a clarity--

i am reading the blue jay's dance: a birth year by louise erdrich, and really enjoying it. i am going to copy here a passage from it that struck me with a clarity--for some reason! funny, because i am not in newborn throes--my baby is about to turn 2. yet i am still dealing, at times, with the sense of tragic confusion and with the depression she describes. the clarity i get from this passage comes from how she decides what the depression is, and how she decides where the inability to focus comes from, instead of blaming herself. she makes it seem logical, ok, and natural--a part of life, something that will pass. validating, if you see what i mean. thrilling, isn't it, to not be angry at your own brain/ heart! because that just creates a terribly mired and conflicted situation. . .

"Some days it seems that I have not put her down for weeks. I am her existence, after all, the way she gets what she wants, the outlet, the method, the tool of her need. Sometimes I hold my child in one arm, nursing her, and write with the other hand. With no separation of thought and physical being, there are times I live within a perfect circle.

Then there are the other times. Months go by and with the end of spring the dim realization surfaces--I cannot concentrate on one thought, one idea. Our baby's slumbers have shortened until she's a catnapper, sleeping for irregular, short periods. Her rhythms are neccessarily mine, too, and so I've found that allowing the mind to fuse with itself, to solve a task, is not so much a luxury as a mental neccessity, like dreaming. The primary parent of a new infant loses ability to focus, and that in turn saws on the emotions, wears away fragile strings of nerves.

Hormones, milk, heaviness, no sleep, internal joy, all jam the first few months after a baby is born, so that I experience a state of tragic confusion. Most days, I can't get enough distance on myself to define what I am feeling. I walk through a tunnel from one house to the other. It is dark, scraped out of the emotional mess of life, as gray and ridged as an esophagus. I'm being swallowed alive. One these days, suicide is an idea too persistent for comfort. There isn't a self to kill, I think, filled with dramatic pity for who I used to be. That person is gone. Yet, once I've established that I have no personal self, killing whatever remains seems hardly worth the effort. For those dark and stupid days, I have developed a mantra to ward off the radical lack of perspective which is also called depression. . ."