ERNIE AND ERNESTINA: Searching

Book Two, Chapter 42: A Change in Thinking

I take Mary Cantwell’s memoir, Manhattan When I Was Young, down from my bookshelf. I’ve read it before, but not much stuck. That’s no surprise. I can leave a movie theater and not remember the names of the main characters I just spent the last two hours watching.

After the birth of her first daughter, Mary is suicidal. In her hospital room fourteen floors up, she asks that its window be nailed shut. It is. Shaking and trembling, she fears she’ll drop her baby, so she asks others to care for her infant. They do.

At home, she puts the baby’s basinet next to her bed so she can hear the baby’s breathing, but she is also scared she will hurt the baby. Push her. Crush her. Strangle her. “But every time I feel my hands moving or realize that my eyes have been too long on her neck, her head, I determine again to harm myself before I harm her. The decision to die is a great restorative.”

After six weeks her sickness disperses, like clouds lifting.

Much older now, she is still scared of heights — “that reminder that once upon a time I was crazy.”

Mary Cantwell suffered from post-partum depression. I suffer from post-Ernie depression, and I’m crazy still. I scare myself with my thoughts, all because I feel such guilt at the way I was. Such guilt at what it led to. This guilt shadows me. It overcomes me. It throws me down. I feel condemned to life, and that’s when I want to end it.

What stops me is what my Twelve-Step friends are teaching me: to accept what I cannot change — which is the past — and to change what I can — which is me, right now. These are two powerful messages. I must take them in, make them mine. Believe in them. Believe in me.

I can be a better me.