Book: It Sucked and Then I Cried

ItSucked

Subtitle: How I had a baby, a breakdown, and a much needed margarita

Let me start off by saying, I am not the target market for this book. I am not a parent of a new child or an aspiring parent or even a person who thinks the noble call of parenting is so awesome that I love to applaud and cheer for parents the world over at any opportunity. So I get that this book was not really written to appeal to someone like me.

Let me further disclaim that the author is clearly an amazing writer, because she has this wildly popular blog and gazillions of readers and just wow, impressive. I mean, I love that she can start selling ads on her blog and bing, her husband gets to quit his job. That is awesome. She clearly knows what she’s doing in the writing department. I only even looked at this book because someone had just sent me a link to her blog the week before (okay, and because it’s a memoir, and I’m addicted to memoirs). The blog didn’t draw me in, but I figured, give the book a try, maybe I’ll get to know her and fall in love like all those scads of other people.

So with all that said, I did not love this book. I didn’t hate it, but it was hard to wade through the whole thing, although I did and was glad I did because the last couple chapters were the best part, esp. the one where she talks about how awesome her husband is.

It wasn’t the word baby in the subtitle that made me pick up this book, the word that caught my eye was breakdown. I don’t really talk about it much, (ever?) but I’m no stranger to the breakdown. Have I been hospitalized for depression or anxiety? No. Have I taken medication for it? No. I don’t compare my experiences to hers, because you can’t, and I wouldn’t. It just doesn’t work like that, I get it. But that’s what drew me in, the hope that I could read about someone’s experience with depression (post-partum depression being a different flavor of the blues from mine, one with which I am not familiar) and learn something, gain something.

And I didn’t get those things. I didn’t get access to the depth of her experience, the why of it, the window into this woman’s soul I thought might happen in the safer confines of a book instead of a blog. Now, who can blame her for not sharing those things, because ugh, who would want to? I know I certainly wouldn’t, and maybe you just can’t. Maybe by the time you get better enough to write a book about it, it’s just not even possible to go back to that dark place to write the things that would make this the book I had hoped it would be. But it still felt like a missed opportunity.

I also want to say two other things about my reaction to this book, but they are mostly (but not entirely) about me and my reaction. So if this post is already too long for you, you can stop reading here, and I’ll just say that I recommend this book to people who want to read about the experience of transitioning from not-mother to mother, but I still would not tell those people to get their hopes too high for the best read ever. I can only give this one a half-hearted endorsement.

Now for the other things this book makes me want to say.

First thing: I like humor that has the same quality as one of those chili peppers that doesn’t taste too spicy right away, but later, and after you’ve eaten a bunch of whatever it’s in, the cumulative effect is intense. I like when I book makes me laugh out loud until I cry, but I can’t tell anyone why I’m laughing because it would mean they’d have to read the whole last chapter. That slow burn quality, the building to a crescendo. Like the final 20 minutes of Little Miss Sunshine. I laughed so hard at this part of the movie that Andy asked me at the end if I was okay because he was worried that I was in pain from all that laughing. But if you haven’t seen the whole first hour and whatever, it’s not as funny. It’s funny in context, that movie builds to the perfect crescendo of funny.

This book, with its sarcastic subtitle, seems to attempt to treat the very serious subjects of post-partum depression and first-time parenthood with wit and humor, and hooray for that. But it was not the kind of humor I like. It was amusing in parts, sure, but the structure of almost every paragraph felt the same. Hyperbole, hyperbole, hyperbole, sarcasm, sarcasm, sentence of folksy commentary. It didn’t work for me.

Second thing: When I was a sophomore in college, I developed this massive crush on this guy who had no interest in me. He loved that I was clearly crazy about him, loved the ego boost, but he wasn’t into me. He had a girlfriend, for crying out loud. He never talked about her (and what does that say?), but she existed. There was no place for me, I just didn’t know it. When I went junior year abroad, I wrote him letters all the time, pouring out my soul. Senior year I met the girlfriend. I made peace with the situation, but my crush didn’t go away.

Post-college we had a period of no contact, but still my crush didn’t disappear entirely. After a while, he got in touch. And we hooked up. You’d think it would be great, because finally it happened. It was a disaster.

It’s about time for a little break, isn’t it? Because a few lines of the song are relevant here, and because I do love to take any opportunity to see the lovely Bret and Jemaine, let me direct you to the 2:46 mark in this video:

That disappointment was bad enough, but then I found out that it was not Finally the Start of the Love of My Life (I was the only one who’d been carrying a crush around for 3 years), it was Hey Let’s See What It’s Like to Screw Around with Someone Who Totally Worships Me. I was crushed (and not in the dreamy way anymore).

After that, I got angry. Boy, howdy, was I mad. I wrote to him and asked for my letters back, all those letters where I poured out my little heart. And he sent them back (but he kept the mixed tape, that bastard), and you know what? No soul in them. No heart. Nothing. I was so guarded in those letters. What I had thought was the biggest giving of myself I had ever experienced was, like, eh, that’s it? That’s what was so important I had to get back? Why did I bother?

And this book was a little like that. Write this whole memoir about this huge life experience, and the breakdown part is kind of like, it sucked, I took meds, I went to the hospital, I got better? Eh, not enough for me. It was sort of the same flavor of let-down, I guess.