They are such fragile, tender things.
Don't give them words.
Don't give them names.
Just time
and space
and time
and peace
and time again -
to find
their place.
When dreams bloom into plans, that's when
the spoken naming can begin.
Though safe
to name a thing with wings,
the strength
of words
beats hard on dreams -
those little, helpless paper things.
***
The Anxious One was stunned. The Researcher had found some diagnosis online ("Hey, it was a totally legit, peer-reviewed source! NCBI isn't like, webmd or Women's Health or whatever," said the Researcher) that described everything - all of it - with such acerbic ferocity that she was speechless.
Maybe in the end, this story wasn't going to be about learning to love the Anxious One, after all. Maybe she really was some sort of defect - a messed up piece of garbage, some kind of genetic flaw inside of the mind. Maybe giving this condition a name was the first step to solving the problem.
The Researcher continued to read all about what we had all suspected: the problem had something to do with hormones. The Anxious One could vividly remember being far away from home, surrounded by classmates, trudging up a dusty hill in the middle of a sweltering hot desert. She remembers complaining loudly and obnoxiously about her aching abdomen - the cramps were almost unbearable. But it was not the physical pain - though that's what she had complained of out loud - that had been the worst part. It was a dark shadow of gloom and despair. Had this cloud been chasing her in circles her entire life? How had this gone unnoticed for so long?
While pregnant, it hadn't been there.
No - while pregnant it had been more of a constant cloud, gradually getting darker and darker. Taking up all of the space in her mind until at the very end, she had barely had the strength to sit in a chair with an irritatingly mind-numbing crochet project. It had been around that time that she had gone into labor. She had continued to crochet and crochet until the blessed contractions had been unmistakable. She hadn't wanted to go in to the hospital without being absolutely sure. Once with one of her other children, she had been sent home for a "false alarm." The fear of that happening again was worse than the fear of the labor itself - by a lot. When they had arrived at the hospital, signed in, and been sent to triage, the nurse had been fairly casual. Danny had said, "Just so you know, this is our fifth baby." There had been some agonizing moments of waiting. A nurse had eventually stuck her finger up her vagina to check the dilation of her cervix - so horrid, so embarrassing, but also who really cared anymore through the pain of it all? The contracting muscles were now visible on a screen - empirically proven to exist. The entire world could no longer continue to tell her to be patient and wait just a bit longer - there was definitely something happening.
The nurse hadn't told them what was going on. They just sat there in triage, next to some noobie mom with her entire family, excitedly hoping and probably praying that her cervix was at some magic arbitrary number beyond the previously measured arbitrary number - total subjective numbers based only on the nurse's experience and sense of how much space her own fingers take up in that dark, enclosed hole, the entry to this world. Well, an entry, at least. Some babies force themselves to come out the hard way. But that was not likely to happen to Kate this time.
"Why do you think you want to write about this now?" the Philosopher asked gently. She had given up on wearing those obnoxious Roman Togas. She was instead wearing comfortable jeans with an old, faded t-shirt that read, "Screw the Patriarchy!" (that, of course, made several of the others chuckle with its terrible pun-ishness).
I don't know. It was an important life experience. It mattered to me, regardless of how little it seems to matter to anybody else. Baby #5 might be just another kid - the final member of the basketball team. Final? Maybe? Hopefully? But uncertainly? To me, he is a priceless angel. I hold him every day, sing to him lullabies, touch his sweet little face, chant his little name over and over again. I kiss his cheeks and make him giggle and laugh. I can almost always stop him from crying with just holding him the right way - only twice these past six months have I been powerless, and both times sent me into a hysterical panic. He is an angelic baby. He sleeps long. He is already almost 20 pounds, which is huge! The size of a baby nearly twice his age! He is outgrowing his size 9 month baby clothes. My milk might not qualify to save the lives of other peoples' babies (yet?) but I am certain that it is doing a good job sustaining my baby.
There is no recognition in this job - and that hurts. I got asked, "What do you do all day? Do you just stay home with the kids?" That hurt. It was an innocent question by a nonnative English speaker. You can't blame them for not navigating something with so many facets and nuances clumsily. It still bristled. I am not ever going to know the feeling of recognition and appreciation for the truly difficult things that I do in my life.
This internal war with myself that happens every month, that is unknowable. Unnoticeable. Nobody can get inside my head to know how painful it can be. And then - like magic - it just completely disappears. The cloud lifts. I feel guilt ridden and ashamed for any of the poisonous arrows I've managed to inflict in my closest friends and family members while in this rage-like state of mind. I have become an excellent shot over the years. Recently, I've decided to avoid all contact with people online while in this state of being. It is too difficult for me to suppress the Anxious One.
***
The Philosopher brought over a stack of CD's.
"What's with the CD's? You know, we live in a world that's pretty much a few clicks away from any songs."
"Oh, well, I guess it's just a physical manifestation encapsulating the idea of music. It's something to hold. It hearkens back to earlier times when this was how we consumed music. Sooooo many mixes."
There's ways to control the mind. One is by deep, purposeful immersion into research - of almost any kind. One is by conversing with other people. One is by surrendering the mind completely into a novel.
Music is the one that we've probably tried the least, but it is surprisingly effective at taming emotions. Perhaps even more so than research - which is more of a distraction technique, anyway. Research can be rewarding and fulfilling to the mind, but it does not ever really seem to touch the heart. The place where the emotions can grow thick and tangled. Research is like running away from it. Music is like...
It's like...
How to put it into words? Hmm.
"We'll have to read up on how other people have described what music does to emotions. There must be whole libraries written on this subject," said the Researcher. Yeah. We could do that. But to what purpose, really.
"You know what's funny about music? We can't even carry on a conversation when anything is playing. That cheesy instrumental music they always insist belongs as the background to any so-called inspirational video? It is always distracting." The Philosopher was grinning. "I guess it was more than distracting, it was supplanting."
"Yeah, I totally observed this earlier as we got our two mile run in. Listening to music, even horrible music from the 90's, made the laps instantly shorter. It's weird!" The Researcher was itching to know if this phenomenon had some kind of name, or if there were some kind of academic paper to skim about it.
"There's got to be! People write about everything...well...almost everything. Sort of. Okay not really. But yeah. Certainly about this." The Researcher was running to her computer. She...she's a funny person. Really weirdly interested in everything, somehow. Craves it. Maybe she's just an addict. She's nice to have around most of the time. She's pretty much the reason that it's been possible to avoid confronting this for so long, all these years...
"Guys! Listen to this!"
"Several, but not all, studies suggest that among women with premenstrual dysphoric disorder, symptom severity is correlated with levels of"I thought you were researching music, you dork-face," muttered the Anxious One.
"Present!" shouted Dorky McDorkface. She had been reading the liner notes of all the CD's the Philosopher had brought over and singing the lyrics to her favorite ones out loud, a pretty annoying habit.
"...levels of estradiol, progesterone, or neurosteroids such as allopregnanolone and pregnenolone sulfate (77–79). One of the most compelling findings supporting the role of ovarian hormones in the pathogenesis of premenstrual dysphoric disorder comes from a study by Schmidt et al. (46) demonstrating that women with the disorder are more sensitive to both estradiol and progesterone than comparison subjects. In that study, women with premenstrual dysphoric disorder experienced significant improvement in core mood and physical symptoms with GnRH agonist treatment, only to have a return of negative affect when either estradiol or progesterone was reintroduced in a double-blind, placebo-controlled fashion. Notably, healthy comparison subjects pretreated with the GnRH agonist did not react negatively to administration of estradiol or progesterone."
"Yeah, yeah, we all know that you're really smart. Way to rub it in." The Anxious One rolled he eyes and sunk her head into her lap again.
"It means it really is hormonal, and it really is related to progesterone, just as I hypothesized from those graphs of prevalence of menstrual migraines! HA!"
The Anxious One muttered under her breath, "You're such a hypochondriac. Nobody's going to care. Nobody's going to believe you."
"Don't matter much anyway, do it? Even if they cared, there's not much that can be done. We already know what it's like to have to choose between a happy sex life and a happy life. SSRI's aren't tenable. We just have to bear it, somehow. Maybe it'll go away with menopause?" The Philosopher shrugged. "Here, let's start making some playlists. The music can transport us somewhere."
And it really could! It was strange - like a magician's spell. It probably wasn't special to Kate; this is probably the reason music is a thing that humans do, like - at all, across all cultures. But who cares, if it helps to at least momentarily lift us out of the cloudy fog. Even a weepy, sad song - maybe even especially a weepy, sad song. Powerful magic.
Impossible to think about anything else. Only rote tasks like laundry and dishes could remain. No talking. No thinking. Impossible to write.
Balm for the soul.
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