45

One day I was reading the back cover of a self-help book that was getting a lot of buzz. The back cover said, Do you have any of these symptoms? And ran down a list of about 20 things ranging from Tired All the Time, to Suicide Ideation. I got to the end of the list and said out loud, “I have all of these.”

Well then, said the back cover, you are depressed.

I didn’t know. My family, we didn’t do depression. It had never occurred to me.

Now that I knew, I had to think about it. Married quite a while, three growing kids, house, business, Zorba the Greek’s “full catastrophe.” And now I had depression on top of it?

Not because of it, the catastrophe. On top of it. Like this was just one more thing to take care of, after the laundry and before Christmas shopping.

The suicidal ideation made me laugh. In my version, it wasn’t suicide, it was passive aggression. I’ll show them. I’ll get cancer and die and then they’ll notice who cleans the dirty pots. I’ll get lupus and not be able to move and someone else will have to take out the garbage cans. My favorite passive aggression had no fatal diagnosis; I would merely be forced to sleep all day in a white-sheeted bed in a white hospital room in a white hospital. Need I add that it was very quiet?

I was lucky that my husband did not seem depressed. Overworked? Worried? Stretched thin? Yes. But not depressed. I have seen families where the man was depressed, and the woman was just as frustrated as I was and had a depressed husband to take care of as well as the kids.

My depression was rooted in the fact that I was inescapably female. I had gone back to school for advanced training. I had gotten on the career path. I had met the impossible standards of both the patriarchy and the feminarchy. And I still felt awful.

There’s this wonderful line in Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born where she writes, “I know no woman – virgin, mother, lesbian, married, celibate – whether she earns her keep as a housewife, a cocktail waitress, or a scanner of brain waves – for whom her body is not a fundamental problem.”

Rich’s writing is just as vibrant and meaningful as it was when she wrote it 45 years ago. Partly it’s her good writing; partly it’s because we haven’t solved the conundrum of being female. I see the next generation, now raising the next next generation, and tripping up over the same exposed roots: What’s best for my children? Can we afford this? Are my skills recognized? And oh, the hardest one: Do I deserve to be happy too?

The answer is a resounding YES. You don’t need to read the book. You don’t need to shell out for years of counseling. You don’t need to weigh the pros and cons. Take my word for it: YES.