Twelve days postpartum, lactating heavily, and under suicide watch on the fifth floor of Lutheran General Hospital—the psych ward—the staff compelled me to do things other than eat, sleep, and pump milk¹ for my newborn child². They forced me to strip, for example, when I first got there, to check my body for wounds and scars. People cut, they told me. I don’t, I told them. My only visible scar was a two-year-old surgical scar from a bowel resection for an intestinal blockage that almost killed me—silent confirmation that I’d survived worse pain than this. Besides that, not so much as a Hello, Kitty tattoo. They also required I attend mental-health-themed “training” sessions. Group therapy. With Depressive But Kind Radiologist, Inappropriate Hugs Girl, and Man Who Thinks He’s Al Pacino From Scent of A Woman and Says “Ooo-HA!” Whenever He Looks at Me³. One session we sat around singing “Let It Be”. That was, as I recall, the substance of most sessions. It was as though no one could think of anything more therapeutic than a Beatles sing-a-long. Then, finally, someone rounded me up for something different: Assertiveness Training. Someone with some background in something was going to be leading a room full of contused souls in a lesson on how to speak up for themselves. As with all training sessions, the therapist went around the circle of chairs, having us introduce ourselves and say why we were there. I said: “Hi, I’m Jennifer. I don’t need assertiveness training.” Then I walked out, went back to my room, and took a nap.

---

1. Funny farm fresh, I joked, and no one laughed.

2. The son I loved so madly I’d voluntarily checked myself into the hospital to keep from drowning him. I hadn’t slept more than forty-five minutes straight in twelve days: of course I felt close to killing someone. There should have been a better option. Like five days at the Hilton with room service and a nanny. That would have worked. But I didn’t know any better. So I signed on for the bleach and overripe laundry smell of the psych ward, on a Fourth of July weekend, while all the grown-up doctors ate hot-dogs and lobster salad on their yachts, watching fireworks over the lake; leaving earnest, toddler doctors to mind the LGH psych ward and tell me things like: “You have a dystopian personality”; “Does anyone have a utopian personality?” I asked; and the creepiest nurses on the planet to lurk about, supervising me when I expressed milk, so I could not hang myself with the electric breast-pump cord.

3. Oh, yes. While all this was happening I was twenty-six, pretty, sporting double Ds for the first (and last) time in my life, and my flat stomach belied my having borne a child. Instead I had the look of a downcast, South American Barbie. Ooo-HA!

– Jennifer Companik