Black Milk Part 18

a. Two months ago? Maybe more? I am not in the mood to socialize these days.

b. Friends and family come to visit, bless them. I have no control over who is coming, who is going.

c. The other day the girls threw me a baby shower; we had so much fun. I had to go off my diet, of course. How could I resist those cupcakes?

How at peace are you with your body and s.e.xuality?

a. My husband and I sleep in different rooms. I won't be the least bit surprised if we soon start living in separate houses or even on separate continents.

b. We still sleep in the same bed, but I'd rather sleep with the baby. I don't say that though. I wouldn't want to hurt his feelings.

c. Oh, you mean hanky-panky? Oh, yeah, like bunny rabbits.

What do you think about this test?

a. A waste of time.

b. I don't know, I didn't fully concentrate on it.

c. It was fun. Not a problem!

The Evaluation Key If your answers were overwhelmingly A: You've not only met Lord Poton but you may already consider him your best friend. Call your doctor immediately and get help.

If your answers were overwhelmingly B: Your self-esteem is not at its highest and you show signs of pa.s.sive-aggressive behavior. Be on guard. Lord Poton may knock on your door at any moment.

If your answers were overwhelmingly C: You don't have to ever worry. Depression to you is like Earth compared to Jupiter. In all likelihood, you will never cross paths with Lord Poton.

Writer-Mothers and Their Children Alice Walker is one of the leading and most outspoken figures among contemporary American women writers. She has an international following and her work has been translated into more than twenty languages. The youngest of eight children, she was born in Georgia to a family of farmers. Her childhood was not a privileged one. Yet her mother was determined to give her children the same opportunities that white children had and did everything in her power to make sure they had a good education. Alice started school at the age of four. When she was eight years old she suffered an eye injury that was to have a profound impact on the course of her life and, perhaps, her writing. Though she forgave the brother who caused her a permanent loss of sight in her right eye, she became timid and withdrawn in the face of the teasing and bullying of other children. From those days on she retained a fondness for solitude and a pa.s.sion for storytelling, weaving together both oral and written traditions.

In the turbulent early 1960s in the South, Walker followed her heart and married a white lawyer. At a time of rampant racism and xenophobia, they were the only interracial couple in the circles in which they moved. They had one daughter, Rebecca. Becoming a mother was a significant turning point in Alice Walker's life. She felt more fully connected not only with her own mother but also, perhaps, with mothers around the world-those whom she would never meet. Later on, in an essay called "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens" she wrote, "For these grandmothers and mothers of ours were not Saints, but Artists; driven to a numb and bleeding madness by the springs of creativity in them for which there was no release." Elsewhere she said that her novels carried the kind of thoughts and feelings that she felt her ancestors wanted to pa.s.s on to the new generations.

The marriage ended in divorce, after which Walker refused to walk down the aisle again. Her views on matrimony and domestic life have been critical ever since. In an essay ent.i.tled "A Writer Because of, Not in Spite of, Her Children," Walker questions the conventional ideas about art and creativity in the Western world. She says the dominant culture draws a boundary between the duties of child rearing and the area of creativity. She sees the inst.i.tution of marriage as a patriarchal construct unsuitable for an independent, free-spirited writer like herself. She playfully adds, "Besides, I like being courted."

Her most acclaimed novel, The Color Purple, vividly testifies that Walker is an author who deals head-on with misogyny and racism. Throughout her life she has worked for a better world where there would be equality and freedom regardless of s.e.x, cla.s.s or race. In her youth she was active in the civil rights movement and the women's movement. Interestingly, she has resisted the term feminism, criticizing it for being indifferent to the problems of women of color. Instead she suggested using a term she coined: womanism. She said womanist was to feminist as purple was to lavender.

More recently she has taken up criticizing the Bush administration's policy in Iraq, drawing the attention of the media to Iraqi mothers and children. She has also traveled to Gaza, meeting with NGOs and the people of Palestine and Israel, bridging cultural differences. She has always been openly political.

In the last few years Alice Walker's private life has been brought to the fore due to a controversy that rose between the writer and her daughter. Rebecca has made several disparaging remarks about her mother, accusing her of forgetting her own child while trying to save the children of others. She says that as a child and teenager she was constantly neglected while her activist mother was running from one event to another. She did not have an easy youth, using drugs and having affairs with both men and women by the age of thirteen. A year later, she became pregnant. She wrote extensively about her ups and downs in her autobiography, Black, White and Jewish. After giving birth to a son she wrote a second memoir about the experience and how she came to choose motherhood after a period of hesitation and doubt. Rebecca believes feminism has deceived many women and has even betrayed an entire generation of women into childlessness.

It is a complicated story. One that has two very different sides, like all mother-daughter stories tend to have. For me, it is interesting to see how such a successful, outspoken writer and empathetic mother like Alice Walker could become so estranged from her daughter. Did she experience an existential clash between her life as a mother and her life as an author? Is this a personal story, incited by specific circ.u.mstances, that rests between the two of them? Or does it indicate something more universal that can happen to anyone at any time?

Inasmuch as I love reading Toni Morrison, I must say I also love listening to her. She has an androgynous raspy voice, as if speaking to us from beyond invisible barriers, beyond the ghosts of past generations. She is the kind of person to whom you could listen attentively even if she were reciting a recipe for pumpkin pie. You would sit spellbound, just the same.

The critic Barbara Christian calls the kind of realism found in Morrison's work "fantastic earthy realism." Morrison doesn't introduce the past in one swoop; she delivers it in bits and pieces, expecting us to work along with her. She wants the readers to be actively engaged in constructing the story, rather than sitting by pa.s.sively. The past for her is a mesmerizing jigsaw puzzle that is painful to put together, but it must be done. She writes with rage and melancholy, but also with compa.s.sion and love. In one of her most acclaimed books, Beloved, which tells the riveting tale of the fugitive slave Sethe, motherhood is examined against the background of slavery. At the end of the novel, Sethe murders her own baby daughter rather than see her become a slave and suffer like she has.

Morrison's women are brave and epic, yet there is nothing overtly heroic about them. It is this combination of the extraordinary with the ordinary in her fictional characters that makes her work remarkable. The kind of motherhood she depicts is based on an elated love that is, at its heart, transformative and healing. Nevertheless, mother and child do not live in a social vacuum, and a woman's performance as a mother is not immune to the ills and sins of the world in which she tries to survive.

Morrison married young to an architecture student. It wasn't an easy marriage, and after having two sons the couple split. She worked as a book editor to support her family. This was the time when she started writing her acclaimed novel The Bluest Eye. It was difficult for her to write after work-she felt she was not very bright or witty or inventive after the sun went down. Her habit of getting up very early, formed when her children were young, became her choice. In interviews about that period she admits with modesty that she found it difficult to call herself a writer, preferring instead to say "I am a mother who writes" or "I am an editor who writes."

Her sons once said that they did not particularly enjoy growing up with a mother who wrote for a living. When asked about the reason for this, Morrison gives a candid and wise answer: "Who does? I wouldn't. Writers are not there." Morrison says writers like, need and value vagueness. Yet the same vagueness that is crucial for literature and creativity can be burdensome for the children of writers.

Morrison is a writer before everything else. She says her friends understand this and accept her the way she is. Real friends do. Sometimes she even needs to give priority to her writing over her children. There is a wonderful memory she shares that I find very moving. When she was working on Song of Solomon, she told her younger son-who was ten years old at the time-that this would not be a fun summer for him because she would be working all the time. She asked him to please bear with her, which he reluctantly but kindly did. Morrison says her son still calls that period of their life "a terrible summer."

Both Alice Walker and Toni Morrison value the richness found in oral storytelling, which has been pa.s.sed down from grandmothers to granddaughters. Whenever they face great obstacles they are inspired by the many courageous women of earlier generations, and they inspire us to care about untold stories and silenced subjects, past and present. Although motherhood is precious for both, in their fiction they refrain from depicting it as a sacred ident.i.ty. They talk openly about the conflicts of motherhood, including the hards.h.i.+ps they have personally experienced. Numerous defeats, weaknesses and losses shape the women in their stories; sometimes they carry hearts so bruised that it hurts to read about them. Yet these female characters are fighters. They are survivors. It is their pa.s.sionate struggles-not the losing or winning-that make them who they are.

A Crystal Heart By late December, Istanbul had adopted a Christmasy look, bright and colorful, and I had tried a few cures to no avail. On the electric pole where the sneakers had hung, there was now a single string of lights, pale green and flimsy. I watched them blink weakly at night, as if they had long given up fighting the dark.

During this time I went to a psychiatrist-a smart woman who had a habit of biting her thumbnail when distracted-but I didn't have much faith in the treatment, and when there is no faith, there is little success. The side effects of the antidepressants she prescribed ranged from an itch in my hands (although this may well have been caused by my desire to write again) to dry mouth and a red rash on my face. It is an endless irony that as beneficial as antidepressants may be for some people, for others their side effects can generate even more depression. I went to therapy, too, but after each session my problems felt amplified rather than diminished. I briefly tried a support group, but being an introvert by nature, I couldn't get used to the idea of talking about my private life to a circle of strangers. As soon as words slipped out of my mouth, they felt unreal, almost illusory.

I didn't know anymore how much of my depression was due to hormones or outside forces, how much of it was self-imposed or culturally imposed. Depressions happen to us against our will and without our knowledge, but then, slowly and furtively, they may turn into a river in which we willingly paddle. There was a nagging fear at the back of my mind that I could be suffering from The Magic Mountain syndrome. In Thomas Mann's novel, his hero, Hans Castorp, goes to a sanitarium to visit a friend who suffers from tuberculosis. During the visit he develops similar symptoms and ends up staying seven years in the same sanitarium. Mann believed that sickness opens up a set of new possibilities for human beings and facilitates moral growth.

Likewise I had embraced depression to the point of seeing it as a permanent condition and looking at life through its blurry lenses. I urgently had to go back to writing to find my way out of this quagmire. I had to put my thoughts on paper, but the words wouldn't flow. I couldn't write for eight months.

Eight months might seem like nothing; for me, however, it felt like an eternity. During that time, postpartum depression became an inseparable part of my life. Wherever I went, whatever I did, Lord Poton followed me like an avid stalker. His presence was tiring, and yet he never took things to the extremes. He didn't eradicate you, but he turned you into something less than human, an empty sh.e.l.l of your former self. Perhaps he didn't stop you from eating and drinking altogether, but he took all the pleasure out of it. Perhaps he didn't destroy all your reserves of strength, but he drained them enough that you felt stuck between deep sleep and wakefulness, like a doomed somnambulant.

Before I knew it, literature turned into a distant and forbidden land with bulky guards protecting its boundaries. Worried that I would never be allowed in again, I wondered if writing was like riding a bike-something you didn't really ever forget once you learned how to do it. Or was it like learning Arabic or Korean? The kind of skill that abandoned you, little by little, if you were out of practice for long.

First, I convinced myself that I had forgotten how to write.

Then I started suspecting that writing had forgotten me.

Writing novels-composing stories, creating and destroying characters-is a game favored by those who refuse to grow up. Even though the game takes place on paper, the possibility of playing it over and over again helps you forget your own mortality. "The spoken word perishes, the written word remains." Or so we like to think. It gives comfort against the fleetingness of life. A novelist believes, somewhere deep down inside, that she or he is immortal.

And faith is an important part of being a writer. You come to believe so intensely in the stories you create that the outside world at times will seem dull and inconsequential. When your friends call, when some important matter arises, when your husband wants to go out to dinner, when social responsibilities weigh down on your shoulders, you will find an excuse to get out of each. Everything will be "secondary"-only for writing will you find the time.

The novelist is, and has to be, selfish. Motherhood is based on "giving."

While the novelist is an introvert-at least for the duration of writing her novel-a mother is, by definition, an extrovert. The novelist builds a tiny room in the depths of her mind and locks the door so that no one can get in. There she hides her secrets and ambitions from all prying eyes. As for the mother, all her doors and windows must be wide open morning and night, summer and winter. Her children can enter through whichever entrance they choose, and roam around as they please. She has no secret corner.

When your child falls and sc.r.a.pes his knees or comes home with his tonsils swollen or lies in bed with fever or when he performs as SpongeBob SquarePants in the school play, you cannot say, "Okay, well, I am writing a new chapter just now. Can you please check back with me next month?"

Betty Friedan-writer, activist, feminist-firmly believed that we needed a broader definition of success than the one largely held by modern society. We had to reframe family values in order to change the system in which every suburban mother struggled on her own, thinking there was something intrinsically wrong with her when she experienced the slightest sense of failure. Friedan herself wrote groundbreaking books and raised three children. "People's priorities-men's and women's alike-should be affirming life, enhancing life, not greed," she said.

All kinds of depression deepen when we forget to enhance life. Perhaps the most persistent question we ask ourselves at times like these is, Why? Why is this happening to me? Why not to others, why me? Saint Teresa of Avila once said, "Our soul is like a castle created out of a single diamond or some other similarly clear crystal." The trouble is we women sometimes fear the crystal is irreparably fractured when it is not, and we think it is our fault when it is not.

My maternal grandmother was married at the age of fifteen to an army officer she had seen for only two minutes (my grandfather knocked on her door pretending to be looking for an address, and she opened the door and gave him directions, similarly pretending). My mother married a philosophy student at the age of twenty, when she was still in college and could not be dissuaded from marrying so young.

One woman had an arranged marriage in Turkey in the 1930s, raised three kids and was fully dependent on her husband's ability to support her. The other married in a love marriage of her choice, got divorced, graduated from college (she finished her degree after the divorce), raised her kid and was economically independent. Although my grandmother was bound by traditional gender roles and my mother was the emanc.i.p.ated one, interestingly, when it came to surviving the vicissitudes of womanhood (like postpartum blues, menopause, etc.), there were times when my grandmother was better prepared. From one generation to the next some valuable information was lost along the way: that at different stages in her life a woman could need, would need, the help of her sisters, blood or not. As for my generation, we are so carried away with the propaganda that we can do anything and everything we want, our feet don't always touch the ground. Perhaps we forget how to ask for help when we need it most.

Today, we do not speak or write much about the face of motherhood that has been left in the shadows. Instead, we thrive on two dominant teachings: the traditional view that says motherhood is our most sacred and significant obligation and we should give up everything else for this duty; and the "modern" women's magazine view that portrays the quintessential "superwoman" who has a career, husband and children and is able to satisfy everyone's needs at home and at work.

As different as these two views seem to be, they have one thing in common: They both focus solely on what they want to see, disregarding the complexity and intensity of motherhood, and the way in which it transforms a woman and her crystal heart.

Farewell to a Djinni Katherine Mansfield once remarked in that captivating voice of hers, "True to oneself! Which self? Which of my many-well really, that's what it looks like it's coming to-hundreds of selves? For what with complexes and repressions and reactions and vibrations and reflections, there are moments when I feel I am nothing but the small clerk of some hotel without a proprietor."18 As the small clerk of my own hotel, I wish I could say that, in the end, using my willpower, self-control or wits, I defeated Lord Poton. I wish I could claim that I beat him with my own strength by cooking up a grand scheme, tricking him into oblivion. But it didn't happen like that.

This is not to say that none of the treatments had any effect. I'm sure some of them did. But the end to my postpartum depression came more of its own accord, with the completion of some inner cycle. Only when the time was right, when I was "right," did I get out of that dark, airless rabbit hole. Just as a day takes twenty-four hours and a week takes seven days, just as a b.u.t.terfly knows when to leave its coc.o.o.n and a seed knows when to spring into a flower, just as we go through stages of development, just as everything and everyone in this universe has a "use by" date, so does postpartum depression.

There are two ways to regard this matter: The Pessimist: "If one cannot come out of depression before the time is ripe, there is nothing I can do about it."

The Optimist: "If one cannot come out of depression before the time is ripe, there is nothing depression can do to me."

If you are leaning toward the Pessimist's approach, then chances are you are in the first stages of postpartum depression. If you are leaning toward the Optimist's, then congratulations, you are nearing the exit. Every woman requires a varying amount of time to complete the cycle. For some it takes a few weeks, for others more than a year. But no matter how complex or dizzying it seems to be, every labyrinth has a way out.

All you have to do is walk toward it.

Lord Poton: There is something different about you this morning. A sparkle in your eyes that wasn't there before.

Me: Really? Could be. I had a strange dream last night.

Lord Poton: I hope it was a nightmare! Sorry, I have to say that. After all, I am a dastardly djinni. I can't wish you anything good, it's against the rules.

Me: That's okay. It was as intense as a nightmare anyway.

Lord Poton (more interested now): Oh, really? Tell me!

Me: Well, we were standing by a harbor, you and I. It turns out you were leaving on a s.h.i.+p that transports djinn from this realm into the next. It was a mammoth s.h.i.+p with lots of lights. The port was so crowded, hundreds of pregnant women were gathered there with their big bellies. Then you embarked and I sadly waved good-bye to you.

Lord Poton (confused): You were sad to see me go? Are you sure? You must have been jumping for joy. Why, I've destroyed your life.

Me: No, you haven't. It was me who has done this to myself.

Lord Poton (even more confused): Are you trying to tell me you're not mad or angry with me?

Me: I am not, actually. I think I needed to live through this depression to better rea.s.semble the pieces. When I look at it this way, I owe you thanks.

As if I have smacked him in his face, Lord Poton flushes scarlet up to his ears and takes a step back.

Lord Poton (his voice shaking): No one has spoken to me like this before. I don't know what to say. (His eyes fill with tears.) Women hate me. Doctors, therapists, too. Oh, the terrible things they write about me! You have no idea how it feels to be insulted in brochures, books and Web sites.

Me: Listen, that s.h.i.+p in my dream had a name: Aurora. It means "dawn" in Spanish, safak in Turkish.

Widening his slanting eyes, he looks at me blankly.

Me: Don't you understand? I am that s.h.i.+p. I was the one who brought you into the port of my life.

Lord Poton (scratching his head): Let's accept what you are saying for a moment. Why would you do such a thing?

Me: Because I thought I couldn't deal with my contradictory voices anymore. I've always found it hard to handle the Thumbelinas. If I agreed with one, I could never make it up to the others. If I loved one a little more, the others would begin to complain. It was always that way. I had been making do by leaning a little bit on one and then a little bit on another. But after I gave birth the system stopped functioning. I couldn't bear the plurality inside of me. Motherhood required oneness, steadiness and completeness, while I was split into six voices, if not more. I cracked under the pressure. That was when I called you.

That is when the strangest thing happens. There, in front of my eyes, Lord Poton starts to dissolve, like fog in the sunlight.

Lord Poton (taking out his silk napkin and dabbing at his eyes): I guess it is time for me to leave, then. I never thought I would get so emotional. (He wipes his nose.) I'm sorry-you took me by surprise is all.

Me: That's all right.

Lord Poton (sniffling): I guess I'll miss you. Will you write to me?

Me: I'll write about you. I'll write a book.

Lord Poton (clapping his hands): How exciting! I'm going to be famous!

A heavy silence descends, rus.h.i.+ng into my ears like the wind through the leaves. I feel light, as if something has held me and lifted me up.

Lord Poton: Well, good-bye. But what will happen to the finger-women?

Me: I will take them out of the box. I'm going to give them each an equal say. The oligarchy has ended, and so have the coup d'etat, monarchy, anarchy and fascism. It is finally time for a full-fledged democracy.

Lord Poton (laughing): Let me warn you, love, democracy is not a bed of roses.

Me: You might be right. But still, I'd prefer it to all other regimes.

PART SEVEN.

Daybreak.

The Calm after the Storm.

One sunny day in August, when the plums in the garden had ripened to purple perfection, Eyup came back from the military, looking thinner and darker. He didn't say a word for a long time, only smiled. Then I heard him in the bathroom, talking lovingly to the shampoo bottles, perfumes and creams.

"You don't say hi to your wife, but you chat with your shaving cream?" I asked.

He laughed. "In the army one gets to miss even the tiniest luxuries in life and learns to be grateful for what he has on hand."

"Perhaps depression teaches us the same thing, too," I said. "I've learned to look around with new, appreciative eyes."

"I'm sorry I couldn't be with you," he murmured, pulling me toward him. Then he added pensively, "We could have handled this better."

"What do you mean?"

"Why didn't we ask for help from our families or friends while you were going through that turbulence? Why didn't we hire a nanny to help you? You tried to do everything alone. Why?"

I nodded. "I thought I could manage. I thought I could rock the baby to sleep, feed her healthy food and write my novels. It never occurred to me I wouldn't be able to do this alone. That was my strength and my weakness at the same time."

"From now on, we will do it together," he said tenderly.

"Good," I exclaimed. "Are you going to take care of the baby while I write?"

He paused, a trace of panic flickering in his eyes. "Let's start looking for a nanny."

We did. In ten days we found a nanny from Azerbaijan, a woman larger than life-huge b.r.e.a.s.t.s, teeth capped with gold, a loud voice and a hearty laugh. A bewildering combination of Mary Poppins, Xena the Warrior Princess and Impedimenta-the stout, matriarchal wife of Chief Vitalstatistix and the first lady of the village in Asterix the Gaul. A woman who could say the sweetest words in Turkish, talk a blue streak in Russian, and believed the main problem with Stalin was that he hadn't had a good nanny as a child. She taught us the basics about babies-how to burp them, rock them to sleep, feed them, and still have time for ourselves. She helped us greatly. We all helped one another.