I Lost Everything in the Post-Natal Depression (6 page)

The other night I knocked loudly on the bedroom door.

“Who is it?” asked a voice.

“It’s Mama.”

“Who?”

“Mama!”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“What do you want?”

“Open the door. I want to talk to you.”

“Did ‘he’ send you to get his records back?”

“No. Unlock this door.”

The door opened a crack and one eye peeked out. “Oh, it’s you.”

“You were expecting Donnie Osmond? Come to dinner.” The door slammed shut.

Following a telephone wire, I traced the next child to a locked closet.

“I know you are in there. The telephone wire is warm. Come to dinner.”

There was silence. Then a whispered voice said, “She’s listening. I’ll call you back.”

The next one was a toughie. I found him behind a locked door in the garage playing his drums.

“Do you hear me?” I shouted. “It’s dinner.”

“Who told you I was here?”

“The neighbors.”

“Is that all you want?”

At dinner I asked them, “Why do you feel you have to lock yourselves in your rooms? Surely, we can respect one another’s privacy without bolts and chains. Getting this group to a dinner table is like cracking the First National Bank.”

“Look, Mom,” they explained patiently, “we are going through a phase of our lives when we need privacy. We have to have time to find ourselves … to find out who we are, what we are, and where we are going. Surely you can understand that.”

Later that evening, I had locked myself in the bathroom, when a note slid under the door. It read, “I need a quarter. Where is your purse?”

I wrote back, “I am finding myself. If I don’t know who I am, it’s a lead pipe cinch I don’t know where my purse is.”

The experts say there is a time to talk and a time to be still. With teen-agers you’re never quite sure. I was riding with my daughter when suddenly, for no reason, she turned down a dead-end street. Cautiously I said, “You’d better turn around.” She kept going so I raised my
voice and said, “There is a guard-rail approaching us and I think you’d better turn around.” She sat there frozen to the wheel until I finally shouted hysterically, “For God’s sake,
stop
.”

She slammed on her brakes, turned to me, and said softly, “Can’t we ever talk? You’re always shouting at me.”

Now that might not sound like a formal invitation to you, but to me it was like a Bird of Happiness chirping. “I’ve wanted to talk with you for a long time,” I confided, “particularly about selecting a college. I’ve been noticing that you’ve been getting application blanks from schools behind the Iron Curtain and thought you might like a little help from Daddy and me in choosing a school.”

“Why should you want to visit a campus?” she charged. “You’re not going there.”

“Indulge us,” I smiled. “We are old people and we are high-strung. Your father and I just want to make sure there are alligator-stocked moats between the girls’ and boys’ dormitories and that the dorm mothers aren’t smoking funny cigarettes.”

“I wouldn’t mind it if you just look,” she sulked, “but you and Daddy will ask a million questions like, ‘How much does it cost?’ and ‘How many ironing boards are there on each floor?’ and ‘How many students are there in each class?’ Dumb stuff.”

The first school we toured we liked. Academically, it was tops. She shook her head hopelessly. “That’s easy for you to say. Did you see those five boys in the Student Union? Short. Short. Short. Short. Short.”

The next school we visited also had some merit. (Also five ironing boards per twenty-five girls.)

“You’re kidding,” she said. “The ski slopes are a day away.”

The third one had a poster of Fidel Castro in the administration
building, but other than that it seemed acceptable.

“No way,” she complained. “The registrar had a burr haircut.”

Other schools met with disfavor because (a) a chaplain made you write to your mother once a month; (b) their football team had a bad season; (c) Pauline Frack had been accepted and if they took Pauline Frack they’d take anybody!

“I wish you’d be more like Wyckies’ mom and dad,” she said. “They check out campuses but they don’t bug anyone.”

My husband and I had never toured a campus tennis court by flashlight, before, but at least our daughter was talking to us. She said, “Crouch a little more.”

Her departure for school was quite dramatic. Not that she spoke a lot, but her actions moved us to tears.

As my husband and I walked through the gutted, bare rooms of our home, our footsteps echoed hollowly on the bare floors. Finally, my husband spoke, “It’s incredible, isn’t it? It took us twenty-three long, married years to amass eight rooms of furniture, forty-three appliances, linens for five beds and an acceptable wardrobe, and now … it’s all gone.”

I nodded. “And to think she condensed it all in two large suitcases and a zippered gym bag.”

“I just don’t believe it,” he said, closing the doors on the bare linen closet. “The sheets, the towels, our electric blanket. All gone. Why don’t you make us a cup of coffee?”

“Can you drink it out of an ashtray?”

“Forget it,” he said, “I’m going to sit down and.…”

“I wouldn’t,” I cautioned. “She took that small occasional chair you used to sit in.”

“And the TV?” he gasped.

“The first to be packed. Along with the transitor radio,
the hair dryer, the make-up mirror, the electric skillet, your shaver, and your parka jacket.”

“And I suppose the phonograph is.…”

I nodded. “College bound, along with the typewriter, the electric fan, the space heater, bulletin board, label maker, bowling ball, popcorn popper, and full set of encyclopedias.”

“How will she lug all that stuff back to school?”

“I think she dismembered the bicycle and put it under her seat.”

“What are we going to do?” he asked, looking at the barren rooms.

“If we looked better we might get on ‘Newlywed Game’ and try to win a washer and dryer.”

“I think we’ve got enough Green Stamps for …”

“Forget the Green Stamps,” I said softly. “She took them.”

“We could take a trip and ….”

“If we still had luggage,” I corrected.

“This is ridiculous,” he snarled. “Why can’t she go to school right here at home?”

“She wants to get away from our materialism,” I said.

The women in the Mortgage Manor housing development just started a Watch Your Weight group. We get together every Monday for coffee and doughnuts and sit around and watch each other grow. Somehow, it makes us all feel better to know there are other women in the world who cannot cross their legs in hot weather.

The other Monday after I had just confessed to eating half a pillowcase of Halloween candy (I still have a shoe-box of chocolate bars in the freezer to go), we got to talking about motivation of diets.

“When my nightgown binds me, I’ll go on a diet,” said one.

“Not me,” said another. “When someone compliments me on my A-line dress and it isn’t A-line, I’ll know.”

“I have to be going someplace,” said another woman. “I know as sure as I’m sitting here if someone invited
me to the White House I could lose fifteen pounds just like that!” (Snapping her fingers)

“I am motivated by vacation,” said another one. “I starve myself before a vacation so a bunch of strangers who have never seen me before can load me up with food so that when I return home I look exactly like I did before I started to diet.”

“Home movies do it for me,” said a woman, reaching for a doughnut.

“You mean when you see yourself and you look fat in them?”

“I mean when they drape me with a sheet and show them on my backside.”

Finally, I spoke up. “There is only one thing that motivates
me to lose weight. That is one word from my husband. My overeating is his fault. If he’d just show annoyance or disgust or say to me, ‘Shape up or sing as a group,’ I’d do something about it. I told him the other night. I said, ‘It’s a shame your wife is walking around with fifteen or twenty excess pounds. If things keep going on I won’t be able to sit on a wicker chair. What are you going to do about it?’ I asked, ‘just sit there and offer me another cookie? Laugh at me. Shame me into it! Humiliate me at parties!’ Sure, I’d get sore, but I’d get over it and I’d be a far better, thinner person for it. Just one word from him and I’d be motivated!”

“Diet,” he said quietly from behind his paper.

“Fortunately, that wasn’t the word. Pass me another doughnut, Maxine.”

I have dieted continuously for the last two decades and lost a total of 758 pounds. By all calculations, I should be hanging from a charm bracelet.

Although I kid Weight Watchers a lot, it is the only organization in which I ever lost a great deal of weight. But I fought them.

Every Thursday morning, a group of us had to “weigh in” before the lecture. Our ritual was enough to boggle the imagination. We got together a checklist of precautions before we actually stepped on the scale.

Bathroom? Check. Water pill? Check. Have you removed underwear, wedding rings, nail polish? Check. Set aside shoes, corn pads and earrings? Check. Are you wearing a summer dress beneath your winter coat? Check.

The first week I stepped on the scale and my instructor said, “You have gained.” (Next week I cut my hair.)

The next week, she said, “You have lost eight ounces, but that is not enough.” (I had the fillings in my teeth removed.)

The third week, I had dropped a pound, but my instructor was still not pleased. (I had my tonsils taken out.)

Finally, she really chewed me out. She accused me of not sticking to the diet and not taking it seriously. That hurt.

“I didn’t want to tell you,” I said, “but I think I am pregnant.”

“How far?” she said coldly, clicking her ballpoint pen to make a notation on my card.

“Possibly three days,” I said.

She glowered, “Any other excuses?”

“Would you believe I have a cold and my head is swollen?”

“No.”

“How about I was celebrating the Buzzard’s return to Hinkley, Ohio, and had butter on my popcorn?”

She tapped her pen impatiently on the card and stared at me silently.

“Lint in the navel?” I offered feebly.

“How about first one at the trough?” she asked dryly.

I learned quickly never to argue with a woman who had the scales on her side.

I saw my old instructor the other day and she eyed me carefully and asked, “When are you returning to class?”

“As soon as I have my appendix removed,” I said, returning her gaze.

I’m not sure, but I think I heard her moan.

I am sick and tired of people saying to me, “Boy, do you have it made. A sober husband, three healthy kids, a house in the suburbs, and a little part-time job to keep you in pantyhose.”

Well, let me tell you, my life is not all pretzels and beer. How would you like to get up every morning of your life and confront a seventeen-year-old daughter who is 5′6″, weighs 110 pounds, refuses to eat breakfast, and insists, “I’m not hungry.”

Every time she says it, it burns me up. I set two alarm clocks to make sure I don’t miss a meal, and she says, “I’m not hungry.”

My husband says I am suffering from repressed antagonistic rivalry that manifests itself in many strained mother-daughter relationships and simply means resentment, jealousy, and competition between us.

“Nonsense,” I told him. “It’s just heartburn from the cold cabbage rolls I ate before I went to bed last night.”

The other morning as I forced down three pieces of bacon she left untouched, I had it out with her.

“Look,” I said, “it’s not normal to wake up in the morning and not be hungry. From the time you eat dinner the night before to the time you eat your lunch at school, it is sixteen hours. That’s too long between meals.”

“But some people don’t need food.”

“Don’t need food!”
I gasped. “I don’t want to frighten you, but a buzzard followed you to school the other morning.”

“I can’t help it. It upsets my stomach when I eat.”

“Do you know what you are doing to your mother?”
I sighed. “Killing her. That’s right. I don’t know how much longer I can go on carrying you. When you were a baby I didn’t mind eating your leftovers … the strained peas, the mashed squash, and the puréed lamb, but as you got older, the burden became greater. Having two breakfasts for the last seventeen years is beginning to show on me. I put on weight easily. Remember when I got a flu shot and put on three pounds from it? But, if you don’t care what happens to your mother.…”

“The dog doesn’t eat his breakfast and you don’t yell at him,” she said, slamming out the door.

You know something? With a little catsup, it didn’t taste bad.

If there is one person in this world I have absolutely no compassion for, it’s a size five telling me she’d like to put on weight and can’t.

It’s like Zsa Zsa Gabor complaining to a spinster that they don’t make drip-dry wedding dresses.