Puppies, my postpartum depression, and literary theory
I promise it's all connected
Brett and I got a puppy after a few months of dating when we were 12 [read: 26]. I don’t recommend anyone do this! The odds are very good you will break up and experience a stressful canine custody battle! But we were young and in love and very silly so we got a dog and I devoted myself to being the best puppy caregiver I could be. His name was Paddington and he was ridiculous and my love for him was immediate and effortless. Here’s a photo of us in the golden days of yore.
Paddington was not a perfect dog, but he instantly felt like my dog. I never for a moment doubted his place in my life and despite introducing countless disruptions to my days, Paddington inhabited the space in my heart I’d been taught babies should and would inhabit. I quite easily could’ve written the following Instagram caption about Paddy and would have meant it.
Welcome to our third-floor Astoria walk-up sweet Paddington. I can’t remember life without you.
Becoming a first-time dog-owner, in other words, was the first and only time I’ve experienced the ease of love at first sight. It was quite literally puppies and rainbows and nary a dark feeling was felt.
Paddy moved with us from New York City to New Hampshire, where he immediately settled into his life as a country squire. He indulged our desire for human offspring [begrudgingly], and trained our three children to essentially leave him alone in their grabby baby/toddler days. As an elderly dog, he made sleep look like art.
He died last year at the age of 15, and led, by all accounts, a great doggy life. Despite being of an advanced age, his death was traumatic and sudden. He started seizing at 6:13 AM and couldn’t stop. By the time Brett got him to the ER vet (still seizing), it was obvious that he needed to be euthanized. Emergency surgery on a 15-year-old dog with highly dubious chances of meaningful recovery was not a real option.
I grieved. Of course. But I also had three kids, so it was easy to feel “ok” after a few days simply due to the relief of doing. We knew we’d eventually get another dog, but didn’t know when, and in the meantime soothed ourselves with my parents’ dog, who lives with us when my dad winters in Florida.
Last month, we started seriously looking into welcoming another dog into the family, and the first flutters of anxiety started to creep in when the problem of choice arose: this cute dog or that cute dog. We exhaustively weighed pros and cons and ultimately decided on that cute dog.
On Tuesday, three days prior to driving to western Massachusetts to pick up the chosen dog, I sat Brett down and essentially told him he’d need to be the primary dog caregiver until the busyness of book stuff had died down. I was and am pretty consistently racked with pre-pub nerves, and all of a sudden, the notion of getting a dog RIGHT NOW felt like a monstrously ill-timed decision. But Brett assured assured assured me that he was on top of all things dog and that my high maintenance morning routine (and many of my other high maintenance routines) would remain unaffected. I reasoned that puppy training was easier in springtime New Hampshire than, for example puppy training in February New Hampshire. And the puppy really was quite cute.
The puppy was even cuter in person despite being a little more timid than I’d anticipated. He didn’t make a peep during the 3 hour car ride, during which Brett and I listened to a murder podcast because both of felt like nervous wrecks/people who had just committed a crime.
We got home and I quickly left to pick up our youngest from preschool. Brett and I were abuzz with excitement - we couldn’t wait to surprise the kids with the puppy because what’s a better kid surprise than a puppy? The almost-four-year looked befuddled and enquired about the dog’s owners. We told him the puppy was our new dog and the almost-four-year old said he wanted Paddy.
I felt a pang of mild devastation but he’s an almost-four-year-old so I shook it off - the big kids would give me gleeful reaction I craved!
Obviously the big kids didn’t give me the gleeful reaction I craved!
Despite smiling and demonstrating a decent level of interest, it was not the “A puppy!” moment I had hoped for. There was no jumping up and down. No squealing.
The puppy is 5 months old so doesn’t have that 16-week floppy-in-your-face puppy energy, which may or may not have induced the “A puppy!” moment from my kids, but the lack of the “A puppy!” moment made me instantly second-guess our decision to get an older puppy instead of a puppy-puppy even though we had decided on the older puppy because he’s marginally house-trained which is a very good reason to get an older puppy as opposed to a puppy-puppy!
Before bed, I bent to pet the puppy and he sort of ducked away from my hand which made me cry for the first time. I sat rigidly in the corner of the couch as Brett attempted to assure assure assure me that the puppy would relax and settle in and it was normal to have Big Feelings about Big Life Moments but I was in rigid sadness mode which nothing but time can release me from. I went to bed. Brett slept downstairs with the puppy.
On Saturday, I woke up feeling tight dread, the all-encompassing kind without any discernible edges to peel back or see beyond. The last time I’d felt so despondent was when a doctor suggested I might have the baby blues after the birth of my first child. I remember the utterance of the phrase “baby blues” making me feel bleaker than ever because it was so clearly a misunderstanding of what I was experiencing at the time, which was existential, dark, and terrifying.
I did The Class and cried and tried to feel comforted by my fitness instructor mommies but the endorphins didn’t work and the tears weren’t cathartic enough to blast through my growing depression so I spent the majority of the day hunched in a chair with a crossword puzzle. Intellectually, I could see that the puppy was already warming up to us and our chaos, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that his arrival upset the balance of our household, that the energy of the house was off. He was a sweet dog, but he didn’t feel like our dog. Paddy was our dog. I felt regret, I felt disappointment, and I felt a sort of shame that I had not only made an incorrect decision, but that I had foolishly expected to feel simple joy, that I had expected my emotions to be easy.
I was mad at myself for falling for the oldest trick in the book: expecting to feel a certain way based on a certain event transpiring.
Similarly, when I was gripped by not-yet-diagnosed postpartum depression, I understood that my body had gone through a cataclysmic event and that the existence of a new human where previously there had been only intention and later a swollen belly was as big of a change as one could expect to experience in life. I understood that such a transition would (of course!) coincide with Big Feelings but the dullness of a depressive cloud sometimes feels worse than the sharpness of rage or the clarity of deep sadness. A sudden burst of anger or sudden onset of hiccuppy tears are comfortingly temporary. Even in the midst of a body-wracking sob or a red rage that makes you want to smash things, a part of you is conscious of being on a ride with a beginning, middle, and an end. These types of Big Feelings follow a familiar dramatic arc. Rise, crest, and fall.
Depression is different because it is everywhere and everything all at once. It’s you. It’s the air. It’s someone else’s easy laughter. It’s the toast you happily ate yesterday but which chokes you today.
My brother, sister-in-law, and their kids came over on Saturday afternoon which helped. My sister-in-law provoked some latent grieving for Paddy and the specificity of these tears felt so much better than the dullness. We talked about names. She assured me I’d feel entirely different within a week and her certainty was exactly what I needed. We talked about the strangeness of loving creatures with cruelly short life spans. We talked about the psychic differences between getting a first dog as a childless 12-year-old [read: 26-year-old] and getting a second dog as a 41-year-old mom of three (already emotionally wobbly thanks to the impending publication of her first book!). A friend texted me that her experience bonding with a new pet as a mom was radically different from bonding with a new pet as a childless twenty-something. It all helped.
It’s nearly a week later and my sister-in-law was right. I do feel almost entirely different. The depression has mostly lifted and been replaced by a general tenderness and susceptibility to weepiness (hugging my kids, watching Pixar movies, hearing the peepers at night, an interviewer reading a line aloud from my book).
The puppy, who we named Sam for one day before switching it to Harry despite several extended family members preferring Glenn and one sorta brilliant friend suggesting Gary, and who the almost-four-year-old insists is calling Grassy, has shed the vast bulk of his shyness and is happily trying to eat every non-edible object he comes across. His paws are deliciously blocky.
Finished copies of Momfluenced arrived yesterday and I filmed the obligatory box-opening video despite feeling a curious blankness upon seeing my beautiful books (they really are so beautiful!) for the first time which reminded me anew that Big Life Moments have always been hard for me. It’s so infinitely human to dream about one’s future self feeling joy or elation or love or pride or certainty as a way to navigate the vicissitudes and undulations of the present. The present eludes ownership, while fantasies of future selves feeling future feelings are much more easy to grasp hold of. This moment is over. This next moment is over. This feeling has passed. This feeling is creeping in. But the future stays still and can be whatever you need or want it to be. You can be the author of the future whereas you are really only a supporting character of the present.
I discovered the work of Lauren Berlant while researching Momfluenced (the last chapter of which is heavily indebted to her theory of “cruel optimism”), and in an analysis of how the structure and accepted rules of genre impact not only literary theory but the ways we make sense of our lives, Berlant writes this: “Genres provide an affective expectation of the experience of watching something unfold, whether that thing is in life or in art.”
The genre of Big Life Moments invite us to nurture expectations of the future perhaps because we so badly want to witness our own lives unfold and eke the same sense of satisfaction from our experiences that so readily accessible from a rom-com or a narrative of motherhood which promises uncomplicated love and complete fulfillment.
In an essay on Berlant’s notion of genre, Virginia Jackson argues that Berlant views the rigidity of genre and the promise of happy endings (the happy ending of the baby, the happy ending of the puppy, the happy ending of the book) as possible impediments to joy. Jackson notes that as neatly packaged linear genres become “more fictitious and less attainable,” our expectations of future bliss/success/achievement (what Berlant calls “fantasies of the good life”) may become less integral to how we see ourselves in the world.
(If the mortgage for the house with the picket fence is unattainable, maybe that genre will give way to more sustainable housing; if weddings are too expensive, maybe there will be fewer disappointed and mistreated brides; queer and trans modes of adaptation in these as in other respects become models for our common survival.) Because women are made of such investments, they have a lot of practice in adjustments of scale, and in this way as well women are calibrated to the critical history of the present. We have serious skills in managing the treachery of genre.
Jackson’s mention of women being uniquely experienced in the management of expectation and the tyranny of genre makes sense to me. Girls and women are taught to prioritize and mold their lives around Big Life Moments from the jump. First Crush. First Period. First Heartbreak. First Sex. First Love. First Job. Marriage. Motherhood. Menopause. It makes sense to me that a person conditioned to make meaning from their lives by working towards Big Life Moments would also be uniquely prone to feeling hollow, disappointed, or even depressed when asked to experience those Big Life Moments in real time. Conversely, it’s difficult for me to even conceptualize a life that isn’t organized into a series of disparate milestones or chapters.
Despite most of my middle school teachers teaching me that an essay should be neatly contained to five paragraphs and always end with a clear conclusion, this is an essay aligned with the roots of the word! “Essay” stems from the Latin word exigere, which means “ascertain” or “weigh,” the Old English word assay, which means “attempt,” and the Old French word essai, which means “trial.”
So this is me “attempting” to make meaning, to “weigh” what a sudden depressive episode triggered by an objectively adorable puppy might help us “ascertain” about the stories we tell ourselves about our own lives.
Re: depression, this podcast episode made me feel seen as hell, and
's recent newsletter about the full moon in Libra invited me to give myself some grace and blame my fragile mental state on the cosmos.
Would like to be able to heart this times infinity. I so completely relate to Big Life Moment Letdown and you absolutely nailed it with how girls, in particular, are taught to organize our lives and measure our worth by these (so often inevitably disappointing) milestones. Also Sam/Harry/Grassy is adorable. (But I so get it.)
I brought a dog to my marriage - Tera, named for Bridge to Terabithia. A 110 pound mixed breed who was perfection. She died suddenly 7 days before my oldest was born. Our vet was the first to say her spirit passed to my son. We have had 3 dogs since, and they have all been who we needed at the time.