room(s)

doorless maze entry

The house is still empty: entire rooms unfurnished, huge walls white, bulbs bare. I’ve been joking about feng shui, about which I know nothing. The ascetism I practice is more about impermanence than things
in this house, in this life,
finding their rightful place.

Even the buka sleeps in a stroller.

I knew I wasn’t doing well. I had all the signs of the desperate housewife: waiting for the door to close in the morning so I could burst into tears unseen, feeding the baby with utter indifference, wearing the same sweatsuit for days on end, and nights. A friend told me about a new, free, state-run wellness center where she was about to start counseling. I expressed some interest. She told the counselor about me and my baby blues, and the counselor said I should give her a call. I stalled, replaying in my mind the standard line, “the buka’s okay, and you’re okay, so get over it,” trying to decide whether it really works that way or not… and I called.

I set off with the buka on a rainy morning. I had an appointment at 10:30. Even so, they made me wait an hour, which is an eternity with a baby who is half-awake and ready to scream her head off, in a large, half-constructed room with noisy, smelly painters. Lots of people passed by and said the buka was cold (she wasn’t). They told me to wait in a small room off to the side where I knew nobody would ever find me. Finally, the woman I was waiting for showed up and said she’d been free for some time, but she didn’t know I was there.

She wrote my case history while I bounced the buka in my lap like a maniac. She made me an appointment with the staff psychiatrist, in three weeks’ time, to see if I had depression.

So you have depression, that doctor said. That’s the first I’ve heard of it if I do, I said. Again, I’d been kept waiting for almost an hour in that same big room where nobody monitors who’s coming or going or waiting, surrounded by posters promoting mental health and the services of this new center. They had reaffirming messages like “We don’t avert our eyes.”

The doctor told me to start from the beginning, to tell him why I was there. I told him a few things about the buka, the circumstances of her birth, things I should have forgotten about by now but can’t. He asked if I had support at home during that time. He changed the focus of the session entirely.

I told him several times that’s not why I was there. At home, things are the way they are, and the way they have been, since the beginning. The best I can do, I said, is just try to be happy with what I've got, which is no small thing, and I know that.

His job was not to believe me but to break me, so he did. It was so easy. He provoked me with questions I knew the answers to, but couldn’t speak aloud. He repeated things I said to make sure I was listening. Don’t judge me by my Greek, I said.

Later, he used this as an example of my low self-esteem, one of many symptoms of depression he found examples of in what I said. He opened his book and went down the list. He drew a picture of my life: a room, doorless and cluttered. He labeled all the objects in it, some of which are mine, and some of which belong to others. I trip over them at every turn. I spend all my time trying to accommodate them, or work around them, or find some space among them. Impossible. There are lots of books.

I can’t help thinking that, if he was right,
and I am in that room,
one of the books that's in here now
is his:
a textbook that says I’m depressed, that I should either be medicated or loved. It's just another bulky item that I don’t have room for, or know what to do with.