Alice is very interested in medicine, because kids’ medicine looks like candy and because Hugh up until about a month ago got much more medicine than she did because he had constant ear infections and so was getting intriguingly colored antibiotics and kids’ painkillers and pink probiotic tabs on the reg in front of her, in plastic syringes that I would hoard from the pharmacy because she kept stealing them and using them for water. (“Do you mind sticking a couple extra of those in with the prescription?” [pharmacist puts one extra syringe in bag] “No, I meant more like…well, how many do you have in your little drawer? Could I get like 20?”) And even when he felt like shit with the ear infections, I swear he relished taking the medicine in front of her, just because she wasn’t getting it. I think he was watching her out of the corner of his eye while he sucked up grape ibuprofen from the syringe and then said “Mo? Mo?”
He’s not getting the ear infections anymore because he got tubes, wonderful miracle tubes, but her interest in medicine continues. In the morning, she likes to make sure that I am getting up, like really really getting up, and she sticks to my side while I get out of bed and then she closes herself in the bathroom with me and then pressed to my side she watches me take my medicine, which right now is: Birth control pill, spironolactone (because my skin got so bad with my IUD and I’m scared to go off it even though I finally got rid of the IUD and went back on the pill), and Prozac. Of course Prozac! That one has been the constant since I was 19. She always asks to look at them all in my hand and touch them and I feel weird and self-conscious sort of like she’s asking me if I can, like, take out my glass eye so she can touch it. “The orange and green one, the white one, and the yellow one,” she says, and I’m like “Yup, well, but honey, medicine’s not something you need to be that interested in.” “Why?” “Because — well, it’s just not very interesting.” “Why?” “It’s just not.” [goes and writes entire newsletter about it]
I went on Prozac in college because I was anxious, so very very anxious all the time, like my brain was always spinning and spinning and running through the same thought endlessly and I just couldn’t get it to turn off. I’d take a little thing, like a tiny thing related to a guy, and just work at it and work at it and not be able to stop talking about it or thinking about it. I went on Prozac and things just got better in a way that I couldn’t exactly define, but it stopped the buzzing in my brain. Over the years, I’ve gradually increased the dosage (I mean, with a psychiatrist), which is always scary to do because I worry one day it will stop working entirely, which it might. But for now it works and it keeps me, I like to think, on the charming rather than debilitating side of anxious.
I stayed on it during pregnancy, both times. Both times I found, with maybe a little more difficulty than you’d expect considering that I was living in New York City and Cambridge where psychiatrists are everywhere but still I ultimately found them, a reproductive psychiatrist to track me and the Prozac through the pregnancy and explain the science to me of what we know about SSRIs and fetuses. There isn’t a ton of science about this because you can’t just assign one group of pregnant women to take SSRIs and one not to, but there is more than you’d think and one of the main, most important things I learned was that being untreated for anxiety and depression and untreated before and during pregnancy also puts you at a much higher risk for postpartum depression, which was something that I really, really, really wanted to get ahead of if I possibly could, because I could so easily, 1,000%, see myself as being a person who’d get it.
Both times, the psychiatrists — if you’re looking, in New York it was Stephanie Ho and in Boston it was Snezana Milanovic, who at least at the time was seeing private patients though I don’t know if she still is but I could help you find out if you needed it — told me, “Happy mom, happy baby.” When you’re pregnant with your first kid, this equation’s a little hard because you’re like, well, I’m not the mom really, yet. And I was so so anxious already in my first pregnancy, so worried about stuff like accidentally eating a turkey sandwich or turning onto my back in my sleep, that it felt slightly incongruous to be okay taking a daily antidepressant. But I was okay with it, and by “okay” I mean that I worried all the time, all the time, that something was going to be wrong with the baby, but I was already worried about this anyway, Prozac or not. “Think how much worse this would be if you weren’t on the Prozac,” I’d remind myself.
Hugh was the only one (not that my sample size is large) who appeared to have short-term side effects from the Prozac after birth. They thought that his arms and legs seemed a little more jerky than normal, and that this could be related to withdrawal. They assured me that this would go away within a couple of days, and the resident who came in and talked to me about it tried to reassure me a lot that this was not something I needed to worry about and also that it wasn’t my fault because it was better to be on the medication during pregnancy if I needed it rather than to come off it and risk things being worse. I was calm, which felt like a miracle. “I know, and I really am okay,” I said. I wanted to say, “Two days of his arms and legs being a little bit more jerky than normal, which I do not notice only you do, versus an entire pregnancy of being an anxious shitshow not just for him but also for my older kid? You don’t need to tell me that it was totally worth it.” I didn’t say this, but I thought it. It seemed unmaternal to point it out, but it was true.
She was examining him in his little plastic hospital crib and trying to explain this, and I said, “Can you show me what you mean?” and came over and touched him as she was pulling his little frog leg in and out, she said, “Look. See, he already is better when you are near him. It gets much better when you are near him.”
I will always remember that.
He was fine. He just was the best baby. I will say that I thought about it again when we were doing early intervention for him because his gross motor stuff was delayed. It is his arms and legs again and it’s me who fucking broke them, I thought. But mostly I could keep these thoughts at bay, which Prozac helped with, surely. Now he’s 19 months old and busy busy busy and starting to run and dance. If you ask him to “jump,” he stamps his foot and looks super proud, because he is not actually old enough to know how to jump yet. Alice thinks this is hilarious. “Jump, Hughie, jump!” Verging into making fun of him, and I have to tell her to stop because he cannot be made fun of. He is just too perfect.
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The newsletter looks different (better) because I’ve tried moved it over to a hosting company called Substack. It looks as if Tinyletter is going to get phased out at some point and I thought making the change sooner rather than later might be better. I’ll gradually move the archives over as well but for now they are all still here. Substack is new, and there are still some things I’m trying to figure out/that they are working with me on. For now, just email laurahazardowen@gmail.com with q’s/comments etc., please and thank you.