Inferno: A Memoir of Motherhood and Madness

by Catherine Cho

According to Korean tradition, after a baby is born, mother and baby do not leave the house for the first twenty-one days.

When my son was born, I was reminded of this tradition daily by my family and by my in-laws, because we were breaking all the rules.

I didn’t see why we had to pay attention to Korean traditions, or superstitions, as I thought of them.

My son was eight days shy of his hundred-day celebration when I started to see devils in his eyes.

My first memory of psychosis is the light.

But I also know that he must be the archangel Michael, come to deliver us from the demons.

I claimed them from the trash bin. They’re now a treasured possession.

am alive. Real. I am married to James. Real. James loves me. Real. I have a son. Real. My son is three months old. Real. My husband and son are waiting for me. Real. I have postpartum psychosis. Real.

I was so preoccupied with the idea of losing my body, it had never occurred to me that I might lose my mind.

I remember living and dying, again and again, each lifetime of decisions splintered into possibilities.

I am like a zoo animal, except the zoo is inverted, and the cage protects those who belong on the outside. We, the animals, roam.

I have my hands in my pockets, so that I can keep ahold of the piece of paper with my truths. It makes me feel grounded, a talisman.

There’s an unspoken rule that the race majority in the room gets to control the remote.

Our rooms are divided by race and gender, one side of the hallway for the Hispanics, one for the blacks, one for the whites. I have to believe it’s intentional. I think it’s to prevent potential gang violence, but it also makes things simpler.

It would be offensive, except that it’s the most obvious way to be identified, especially if you’re not sure of your own identity.

But the rules are like the rules of prison: you never ask another resident why they are here. Even the workers wouldn’t ask that.

I don’t know the names of my medication. I think I’m the only one who doesn’t know.

I try to think of my son. I don’t miss him, but his absence feels strange, as though my body knows we are not meant to be separated.

Koreans believe that happiness can only tempt the fates and that any happiness must be bought with sorrow. As for love, it is thought of as an unfortunate passion, irrational and destructive.

To me, romantic love seemed essential. I didn’t understand how it could be destructive, and I dismissed the warnings as a sign of a repressed culture. I preferred the Western belief in a happy ending.

Romantic love did not feature in these stories; they were an afterthought or a deficiency. Love, instead, was a sacrifice. It meant loss, it meant sorrow. Sacrifice, the giving of oneself completely, that was what was required, that was what was expected. And suffering. As a Korean, I was meant to expect to suffer.

Ethnicity and mental health

So for Koreans, to love means to mourn, to know loss. The sweetness of love is tempered by the knowledge that life will return with a bitterness to create balance to the story.

I learn that we are considered involuntary patients and that we are wards of the state.

She refused to let it be a weakness or a vanity; it was merely factual. Her beauty was alive, wet, and breathing. To look at her was a reminder of one’s own mortality.

I’ve yet to see a kite fly like that again.

He never doubted my promises; maybe because I knew what not to promise. I would never promise that he’d be safe from my father’s temper.

Newspapers were “written by liars,” and we weren’t allowed to read books whose authors hadn’t been dead at least fifty years.

People called Teddy and me foxhole buddies, which was an accurate description. It was just the two of us.

Maybe she knows that I feel like the television is speaking to me. I know I must be imagining it, but the ads feel too accurate, and the Olympic coverage in Korea is the same way.

According to Koreans, you live a whole life cycle in sixty years. And tigers are guardians in Korean folklore, symbols of courage and strength.

The unmarried girls were the unlucky ones; they became comfort women, taken from their homes against their will.

My mother disapproved of superstition, and she didn’t let us burn the paper money or incense in the communal offering, but she didn’t say anything when my uncle told us to empty our pockets so that the dead wouldn’t follow us.

Hong Kong was a mysterious place, and increasingly, it represented freedom from the traps of New York. I handed in my notice to my job and decided to leap.

Unlike my father’s anger, Drew’s was unpredictable, triggered by anything, by nothing. His rage was superficial, circumstantial.

Drew loved me, he loved me so much, and I was difficult. I didn’t know how to make it stop, no matter what I did; if I argued, if I didn’t argue, if I fought back, if I let it happen, it didn’t seem to matter.

This was her son. This was her monster.

Everything I’d suffered, I’d thought of as a sacrifice, a willing gift to someone in return for the love they gave to me.

But I loved the idea of absolving sins through granting life.

How do you live as a ghost?

Hong Kong seemed like a scene from someone else’s life, although sometimes my cheekbone hurt, and then I’d be reminded of the bruises underneath the surface.

James would tell me that he felt like he was being “seen” for the first time in his life.

When he embraced me, all doubt disappeared.

Falling in love with James had a rhythm; it was as though we’d always been existing in the same plane, like we were reflections of each other.

“I surrender” was her most common phrase.

We don’t belong. We keep our heads down.

How were we meant to exit the loops of the past if we were destined to face them again and again?

Pregnancy felt like a separation from the body. My body was doing something on its own, a pre-programmed path it already knew, and I no longer had any control over. It felt like a hand sharply bringing my spirit back to my body, a return to the earthiness of it. It was also an erasure of self. I didn’t feel more “me”; I felt like I was being split, being shared. My body was no longer my own; I was a carrier, a holder of life. It was a reminder that my body was a collection of blood and bones.

I didn’t feel a rush of love or an overwhelming weight of responsibility, emotions that I’d been expecting. Instead, I felt curious, like I’d just been introduced to a stranger. He was a creature, an idea, not even human yet, just a being, a life.

I’d thought I would reclaim my body after birth, but instead, it was now a tool, something to sustain life.

In the blur of those hours, I stopped thinking of myself as having a name; I was a body.