Patrick Swayze As Depression

Hello! I hope you had a restful and pleasant Pie For Breakfast Friday last week, and that the intense onslaught of the holiday season has not yet overwhelmed you.

I kind of can’t believe the end of the year is only a month away. I have lots of exciting events ahead in the new year, including a poetry reading on January 6th here in Baltimore at The Womb Room. This reading is part of a larger event to raise money for their Black Maternal Health Fund. I will be reading alongside my friend and fellow poet, Annie Powell Stone, and we will both have books for sale that evening with 50% of the proceeds going toward the fund. If you live in Baltimore, come out and join us on January 6th from 6:30-8:30 pm at The Womb Room. There will be an open mic and live music and a silent auction. It will be a fun night for a great cause.

I am also running a workshop through Yellow Arrow Publishing that I am very excited about and the first of three sessions is on January 12th at 12:30:

The Written Womb is part writing workshop, part parental support group. It’s an opportunity to connect with other writers while exploring the complex themes and emotions in writing about pregnancy, the postpartum experience, and parenthood. Each session will present a selection of poetry and short nonfiction prose on a specific parenting-related theme to serve as generative prompts. This workshop will offer a safe, communal space to explore emotions about pregnancy and parenthood. Writers who wish to do so will have an opportunity to share their work.Drawing on nearly fifteen years of experience as a licensed massage therapist specializing in prenatal and postpartum treatment, I will incorporate brief mindfulness exercises and body awareness into each session to promote comfort, peace and a nurturing environment as we confront the complicated feelings and revelations that writing about parenthood often brings forth.This workshop is designed with new and expecting parents in mind, but is suitable for writers at all stages of both their writing and parenting journeys.

Sessions are $25 each session or $60 for all three. If you’d like to join me, you can register here.

I’m excited to share that my chapbook, Mother Nature, is now available to print on demand, and is currently on sale. Both this book and One Good Thing (also currently on sale!) would make excellent holiday gifts!

Thank you for wading through this news update, and thank you as always for reading this newsletter and supporting my work. Now onward, to some musings about the movie Ghost, holiday travel and some justified complaining about how we treat mothers.

There’s a scene in the 1990 film, Ghost, where (spoilers for a decades-old movie) Whoopi Goldberg briefly turns into Patrick Swayze so that a bereaved Demi Moore can connect with the spirit of her dead husband. This is not the iconic scene in which Swayze and Moore mold the sexiest vase in human history, but one where Patrick Swayze’s ghost enters Whoopi Goldberg’s body and then proceeds to gently and lovingly caress Demi Moore’s face as they slow dance to "Unchained Melody."

This scene reminds me of how I feel when I’m depressed. Stick with me. 

Patrick Swayze is so sad. He misses his wife tremendously. He holds her and touches her so tenderly, but with a desperation that you can read on his face. The scene is filmed so that we see Swayze and Moore embracing, but in actuality, we should be watching Whoopi slow dancing with Demi. “You can use my body,” Whoopi tells Swayze to start the scene, permitting his spirit to inhabit her physical form. She is Whoopi while at the same time, she is also Swayze. We don’t see it because it would be ridiculous to attempt to portray a romantic moment between Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore by filming Whoopi Goldberg delicately cupping Demi Moore’s face, but in reality (in the reality the movie presents, I mean) it would be Whoopi’s body moving, dancing, holding Demi. She has a sad, dead white guy inside her, but on the outside, she is still herself. She’s still Whoopi Goldberg. 

And that is what my depression feels like. Like someone else is using my body. Like a sad ghost has temporarily taken up residence inside me and I am acting out its unresolved baggage, fulfilling its sad ghost needs. 

In the movie scene, Tony Goldwyn (who is not Gary Sinise, but who my mind always momentarily wants to believe is Lieutenant Dan from Forrest Gump) comes banging on the door and Patrick Swayze rips himself out of Whoopi’s body and she sort of stumbles before gaining full control of herself again. This is also what my depression feels like: it departs as suddenly as it so often arrives and throws me temporarily off balance. I always need a moment, need to pat myself down, feel the structure of my ribs beneath my palms to be like oh right, here I am, I’m alone again now. 

We traveled back to Michigan recently for an early Thanksgiving celebration. It was the baby’s first time in an airplane and our first time maneuvering two children through an airport. Thankfully our older son is pretty self-sufficient. He can carry his own backpack and entertain himself, but he’s still young enough that someone needs to accompany him to the bathroom when we’re in crowded public places, and young enough that when he is both tired and hungry, you can practically hear the countdown clock ticking as you race to get him some food and find a spot where he can rest his legs. 

On our journey back home, my husband went in search of food while the boys and I found an empty gate area where we could stretch out for a bit as we waited for our flight to start boarding. I put the baby down on the floor with a few toys sprinkled around him and let him crawl and roll around for a bit since he would be constrained on my lap for the flight. I sat down next to him with my legs spread out in a wide V on either side of his body and my arms propped behind me. At one point a woman walked past us and, I suppose in her effort to avoid stepping on the baby, she stepped on my hand instead. I winced and she apologized, but then she added, “You’re spread out over a big area here.” She was right. We were. But we had also intentionally chosen an empty gate where no one was around for exactly that reason, so that we could take up space without bothering or inconveniencing anyone. Had she simply walked down a different, fully clear aisle, she could have avoided us entirely. 

A couple of days after we were back home and settled, I had to make a trip to the grocery store. I was working the first day after we got back and thus didn’t have time to go when I had childcare and could have made the trip alone, and because it was the lead up to actual Thanksgiving and my older son would be out of school for the majority of the week, if I had waited another day I would have needed to take both children with me. So my only real option was to set out with the baby in tow on a day when it started raining first thing in the morning and didn’t stop for a single second until long after the sun went down. It was a big grocery haul because we needed our Thanksgiving items, but also all the staples we had put off buying before our trip. The baby is still a bit too small to sit comfortably in a shopping cart, so I strapped him to the front of my body and set about buying what felt like enough groceries for a small army. 

My baby is incredibly cute. I know “all babies are cute,” but this baby is especially smiley and rosy-cheeked and people love to coo over him whenever we are out somewhere. People couldn’t stop cooing over him in the grocery store. They paused in their shopping to tell him how sweet and adorable he was while also telling me how I was pressing his body up against the edge of the case while I reached way into the back of the shelves to grab the last container of plain yogurt. They cooed over him while I stood on my tiptoes and slowly nudged a carton of whipping cream with the edge of my finger until it was close enough for me to bat the side of it with my hand to knock it off the shelf so I could catch it before it smashed against the floor. They cooed over him while I loaded my groceries onto the conveyor belt, and while I packed all of my own bags. They reminded me to watch his head, be careful, look where I was going, but at no point did anyone who had the time to stop and marvel at my baby offer me any help at all. By the time I got out of the store, the rain that had been a steady drizzle when we first went in had picked up and I had to make a decision: do I load the baby in the car and leave the groceries to get soaked, or do I load the groceries and soak the baby? I went with the groceries first because I knew I could put a few bags in the trunk a lot faster than I could unstrap the baby from my body and get him properly positioned in the car seat. I was quick, but not quick enough to stop a nosy fellow shopper from swinging by my car to admonish me for having my baby out in the rain. “You should have an umbrella,” she told me as if I didn’t already have my hands full. “He shouldn’t be out in the rain,” she pointed to the baby, who peeked out from the nylon cover I had put over his head to help keep some of the rain off of him. “He’ll be okay,” I told her as I lifted a heavy bag out of my cart and transferred it to the trunk. “He’s cold,” she insisted. “You shouldn’t have him out in the rain.” 

It was too much. The woman stepping on my hand, the incessant warnings to watch out for the baby as if I didn’t realize he was jutting out in front of me, the insistence that I was doing him harm by letting him get a little wet, the way Patrick Swayze’s sad, frustrated ghost took up residence in my body weeks ago while the Whoopi Goldberg part of me has had to keep plugging along taking care of business as if a downtrodden spirit isn’t holed up inside me competing for space.

“If you’re not going to help,” I told the woman, “then go the fuck away.” And to her credit, she did. She looked shocked and offended, but she walked away from me and let me finish loading my groceries and then my baby into the car. I then drove home, unloaded the groceries, made a quick lunch, and then we got back in the car to go pick up my son from school, but at least for that trip I grabbed an umbrella. 

Being a mother puts you on display and makes you feel completely invisible at the same time. Everyone takes note of your children, whether they are marveling at how adorable they are, or waiting with trepidation to see how much of a public nuisance they’ll prove to be. And there you are alongside them. Your child’s accompaniment, rather than a whole individual person. You’re a thing to be stepped on, squeezed past. You’re someone whose struggles go unnoticed but whose failures never seem to escape attention. When you give birth to a person you somehow become less of a person yourself. I notice this a lot around the holidays when so much marketing language encourages us to “get Mom something for herself this holiday season.” Is there anyone else we buy gifts for where we feel the need to specify that the gift is for them, as if that somehow makes it extra special, as if buying a mother a gift that she is meant to enjoy for herself instead of sharing it with her entire family (or using it to serve them) is somehow especially notable? A gift should always be intended specifically for the person receiving it. Otherwise, you’re just Homer Simpson giving Marge a bowling ball with his own name on it. 

When we were back in Michigan one of our family members asked me if I like being on vacation and I answered honestly, no. Relaxation is pretty rare when you’re traveling with children, especially very young children or babies. A vacation with kids, I explained, is pretty much just parenting in a different place where you don’t have your usual routines and resources to rely on. In many ways, it is harder than your regular life: your kids are extra amped up and excited, they tend to eat poorly and at different times than they’re used to, they are sleeping in an unfamiliar place and thus often sleep worse or stay up later than usual and get overtired. I like seeing people I’ve missed and I like going places where I haven’t been in a long time or that are entirely new to me, but I rarely feel sad when a vacation comes to its end these days. I’m usually more than ready to be back home in my own bed at night, or on my own couch at the end of the day. 

On the actual Thanksgiving day, we made our favorite sides and a delicious pumpkin pecan dessert dish, and we watched Raiders of the Lost Ark as we ate. We made my son cover his eyes for the (spoilers for an even-more-decades-old movie) face-melting scene and a few other parts that we thought would be too scary for him. Even with that, though, I worried as the movie started that we had made a bad decision. Within minutes he had what felt like ten thousand questions. Is this too much for him, I wondered. But when we paused to finish up a bit of cooking and then again after the movie was done, he started inventing his own archaeological adventures, turning the playroom into a tomb full of treasures that he had to leap and slide and expertly maneuver his way around booby traps to recover. This was exactly what I had imagined him doing when I suggested we watch the movie. I know my children. I love them and I understand them. I am a good mom. 

The holiday season is a time when it’s easy to feel like you’re failing. Everyone else is crafty and creative and makes the season feel magical. Or everyone else is sociable and charming and doesn’t show up to holiday parties way overdue for a haircut and wearing stained clothing. Or everyone else has figured out how to properly relax, embrace coziness, and detach themselves from any expectation of what the holiday season should be. Personally, I’m feeling tired. The holidays are a bit like vacation in that it feels like parenting on hard mode. I enjoy them and it’s nice to celebrate, but I’m also always more than ready to get back to normal life when they come to an end. Right now feels like an especially tough time to be launching into December merriment because I am feeling depressed. It’s okay, though; it will pass. It will move out of me like Swayze abandoning Whoopi’s body and I will feel like myself again. A whole person. A real woman. Here I am, I’ll say. Perhaps you didn’t notice me because you were too busy worrying about my children.