Janie squeezed Solo’s hand. “But it sounds like you were scared too.”
“Being scared isn’t an excuse,” Solo said and took Janie’s hand in hers when Janie pulled back slightly. “You were the one who found Chloe. You had to rush her to the ER and then sit there terrified, worried that our daughter might have been poisoned. And instead of calling me to come support you through that, you had to go through it alone, because I’d made you think you couldn’t come to me. I’d made you think that I’d get angry and judge you…instead of sharing your fear and reassuring you that it’d be okay.”
Rae let the silence sit for a moment. “Hannah, I’m hearing a lot of self-criticism. Is there anything else underneath that? Any other feelings about what happened?”
Solo hesitated. This was the part she’d been avoiding thinking about directly. This was where the small, complicated knot of anger that she wasn’t sure she had a right to feel came into it.
“This is a safe space, Hannah.” Rae looked at both of them in turn. “You both have to feel safe enough to share your deepest feelings with each other so that your mutual understanding can grow.”
Janie touched Solo’s thigh again, for longer this time. “Rae’s right, Han. I can’t go back to how it was before, so we have to be honest with each other, even if it’s hard, and even if it hurts.”
Solo tugged on her ear and rolled her neck. “Are you sure?” She didn’t want to fuck this whole thing up when it seemed like they might be making progress.
Janie rubbed Solo’s thigh and nodded. “I’m sure. Let’s do this right.”
“Okay,” Solo said. “I’m a little angry. But not about the incident itself. I meant what I said about being human and making mistakes. But…” Damn her inability to find the right words. Why was she so bad at this? “I guess I’m angry about being left in the dark.” She swallowed hard and met Janie’s questioning gaze. “You left and let me believe it was all my fault. I thought that I was such a terrible wife you couldn’t stand to be around me anymore. We’d been fighting so much, and I figured I pushed you too far, in so many ways.”
Janie’s face crumpled. “Han?—”
Solo held up her hand. “Wait, let me finish. I’m not saying this to hurt you. I’m just doing what Rae asked us to do, and I’m trying to be open and honest. This whole time, I thought I’d driven you away. I beat myself up about it every single day. I tried to figure out what was so broken in me that my wife would rather live in a depressing apartment than come home.”
Tears streamed down Janie’s face, and Solo wanted to shut the hell up and just hold her. She wanted to pick her up and carry her out of the office, forget everything that had happened and start all over again. Clean slate. But that’d just be burying their heads in the sand, and eventually, they’d have to come up for air. And that air would be even more toxic. Solo owed it to herself, to Janie, and to their girls to lay everything out now. If they weregoing to start again, they had to do it right.
“Don’t censor your feelings, Hannah,” Rae said. “Janie needs to hear this, and you need to voice it.”
Solo clenched her jaw and forced herself to look at Janie instead of Rae, or out the window, or at the boring books on the many wooden shelves. “And it turns out, the whole time, you were carrying this huge secret. This thing had less to do with me being a bad wife and everything to do with your own guilt and shame. And I’m angry that you didn’t trust me with it sooner. That you let me believe I was the problem instead of being honest about what you were going through.”
“I’m sorry,” Janie whispered. “I’m so sorry.”
“I know you are. And I’m not holding onto this anger,” Solo said, surprising herself. “I’m just acknowledging it exists.” She motioned to Rae. “Because Rae keeps telling me I need to be honest about my feelings instead of pushing them down and pretending everything’s fine.”
“That’s exactly right,” Rae said. “Thank you for sharing all that. It takes courage to acknowledge complicated feelings, especially when they might hurt someone we love.” She looked at Janie. “How does it feel to hear Hannah express her anger this way?”
Janie wiped at her face with shaking hands. “It destroys me that she thought everything was her fault, and that she blamed herself for me leaving when the truth was...”
Janie’s body heaved with the power of her sobs, and Solo drew her into her arms. She held her there until Janie’s tears soaked her tee, and she’d calmed enough to straighten herself up. She took a tissue and wiped her makeup-streaked cheeks.
“The truth was I left because I couldn’t face what I’d done. Because I was drowning in guilt and shame, and I didn’t know how to ask for help. I was so…so lost. So unable to connect to the world around me. And then Chloe…” Janie rubbed at her forehead. “Hannah suffered because of my cowardice.”
“Is that what you think it was?” Rae asked gently. “Cowardice?”
“What else would you call it? I ran away instead of facing my problems. I hid the truth instead of being honest. I let my wife take on all the blame when?—”
“When you were struggling with untreated postpartum depression,” Rae said.
The words hung in the air like a small explosion.
Janie went very still and deep frown lines creased her forehead. “What?”
“Janie, I was concerned about this in the first couple of sessions, but I wasn’t certain of it. After what you’ve said today though, I think we need to name it explicitly. What you’ve been experiencing—the overwhelming guilt, the inability to forgive yourself for a minor mistake, the intrusive thoughts about being an unfit mother, the isolation, the feeling of being disconnected, the belief that your family would be better off without you—these are all classic symptoms of postpartum depression.”
“Doesn’t that happen right after birth?” Janie asked. “The girls are eighteen months old.”
“It can actually manifest anytime within the first year, and in some cases even later, especially under conditions of chronic stress and sleep deprivation. You may have been dealing with it for longer than you’re even aware,” Rae said, her tone gentle and quiet. “And your symptoms were exacerbated by the traumatic incident with Chloe. All of that created a perfect storm of guilt and shame that your depression latched onto.”
The floor dropped out from under Solo as the realization hit. “How did I not see it?”
“Because you were struggling with your own adjustment to parenthood,” Rae said. “Postpartum depression often looks like exhaustion and normal parenting stress from the outside. And Janie obviously got very good at hiding it.”
