I'm the Xanax now - #152

Hold your breath.

Shangrilogs is a weekly Sunday essay about slow mountain living — exploring our own natures and big nature. Paid subs also get a Wednesday edition, along with the warm, fuzzy feeling of supporting the arts. We keep it kind and curious in these parts. Trespassers will be humbly reminded of their place within the universe.

---

I could smell it when I woke up, the funk. I whiffed, and sat up. The dog was conspicuously missing from bed, along with all three cats. Suspicious. I turned to the baby, sliding a hand gently under his side. Aha. The diaper had sprung a leak on the bed. The baby was still asleep, leaking into the mattress, and I let him lay there next to me for another few minutes. There was a pee pad under the sheet, and these sheets had been leaked on before. We would just wash his sleep sack and wash the sheets. Another day in babydom.

When he finally woke up, arching his back and smiling up at me, I whisked him and his wet sleep sack to the changing table in his room. All of the animals were in his room. Curious. I changed him into a new diaper, then laid him on his small, fluffy play rug to put him in a new outfit since I would need to clean the now wet changing table from the wet clothes.

I put his legs and arms into a new onesie, zipped it up, and went back to the changing table to put the soaked sleepsack and onesie into the hamper. But first, I needed to reset the hamper whose lid had fallen into it, but then I heard the dog throwing up, so I just threw the wet clothes into the hamper with one hand, grabbed a cloth wipe with another, and dove down to catch the dog’s vomit. Half went into the wipe, the other half went on the baby’s arm. Baby laughed. This was funny.

I threw the vomit wipe into the hamper. I threw the dog vomit outfit into the hamper too. Everything is getting washed. I looked at the rug, then thought of the sheets. Maybe the rug would just get wiped.

I comforted the dog, cleaned up the baby, and still, the cats loomed from various perches when normally they are 1) in bed, 2) on the kitchen table, and 3) on the poof in the living room. Those are their spots. Why are they here?

I picked up the hamper with one hand and the baby with the other. We went downstairs to the laundry. I plopped the baby on the floor, grabbed the lid from the hamper, then hulked everything from the hamper directly into the front-loading wash. I put a strip of paper detergent in the compartment, considered the amount of food caked onto the clothes and put an additional strip of paper detergent in the compartment, and off I went.

I made it three, maybe four steps, before off I stopped. There was a clunk. It clunked again. I turned to the washer, sat down the baby, and opened the machine only to be met with the distinct smell of earth. Everything was covered in dirt. Not dirt in the sense of filth — dirt in the sense of dirt. There, in the center of the clothes heap, nestled like a baby bird, was a ceramic plant pot in the shape of a very small giraffe. It was empty.

The cats, I knew immediately. We had noticed the plant in the windowsill suffering the day before, but in our inspections it had only made it to the dresser before we were distracted by something else. It made it to the dresser, to be left there all night, with no supervision. The dresser, next to the hamper, with the lid curiously shoved in.

The cats.

So I pulled all the dirty now dirtier clothes out of the washer, brought the baby upstairs to his dad, then off to the shop for the shop vac. I vacuumed out the water and dirt, tossed some oxyclean into the bin, then a scoop of detergent, and ran the drum clean cycle which I have never used in my life.

I went outside with the heap of fertilized children’s garments and thwacked each wet piece against the open tailgate of the truck until they were the kind of dirty you put in a small washer and not the kind of dirty Tide tries to advertise three times in a commercial break.

Handled. It was only when an hour later I heard, “uh, honey…” that I thought hm. Perhaps not handled. “I just want to know if the washer looks now like it did earlier.” Not promising.

And then I remembered. After I had put the oxyclean and the detergent into the bin, there had already been detergent in the bin, in fact that had been twice as much detergent in the bin as I normally put in the bin and now there was approximately four times the amount of detergent in the bin.

I walked down the stairs like a gangplank, chin held high, very much wondering if the fish might kindly nibble off the rope restraining me before letting me drown.

Fish, known for letting humans drown.

But mercifully, the drum was not full of soap, but rather fur. The drum clean had not only dealt with Mother Earth, but had coughed up what had to have been several years’ worth of cat hair. (And dog hair, he is not blameless.) The fish, at least, came out of this unscathed.

I chuckled, as I wiped the foamy fur mixture from the drum. The plan was to leave the baby in bed with dad and head upstairs to write. The house was in order, we had no weekend plans, I was going to have a dreamy morning and be done by noon.

I laughed at myself. “The plan.” Ok, babe.

I heard another laugh behind me. The baby leaned forward, his hands pressed on the floor between his legs, giggling. He loves laundry. And why wouldn’t he? He never does it. He is merely a guest at the teppanyaki restaurant, watching as things whirl about while mom and dad are wondering if this will be the third time they’ve called the plumber in as many weeks.

But that is the way of the baby. A plant topples? So funny. A fire starts? Hilarious. A plate breaks? Oh, he missed it. Could you try it again? His calamities are both smaller, like a poorly placed gas bubble, and more ambiguous, like boredom (though both are solved by the same thing: pick him up and hand him something he has never been handed before. Tape measurer, spatula, mortar, pestle, tightly sealed jar of peppercorn. It is tightly sealed, right? You checked?)

As advertised, parenting is exhausting. But there is a benefit to that.

Many moons ago, I thought I had a heart problem. It would catch, like a fish, lurching suddenly. And then, also like a fish, I would begin to die. I described this to various doctors. One doctor had prescribed Ativan. It felt like turning on a kettle that couldn’t quite make it to boil. One prescribed Zoloft, which felt like an old landlord painting the same cream paint over the hinges and the outlets, tenant after tenant. A friend gave me some Klonopin, and that felt like four margaritas deep. Finally, I tried Xanax. It felt like I was myself. It felt like I’d never been held up at knifepoint. Never been chased through the snow barefoot to my car. Never been beaten in an alley. Never had a tumor. Never knew the suffocating closeness of being trapped in my own head. It felt like emerging from a chrysalis, beautiful and brand new.

So obviously I thought I shouldn’t take it.

I white knuckled it through most of my panic attacks. I found that physical exhaustion often left me incapable of panicking. My heart simply couldn’t kick into the gear required to make my brain think something was wrong. I biked and I ran and I biked and I ran, but sometimes, panic would win. And when I would find myself closer to the edge of doing something stupid like taking myself to the ER, I would take a Xanax. I didn’t have the money for a superfluous ER visit. I did have the money for Xanax.

Eventually my therapist (praise be the Donna) would retrain my brain around Xanax. It wasn’t meant to be a lifeguard diving into the pool while you battled to the black water of death. Xanax was meant to be the floaties you wore into the pool. Xanax’s role was to prevent you from panicking, to prevent your brain from digging those same pathways deeper and deeper. Take it when you need it, and if it feels good, “well jesus Kelton maybe that’s just who you are when you’re not losing it.”

By the time I got pregnant, Xanax was something I had mostly moved past. Still though, I liked to have the lifeboat attached to my ship. I didn’t plan on the ship sinking, but it was nice to know that if it did, there was a solution that didn’t involve me getting wet. You can’t rely on the fish.

—

“You can’t take it while you’re pregnant.” The midwife glared at me.

“I know that.”

“You can’t take it while you’re breastfeeding either.”

I did not know that, and the flip calendar in my mind sped through many, many, many more months.

“OK,” I said, trying to keep the calendar off my face.

Nine months without Xanax was doable. A year, fine. But nearly two years? My lifeboat? I thought about the lurching, being dragged to death. No wonder the fish don’t help.

I have a vision for my first true day of body autonomy, when W3 is fully weaned, fully capable of being taken care of by something other than my entire existence, and it involves Xanax. I plan to take my small dose, drink a glass of wine, slather retinol on my face, get in the hot tub, and listen to the sound of the heat pump until I think of nothing, softening into the kind of fish you only find in the darkest caverns of the ocean deep.

But for now, I am present. I nurse and I change and I carry and I nap, and the panic has not come. I have not taken Xanax in 17 months, and however many months when I wasn’t counting before that.

While building a baby, and then raising said baby, I have found there has not been room for the idle cruelty of panic attacks. I am either too exhausted or too busy to even consider the future. There is only right now. People say to be present. “It goes by so fast!” they yell, frantically paddling in their own sea of nostalgia, but what else would I be doing? We have no childcare. The only thing I am ever considering is him. I only write when he is with dad, which is where he is right now, downstairs, making noises that indicate he is either bloated or bored or bemoaning the fall of American democracy. It is hard to tell!

In the earliest days of my panic disorder, I would find myself in bed with one hand on my chest, one hand on my head. I was checking my breathing, checking my temperature, checking that I was there. You’re OK, everything’s OK, I’m here, we’ve got this, it’s alright. Over and over.

It is still this way. Hand to chest, hand to head, checking. But it is not my chest, and it is not my head. It is a chest so small as to fit entirely beneath my hand, a head so big I’m not surprised it’s 95th percentile. It is his little body and giant bobblehead that I am checking. And when the gas bubble strikes or the boredom consumes him, there I am.

“You’re OK, everything’s OK, I’m here, we’ve got this, it’s alright.” Over and over.

Also, because we are still in the Age of Disclaimers and not in the Age of Nuance, let it be said that I am not suggesting you have a baby to manage your panic disorder. That is not how I managed mine. It is merely what is currently doing the trick, on top of an earthquake-approved foundation of therapy. I do however suggest getting a bike if you have panic disorder. I stand by that one.

---

Have you lost it? — #60

---