‘The Silence’

Elizabeth Agre ran away from city life into the north woods of Minnesota she is usually writing, painting, or taking pictures. She lives with her husband and their golden retriever

The Silence

We sit in a silence so heavy that I feel like I am drowning in it. I am holding my breath, hoping I might disappear if I’m quiet enough. I honed that skill as a child. You can’t keep using your brittle mental health as an excuse to be a shit person, he tells me. I wish this would hurt, I know it should, but I can’t feel anything. I stare at my left hand, praying for anything that would put an end to this conversation. You really don’t have anything to say? he asks, and I know it’s a genuine question, not a rhetorical one, because every word that comes out of his mouth is always carefully chosen. He uses words with style and precision, as if constantly sitting in a presidential debate. Words usually blurt out of my mouth before I even think about them. He is clean. I am messy. He is calm. I am impulsive. He is perfect. I am not. He didn’t have to pick me, I want to say, but even I know that blaming him for my poor behavior would be immature at best. I’ve been trying so hard. I’ve been sober for a long time now. I thought being sober would be enough but it turns out that it was the easiest part after all. The hardest part is being a decent mother. The constant dread of messing them up. Their happiness is everything that matters now. I don’t matter now. I try so hard to fit in the mold, with the snackboxes and the bedtime stories and the playground small talks and I gently parent them but I feel that they can see right through me; they stare directly at my broken soul and they know. It scares me sometimes, how little I feel now. He can see the void too but not the extent of it, and I can’t fully show it to him.  You scare me, he says, it’s like I don’t know you anymore. You need to get better, you know. And I’ve always been here for you, you know, but I can’t be if you betray me, us, our family. He says our family but he means our daughters. He knows I don’t want them to hate me. They’re too young now but one day they will ask why. How can I explain to them that I wanted to jump so badly that I kept looking out of the window until I found what made me want to stay alive until it made me feel worse. 

He is still looking at me, staring into my eyes to see if they have more to say than I do. I want to reassure him but I don’t know how to. It will get better, I just need time, I say. My perfect husband looks at me, and I can see that behind the anger he really wants to help. I am wondering if he regrets it sometimes, being married to me. I know I would. My perfect husband. My perfect home. I look around the room: the designer furniture and the marble and the art and you can see it was decorated by people who know how to keep up appearances. No frills, no toys on the floor, nothing that doesn’t serve a purpose; the opposite of the mess inside my mind. It doesn’t feel like me – so few things in my life do nowadays – but it’s the first place where I’ve ever felt like home. It took me ten years but I do feel German now, like my daughters and my friends and some of the people I care about only because they’re around. 

I said it didn’t mean anything, because that’s what you say, but I think it might have. The blond guy rearranging his hair in the reflection of his car window. What would have happened if I had never seen him? Maybe I would have jumped after all, or maybe I wouldn’t want to anymore. Looking at people through the window. The blond woman with her dogs. The young man working at the window opposite of mine, also watching people from the other side. Does he see them the way I do? Does he see me? Does anyone see me? Most people see what they want to see. Only a few friends want to see the real person inside, with everything that’s good and the parts that are not, they take them all and they make me feel loved no matter what I do. He calls that enablement; I say it’s support. Their love is keeping me afloat, unconditional and disinterested, which is not something I knew how to receive before. I thought I could be loved only if I did well or if I had something to give. I gave so much and I looked for his love in the sweaty arms of men who treated me like I was as disposable as the terrified little girl drowning in silence. Always too much or not enough.

You can’t keep using your brittle mental health as an excuse to be a shit person. I’m sitting at the kitchen table, a mint green two-seater thin steel table with matching slatted chairs, the kind you would find in Parisian gardens, the kind that’s easy to clean. I could sit anywhere, in one of the navy Togo couches in the living room or in one of the many inviting quilted armchairs lying around the apartment, or at my desk, in the upholstered chair that was custom made to perfectly match the rest of the office. But I sit in the kitchen corner, between the dogs’ water bowl and the massive Miele coffee machine. The kitchen was here before we moved in, and it’s not exactly what I would have picked, but it grew on me. The furniture is all pearl white, covered with dark, thick anthracite natural stones. The floor is made from the same dark oak as in the rest of the house. That’s my spot. There’s the window for people watching, the coffee to keep me afloat, and the food I’m learning not to be afraid of. My laptop and my books and my notes are lying around there for this is my desk now, and my actual desk in the office is covered with laundry. My husband sits down in front of me and lays both his hands flat on the mint green table.
I found a place where you could go for a while, he says, they have doctors who could help. There’s even a gym. I say there are gyms and doctors in Berlin and I don’t need to go anywhere except maybe the fuck out of this house.
You see? It’s impossible to talk to you.

My mother said that too the other day. You know, your depression has been really hard on us. I said I’m sorry my depression is such an inconvenience.
It’s impossible to talk to you.

We moved to this apartment right after Clémentine was born 18 months ago. It’s one of the most beautiful residential buildings in the city. It feels like a hotel, everyone tells me when they visit. You’re living the dream, my mother always says, and I know she’s implying that I’m not grateful enough. I am grateful, and I know I’m living a dream, I’m just not sure whose dream it is. But I do love our home and our area. I can watch people getting in and out of my gym, tourists crossing Gendarmenmarkt out of their to-do list, botoxed housewives with Goyard bags and tiny dogs and my neighbors’ drivers waiting for them in black Maybachs whose engines are always running. My neighbors are ambassadors and famous CEOs and politicians and Bavarian businessmen and I can’t figure out what I am supposed to be in the middle of that fancy party. Gendarmenmarkt is unlike any place in Berlin and it actually doesn’t feel like we are in Berlin at all, but in a miniature Munich where everyone knows each other. I meet people from the gym at the coffee shop, the cosmetic surgeon at the gym, my daughters’ pediatrician at the restaurant, and him everywhere. I always meet the same people like nobody goes in or out of Gendarmenmarkt except the buses packed with tourists. I watch my daughters eat at Borchardt every single week; they smash food on white table clothes while I wonder if they realize this is not normal. 

I changed so much when I became a mother the first time; it’s like she came to save me. The world was different before and after Bérénice. She was pulled out of my open belly and she was everything that mattered. I couldn’t get enough of her. I would take her everywhere and parade her like a tiny Messiah announcing my own resurrection. Maybe that’s why she’s obsessed with Jesus now. Jesus, Elsa, and Pikachu, the Trinity of her own weird world. She was so perfect from the beginning, and I got addicted to motherhood. I went back to work but nothing else interested me and I had to do it again. I needed more saving.  

Nothing was easy with Clémentine. Even her conception hurt; I was ovulating on Christmas Eve and we had to sneak out of the living room where my family was pretending to have fun without alcohol. Just get it done, I told my husband. 

The pregnancy was a nightmare, and the year that follows was tough too. But the support was overwhelming. We never love women more than when they almost die to bring a child to life, like it’s what we’re meant to do. The ultimate sacrifice. We both almost died. And then she was sick. It was torture, but it made me so likeable. You’re so strong, everyone told me. This is it, I thought, I really am a good person now. I got high from the support and repeating my pregnancy story like a pep talk and believing that I had unlocked my new, upgraded personality. When people asked when I was going back to work I would say things like I am focusing on being a mother now, Clémentine’s health is our priority. I never left her side for a year. I breastfed her and carried her around. I met only my mom friends, and we talked about being mothers. I was doing everything perfectly. 

It’s not about not loving life after kids. I’ve never loved life all that much I guess. Parenting is fun, for the most part. I even love the boring parts; I’m great at being boring. I love chores: diapers, laundry, cooking diner, check, check and check. I feel productive; it fills me. I love doing things I can quantify. I don’t feel more alive but I feel like I’ve actually done something useful. Chores are not hard, being a good parent is. But I don’t think I’m actually doing too bad. I am proud when I see my daughters’ personalities shine because we let them. 

We’ve been through so much. I had the ovarian tumor during the pregnancy. Bigger than the baby, they kept saying. And she almost didn’t make it, and I almost didn’t make it. I still think about it every night. The white light on the ceiling, the doctor who said she would die if she got out now, the look on the young Italian anesthesiologist face when I begged him to put me to sleep because the emotional pain was too much, the matching outfits I had just bought in London that they would probably never get to wear. And she survived and we were happy until she was lying in the NICU and she got out and we were happy until she was riding in an ambulance to Bernau and she got better again and again we were happy until the tall blond cardiologist said she will need heart surgery or when the doctor found something wrong near her brain or when the physiotherapist said the tumor pushed on her back muscles and we were never happy again. 

The day after our appointment at the children’s cardiologist, I walked around Gendarmenmarkt. It was still summer and the cafés’ terrasses were crowded with people who seemed happier than me. I left my friend a vocal note because that’s what I do when the pain is so heavy that I need her to carry some of it. I cried, and even after I finished the note I kept crying. I couldn’t stop until I reached the Einstein coffee shop and I haven’t cried since. I have been living on autopilot for the past six months, struggling through chores and playdates with a forced smile on my face. I told the therapist that I am scared my emptiness will affect the girls. She said it will affect them, it has to. I just wish they were enough, but nobody can fully heal another person. I am sober but I don’t feel like it. I don’t drink, but I replaced wine with chaos. I feed on other people’s perception of me. I’m constantly seeking the validation of strangers, when I can’t bother to act right with my own family. Watching people from the window. The blond guy rearranging his hair in the reflection of his car door. How I’ve been trying to show a little depth like it matters. So much of my energy goes into things that do not matter now. He looks at me like someone who wants to own me until I cease to exist. And I wonder what inside me triggers men to want to hurt me, and why I seem to need that somehow. But it’s not only me now. The girls are looking at me with their big blue eyes; I am their role model. I hear my tone and my expressions in Bérénice’s voice. I see how Clémentine moves her hands the same way I do. They’re watching me to know how they have to behave and it terrifies me. I can show them how to walk in parks, how to dance to music, and how to play with toys, but I can’t act like a person they should look up to.

I read that your childhood comes back to haunt you when your child reaches the age when you were hurt the most. Maybe that’s why I can’t sleep anymore. I look at her and I wonder how I would react if anybody beat up her tiny body on the ground. I look at her and I wonder how you can hurt a child. I would tell her that it was not her fault. I would tell her that I cannot always prevent hurt but that I will always be there to heal it. I would not tell her, but I would kill a thousand people if they touched her. because she’s enough for me to fight for. But I wasn’t. How do I explain to my husband that I don’t know how to be loved properly? The constant need to prove myself that I’m worth fighting for. How I self sabotage to see if anyone’s still coming to help me. 

Ludivine M. was born and raised in Paris, France, and has been living for the past ten years in Berlin, Germany, where she works and raises her two daughters. She mostly writes nonfiction essays about motherhood and addictions. Her work has appeared in The Word’s Faire and Tint Journal. You can follow her here: https://www.instagram.com/ludivine_bodymind