In the Blood by Lisa Unger

shared moment in a quiet house, we are sitting on the couch trying to remember how to be alone together. But it feels awkward. He looks different, thin and pale with dark circles under his eyes. I am different in about a hundred different ways, jumpy and nervous, quick to snap. We are both waiting for the noises on the monitor that will send one of us up the stairs.
    But when I looked at my husband, I didn’t see the mirror of my own despair. He didn’t seem shattered the way I felt. But, of course, he left for the office every day. Our front door was his portal back to the normal world where people work, and went out to lunch, and surfed the Web at their desks in the afternoon, and met for drinks. People laughed and had thoughts, important thoughts that didn’t fly out of their heads like owls delivering secret messages.
    He disappears through the portal by seven in the morning (before the baby, he never left until eight-thirty at the earliest).Sometimes he comes home as late as eight. He says he has to work more now, because of the baby, because I have decided not to go back to work and to stay home with our child. I felt the first trickle of resentment the minute he walked out the door his first day back, clutching his little book of photos. Six weeks later, my resentment has bloomed into a full-blown rage. But I bury it, deep inside. I know it is wrong. I wasn’t really angry with him, was I? After all, he was supporting us now. And it was I who had pushed for a baby.
    “We had a hard few weeks,” he says. “But he’s doing a lot better, isn’t he?”
    I don’t say anything. There’s a glass of wine for me on the table, but I don’t want it. If I drink it, I’ll have to pump and dump. I hate hooking myself up to that machine, sitting and listening to it sigh and whir as it drains the milk from my breasts.
    “The crying,” he says. “That was so hard. But it’s stopped, other than what’s probably normal. And he’s sleeping a lot.”
    “He doesn’t seem right,” I say. It sounds weak and a little whiny. I can’t put into words what I feel in my body. My husband stares at me in that way that he has, so present, so earnest. He has his hand on my leg.
    “The labor, the C-section, the colic,” I say into the thick, expectant silence. “Maybe it hurt him.”
    He is tender, tries to talk it through with me. (He’s just a baby. We’ll all adjust, because everyone does, don’t they? Maybe we got all the hard stuff out of the way, maybe we’ll sail through the terrible twos and adolescence, he joked.) But I had a feeling that we wouldn’t be sailing through anything ever again.
    “My father,” I say. And I hate the words before they’ve even tumbled out of my mouth.
    “No,” he says, horrified, as though the thought has never crossed his mind. “Don’t.”
    “He looks just like my father.”
    So much for “date night.”
    The next day, he calls in sick to work. Appointments are made—not for the baby, but for me.
    My ob-gyn quickly diagnoses me with postpartum depression. And my husband and I sit in her pink, sunlit office while she explains how the massive hormonal shifts that occur after pregnancy don’t regulate right away for everyone. She kept calling it the baby blues, which I think she did to take the edge off of it. Because while “baby blues” sounds soft and pastel-colored, easily managed, postpartum depression is black and red, with thick, hard edges; it bludgeons. It was likely, said the doctor, that my traumatic labor, the emergency C-section, followed by the colic, have contributed to my descent into PPD.
    “It all feeds into each other,” said my doctor patiently. “And—P.S.—none of this is a walk in the park under the best of circumstances. More women suffer PPD in a given year than will sprain an ankle or be diagnosed with diabetes. So, you’re not alone.”
    To my husband: “Let’s make sure Mom is getting plenty of rest. Can you take the nighttime