One of those late vacation afternoons, Ryan dropped me, Irie, and Frank off at a beach in Fish Creek, and he headed to Peninsula State Park with Leo and Fern. Their plan was to fish for an hour with hopes of catching and releasing anything with scales and fins. In our corner of the lake, Irie and I collected smooth rocks and stacked them on big boulders, pretending to construct lakefront spas. We took turns massaging our feet with handfuls of sand, pushing stones between each other’s toes.
Across the bay, we could see Ryan fishing with the other half of us. The depths of Lake Michigan separated us from each other, and although I knew our separateness was temporary, I could feel myself sinking into the quicksand of sadness. The cold water pushed bright shards of earth onto the matrix of my foot, and minnows flicked around my ankles. In precisely that moment, another baby seemed like the only solution to my loneliness, a bridge or lifeboat that would unite the halves of our family, making us whole again.
Over the previous decade, I’d watched the EKG of my mental health spike and return to its baseline every fourteen months, but this time around, I’d waited twenty-six months, and I was beginning to plummet far below my functioning threshold. I knew a final pregnancy would lift me up toward happiness one last time before I returned to the doldrums where I’d spent most of my life before becoming a mother.
When we lived in Ann Arbor, I picked fights with Ryan daily. During a snowstorm once, I threw open the kitchen door and launched my wedding ring outside into a snowbank. “Fuck you,” I said. “Fuck this marriage.” Back then, I was crazy, and Ryan was calm. He pulled on his winter boots, trudged outside, maneuvered our vehicle from the carport, cast headlights over the snowy dunes, and traced a tiny hole to my ring at the bottom. This kind of behavior was normal for both of us back then. My depression would rise like reflux; he’d contain it with his patience.
When I was feeling most unhinged, in my early twenties, my suicidal fantasies were linked to symbols of motherhood. I’d close my eyes and ball into fetal position, a child inside an anonymous womb, maybe my own mother’s, as this vessel of a woman hurled herself from balconies into cold Wisconsin waters.
How strange that motherhood itself temporarily cured me. When Ryan began his law practice, people asked, “How does he defend guilty people?” I’d think to myself, if Ryan knowingly combined his DNA with mine in the spirit of new life, setting aside my problems in mental health, he could defend just about anybody.
On our last full day in Door County, the kids and I walked to a candy store, where we handpicked our favorite saltwater taffy from a repurposed claw-foot bathtub. From there we meandered to a toy store, where I excused myself to the restroom. I hung a plastic shopping bag filled with a pound of taffy on a hook. A cool breeze filtered through the window. Sunshine and fluorescent lighting cast me in the spotlight of the public toilet, where once again I sat down and realized I was bleeding. Disappointment stuck in my throat. I never ended up eating anything sweet on that trip, neither taffy nor pie, not even s’mores. Eat your heart out, they say, and I did. Back at our rented cottage, I told Ryan bluntly and plainly, “We didn’t make a baby.” I remember vividly that he started to dance across the gold-and-beige pattern of the peeling linoleum.
When my dad said motherhood possessed the power to cleave open or to heal old wounds, to ameliorate or to exacerbate my depression, he was specifically referring to my perfectionism. Submitting dozens of unnecessary extra-credit assignments in middle school, pushing bedtime to midnight; counting my footsteps and paces, long before Fitbits were invented; and washing our atrium floors until they gleamed, on my hands and knees, when I should have been outside playing—just a few examples from my former obsessive self. People I’d known since motherhood probably couldn’t imagine Laura Jean the fusspot, the purist, hair slicked back into a ballerina’s bun. Motherhood transformed me into somebody blithe, easygoing, and filled with laughter; although Ryan, who’d known me forever, said my seriousness remained tangible, a long thread whipping blind stitches.
Raising children stimulates the dreamlike pleasure of déjà vu. My children seem to have emerged from old film reels, appearing and acting like me but slightly varied, restored, fully embodied, as opposed to remembered fragments. Nothing comforts like familiarity. A kaleidoscopic gene-scape—that recombination and redistribution of my traits and Ryan’s—is just part of the magic. Children also quickly master the art of mimicry. My neighbors’ girls, adopted from Ethiopia, resembled their mother more than my own daughters resembled me. They had studied her facial expressions intently. They were quick understudies, motivated by love. I’d have gambled on their affinity.
I could easily have suffered postpartum depression, but instead, with children underfoot, I began miraculously to appreciate messes, unfinished business, and the unlucky odd number of muddy footprints on my kitchen floor. With a psychiatrist as a father, imagining the worst had come easy, and my perfectionism was a talisman against bad luck. My parents’ divorce had proved to be a coming-of-age event, grooming me to hear awful true-crime stories. My mom chronicled my father’s alleged solecisms and sins, and in turn, my dad upped the ante on storytelling too, phasing out the mole people
