The Sins of the Mother - An American Monologue

It turns out Fletcher also writes less funny performances pieces based on American History. I remember hearing about this one in the news, and the mental health piece kind of hits closer to home than I’d like to admit. I think because the people are still living, he asked to be credited under a pen name. You never know what someone is going through; and it’s never a bad idea to get some help. More resources here:
https://988lifeline.org/

The Sins of the Mother
The Story of Andrea Yates

By Fletcher Stein

BANG. It’s the starter’s pistol. It goes off, and BANG. You don’t need to think anymore, you just DO. With that BANG, the world becomes clear. You don’t have to decide to dive, you dive. You don’t have to decide to swim, you simply become a swimmer. You take a breath and put your head down and it’s finally quiet, and you follow the blue stripe at the bottom and you don’t have to think about what you should have been, what you could have been, what you might someday be. When you’re underwater, a swimmer is just what you ARE.

Outside of the water is where the trouble starts. I climb out of the pool to be…judged. My father shaking his head at the stopwatch my coaches have asked him to stop bringing to meets. My mother’s eyes searching my exposed skin for any insistent fat. My coaches looking for bulimia scars from sticking fingers down my throat. Scars, the price of pursuing perfection. Everything else the shame of falling short.

I hadn’t swam in competition in fifteen years when Rusty and me had our fourth baby. Luke. But that feeling started to surface up all over again. I told Rusty, and I told all the doctors he took me to that I knew I was a horrible mother. I was cursing our children to Hell. I deserved to be punished and they needed to be free of me. The doctor that was there when I was let out of the psych ward told us we shouldn’t have any more children. But if you want to be a perfect partner to someone like Russ you don’t admit defeat. And within a few weeks baby number 5 was on the way.

Trazadone is a Seratonin Antagonist and Reuptake Inhibitor, a second-generation antidepressant that is often prescribed in low doses to treat insomnia. I used to know about those things when I was still a nurse.

In my family, you would never get away with doing something to the bare minimum. Perfection WAS the bare minimum, and that’s what Rusty Yates represented to me.

I met Rusty when I was in nursing school, actually. We lived in the same apartment complex, this big sprawling sun-belt style thing where all the units were accessed by balconies that looked out over this beautiful pool. Of course, when I first knocked on Rusty’s door it was because his unit looked out over a parking lot. I asked him if he’d seen who hit my car, and even though he said he didn’t he said he recognized me. He’d seen me swimming and sunbathing, and we decided to go out and get a steak sometime.

Nobody had ever hit my car, really. I just made that up to have a reason to talk to him. I had never done anything like that in my whole entire life, but I was desperate. Growing up, my parents expected perfect grades, the perfect backstroke, the biggest paper route in Houston, up at 5 AM everyday before school - and I never learned to have time for other people. I was 23 when I got my first boyfriend, and when he dumped me was the first time I felt really depressed.

So when I saw a handsome jock in my apartment building carrying math and computer textbooks around, I memorized his schedule. I bought a new bikini and I made sure I was out at the pool times he got home so he would know who I was, and I figured out which one was his window and I made sure I parked there every day so I had a reason to knock on his door.

And Dammit it worked, because I am a Valedectorian, and a Swim Team Captain and I was not going to let my father down by dying some lonely old maid.

At our wedding, Rusty told everyone loudly that we never planned on using birth control, and that we were going to have as many children as nature permitted. And I was going to be as perfect of an obedient wife as I could. I had Noah two months before our first anniversary, and was pregnant with John before the second.

You don’t talk about depression in good Texas families, so Rusty never knew about the visions of bloody knives I had when Noah was born, or the voices telling me I was a terrible mother who didn’t deserve happiness after I had John. Any signs of depression I showed, he just wrote off as the Baby Blues, and moved on.

When he got the chance to work with NASA in Florida for six months, he told them yes without asking me, and he decided the whole family could drive down there in a camper, and then we’d just live in it. And when we got back, pregnant with Paul, we’d keep living in RVs.

Maybe if we could have just stayed in Houston a little longer - where my parents and my brother could help with the kids. Where the friends I’d drifted away from might see me in the supermarket and corner me and ask me if I was OK. Where we had a real house for our boys to grow up in, and we didn’t have to sell the ornaments I’d bought for Noah’s first Christmas tree, Maybe it would have all been different.

But that would have meant Rusty admitting something was wrong with me. Admitting he knew I was broken. I wasn’t perfect.

But still. He knew that when I was pregnant with John I quit swimming. I quit working, and I quit seeing my friends. He didn’t know about my struggles with bulimia when I was younger, but he was aware that I never got undressed in front of him anymore, only changing behind a closed closet door. He noticed that I avoided arguments by giving him the silent treatment for days at a time, I know that, because he’d beg me to react to him. “Throw a frying pan, please! Anything!”

He knew that while we were living in a bus I never let my brothers or their kids visit us at home, and I spent all my time caring for my Dad but he just wasn’t getting better, which just proved that I was right to give up Nursing because I just couldn’t take care of anyone. But I gave it up to take care of my kids, but I couldn’t take care of anyone, and it was just so much.

Postpartum psychosis isn’t just some Baby Blues you get over, it is a serious depression and it can get worse with every baby you have. A few months after Luke, our fourth child was born, I took forty Trazadone, which is a Seratonin Antagonist and Reuptake Inhibitor, which had been prescribed to my mother in a small dose to treat insomnia. I took forty Trazadone because I wanted to sleep forever.

****

The bus; people always want to know why we lived in the bus. It was after our second baby, John was born, Rusty got this opportunity to do a project with NASA in Florida, and he thought it would be best if we all drove out there together in a camper trailer and just lived in an RV park for six months.

The whole time I was selling all the furniture we’d bought together so we could lease out our house while we were gone, none of the neighbors could say they ever heard me complain. While I tried to find space for family photos and my wedding dress in the storage unit where Rusty was stashing his table saw and free weights, no one could say they heard me complain.

When I was pregnant with my second child barely 18 months into our marriage, and I quit working. Quit swimming. No one could say they heard me complain.

As I withdrew from the few friends I had, as Rusty tried to get me to read challenging books like I used to. Or offered to cut back on work so I could go back to nursing. No one could say they heard me say a word.

When Rusty got scared and frustrated and angry at my silence. When he yelled “Say something! Show me you’re in there! Throw a frying pan at me. Do Anything!!” No one could say they heard me complain.

When my pregnant body brought back all those old high-school-bulimia feelings, and I stopped changing in front of Russ. When I refused to undress anywhere except inside a locked closet, at least no one could say they ever. Heard me. Complain.

“I’m a mother now” I’d say to him. Just as calm as anything.

Maybe if we could have just stayed in Houston a little longer - where my parents and my brother could help with the kids. Where the friends I’d drifted away from might see me in the supermarket and corner me and ask me if I was OK. Where we had a real house for our boys to grow up in, and we didn’t have to sell the ornaments I’d bought for Noah’s first Christmas tree, Maybe it would have all been different.

But that's not the role of the obedient wife. The obedient wife doesn’t complain.

In Florida, we got to know an old mentor of Rusty’s, Reverend Weurnike. He let me know, I was right to stay quiet. An obedient wife. It was the first time I’d felt like I was doing anything right in a long time.

The reverend was always after Rusty for working too much, for caring too much about material things. I thought he should’ve been at our garage sale. But Rusty took it to heart. “Travel Light!” became his new family motto. He decided we would stay in an RV when we went back to Texas. The Reverend thought this was a great way to simplify our lives. In fact he had a converted GMC bus for sale that would be perfect for our situation. Russ bought it hook line and sinker.

He thought it was exciting. “We don’t have a budget!” He’d say. “We just LIVE! Take it easy!” And that’s what he thought we were doing, for almost three years in RVs. An obedient wife doesn’t complain.

Until the day, a few months after Luke was born, I called him at work. He came home to find me slumped in the bus biting my fingers until they blood and my legs shaking uncontrolably. The next day I took the Trazadone.

****

Haldol is a brand name for Haloperidol, a typical butyrophenone-type antipsychotic, used to treat tourette’s tics, schizophrenia, and acute psychosis. I had already been discharged from the psych ward of Methodist Hospital after my Trazadone overdose, because of, quote, “insurance reasons”. I refused to take the Zoloft they prescribed me, and I would just stay in bed scratching bald spots onto my scalp and scoring scratch marks into my legs. I thought the children were eating too much. You know I struggled with weight in high school - or at least, being in front of crowds in a bathing suit every weekend, I had to keep an eye on it.

The day I met Dr. Starbranch, Rusty found me in the bathroom with a knife to my throat.

“Let me do it,” I told him. “Let me do it.”

They hospitalized me again, and I thought I was being a good obedient wife, just accepting my fate, not complaining. The doctors thought I was “Catatonic,” and as a last ditch effort they injected me with a drug cocktail that included Haldol. You don’t mess around with that stuff - in all those movies set in psych wards, when the hero wants to escape so they stop taking their “meds”, it’s Haldol they’re talking about. It can have nasty side effects, but it was the first thing that worked.

Rusty said the day I started Haldol was when I started looking at the pool again, longingly. When I started opening up to him again. How he saw the woman he thought I could be. He finally moved us out of the bus, into a three bedroom house. But I could never break the feeling that I had failed at being the obedient wife for Rusty’s “simple life.”

So I made up for it. I started swimming again - but it had to be 70 laps every morning at dawn. I started baking cakes, sewing costumes. I had the best-stocked stroller in the neighborhood. I homeschooled the kids, buying extra workbooks and taking them on field trips. But I guess I couldn’t even do that right - Rusty kept telling me I was making it too difficult on myself. “You’re making it more complicated than it needs to be.”

Still. By the end of that year I stopped taking the Haldol. Rusty figured I was getting better. Who was I to speak up? Of course, Rusty never really seemed to want to know the details of what I was feeling. After the trial, he seemed shocked by the therapist’s notes that had become part of the record. Visions of knives floating above our first child. Voices telling me it would be better if I was dead. He never put together the Trazadone incident was a suicide attempt, to take my own life before I hurt somebody. He thought I was silent and nervous; I was just trying to stop myself from causing harm.

It took all of this for him to move us, with four kids, out of the RV and back into a house. I started swimming again, but Rusty was concerned that I was doing too many laps. I came up with really creative lessons for the kids’ homeschool, but Rusty thought I was “making it too difficult on myself”. We’d learned not to trust organized religion from a travelling preacher who was Rusty’s spiritual mentor when we lived in Florida. But when it was ME writing letters and phone calls with him and his wife, all of a sudden Rusty thought he might be too extreme.

The role of the woman is derived from the sin of eve, he taught. And bad children come from Bad mothers. That’s why I worked so hard at the homeschool lessons; to give my children a chance to overcome my badness. It’s why I swam so much, because I needed to stay attractive to Russ. I kept the best-stocked stroller of all the moms at the playground and I sewed costumes for all the neighborhood kids. For a little while, it seemed like it might be good enough.

Postpartum psychosis is a serious depression, complete with visions and breaks from reality. It can get worse with each child, and the doctor I was seeing didn’t think having another child would be a good idea. But Rusty told her that the trade between my illness and the birth of our child was a simple one. A good wife doesn’t disagree.

My friend Debbie, from nursing, asked if I really need a fifth child, with all the struggles I’d already had. I didn’t understand what she meant. “Rusty wants more kids.” I told her. “Rusty only cares about Rusty” she said.

I wanted a girl. “Let’s get enough boys for a basketball team, and then we can talk about girls,” he said. My mother wasn’t so sure. She’d had to beg him not to make us go back to the RV when I was sick. I told her it made me feel like I had failed his vision of a family living a simple life. I wasn’t going to fail him again.

Mary Deborah was born in November of 2000. By March of 2001, my father died. I was back to not speaking, scratching my head bald and refusing to feed the baby. I didn’t want her to end up bulimic like me.

Rusty got me checked into a mental hospital at the end of March. They refused to give me Haldol, even though it was the only thing that had ever worked. I don’t know if the doctor there ever read my old records, but he insisted I didn’t have psychosis. I know he asked Rusty about me. I know Rusty would talk over everyone in group therapy sessions. I know Rusty would answer for me when anyone asked me a question. I stayed obedient.

In April I got sent home. I got worse. Rusty’s mom took the kids for a walk, and came home to find me filling up the tub. She asked why. “I might need it,” I said.

In May I went back. After 10 days, I got sent home. I would get worse. The doctors would tinker with my medication. Rusty would pick up a new prescription. I’d start to get better, and then I’d wake him up with screaming night terrors. Every couple of days I’d start to get better, then I would suddenly get much much worse.

I couldn’t stand watching my father get sick, then better, then sicker, then go to the hospital and wonder if he was going to come back. And I was an adult. I was a nurse. I was a valedictorian. It must have been terrible, for the kids to see their mother go through so much of the same. Their imperfect mother. What chance would they have?

On June 20, Rusty went to work while the kids were having breakfast. As they ate, I started filling up the tub.

I brought Paul upstairs with me, my perfect little three year old boy, and held him under. He had never been much trouble, never made much of a fuss, and when I tucked his soaking body into my bed he was just perfectly peaceful.

I brought Mary upstairs with me, and gave her a bottle to distract her while I drowned little Luke, and five-year old John, and tucked them into bed too. Once she finished the bottle, I held her under as well. I called Noah up to me now. He was seven, and could come upstairs on his own. Mary was still in the water, and he asked what was wrong with her.

He tried to run away, but it wasn’t too hard to catch him. He tried to fight as I held him under, but I wasn’t going to fail. When he stopped moving, I put Maty into the bed with the other boys and called Rusty at work. “It’s time.” I told him. “You need to come home.” Then I called the police, and waited for them in the living room. The sergeant who came onto the scene found Noah still in the tub.

I don’t know how to explain it. The children, they weren’t developing correctly. Does that make sense? I wasn’t a good mother to them and because of that they weren’t…develping…correctly.

I did not hate the kids-their death was my punishment, not theirs. “It would be better for a person to be flung into the sea with a stone tied to his neck than cause little ones to stumble.” That’s in the bible. And I had caused them to stumble.

Just like when I was young, I had stumbled. I had fallen short time and again. And just like when I was young, I hoped they would find peace and freedom under the surface of the water.