An hour after my son was born, I had an eclamptic seizure and went into a coma for 14 hours. Distant baby crying drew my soul back into my body. The persistent urgent sound became louder, prying my eyes open. Through blurry sight, I saw myself on a hospital bed in a hazy dark room with wires attached all over my body. Small flashing beeping lights were on the other side of those wires, and my husband sat in a chair next to the machines. The double doors opened abruptly flooding the room with blinding light, and a woman in blue scrubs delivered my crying baby to me.
After two months of heart-pounding, breath-stopping, walls drizzling, insomnia induced stupor, it was suggested that I might be experiencing postpartum depression. Antipsychotics made me dream of blood and battles, so I threw them down the toilet. I saw an acupuncturist who put needles all over my back until I shook like I had during my eclamptic seizure. But I didn’t die like I had before. I started to come back.
Images began to flood my vision. Whole paintings would come in a second, title and all, but I didn’t yet have the skill to paint them. While my son slept, I meditated and prayed to the great masters, DaVinci, Dali and Michelangelo. “Teach me how to paint,but…” (I included a disclaimer) “I don’t want your madness.” Eight months after my son was born, I painted my first painting, “Birth.”
