Inferno: A Memoir of Motherhood and Madness

by Catherine Cho

We gave a toast to the baby, our own private celebration.

I told him the stories of sacrifice, of a love so true that it could only cause pain.

I hear someone say the word “spy,” and I wonder if they think I’m a North Korean spy.

I feel their eyes on me whenever there is an ad featuring an Asian woman. I start to hear footsteps behind me while I’m pacing the halls.

The days before psychosis are still a blur, but my sense of who I am is coming back. It’s slow and unsteady, but I feel more certain in myself. I can feel myself grounded in the present, being more aware of where I am, who I am. I find myself noticing the time, noticing the walls and the chipping paint. I feel claustrophobic; it’s a slow suffocation.

I wonder if I look too calm about being separated from my son. Shouldn’t I be eager to go home? Shouldn’t I be hysterical?

Thinking of him is like trying to capture an echo.

Maybe it’s the medication, I think. In a way, it makes me feel grateful.

Am I not sane? Even asking that question, doesn’t it prove my sanity?

It was sets of three, cycles that we had to repeat, again and again like military drills.

Why did no one talk about how tiring it was? Or had they, and I just hadn’t been paying attention?

Mother: I had a new understanding of the word.

I don’t know if I’d describe what I felt as love. It was something beyond that. It was more primal, a fierce, possessive affection. He was ours. He was mine.

I’d heard once that most of the cells in our body regenerate every seven to fifteen years, and so we become new, but with some parts deep within that will never be replaced. Still, it made me think of being a new creature, cleansed.

The divers in Korea are always women. They swim along the coast, diving to deep depths without any breathing equipment. They ignore the dangers of the strong currents, providing for their families by collecting abalone from the seafloor. I wonder if they think of Shim Chung as they dive deep beneath the waves. I used to imagine they’d find pearls, pearls like tears, gifts from the queen of the sea.

I was a blind man’s daughter in a deaf man’s house.

And it wasn’t completely true. His parents did mean what they said; however, what I only slowly began to realize was that they didn’t mean their words to be taken seriously. They were used to speaking without being heard. Words were just sounds, not carefully chosen.

love flows from one generation to the next, never the other way.

My father-in-law wasn’t worried because of our actions; his anxiety was his own. I saw a man who had seen so many worst-case scenarios, who felt powerless to help and was terrified of having to recognize those own signs in the ones he loved. He knew he was an anxious man, he knew that he was always worried; it wasn’t Cato he was trying to protect, it was himself.

And I, I was the problem, I was the one messing it up, by ignoring her cues. She had been asking me to mirror her, to look carefree.

It was like I’d been sprinting, and this was the moment when everything came to a sudden stop. The world flipped. Everything changed, but nothing had changed. I believe this was the moment that ultimately triggered my psychosis.

Koreans believe in reincarnation, in recurrence, souls that are reborn again and again.

Three sons, diagnoses, mirroring actions, darting eyes.

Who would you trust to pack your parachute? And I always knew, when I met James, that he would be the one who I would trust.

It was a warning against the triumph of love, because something so beautiful, so raw can only end. To bare one’s heart is to know suffering, vulnerability. It is a destructive force. That’s what makes it beautiful, to know mortality and failure, but to step off the edge anyway.

“Your son has to die, and it has to be your husband’s fault.”

I felt like Icarus, gasping in what was awesome, transcending fear.

Copy paste copy paste copy paste. Forced to walk around the hotel room in an infinite loop, trying to keep his son alive, but failing.

Maybe if I hurt myself, maybe if I did this, I could break James’s reality. I could show him that we were in purgatory. That we needed to exit. I felt the demons rush toward me, their faces pressing in gleefully, and their hands pressing on me as they twisted my ankle and pulled me down.

I was meant to be a sacrifice, to stop the oncoming tide.

I thought of all the patterns in the universe. Why had I never noticed them before? I’d been so blind. I was sensing something larger than myself. I was seeing the face of God. I was seeing the infinite.

I’ve lived multiple lifetimes already. I want more than a lifetime. I want a lifetime of suspended moments.

I think this is why Koreans are so obsessed with time and the past. They are yearning for something pure, for something they are never sure will happen again, but yet they wait. They treasure the waiting, the yearning, because that is all they have.

This is my thousandth step, I think. I can finally breathe.

I had spent a total of twelve days away from Cato, four days in the emergency room and eight days at New Bridge ward.

My sense of what was real and not real was blurred, but slowly I was able to reconstruct what was reality and what was my psychosis.

It was unusual for postpartum psychosis to occur when the baby was already a few months old.

One thing that was shared by all of these women was a feeling of separation from their child, and I could sense from the forums that there was a deep sense of shame from the women who had been unwell.

The separation from Cato had been unnecessary, the rules felt so trivial and arbitrary, but it had had such an impact on our lives.

“It’s hard not to be able to make your child happy.” And she’d look at me with an expression that I didn’t fully understand.

You will understand, it was unspoken, but the words were there. Love flows down.

I don’t know if psychosis brought us closer together. I hope that it did. What I do know is that it changed something profoundly in James.

It was love that saved me. I was sure of that. My love for James, my refusal to leave him behind.