Fullepub 
Chapter 41
41
Anxiety attacks are very common. Especially for new moms. This is normal.”
I wondered if I should have said more. The doctor blew on the end of her pen as though it were hot. She wrote me a prescription and explained when I should take them. I left the building thinking of my mother’s translucent orange containers filled with tiny white tablets, dwindling over the course of each month.
• • •I knew something wasn’t right. At first it was the emptiness she’d had in her eyes ever since I found her in Sam’s room, the way she seemed to look through me when I was with him now. Her contempt had shifted from the wildly exhausting tantrums that had once left me in tears to a manipulative, premeditated coldness. Her calm, steadfast dismissal of me was far beyond her nearly seven years. The icy looks. The complete disdain. The passive resistance to doing what I asked her to: Can you finish your dinner, please? Can you put away your toys? She simply disengaged with zero reaction, nothing for me to work with. Punishments or threats were useless; consequences had no meaning to her. Whatever attention I had gained from her since Sam was born had all but disappeared. She wouldn’t let me touch her. We resumed our old stand-off. And you resumed your old place as the only person she wanted in her world.
• • •Eventually we learned to tolerate each other enough to coexist. She needed very little from me, to the point where she began to feel like a boarder I had to feed with plastic dishes on a heart-shaped place mat. I focused instead on Sam, on our routine, on the motions required of me when she wasn’t at school. And when you came home in the evening, she came alive again.
Sam was my light and I did everything I could to stop Violet from dimming it. Some mornings we came home after dropping off Violet and went back into our unmade bed with our suite of necessities—bottle, tea, books, Benny. The mess in the kitchen and the laundry could wait for us. Instead we passed the time staring at each other. We mused about ducks and dinosaurs and belly buttons. Later on we napped in the late-winter sun. He slept on my chest, even after he was weaned from my milk and my smell had changed. It was as though he knew how much I needed him.
The anxiety stayed away for the next little while. I kept the unfilled prescription in my purse—every time I saw the piece of paper when I reached in for something, I would think of my mother. I couldn’t bring myself to go to the pharmacy. I didn’t trust myself.
