How much of my baby complex was physical, and how much was psychological? As medical researchers discovered that synthetic oxytocin was a potentially viable treatment for opioid addicts, I began to wonder how I’d fare when and if my own organic supply began to taper. Would I need to inject, imbibe, or inhale the man-made variety just to avoid withdrawal symptoms?
It’s no surprise that sex was my gateway drug. During our high school years, when Ryan and I began officially dating, just seventeen-year-old kids, we’d make love wherever we could: a parking lot between Oshkosh and Madison on a summer day; beneath the foothills on campus at the University of Colorado; eight times one weekend to the soundtrack of a televised Cardinals–Braves playoff series at an Estes Park hotel, paid for with a buy-one-night-get-one-night-free coupon from the back of a Boulder phone book; in my Wisconsin Avenue apartment with a view of the state capitol; in Madrid, where daytime and nighttime were transposed; at Niagara Falls to the onslaught of hydro power; and in Prague, in the communist-style dormitory, where we copulated passionately and quietly behind heavy iron curtains. We didn’t know yet that by the time we’d accumulate more than our replacement value in children, we’d need to pay babysitters just to make love, clandestinely, in his office, on the eighth floor of the old bank building.
When Ryan was appointed by the state to defend Eaves, she and Ryan met there with MEG agents, who were plotting a strategy to bring down the head of the largest-ever heroin-delivery drug ring in Winnebago County: eighteen thousand dosage units of crack cocaine and ninety thousand dosage units of heroin, a multimillion-dollar venture worth more than fifty arrests. MEG guys, working undercover, craggy and weathered as real users, layered Ryan’s desk with mug shots of suspects. They matched numbers to faces, dates to purchases, and dirty deals to previous criminal records. Jabbing her fingers like darts popping balloons, Eaves burst one after another until the MEG agents decided her statement was substantial enough to win the grand prize—a conspiracy case against Lazarus Jackson, the big shot. If Eaves agreed to testify, consistent with her statement, in the slim chance of trial, the state agreed to amend her charges to possession of drug paraphernalia.
This is what I’d think about when we’d retreat to Ryan’s office late at night, after a few drinks and a good meal, the babysitter’s clock ticking. I felt a little exhilarated and a little filthy about lovemaking there. And much like the purity of a drug supply, sex, for us, was always changing. When we were twenty-five and stopped using birth control, we expected many more months of uninhibited sex. We drank sidecars and made love, tucked inside the red walls of our third-story pretty-penny apartment in Madison. It was like mating inside Georgia O’Keeffe’s red canna lily. But within three weeks our first baby was conceived and growing fast.
Pregnancy nausea astounded me. I slept odd hours, alone in bed, exhausted from teaching and desperate to deaden my insatiable hunger pangs. My first job after graduate school was teaching at EAGLE School near Madison, earning a handsome salary of $26,000 per year, no benefits. I’d drop Ryan off on the UW campus, our source for student-spouse health insurance, and then journey to my four-in-one position: Spanish teacher, English teacher, student council advisor, and drama director. I took only one sick day that year, the second Monday of the first semester, as I curled into a ball and wept, wondering how I’d grow a child while mothering nearly fifty adolescents for seven hours a day all year long.
Halfway through the pregnancy, when my sickness retreated, I felt robust, but my conversion from Ryan’s nighttime lover to round-the-clock mother figure was imminent. Upon Irie’s arrival, I discovered something more pleasurable than sex—the self-indulgent and gluttonous ritual of maternity. I latched her mouth to my breast, incubating her nakedness on mine. Sexual pleasure paled in comparison to this high. Thanks to oxytocin, Mother Nature’s liquid bliss, not to mention the divine event of nurturing my daughter. Irie, also known as Oxytocin Girl in my world of everyday superheroes, had rescued me.
I would later discover in the course of my research all over the internet that journalists compared babies to drugs, based on neuroscience. As it turns out, my brain had been commandeered by motherhood; I’d never get it back, and this exhilarated me. Although I could not yet articulate the needs of my limbic system at that time, intuitively, I didn’t just want a fourth baby. I needed one.
“How would you describe the feeling you get from shooting heroin?” I asked McNally.
“I’m free,” he said. “Take a nap for five minutes, wake up to no worries. It’s a buzz I would want to keep forever.” Better than pot, better than meth, better than oxy. OxyContin was a popular choice for McNally and other addicts between 1995, when the FDA approved it, and 2010, when Purdue Pharma LP reformulated the opiate so it could no longer be crushed to powder and snorted. Efforts to recodify OxyContin as abuse-resistant were so successful that the majority of abusers picked up a heroin habit instead. It was suddenly cheaper, more available, and more efficient to use.
Oxy from Greek means sharp, pointed, acidic, intense. Perhaps, by way of an oxymoron, it might also mean smooth, because oxytocin furbished the edge off my depression, a feat traditional antidepressants—Prozac, Zoloft, Celexa, Wellbutrin—had failed to accomplish. In heroin overdoses, opiates cause bodies to relax so profoundly, they forget to breathe. In the same way, I’d feel laced and placid upon breastfeeding, the glorious “pleasure hormone” released in generous but modulated shots by my pituitary gland, as it had been during orgasm and childbirth, only stronger. At my breasts, my babies—fuzzy, eyes dilated like pain-relief tablets, fingers clenched into little heartbeats—sucked hard enough to pull euphoria from the dark chasm inside me and force me to notice
