Blue Nights

Motherhunger is so expensive. Sometimes, often, I feel like a tube of need that spends all its time shoving things in one end (lattes, sweaters, pens, cars, relationships, to-do lists) and then dealing with the stress of it all coming out the other end (gas, diarrhea, poop). I’m a simple organism who floods their body with complexities. A baby doesn’t need a lot: the mother’s body, a diaper change, a safe place to sleep where they do not feel alone, but when you take away any of those things you have a hole you could easily spend your entire life trying to fill, or trying to get other people to fill it for you.

Sometimes being adopted feels like being on fire and having someone come up to you and ask you if you have a match. For example, Joan Didion, a writer I adore, sounds like any privileged narcissist who adopted a child. In Blue Nights, the last book she ever wrote, the book about her adopted daughter’s death, Didion wrote of Quintana’s mental health:  

“The name of the condition that seemed to apply was this: ‘borderline personality disorder.’ ‘Patients with this diagnosis are a complex mixture of strengths and weaknesses that confuse the diagnostician and frustrate the psychotherapist.’ So notes a 2001 New England Journal of Medicine review of John G. Gunderson’s Borderline Personality Disorder: A Clinical Guide. ‘Such patients may seem charming, composed, and psychologically intact one day and collapse into suicidal despair the next.’ The review continues: ‘Impulsivity, affective lability, frantic efforts to avoid abandonment and identity diffusion are all hallmarks.

I had seen most of these hallmarks.

I had seen the charm, I had seen the composure, I had seen the suicidal despair.

I had seen her wishing for death as she lay on the floor of her sitting room in Brentwood Park, the sitting room from which she had been able to look into the pink magnolia. Let me just be in the ground,’ she had kept sobbing. ‘Let me just be in the ground and go to sleep.

I had seen the impulsivity.

I had seen the ‘affective lability,’ the ‘identity diffusion.’

What I had not seen, or what I had in fact seen but had failed to recognize, were the ‘frantic efforts to avoid abandonment.’

How could she have ever imagined we could abandon her?

Had she no idea how much we needed her?”

Didion wrote also about a fragment of a novel Quintana was working on as a 13 or 14 year old “just to show you.” The story is about a 14 year old named Quintana who gets pregnant and subsequently rejected by her parents.

‘On the next pages you will find out why and how Quintana died and her friends became complete burnouts at the age of eighteen.’

So ended the novel she was writing just to show us.

Show us what?

Show us that she could write a novel?

Show us why and how she would die?

Show us what she believed our reaction would be?

Now, they didn’t even care any more. 

No.

She had no idea how much we needed her.

How could we have so misunderstood one another?”

In the span of time it took me to copy down Didion’s words, I had two bowls of cereal, three squares of dark chocolate, two gulps of Diet Coke, a handful of salted almonds and some water. I was trying to eat and drink my way out of my skin, but I was still intact and so I had to come back and keep typing the words of an idol of mine saying things that felt like were coming out of the mouth of a moron, coming out of the mouth, perhaps, of my mother, of the rest of the world, of all the people who had not lost their mothers when they were born. As usual, the hate I felt boomeranged back to me, and I ended up overfeeding myself in a way to get grounded, numb. 

The hunger of parents for a baby of their own leads to misunderstandings.

I see myself as a cake that was taken out of the oven before my skin had time to set, and so anything that touches me injures my surface, takes a bit of me away and therefor injures me at my core. Human babies are not born able to take care of themselves, so they are part of a body unit: motherchild. Motherchild is one, and when you split it into mother/child what you get is two torn halves.

What you get is “affective lability”. What you get looks like borderline personality disorder because you took someone and created a situation where they now live on the borderline between two lives: the one where they were motherchild and the one where they are now mother/child. Mother/child is disorder, don’t you get this? How do you not get this? How do you not see? 

Tear your body in half, right down the middle, just put yourself through some saw like a plank of wood and have a left and right half. There you go. That’s what mother/child separation feels like to the brain. 

The hunger of the parents was for a baby to help make the parents feel complete, both individually and as a partnership. A lot of hunger goes into the desire for a baby. People want to eat up their babies, gobble their little toes, breathe in the smell of their hair. The thing is, babies need more than they need to be needed. Babies are supposed to be on the receiving end of care, and then, decades later when their parents are old and infirm, the roles change and the babies are now the parents who take care of the new-old babies.

But when babies raise babies, everyone goes hungry. 

The hunger inside of me is embarrassing, shameful, and frightening. I can’t trust myself not to eat the whole pie if you leave it at my house, and so either I give it back to you, give it to someone else as quickly as possible, or I throw it away as soon as you leave. One slice is not enough. The problem is, one pie is not enough, either. Nothing is enough.

I want to crawl into bed with my mom. I want to hold her. I want her to hold me. 

I got to do this when she was dying, and I felt so much myself, so at home. My body was tending to her body, and her backbone was pressed up against my chest and she was so thin and frail and open to love—she couldn’t help it—she was too sick to have up any walls and so there I was, both revulsed by the familiar thinness—thin nightgown, thin shoulders—and driven by what felt like instinct to try to get my body to pass right through her body, to finally feel drenched in mother. I thought I could make her better. I thought my body could do miracles and shrink the tumors, end the pain, and bring her back, singing, to us, to me. 

Why could I not will her well? 

It made no sense to me when I could not convince my first mother to meet me and it made no sense to me when I could not convince my second mother to find a way to beat death and stay.