Seizures

Age 8

Your mother has a seizure on the front lawn after grocery shopping and you stand there wondering what you’ll have for dinner as a can of peas and a jar of sauce roll into the cul-de-sac where you ride your bike and play freeze tag. An ambulance swallows her. Eleven months later, you’ll watch her gleaming coffin lowered into the dull dirt and you’ll watch your father slowly spiral into relentless grief that lays waste to your house until the bank finally forecloses and you move from apartment to apartment to apartment.

Age 12

You writhe on the bed and bleed through the maxi pad, your underwear, your shorts, the sheets, the mattress. Is this what happened to your mother on the lawn? Is the ambulance coming for you like a shark who smells your blood? While you sweat and shake, Billy Idol sneers from one of countless rock posters wallpapering your bedroom: hey little sister, what have you done? Your father says you have to go the emergency room because it wasn’t like this when your sisters got theirs. You agree to go to the hospital but please, you say—pain burrowing into your back and blazing through your belly—not in an ambulance. The day your body gains the ability to have babies will always live in your mind as a medical emergency, but the doctor says there’s nothing wrong and hands your father a slip of paper for the pharmacy. The next day you start fifth grade dressed in your plaid Catholic jumper, a super-winged maxi pad, double underwear, shorts, tights, and a backpack slung over your shoulder with a bottle of prescription painkillers rattling inside it. The nuns will never know.

Age thirty years before birth

Your father is a monk and he leaves the seminary before they make him a Catholic priest for reasons he’ll never reveal. He meets your mother, marries, has three daughters. He’ll share with you fragments about his holy life and the one detail that sticks is the way his mother felt when he stopped short of priesthood: deeply disappointed. You’ll meet your grandmother a half dozen times and you’ll always see that nun-like look of disappointment when she lays her eyes upon her son. 

Age 48

The pregnant women you study at your job take anti-epileptic drugs (AEDs) and you track the rate of AED-associated malformations in their babies: clubbed foot, a hole in the abdominal wall out of which the baby’s intestines spill, cleft lip, an extra digit. In some cases, the babies won’t make it and the mothers will wonder what they did wrong. Call scripts keep the conversations clinical. You ask questions about their menstrual cycles, the nature and cause of their seizures, the time that elapses between their awareness of an approaching seizure and the seizure itself.

Age 8

Five minutes before your mother’s seizure she’s driving and you’re in the back seat, pouting because she didn’t get you an Almond Joy at the grocery store. She doesn’t shake and slump and lose control of the vehicle. Her eyes don’t roll back and she doesn’t careen you off the road into oncoming traffic or flip the Toyota into that ditch near the woods where the big kids smoke Marlboro reds. You don’t die dangling upside down, trapped inside your safety belt while the engine explodes. Your car doesn’t submerge itself in the Charles. You don’t drown.

Age 48

There’s a question in the call script about fertility history.

Age 37

You’ve peed on pink sticks over many months and the minus signs make you wonder what the prescription painkillers you started taking with that first period have masked all these decades. “Endometriosis,” your dead mother might have said, “let’s get you some help.” You should have started trying to conceive sooner, but in therapy you couldn’t work through mothering without a mother and you couldn’t figure out who would take care of your father—who isn’t yet sick but is as penniless as the priest he didn’t become—if you’re an overwhelmed mother. You, as it will turn out, four years from now, that’s who. Your sisters won’t have the bandwidth; they’re motherless mothers.

Age 48

There’s a question in the call script about past pregnancy outcomes.

Age 38

Your period is late and you’ve agreed not to obsess over minus signs so instead you and your husband go on vacation and rip through a rippling rink of deep sea. You crank the jet ski’s handle harder, faster, and you’re free and you’re scared and you’re laughing and you’re madly in love and you’re high on the press of his chest on your back, hungry for more salty spray on your tongue, elated by the speed and buck of the machine between your legs. That night, you bleed through your underwear, your shorts, the bedsheets. What slides thick and sinewy out of your body in the flipped condo bathroom with the faux-marble vanity looks like a massacre. You’ll wonder forever if a baby would have arrived nine months later had you remained vigilant with those sticks, stayed still and silent as a cloistered monk, prayed, kept faith.  

Age 39

After moving in and out of two dozen apartments, you buy a townhouse because you can’t afford a house that looks like the one where your mother seized before the bank seized it, but you want to own your home so you won’t end up in a two-room, low-income apartment in Revere like your faithful widower father, who has just enough space for his TV, his armchair, his beat-up bed, a second-hand table stacked with unfinished crossword puzzles and yellowing funeral prayer cards.

Age 8-48

At the after-party for your mother’s funeral an aunt says your mother is in a better place and for the next three-plus decades you move from apartment to apartment from state to state from job to job from relationship to relationship from teacher to teacher to teacher to psychiatrist to guru to nutritionist to diet quack to book coach to priest to healer to massage therapist to professor to fertility doctor looking for that place.

Age 42

Your father has a seizure when you’re transferring him from the bed to the wheelchair in the living room of the townhouse you thank God you bought because where else would your father live in his final months? Not in the nursing home where he lived for two weeks before you sprung him, where you visited him and asked what you could bring him and he said a loaded gun. Here, in your townhouse, the seizure is a classic grand mal and he’s shaking and drooling and his eyes are rolling to the whites and you can’t just stand there like a helpless eight-year-old while a neighbor presses a spoon to your mother’s tongue and your sister runs to the end of the street to flag the ambulance. You’re the adult, the caretaker here, so fucking do something. Move. You take your father to the doctor in a cab made for wheelchairs because distrust of ambulances runs in your family. The doctor says call hospice. They show you how to drip morphine and Ativan into the soft pink flesh of your father’s inner cheek from two vials with eye-droppers that you somehow manage not to lick though you can taste the relief it would bring, like when you were eight on that one blazing summer afternoon and you looked at the sky and opened your mouth to swallow sudden rain.

Age 48

Your moods swing like this essay’s timeline when your husband gets a job and you move from a life you like in New York (you’re renting again because your father died on morphine and Ativan you administered in that townhouse and his ghost won’t move out) to a life you have no idea how to lead in Tennessee. The psychiatrist’s answer for short-term relief is Ativan. You fall asleep high, happy that you gave your father this relief as he slid toward heaven. Twelve hours later you wake in a fog that lifts to unveil rage’s sharp, whirling weather. You don’t want to live here. You want to move. You want to live in that house on the cul-de-sac that you stake out every time you visit Boston.

Age 48

There’s a question in the call script about reasons for taking an AED. Possible answers include epilepsy, pain, and mood disorder.

Age 48

The psychiatrist’s long-term solution for your swinging moods is an AED, which you take for twelve days. The medication causes a whole new set of swings—from jitters to insomnia and back again. You stop because it’s not like you’re suffering from seizures or something. It’s not like your moods really interfere with anything. You’re not flailing on the front lawn. You’re not moaning or choking or in any danger of hitting your head. You’re not feeling the effects of a hidden brain tumor or trying to raise three daughters while also keeping your house clean and your marriage intact. You’re just unable to function all that well a few days every month, around the time your period would come before it stopped coming when you were only forty-four. It’s not like you’re dying. It’s just your spirit dimming and dimming and dimming.

Age 42

Your father is dying but some part of your grief-stricken mind thinks you can save him. You and your husband wake up several times a night to put cold towels on his forehead and to transfer his weak body from the bed to the commode. You bathe him together, you hoist him from the floor like a pair of paramedics when he falls. Your husband shaves your father’s sunken face over the kitchen sink. You make him oatmeal and raise cans of Ensure to his grey lips. You love taking care of him. Motherhood, you’re made for it. You and your father play a child’s card game four weeks before he dies because your usual game of poker is too much for his foggy mind. You ask if he has a seven and wonder out loud who will take care of you like this when you’re old and sick and shit out of luck. “You have to adopt a kid,” he says, “go fish.”

Age 43

The woman at the adoption agency says you and your husband seem perfect. You fill out a form. You back away from the process because you’re desperate to make your body make a baby. The fertility doctor says your husband’s sperm is stellar and your uterus looks amazing and a donor egg with IVF will give you excellent odds. You swing between yes and no, then step away from the process because you’re sure it’s grief and not a real desire to have a child that drives you. Your need to become a mother will strike for a few days at a time without warning for the next several years, like seizures that threaten to drive your mind off the road of your real life, your writing life, which you’ve only now managed to commit to fully after years of fits and starts.   

Age 48

You’re closing on a three-bedroom house in three weeks. You’ll have a decent-sized office for the first time in your life. You’ll have an empty bedroom that you won’t rush to fill. Instead of quitting your job like you’ve done roughly every three years your whole life, you’ll keep studying the pregnant women and their AED usage and the outcomes on their babies. You won’t quit writing for months on end then try to remember where you left off. You won’t move again, though you never expected to settle here. You’ll stay. You’ll have faith. You’ll remain.

Age ____

You hear something you’ve heard a million times but this time it sticks: Pattern stories come alive not when you make the pattern, but when you break it.