It was more than three and a half decades ago, but I remember that time clear as a bell. I had just given birth to my daughter, Zoe, who emerged, with some hesitation, at less than seven pounds. She had tufts of strawberry-blond hair growing straight up from her scalp, like a mini-Mohawk; delicately etched eyebrows in the shape of accents circumflex; and a perfect rosebud mouth. As I cradled her in my arms, I felt the stirrings of many different feelings: love, pride, protectiveness, anxiety, and panic. Here was this tiny little girl, breathing almost imperceptibly, infinitely vulnerable, and wholly dependent on me for the foreseeable future. It wasn’t as though she had come as a surprise, and yet I didn’t feel ready.
As the weeks and months passed, I found my mood darkening into what became a major depression. I had suffered from clinical depression before, for which I had taken anti-depressants; I had gone off them when I became pregnant and then started on them again after Zoe was born. But my mood continued to go steadily downhill. Even with the help of an attentive baby nurse, I felt incapable of taking care of my infant daughter and found myself wondering if she would be better off without me. Or perhaps it would be better for her not to be around at all. One day I told my mother that I had been thinking about drowning her in the bathtub. And then I hastily said, “Not really.” A day or two later, I repeated it, a thought that seemed strangely authoritative, as if it knew me better than I knew myself. Part of me realized it was a disturbed daydream, but another part of me kept returning to it, like an aching tooth I couldn’t stop touching.