It Sucked and Then I Cried Read online

  IT SUCKED

  and then

  I CRIED

  Simon Spotlight Entertainment

  A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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  Copyright © 2009 by Blurbodoocery, Inc.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Armstrong, Heather B.

  It sucked and then I cried : how I had a baby, a breakdown, and a much needed margarita / Heather B. Armstrong.—1st Simon Spotlight Entertainment hardcover ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4169-5914-4

  ISBN-10: 1-4169-5914-9

  1. Armstrong, Heather B.—Family. 2. Motherhood—Utah—Salt Lake City. 3. Salt Lake City (Utah)—Biography. I. Title.

  CT275.A8219A3 2008

  306.874'3092—dc22

  [B] 2008038999

  Visit us on the World Wide Web:

  http://www.SimonSays.com

  For Mary Krause Fowler, the teacher who encouraged me to rhyme

  Contents

  Prologue

  1. Let the Anxiety Commence

  2. How to Exploit an Unborn Baby

  3. A Twenty-pound Basketball With Legs and Arms

  4. Dressing Like a Concubine in Humpty Dumpty’s Harem

  5. Labor to the Tune of Janet Jackson’s Nipple

  6. You Have to Feed the Baby…Through Your Boobs

  7. Sympathy for the World

  8. It’s All Fun and Games Until Someone Pokes Their Eye Out With a Baby

  9. The Dive That Turned Into a Belly Flop

  10. Your Biological Clock Is a Dumbass

  11. Other Mothers: Your Harshest Critics

  12. Trusting the Wisdom of a Dog

  13. Finally, Proof That I Was in the Room When She Was Conceived

  14. Heather, Interrupted

  15. Her Screamness Who Screams a Lot Every Day With the Screaming

  16. If Your Wife Is Pregnant, You Might Want to Skip This One

  17. My Arms Spread Completely Wide

  18. I Never Thought I Would Become This Woman

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Photographic Insert

  Prologue

  Many years ago I started a personal website so that I could share my thoughts on pop culture with a few of my friends scattered across the country. I wrote about movies and music and dissected the plot lines from short-lived sitcoms, sometimes adding a paragraph or two about the men in my life. Within a year my audience had grown from a few friends to thousands of strangers all over the world. More and more I found myself writing about my personal life, and eventually I started writing about my office job and how much I wanted to strangle my boss, often using words and phrases that would embarrass a sailor. When the company I worked for found my website, they fired me, walked me to my car with a cardboard box full of my belongings, and frisked me to make sure I hadn’t stolen a stapler. Suddenly confronted with what I had done and who I had become, I took down my website because I knew I was about to have a nervous breakdown. And I didn’t want to do it publicly.

  Within six months I had put the website back online, although by that time I had learned to approach my writing with a heightened sensitivity to boundaries. I still wrote about my personal life, but I made sure to write about people in a way that they would never be upset when they showed up in one of my stories. Most of the stories at the time were about my new husband and how unemployment had forced us to move from Los Angeles to my mother’s basement in Utah, and they would soon chronicle the purchase of our first house, the agonizing decision over paint chips, and the morning we saw a second line show up on a pregnancy test.

  Pregnancy was an endless trove of content, and as my body changed I shared with my audience how I felt like I had been possessed by a hostile host organism. And although my website brought me a lot of comfort during those months, I truly believed that I would give it all up once I had the baby. I didn’t think there would be time to maintain a website when my days would be filled with diapers and breast pads and hobbling to and from the crib.

  But then I had that baby, and immediately everything in my life opened up with the same speed that it fell apart. My world expanded with a sympathy for every other human who had brought a child into their lives, but I had never before felt so isolated or alone. There were many days when the only way I could survive another hour was by writing about it.

  So I kept writing about it, and then I had a nervous breakdown. Publicly.

  The nine months of that pregnancy and the nine months after I brought the baby home were the most transforming period of my life. I had never flown so high, nor had I ever sunk so low. Hour by hour I searched for something to laugh about so that at the end of the day I could catch my breath instead of giving in to an overwhelming sense of hopelessness. A nuclear bomb had gone off in my living room, and although I had had nine months to prepare for the mess, it took me nine months to piece everything back together.

  Luckily I collected notes throughout the cleanup, and when I finally stepped out of darkness and into daylight I realized just how close I had come to giving in, and how crucial it had been for me to share my journey. I don’t think I would have survived it had I not offered up my story and reached out to bridge the loneliness. This is that story.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Let the Anxiety Commence

  My husband has great hair, but even more impressive than that, he has impeccable taste in socks. And then there’s his soft skin, pale white and scented with aftershave, always tempting me to press my nose in an ugly way to the side of his neck. He is a good person, someone who genuinely cares about other people and wants to see other people succeed. He loves his friends and his family, he doesn’t cheat on his taxes, and he usually lets me have the last bite of ice cream. Most important, he has gigantic, bearlike hands, perfect for opening stubborn pickle jars and for holding me tightly when I’m freaking out.

  His name is Jon, and together we had a baby.

  I had wanted to be able to say that since our first date, a late breakfast at a dirty diner in Los Angeles a few years ago. I remember looking across the wobbly table, over a plate of bacon and buttered toast that I was too nervous to eat, and knowing that I wanted children with eyes like his, a piercing pale green. That afternoon after I said good-bye, after I kissed him gently next to the large swath of eyebrow that starts on one side of his head and continues uninterrupted across his forehead, I called my father and told him to write this name down: Jon Armstrong. Because he was the man I was going to marry.

  A year later we eloped on a cliff at Yosemite National Park. It was a sudden decision, an idea we tossed around for barely a month, and we kept it secret from everyone we knew except his mother, and my mother, and my father. There was no way I could get married without telling my parents as I had put them through sufficient heartache already by leaving the Mormon faith that they had brought me up in, voting Democrat, and regularly reading Noam Chomsky. The best way I can describe the dynamic between me and my parents is that they would rather have me addicted to porn than donating money to the ACLU.

  I remember calling my parents to let them know what we were doing, and I was a little nervous that my mother would freak out and try to talk me out of it, or maybe even hang up. But both of my parents were sur
prisingly thrilled that I was getting married. They thought it was the most responsible decision I had made as an adult, probably because it meant that they no longer had to be embarrassed that their youngest and wildest child was living in sin. Although, because I was not getting married in a Mormon temple, I was still throwing wrenches into their plans for me as a child, the biggest of which was that a non-temple wedding meant that I would not get to be with them in the hereafter and would instead end up in the part of Heaven reserved for thieves, murderers, rapists, and people who own autographed copies of Bill Clinton’s head shot.

  My parents have always loved Jon, sometimes more than they love me, and not just because it was mostly his idea for us to move to Utah to be closer to them. He is the more conservative one in our relationship, the one who is always turning down the radio, and I’m pretty sure that they think he saved me from living a long, lonely life by myself. Not because I don’t have many great qualities, and I’ll just go ahead and trot those out right now because my skill set is impressive. I have very nice elbows, not too pointy or too round. I can boil water. I can also parallel park a small car. Sometimes I am a nice enough person that I let someone else win at Scrabble. See?

  My parents were worried that I’d end up a bitter spinster covered in cat hair because I inherited many of the annoying qualities of their own brothers and sisters. I can be loud and say inappropriate things, I will always laugh at a fart joke, and I often don’t look in the mirror before I leave the house. But I am most like my aunts and uncles in that I have to take a lot of medication to prevent myself from throwing rocks at people. I suffer from chronic depression, and in the years before it was diagnosed I was a miserable human being who routinely wrote bad poetry about being misunderstood. I was a sophomore in college when it was finally treated, and I instantly became a much more bearable person, albeit one who had to pop a pill once a day to connect certain chemicals in my brain.

  There are many people in my life who are embarrassed that I can freely admit this about myself, that I have to take pills to be happy, but before the pills I had tried a few of the other options that are out there for people like me:

  I ignored that weird, sad feeling.

  I substituted bad thoughts with thoughts of unicorns.

  I exercised until the pain in my legs seemed far worse than the pain in my heart.

  I overate to drown the sorrow.

  I prayed that God would give me the will to get over it already.

  Surprisingly, none of these things worked, and when I found myself on the brink of dropping out of college, my parents finally agreed to send me to a professional. After one week on an antidepressant I was a changed person, and I remained on that drug for the next seven years, right up until Jon and I got married. I stopped not because marriage had miraculously cured me of the grumples, but because I wanted to have a baby, had been jolted awake in the middle of the night for over a year by my biological clock screaming, “HEY! IT’S ME AGAIN! WHERE ARE THE BABIES?”

  I wanted babies, so I stopped. At least, that’s the medical term for what it’s called, stopping. But I think they should call it Reenacting That One Scene From That One Movie Where That Guy Is Trying To Stop Using Heroin, and he’s having a nightmare while he’s awake that a dead baby is crawling across the ceiling, and he’s all, oh God, oh God, please, please, make it stop, and the dead baby is twitching its rigor-morted head from side to side as it gets closer and closer, and then that guy throws up a hamburger.

  Withdrawal from an antidepressant feels just like that, and in the first few months that I was off of my medication, I wanted to go back on almost every day. I needed the pills, because otherwise I did a lot of yelling and tossing things through the air, and sometimes Jon was an accidental target. Without my pills I was wildly irrational, and when we did not get pregnant THE FIRST MONTH WE STARTED TRYING, I was convinced that it meant I was barren. I saw the single line on the pregnancy test and fell into a giant wad on the floor because all I could imagine was years and years of fertility treatments that would never work, and if they did work it wouldn’t be until I was sixty. And then we’d have quadruplets. And they’d all have fourteen toes. Because I wasn’t good enough.

  So we tried again the next month, and because I am a perfectionist driven to the point of madness with the need to be good at everything, I forced my husband to have a ridiculous amount of sex. One night after he had moved 7,800 pounds of boxes from a moving truck into our new house, I didn’t even let him sit down to catch his breath before I had shoved him onto the bed and jumped on top of him like an alley cat might attack a discarded cheese sandwich.

  “I’m ovulating,” I told him as I tried to pry off his shirt.

  “That’s very sexy, and all,” he said as he held his arms at impossible angles so that I couldn’t get his clothes off. “But did you see what I just unloaded off that truck? IT WOULD TAKE AN ACT OF GOD, WOMAN.”

  But I didn’t hear that. I heard: “You are ovulating, and I don’t love you.”

  Because I am insane.

  Two weeks later I took a second pregnancy test. I had promised myself that I was going to wait longer, just to give my body a little more time, but when Jon got up early one morning, I could only lie there alone for five minutes before giving in. I needed to know so that instead of having to experience all that torturous hoping, I could just go back to what I did best, being sad and worried about what it will be like to raise quadruplets in my sixties.

  So I ran and got Jon, and we were like two ten-year-old kids digging through mom’s closet to find Christmas presents. The second pink line on the test showed up within about four seconds, before I could even set it down on the countertop in the bathroom, and Jon and I nearly killed each other with hugs and screams and flailing, gangly arms. It was exactly like I had fantasized it would be in that I really did want to call every single person I knew, but the feeling itself was a single point of light swallowed almost whole by a vast space around it, like holy shit, we’re going to have a baby! And at the same time, HOLY SHIT. WE’RE GOING TO HAVE A BABY.

  Instead of getting into bed and going back to sleep after the 4 AM pregnancy test, we talked feverishly for three hours about what we were going to call our work in progress. It was a discussion I had waited my entire life to have, one that I had practiced hundreds of times before in my childhood with Barbies and Cabbage Patch Kids and a goldfish I accidentally boiled because I thought it would rather swim around in warm water. I know I’d much rather be warm than cold, why would my pet want anything different? Except once I put him in the water he started swimming in delirious circles, and then tried to JUMP OUT OF THE BOWL. TWICE. I sort of just stood there and watched him, like, fish is crazy! Until he turned upside-down and floated to the top. Maybe I won’t repeat this story ever again, at least not until I have proven that I know better now.

  I had hundreds of ideas for names, most of them stolen directly from the cast of The Dukes of Hazzard as there was no other show on television that has more accurately captured the spirit of my Southern upbringing, where my mama knew everyone’s business and my cousins routinely took each other to prom. If my kid wasn’t going to have my last name, he or she could at least look at their driver’s license and be reminded of their maternal Tennessean heritage, one where wearing shoes to the grocery store is totally optional by law.

  But giving a child the name Bo or Luke or even Rosco is way more generous to your offspring than naming your daughter after a character in a Western no one has ever seen whose most defining asset was that he shot a lot of people. That is what my father wanted to do, wanted to name my sister Mangus, even though that word sounds like a brand of cold sore. My mom didn’t let this happen, but she did agree to let him name her September. Even though she was born in January. And my brother’s name is Ranger. After a box of cigars my father saw at a truck stop in Arkansas. I guess this is one of the very few confounding things about my parents, that they are the most conservative people on the plan
et, and yet, the names of two of their children make them seem like Berkeley hippies who regularly dine on organic tofu.

  Jon wanted nothing to do with a Bo or a Luke because he knew too many of those who had communicable diseases, and the act of calling our child one of those names would force him to lose four teeth. Which, okay, fine, we both had to agree on this, so I let him list his favorite names: SnigSnak, Qranqor, Styrofoam, KidNation, Frontline (after the television show or the flea medication), One (or First, or Premiere), Palette, Alphamask, Format (for a boy), Formatte (for a girl), Profile, Tweeter, Peavey. Possibly Wrench if the baby came out with an interesting nose.

  While all of these ideas were teeming with originality and flair, two very important qualities in a baby name, we couldn’t help but think that what our work in progress needed was something more Utahn. You cannot live in Utah and give your baby a boring name that some other baby in Wisconsin might have, and we couldn’t get over the nagging feeling that someone in Wisconsin was naming their first-born child Alphamask as we lay there debating.

  So in the tradition of the Utah Baby Name, we took an existing name and tweaked it into an unrecognizable mass of nonsense. It was not uncommon to meet people in this state who had names made up entirely of random letters just thrown onto either side of what could be, if you squinted hard enough, an actual word, like Aaronica or Ondulyn or Claravid. I threw out Fonzie which Jon transformed into Fawnzie, which when taken to its logical Utahn conclusion ended up being Fawnzelle. And so, our work in progress was called: Fawnzelle La Bon Marché Armstrong, if she turned out to be a girl; Fawnzel Le Bon Marché Armstrong, if he was a boy.