hyper upset about the lack of a place to fix a digital watch, or the loss of your keys, or the fact that it takes you three months to merely schedule a dentist’s appointment, if you’re one of those people who do get upset about such things but do not feel like such things bring into question the purpose of your life and mean that everything is going to shit everywhere… well, I’d like you to please go away. 

I was talking with a dear friend of mine this week; I said I was struggling, started crying, sucked it up, apologized for unloading.  Of course she said what any friend–myself included–would say: that I was welcome to unload.  Then she said that she wished she could help, that I was intelligent and beautiful and talented and wonderful, and that she wished I could internalize all that and be happy.

Sounds kind of yucky, doesn’t it, Adele?  Your mother, an aging tween with self esteem problems.  But I’ve always been this way, this entity of trying.  Trying to feel good.  Trying to become instead an entity of coherence, with my feelings matching my external circumstances instead of countering them so profoundly.  I think this is the state, Adele, that a lot of depressed people are in, either most of the time, all the time, some of the time, or a little of the time.  And this place is a tremendously powerless place to be.

I suppose it’s brain chemistry, Adele.  You might have these kinds of troubles, too, and when I think about this possibility I remember that psychiatrist I eventually dropped.  She said the following, more or less: that I should think long and hard about having a second child because I had a depressive condition and things would be hard.  I dropped her–not because she warned me, which seemed appropriate, but because when she learned I was pregnant with you, she was an unsupportive, mean bitch.  But you know what?  Things are hard.  She was a lame psychiatrist and she lacked warmth, but she was right.  (This is how those of us with character reflect on people, Adele: we take note of someone who sucks but then acknowledge their strengths, too.  This is the way the world should work, the way we should think about one another and the way we should love those whom we do not like.)

Adele, I wonder what you might  be thinking?  That your mother has passed down her defective genes to you?  Yes.  I have.  And although we have diluted my genes with those of your even-tempered, positive, happy father, the fact that I have worries me.  A few comments on my Brain, Child article expressed dismay and impatience and anger with the fact that I had chosen to get pregnant.  Well, I published an article.  This is something that’s damned hard for me to do, and I’m glad to have published something, and I think that everyone who reads it absolutely has the right to voice their opinion about it.  But those comments were a bit hard to read because Adele, it did not occur to me one time to NOT have a child because of my history.  Not once, not even when Psychiatrist of Suck warned me.  The only time it occurred to me was after you were here, when I read those comments, and I have thought hard about them since, because in my case those comments are fair.  And my answer is this: I think denial of my condition kept me from considering the option of no more children.  Denial of my condition still keeps me from taking care of myself as well as I should (because fuck this, I need to get it together, not take more drugs, right? isn’t that how the mind works?).

However, I wanted your wonderful brother to have a sibling, Adele.  I wanted to have a fuller family, one that is happy (despite me, we are) and active and fully engaged in family life and family love and family rituals and familyness.  And Adele, once you arrived, I realized it wasn’t just a fourth I wanted: it was you as that fourth.  You and your brother adore one another.  You adore everything, everywhere (except the moment when as you nurse I remove your hand from my larynx–it isn’t a knob, Petunia, and my upper chest is not a drum, and my nipple is not a teething ring).  You love to swing.  You love to point.  You love vegetarian chili and macaroni and cheese and you love to mush them into your hair.  You love it when I whisper rapidly into your ear, you love it when you pull yourself to a standing position in your crib and bounce.

So what can I say?  Did I make a mistake?  This is the wrong way to think about having children.  I made my life harder–MY life in particular, the one that I suppose is characterized by depression (it’s who I am, Adele; I often greet it, say hello there, sadness and longing and despair, welcome back, because dammit, I love you, too), this life I so often seem to feel like I have yet to begin.  I suppose you are a beginning for me, Adele–despite the grotesque cliche, you are.  And your beginning is something you can share with me.  I am so, so glad to have it.

I love you.

Mommy