Night, Forgotten

Original Edition - Chapter 5: Now

My eyes blink open in the direction of where Owen's body should be. Instead, I gaze past crumpled sheets to the book that lies on his bedside table. Propping myself up on my elbow, I lean toward it to get a better look.

I recognize the cover from back when I was pregnant. It's one of those practical guides you can pick up at the doctor's office or as a last-minute, uninspired gift from the shop in a hospital lobby. Written in a curly, sans- serif font across an image of a sullen-looking pregnant woman is the title: Perinatal Mood Disorders.

I haven't picked up this book since coming home from the hospital, but now here it is, out on the table. One of Owen's leather bookmarks dangles from between its pages. He left it here for me to find. It's no doubt my husband's way of sending me a message.

Now that it's for Thomas to come home from the hospital, I need to get it together and address everything I've been failing to do since he was born.

The three months since I gave birth have passed as one long, unsteady ride on a teetering carousel. My world has been spinning by in a ghastly blur as we've waited for Thomas's due date to arrive, September 12th. The day he should have been born is also the day he's allowed to come home from the hospital.

Today.

Soon we'll drive to St. Elizabeth's, dress the baby in his first real outfit, and bring him home to the nursery.

But right now, I cannot compel myself to get out of bed.

Seeing the Perinatal Mood Disorders book on the bedside table, I feel a twinge of reluctant curiosity. I let my eyes focus on a sentence in one of the middle paragraphs of the back-cover copy: "For women who are experiencing depression, the struggle to breastfeed can feel like a life-or-death matter." My chest tightens.

Despite my efforts to feed him breastmilk, Thomas only drinks formula. I'm embarrassed that my husband is up at night feeding the baby from a bottle while I sleep or wander around in a fog of dull pain.

It's not just the breastfeeding, though. That's not why Owen is reading about depression. According to Dr. Almaden, the psychiatrist who diagnosed me, my diagnosis is "perinatal depression" since it started during my pregnancy.

Part of me likes having that diagnosis. It feels comforting, in a way, to know that my mental state has an explanation that might apply to any other person who's just gone through pregnancy and given birth. Maybe it's a chemical imbalance, like the anxiety I've been doing my best to cope with since I was a kid. It's possible, I suppose, that whatever's going on inside my brain has nothing to do with the night I've forgotten.

Maybe I'd be feeling this way even if Thomas were a wanted child.

It doesn't seem right to use the word "feeling," though. I don't feel much of anything except loneliness.

After all, I only know about one other woman who suffered from depression after giving birth, and I never even got to meet her. Her name was Paula and she was a parishioner at St. Catherine's, the church where Owen used to attend Mass with his mother on Sundays. I didn't know her, but I know what happened to her, and I don't want to think about that right now.

Like me, she was the mother of a child she never wanted.