Feeding the Emptiness

Image credit: Photo by Djuliet on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons

Many years ago, before we had children, my husband bought me a small fish tank for my birthday. At the time, I wanted a car. I didn't really think he could buy a car, but I was relying on a very iffy public transit system to get to work, so I half hoped. His only clue ("it's pink") did not seem encouraging, but maybe he was buying one used. From a Mary Kay lady. He was definitely very excited and spending a lot of time in preparation and whispered conferences with friends. When the big day came, he proudly unveiled the tank, complete with pink gravel.

Over the years, we've had a variety of freshwater fish, from tropical to ordinary old feeder goldfish. We once had a fish give birth to tiny babies, whose growth was somehow stunted, perhaps from my over-caution in keeping them too long in a small breeding section of the tank. When my son Austen was born, the tank was home to one large angel fish, who had outlived all the rest.

As an infant, Austen screamed -- piercing screams -- nearly constantly when he wasn't nursing, which I did nearly constantly to keep him from uttering those awful screams. He had (even for a newborn) problems sleeping. He was different, more intense, more needy from the day he was born, from before he was born. And I felt like I was living my life clutching a live grenade that could explode at any moment.

In the anxiety, depression, sleep deprivation and sheer overwhelmingness of those early days, the fish tank fell into neglect. The water got murkier as it was cleaned less often. And when the last of the fish finally died, we didn't replace them, but let the tank stand empty. My memories of that time are fuzzy -- events run together and odd things stand out, disconnected -- like one long waking dream. And one of the disconnected, fuzzy memories that's weighed on me over the years was of purposely starving the last of the fish when my son was an infant. I remember lying in bed and willing myself not to get up and feed them. I wanted to be free of them, but I felt awful letting them die. Well, they could eat the algae or they were better off dead anyway, I'd tell myself. I remember the tank getting so cloudy and black that I wasn't sure when they had died. And over the years the thought of that tank haunted me.

I eventually cleaned it up and restocked it with fish. Currently, it houses one lone goldfish, as I never have gotten back into the habit of keeping it up well enough to feel comfortable with anything higher maintenance or less hardy. But as I was feeding that fish the other night, I was overcome once again by that familiar guilt and shame for the fish I'd starved. Or, it suddenly occurred to me, had I? Had I confused a dream for reality? Wouldn't Mark have fed the fish if I hadn't? It was hard to know what happened back then. Everything was such a muddle.

I turned to my husband, who was lying on the bed, and said, "I have this memory of purposely starving my fish when Austen was born. Only I'm wondering now if it really happened that way or if it was a dream." And Mark said, "That doesn't sound at all like anything you'd do." And it was true. I've been known to bring home and tend to everything from wounded birds to baby squirrels to stray kittens. And I'm obviously the kind of person who spends years plagued with guilt and shame at the thought that I might have killed some pet fish. But I was crazy back then. Crazy with post-partum depression and anxiety and the weight of Mark's growing addiction pressing down (although I didn't know that's what it was at the time). I wasn't me. Who knows what the crazy-me did?

If Mark was right and it didn't make sense that I was a fish murderer, then what had happened? I concentrated. Wasn't Angel the only fish left in the tank when Austen was born? He was. I had written it in the baby book (one of the few things I wrote in the baby book); next to "Who was there to greet you when you came home?" I had written "Our fish, Angel." And I hadn't gone out and restocked the tank. When Angel died I left it empty. So what fish could I have killed?

Then it came to me: it was the baby fish I remembered killing, because I remember thinking I couldn't tell when they had died; the water was so murky and they were tiny and good at hiding in the plants. And the puzzle snapped together. I was lying in bed willing myself not to go feed the empty tank again, because the crazy, panicky part of my brain was telling me that I couldn't know what wasn't there. I had been feeding the empty tank after Angel died. Maybe, I thought, those little fish that I thought had died long ago were still there in the plants. Maybe they needed me to feed them. I couldn't know, and I shouldn't starve them.

The guilt and shame melted away, transforming first into relief (I was not a fish murderer!) and then into delight at the metaphor for so many of my relationships: carrying guilt and shame for years because I hadn't perpetually fed an emptiness that I thought couldn't live without me. It's a good thing Mark didn't get me a car; I wouldn't have felt nearly as bad for not putting gas in it when it broke down.