Recently in "Parenting in Quarantine: We Are All Going Crazy," Vogue writer Taylor Antrim described the claustrophobia of raising
kids during the coronavirus pandemic. With the assistance of her daughter’s
imagination, she inadvertently and unbeknownst to her discovers the hell of
depression and its cure.
While admitting gratitude for her family’s health and
relative safety, Antrim notes how working from home plus two young children is
a “recipe for insanity.” She has responded to the seclusion with “military
precision” and strict schedules, one of many acceptable solutions to the never-ending
slog of Groundhog Days trapped inside.
For the record, my family and I are taking the opposite
approach: unregimented days of playing, cuddling, singing, and looking
wistfully out the window at the coming spring. To the author’s credit, we are
all going crazy here too. Without grandparents and babysitters, library story time
and ballet classes, I am home alone with our two- and three-year-old daughters.
To pass the time, the author’s seven-year-old daughter
Vivian created a small handmade book called The Very Grumpy Baby. This “parable
of madness” is described as follows:
“In it, a couple gives birth to a grumpy baby. A baby who
never smiles. A baby, she writes, who says, “I want to be evil.” On page two
the parents consult a doctor. The baby is not sick, the doctor says. The baby
simply doesn’t smile. But the parents continue to worry about their baby. By
page three they have come up with a plan. They will themselves refrain from
smiling. They will be as grumpy as their grumpy baby. After a week of this, the
baby smiles. The end.”
Certainly, Vivian “is going through something,” as her
mother notices. Her young imagination, however, has captured the essence of the
isolation that depression can bring. Try to see the grumpy baby as an
individual who suffers not from a physical illness but a mental illness. The
baby’s intense emotions cannot be resolved until her parents empathize so wholly
that they agree to a shared grumpy existence with her.
It reminds me of the Robin Williams’ film What Dreams May Come, in which a husband literally travels to hell to rescue his wife who
has committed suicide. Her particular hell is a decrepit version of their
earthly home – gnarled walls and sloping floors splitting apart in the dusty
shadows of an echoing empty prison. She cannot remember her suicide or
recognize her husband, until he agrees to join her in madness. Only as his
memory and sanity slips away does she emerge from her suicidal solitude.
Depression – usually the precursor to suicide – is a wicked
illness that isolates the afflicted, undermines their self-esteem, and ravages
their souls. What we want most – connection, acceptance, reassurance – is destroyed
through self-inflicted mental and physical quarantine. It is like living a
lifetime in the hell of coronavirus with no promise of spring or eventually flattening
curves.
Vivian’s story makes perfect sense now. A human being is
born without the innate ability to smile. Even after a medical consult (is it
just one doctor, or a horde of therapists, psychiatrists, psychologists…) the
baby cannot escape its grumpy fate. The solution? Her empathetic parents reach
in, share her misery, and thus help her heal. This parable is far from “chilling”
as Antrim asserts. Instead, it is a call to warmth, until her daughter can
emerge connected, rescued, smiling.
I am not advocating that parents affect misery to make their
grumpy children feel better. But the analogy between The Very Grumpy Baby
and anyone suffering from temporary sadness to lifelong depression should
direct us to lean in and empathize. Even as, and I would say especially as, we refuse it, company and
love and a companion willing to sit with us in hell can help us escape our own
parable of madness.
