Prozac is the best marriage counselor
I put supper on the table, and I was hungry. I couldn’t wait to eat baked chicken with a cracker crumb crust, mashed potatoes, and marinated broccoli–a meal everybody in our family liked for a change, and I didn’t have to fix anything else for picky eaters. Anita rolled her wheelchair to the kitchen table.
“Did you remember to hang my pants instead of putting them in the dryer?” She asked.
Oops.
“I told you to hang them up or they will shrink,” she said.
I pulled the clothes from the dryer and put them in the laundry basket. I found the pants, but they didn’t look like they’d shrunk. I showed them to her.
“They look ok,” I said.
“You don’t listen to me. Nobody listens to me. It feels like I don’t exist.”
I knew Anita’s plate of food was going to sit there uneaten. She began crying.
“Nobody listens to me. Nobody cares about my feelings. Take it away. I’m not eating supper.”
She rolled her wheelchair to the end of the hallway, crying non-stop, occasionally yelling an incoherent scream. I walked behind her, tried to console her.
“Leave me alone. You don’t care. You don’t take me seriously”
Now, I was frustrated. I just prepared a delicious meal, and she was crying hysterically over something trivial. Moreover, I devoted my life to her, and she claimed I don’t take her seriously.
“I didn’t do it on purpose. It was an accident.”
“That’s not the point. You never understand the point. You never listen to me. I don’t matter because I’m in a wheelchair. Leave me alone.”
“I did listen to you. I just got busy and forgot your pants were in the washing machine. I was cooking supper, doing laundry, and taking care of you and Daphne. It just slipped my mind.”
“Everybody ignores me because I’m in a wheelchair. Leave me alone.”
“!#!# (random collection of cusswords),” I exclaimed before marching off to eat my now cold supper.
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
Scenes similar to the above began occurring with more frequency. Anita would cry for hours and threaten to go home to mama–a ridiculous proposition because her mother had recently had a hernia operation and was in no condition to take care of her. She would become inconsolable, and I couldn’t comfort her, no matter how hard I tried. Sometimes, this made me feel angry, and other times I felt bored because the crying went on for so long, it became monotonous. There were several sources of conflict that precipitated these outbursts, and Daphne, in the language of a little girl, referred to her mother as a “maniac crier pants.”
Child raising was 1 conflict. Anita would want me to enforce some discipline on Daphne for something I thought was unimportant, but I would do it because Anita was unable to enforce it from her wheelchair. I would have been ok, if she could have done it herself, but I didn’t like to enforce rules I didn’t agree with. I would be annoyed and suppress the irritation until our next fight.
My parents were another source of conflict. My mom came over once a week, so Anita and I could go to lunch and the grocery store. She went out of her way to help us, but Anita resented it, and I would find myself in awkward situations. Once, my mom bought some socks for Daphne that Anita didn’t approve of. I had to tell my mom to take the socks back. Another time, my mom planted flowers in front of our house. Anita made me tell my mom to dig them up. The Anita I loved did have a bossy personality, but this situation that made her feel out of control was turning her bossy personality into an overbearing partner difficult to endure.
Both my parents came over once a week for supper. My dad had a flamboyant outgoing personality that clashed with Anita’s. My dad was always bringing new toys for Daphne that Anita rejected. My dad wanted to encourage Daphne to be a doctor, so he brought her some old stethoscopes. Anita made me hide it. He brought a doll that sang “The Macarena.” Anita made me dispose of it, though that one got on my nerves too. One of my dad’s nurses gave him a snow globe to give to Daphne. Somehow, that one ended up broken with shards of glass strewn everywhere. Finally, she told me to tell my parents to stop coming every week, putting me in yet another awkward situation. Thankfully, my parents ignored my request.
My mother-in-law likes to be called Nanny. She’s a sweet old lady who enjoys taking care of small children, and her last job, while she was still able to work, was at a daycare center. Her plain-spoken manner and her dialect are commonly found along the Appalachian Mountains from West Virginia to north Georgia. She is the hero of this chapter. One evening, Anita was suffering from 1 of her long crying spells and threatening to “go home to mama.” She went so far as to actually call her mom and tell her to come get her. Nanny told her she was “crazy” and said, “go to the doctor and tell him to prescribe a different kind of mental pill.” Anita was taking Trazadone, but it was not working.
My father prescribed Prozac, and it worked like a miracle. The fights and crying spells were reduced in both frequency and duration by 90% within a few weeks. Prozac made my life much easier. Prozac is an anti-depressant introduced by Eli Lilly during 1988. Brian Malloy and Klaus Schingel invented the drug, and they should have been given the Nobel Prize. Prozac is in the National Invention Hall of Fame. Today, at least 35 million people in the U.S. are on Prozac–more than 10% of the population. In my opinion many more people need to take it, and even Anita’s gynecologist joked it should be put in the city water supply. Moreover, it’s much cheaper than marriage counseling. Anita and I began getting along much better after the Prozac became established in her bloodstream. She even became more excepting of my parents’ roles, and we began going to their house for supper once a week. People who think marriage counseling is the answer are wrong. Sometimes all it takes is a pill. Prozac saved a lot of money, effort, and heartbreak. However, we were fortunate my father was a physician, and we didn’t have to seek the help of an expensive psychiatrist. Other couples might have to seek marriage counseling before realizing a mental pill for 1 of them is the solution.
I asked Anita, if she could tell a difference between before and after she began taking Prozac. Oddly enough, she said she couldn’t. She’s been taking Prozac since at least 2002, so maybe she has forgotten. Prozac works by increasing the uptake of serotonin into the brain, thus improving mood, and it also helps improve self-esteem and reduces negative thoughts. During her depressive fits, she often expressed the feeling she wasn’t worthy and became focused on the negative scenario of leaving us to go live with her mother. Once every 2 or 3 months, she has a relapse and suffers from a depressive fit, but they don’t last as long as they did before she began taking Prozac. On those days I always wonder, if she had a defective pill that day. I’m also less angry and frustrated when she has these fits because I became accustomed to much worse.