The wail of sirens disturbs the stillness of our shushed suburban street. My seven-month-old daughter is heavy and soft in my arms. Her face still flushed, she is quiet. No longer coughing. Or sputtering. She hears the noise and points outside, turning her questioning blue eyes to mine. I am wondering too. What am I going to say? Why was I so quick to call for help? From the living room window, she and I watch emergency vehicles stop at the sidewalk in front of our house. The bordering garden droops in the torpor of midday heat. With a mixture of relief and embarrassment, I see she is breathing without any effort. She squirms, reaching to the window, and I automatically stiffen my arms and move my weight from my back foot to my front foot to support her. She’s my fourth child. I should know how to do this.
A few minutes earlier, I’d found her sitting on the living room floor with a bright orange strand of Raggedy Ann’s hair hanging from her lips, the doll still clutched in her small, sweaty hands. Had she eaten more strands? The hair was made out of rough-to-the-touch, straggly yarn that easily separated into slinky wet pieces. As I bent down to pick her up, she began to cough. I pried open her mouth with my hand and ran a finger along the roof, cheeks, and teeth to clear out any other stray pieces. I didn’t find any. Then she started coughing again and I couldn’t tell if she was startled by my sudden strong action or if she was choking on another piece of yarn in her throat. Had she eaten more strands? That was it. I wasn’t taking any chances. I called 9-1-1.
Two months earlier, in another suburb across the city, emergency vehicles had arrived at my friend Lindsay’s house. I didn’t find out what happened until a couple of days later, when a mutual friend called me. She said, “I’m sorry to tell you this, but Lindsay died. She had postpartum depression, and, I guess, it got the best of her.” I had been holding my baby in the nursery when I answered the phone. I put her down in the crib and stepped away from her. “What?” I said. I couldn’t understand the meaning of her words. Lindsay? The best of her?Dead? It didn’t make any sense. Lindsay wasn’t depressed. At least, I hadn’t thought she was. How could the best of her be dead?
Although Lindsay and I had attended the same college, we met years later at a local gathering for our college club. I liked her instantly. She was easy to talk to, smart, and kind. We had daughters the same ages, and eventually sons who shared the same first name. Her father-in-law lived in the same town as I, and when Lindsay’s house was renovated, her family moved in with her father-in-law for several months. During that time, we had many playdates with our kids. once I admired her kids’ tea party dishes and the next day she left a set of the dishes on my doorstep as a gift. That’s who Lindsay was. She was thoughtful, generous. After their renovation was completed, her husband got a job offer in India and they moved there for a year. The family had only been back in the States for a few months when Lindsay’s son was born in late December, a week after I gave birth to my fourth child. Although she and I hadn’t stayed close while she was away, we planned to get together again. Soon: once we both adjusted to having new babies and larger families. I looked forward to seeing her, to becoming closer friends.
Outside my house, the sirens stop. Taking a moment to compose myself, I open the front door and step aside, allowing the humid summer air and four paramedics to enter my front hall. They stuff the space with their bodies, the heavy smell of metal and sweat, machines and men. We say hello and they wait, expectantly, for me to explain the reason for my call. As I begin my quickly rehearsed speech, heat rises in my cheeks.
“I’m sorry,” I say, “I think she swallowed some yarn from a doll she was chewing on, and I thought she might be choking.” I stumble on my words when I look down at my baby, and notice my bare feet. The stripes on the wall behind the paramedics began to waver and I put my hand on the stair banister to steady myself. How do I make them understand the urgency and alarm I felt earlier? The paramedics stand next to each other and wait for me to continue.
Then, watching my face, one asks, “Are you alone in the house?”
“No,” I respond, “my kids are all here. My husband will be home later.”
“Are there any other adults in the house right now?” My eyes sweep the rooms around us. Does it look like there are any other adults here?
“No, just me.” I’m alone in the house with my kids like I am every day of every week, doing what all mothers do—caressing, singing, nursing, holding, clapping, exclaiming, feeding, stroking, sleeping, dressing, drinking, rocking, cleaning, talking, feeding, changing, walking, washing, drying, sweeping, wiping, brushing, folding, chopping, cooking, dozing, cutting, running, feeding, ignoring, cajoling, begging, pleading, yelling, crying, screaming, waiting for my husband’s car to pull into the driveway.
The paramedic continues, “How old are the other children?” My eldest daughter, standing close to me, listens intently. “Seven, five, and three,” I respond. As I answer, I remember that this might have been the second choking incident of that summer. Another time when the baby had a coughing fit, I took her over to a neighbor’s house, to a woman who was a first-grade teacher and probably knew all kinds of things about children. I asked her if she thought my daughter was choking. The baby had just started to eat solid foods and it was difficult to tell sometimes if she swallowed the food, or stored it in her round cheeks. I just wanted another set of adult eyes on her, to reassure me. My neighbor laughed, waved away my question, and said, “No, she looks fine.” My neighbor’s husband said nothing, just looked at me, askance. Now, standing across from the paramedics, I see myself through their eyes: a woman, about forty, dressed in jeans, hair pulled into a messy ponytail, in a house with four small children, who called 911 because she thought her daughter, her youngest of four, was choking on a piece of doll hair. What are they thinking? Are they wondering why I couldn’t see for myself that the baby was fine? Are they assessing me?
My first child, a daughter, was born in early March, 2002, in the middle of a snowstorm, after a typically long, dark, Chicago winter. Less than a week after she was born, if I tried to sleep, film clips streamed on a repeating loop behind my eyelids—scenes with women bruised, beaten, raped, murdered. How would I ever keep my daughter safe? Sometime in the months after her birth, my mother-in-law asked me if I was depressed. I don’t remember how I responded, but I do remember not wanting to carry my daughter into the kitchen. There were too many hot surfaces. Too many sharp objects. In May, while we were away for a weekend visiting my parents, our house was burglarized. It felt like an intimate violation. I couldn’t bear to imagine a stranger in my daughter’s room, touching her clothes or crib. One night in July, I woke up after taking some cold medication and couldn’t breathe. Too weak to stand, I crawled down the hallway to ask my husband to call an ambulance. At the hospital, a technician asked what happened to me. I said I didn’t know. All my bloodwork and tests were normal, except for my potassium level. So they inserted an IV into my arm and pumped the cool, burning liquid into my body. For a week in August, I wasn’t able to get out of bed and walk down the hall to my daughter’s bedroom. I didn’t know why I had no energy. Why I was so depleted. When my daughter wanted to nurse, my husband brought her to me. I couldn’t control my thoughts, my visions, and if I told anyone what I was experiencing, I thought they would take the baby away from me. Six months after my daughter’s birth, I called a friend who was an ER doc and asked her to come over. I told her I could see myself hanging in the bathroom. She said, “Now you’re scaring me.” I don’t remember what happened after that. I don’t think I got help. Eventually, I guess, I felt better. By my daughter’s first birthday, I was pregnant with my second child. Followed by the birth of two more children before my oldest turned seven. My husband and I planned each of these children, and yet because of my earliest experience of motherhood, I knew there was a possibility of experiencing postpartum depression again.
In subsequent pregnancies and postpartum periods, I watched for signs of trouble. I was careful. I avoided things that triggered me. Movies, news stories, Oprah, talking to my mother. However, the loss of my friend due to postpartum psychosis sent me reeling back to my early days and months of being a mother. In the midst of grieving, questions about her death ran endlessly through my mind, and I felt her presence just over my left shoulder. If I went into my basement, I had to turn on all the lights so there were no dark corners. If I glanced up quickly, I thought I might catch a glimpse of her. Even in death, she continued to dutifully perform her motherly tasks—washing the dishes, switching loads of laundry, changing diapers—right alongside me. Her hands moving as my hands moved. She was my shadow; I was hers. She was so close. I kept seeing flashes of her—the blue stone in her wedding band, her surprisingly large hands and feet, her dark curly hair. I heard her voice speaking to her children, saying their names. Her death didn’t make any sense to me. I wanted to go back and tell her about my struggle with postpartum depression. I wanted her to know she wasn’t alone. I wanted to pay more attention to her and change her mind. I was so preoccupied one evening I almost drove through a red light. I knew then that my grief and anxiety was getting out of control and I called a therapist.
In my front hall, the paramedics stare at me and my mind prickles. Do they think something is wrong with me? I restate my reason for calling 9-1-1. “She was choking and making noises like she was having trouble breathing. I just wanted to be sure she was okay.”
The paramedic looks down again at my daughter, checks her face, her breathing, and, perhaps, makes up his mind about me as well. His face settles. “She seems okay, I think.”
“Yes, I think so too. She does seem fine now,” I respond, dismissing them as quickly as I can. “Okay, thanks. Thanks for coming out. Sorry to have bothered you. Thanks again.”
A few years after her death, when stepping into Lindsay’s mind and body posed little risk to me, I sat down at my desk and wrote what I imagined her last hour might have been like.
It was a sunny morning, four days after Mother’s Day. Trees jammed with chirping birds. Lindsay hired a babysitter to take the girls to school that morning because she wanted to be alone with the baby. And when the babysitter arrived the girls were fed and dressed. She kissed each one of them, hugged them tightly, taking a moment to look at each of their faces. Seven and five. Her beautiful girls. She said goodbye and watched them walk down the driveway to the sidewalk. The school was only four blocks away. They would be there early and could play on the playground until the bell rang.
She closed the door, and walked back to the kitchen, swooping the baby out of his highchair to hear his squeaky laugh. It didn’t matter if he was done with his breakfast or not, she wanted to nurse him. She carried him upstairs, jostling him on her hip. Soft and warm, curls stuck to the back of his sweaty neck, heavy in her arms for almost five months old. She sang and cooed to him as she laid him on the changing table, and he grabbed a strand of her long dark hair as it dangled over his face. She gently batted it away from him so she could see his smile as she sang to him. When she finished, she sat down in the nursing chair, and lifted her shirt so that he found her nipple easily. Short, sharp tugs and bursts of milk at first, and then as he settled down, longer gulps of contentment, milk draining from her. She let him nurse for as long as he liked, and when she finally pulled him away from her breast, she looked into his easy brown eyes, whispered a prayer, and laid him in his crib. She knew she had to do this part quickly, before the babysitter returned. She pulled her arms away from him, turned on his mobile, and walked out the door, leaving it halfway open so the babysitter would hear him if he cried.
She looked into each of the bedrooms, just for a moment, the sun streaming and lighting up the hallway. There wasn’t much time. She headed to the basement. Everything was waiting for her. She’d set it up the night before. As she turned and closed the door to the basement, she locked it. Just to be sure.
I wrote about the morning she died to see what was there for me. And what I could give to her.
Then I let her go.
In the meantime, the soft downy fuzz of my baby’s head and the scent of her newly born flesh grounds me. And the joy I feel when I’m holding her body pressed against mine; there is nothing else like it. She is mine; I am hers. As I usher the paramedics out the door, I’m greeted by a perfume of heat mixed with dirt. With my daughter in my arms, her face no longer flushed, I watch them walk down our paved stone path, past the roses tangled with coneflowers, phlox twining with lavender, catmint. The men get into their shiny vehicles and each door closing resounds off the hot asphalt. They turn on the engines and drive into the cul-de-sac to turn around. Coming back again, they drive away from our little yellow house. The sirens are silent.
Julie Lambert writes creative nonfiction, flash fiction, and poetry. She’s currently working on her memoir, Shed 1,000 Bodies. She is a graduate of The Writer’s Hotel and a recipient of an Individual Artist Support grant from the Illinois Arts Council. She has performed in live lit venues in New York and Chicago. Additionally, she is deeply interested in bettering women’s lives, particularly women and children. To that end, she has worked as a birth doula with Chicago Volunteer Doulas, trained with Dr. Uma Dinsmore-Tuli in well woman yoga therapy, and studied treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder at the Chicago Center for Integration and Healing. She has a BA in English Language and Literature from Smith College, and a master’s in English Language and Literature from Loyola University of Chicago. She lives outside of Chicago with her husband and four children.