The Love That Stayed

What does love look like when someone cannot give anything back?

One of my worst fears has always been paralysis — losing the ability to move, being confined to a bed or a chair, depending entirely on other people to care for me. I never imagined that fear would come true in a completely different form.

During my first psychiatric hospitalization, I was fully dependent on the people around me — not because my body had failed, but because my mind had. I couldn't reassure anyone of anything. I wasn't the wife Scott had married. I wasn't the daughter my parents knew. I couldn't simply say, "I'm okay."

And yet they stayed.

That is what I keep coming back to. Love is easy to recognize when someone is healthy, present, and able to receive it. The harder question is what love looks like when the person you love disappears into an illness they did not choose.

During my hospitalization, Scott came to see me every evening. There is so much from that time that I don't remember clearly, but I remember knowing he was there. I remember the comfort of having him close before he eventually had to leave the hospital and go home without me.

He was a brand-new father caring for our newborn son while his wife was hospitalized. Our family didn't yet understand what was happening to me or when I would come home.

And still, he came back.

That is what love looked like.

It also looked like my parents and sisters waiting on the other side of the walls of a psychiatric hospital while I wasn't allowed to leave. They didn't know what had happened to me. They didn't know when — or even if — I would return home to them as the person they knew.

It looked like my family caring for and loving my newborn son because I was too sick to do those things myself.

For a long time, I couldn't appreciate that last part.

I was angry.

I was angry that everyone else got to be with my baby while I didn't. I was devastated by everything I had lost. Even now, I don't like looking at photographs from those thirty days. It hurts too much.

I missed pieces of my son's newborn life that I had spent years imagining. I missed his first Christmas. Mostly, I missed the ordinary time I had expected to have with him — the quiet beginning of motherhood I had waited so long for.

My sisters brought me a small photo album while I was in the psychiatric hospital. Inside were pictures of my family from the few days before we were separated.

That little album became incredibly dear to me.

I looked at it over and over again.

I think about that now. While my mind was somewhere I couldn't control, while so much of what I understood about reality had disappeared, I kept returning to the people I loved.

I lost so much during postpartum psychosis.

I lost trust in my own mind.

I lost my sense of reality.

I lost thirty days with my newborn son that I will never get back.

For a while, I lost the person I thought I was.

But I didn't lose my love for Grayson.

I didn't lose Scott's love for me.

I didn't lose my family's love.

I didn't lose the love of the people who were fighting to bring me home.

And eventually, I would learn that I hadn't permanently lost the ability to love myself either.

That one took longer.

For years, I looked at what happened through the lens of everything postpartum psychosis had taken from me. It took therapy for me to begin looking at those same thirty days differently.

Instead of only seeing that my family got to be with Grayson when I couldn't, I began to see that my family was there for Grayson when I couldn't be.

There is a difference.

I began to feel grateful that when I was too sick to care for my son, there were people who loved him enough to step into the space I desperately wished I could occupy myself. I became grateful for all the ways they stepped up for me when I needed them most.

Sometimes love is keeping someone's place in the world for them until they are able to return to it.

My family did that for me.

And they are still doing it in smaller ways.

Recently, I told my oldest sister how frustrated I was becoming with the querying and publishing process for Still His Mother. I was feeling defeated and down in the dumps.

She could tell.

"I'll be your publisher," she told me.

I knew immediately that she meant it.

She had watched me live the story I am now trying to put into the world. And when she said she would be my publisher, what I heard underneath those words was something much bigger: If you need someone to fight for this with you, I will.

My middle sister has told me more than once that she wants to be my manager for the book.

It makes me smile.

But I know she means it, too.

The same sisters who loved me through the hardest period of my life are still standing beside me six years later, telling me in completely different ways: We're here.

But there is another kind of love I've had to learn about.

My own.

For a long time, I struggled with the idea that getting postpartum psychosis somehow meant I hadn't been as good of a mother as I had expected myself to be.

Before Grayson was born, I had spent my entire life mentally healthy. Then, almost overnight, I developed a serious psychiatric illness. When I came home from the hospital, I wasn't simply returning to motherhood. I was trying to recover while making sense of the fact that my own mind had suddenly become something I couldn't trust.

I held myself to standards I couldn't possibly meet.

It took a long time to give myself grace.

My therapist eventually reminded me of something I had trouble seeing myself: I had been fighting to be Grayson's mother since before he was even born.

Even from inside the psychiatric hospital, I wanted to be with him.

Today, some of my favorite moments with my son would probably look completely ordinary to anyone else.

I take him to school.

I pick him up.

Sometimes it's just the two of us going to PetSmart to get another fish for his aquarium. Sometimes we're going to Wendy's because it's his favorite restaurant.

Those moments mean more to me than he knows.

I get to be the one driving.

I get to be the one beside him.

I get to take my son somewhere, just the two of us, and spend that ordinary time together.

There was once a time when I couldn't do any of those things. So when I pull into the school pickup line or walk through PetSmart with Grayson, I know how hard I fought to become the person who could show up for him this way.

For years, I thought so much about what I had lost that it was difficult to see what had stayed.

Now I can.

If I could go back into that psychiatric hospital and sit beside the woman I was then, I would tell her that all of those people on the other side of the walls love her tremendously.

I would tell her that her little boy is going to love her tremendously, too.

I would tell her that the bond she is terrified of losing isn't going to disappear.

And I think I would tell her one more thing.

You're still in there.

Because when I talk about the love that stayed, I don't only mean Scott's love. Or my parents' love. Or my sisters' love.

I mean mine.

After postpartum psychosis, I went through years of anger, sadness, fear, and grief over what had happened to me. There were times when I wondered what the illness had changed permanently. I wondered what remained of the Jordan I had been before my mind became sick.

Six years later, I think I finally know.

She is still here.

Maybe I'm not exactly the woman I was before. I don't think anyone can go through something that changes them so profoundly and return completely unchanged.

But the loving part of me survived.

Postpartum psychosis took my reality for a while. It took my trust in my own mind. It took thirty days I desperately wanted with my newborn son. It took moments I can never get back.

But it didn't take my love.

That stayed.