In the Bleak Midwinter

Remembering Christmas 2008

The toboggan of the Christmas season is now at the top of the hill. For the next ten days, there will be an indescribable magic in the Conti-Brown air.

It has indeed already begun. There is snow in our backyard; we’re about to have a snow ball fight to end all snow ball fights (free parenting tip: after the age of 5, you should hold your children to adult standards in snowball fights. It’s good for them and feels fantastic to win so easily.)

We are listening to Bing Crosby threaten listeners with adverse possession of their front porches unless he receives his figgy pudding. Nikki the vegetarian is threatening to remove our traditional Brazilian pichanha from the Christmas Day menu in exchange for what she called a Vegan Lentil Nut “Meatloaf” (and one of our children can’t tell if she’s serious).

Everything is as it should be.

Of course, the world looks different from outside this festive bubble. Misery abounds in so many corners of so much of the world. There have been many times that Nikki and I have felt broken by the starkness of the contrast between our good fortune and the calamities of the wider world.

In today’s personal post I want to share a core experience when we were on the opposite end of that stark asymmetry.

It was the Christmas season sixteen years ago. Our oldest was just born days before. It should have been our best Christmas.

Instead, our world was falling apart.

California, Mormonism, and Stanford Law School, fall 2008

Nikki and I had been married for three years. By Latter-day Saint standards, marrying at 24 wasn’t particularly young and having children at 27 wasn’t either. By the standards of Harvard College (where we met) or Stanford Law School (where I was then enrolled), we stood apart. But not too far. By the time our baby was ready to come, we were accustomed to bridging the divides between our sometimes-insular religious community and the wider circles we traveled.

A few weeks before, though, we had navigated a harrowing and almost violent confrontation between those two worlds. It was 2008 in California, and conservatives had placed on the ballot a proposal to overturn the state’s judicial recognition of gay marriage. The students of Stanford, including our closest friends, lined up on one side of the issue; the Church had made itself the public face of the other side. For those (admittedly few) liberal and libertarian Latter-day Saints, this was an awful time where our own sense of public policy, institutional loyalties, and closest friendships were all thrown into chaos.

During that political season, church ceased to be a refuge. Some members believed so completely in the righteousness of their anti-gay marriage cause that Sunday School became a political rally. I remember one older woman in particular whose words felt like poisoned arrows. For the first time in my life, I wondered if there was a continued place for me among the Latter-day Saints.

School was only marginally better. My best friend and study partner in law school, a gay woman who deeply respected my religiosity, tearfully asked me for any kind of explanation I could offer for the Church’s position that didn’t start or end in animus. I couldn’t give it. She at least had the investment in me to seek the conversation. Other acquaintances simply stopped talking to me. And, as a liberal Mormon from Harvard who refused to participate in the campaign, I fared pretty well; I recall one more conservative Latter-day Saint whose entire law school career ended in ostracism by her public activism.

Preparing for parenthood

Nikki was eight months pregnant when the election occurred and the conservatives carried the proposition. It was a morose time. We kept attending church, but it wasn’t the same. There were profound wounds in our otherwise vibrant congregation. At least in law school we were approaching exams and Stanford was nerdy enough that most students were sticking to themselves in their little corner of the library.

The day of our baby boy’s arrival had come. Nikki and I had agreed that the sign for her to me was to text our baby’s name with an exclamation point when I needed to come back from the law library where I was studying for finals. One thing to know about Nikki, though, is that she has a superhuman pain threshold. I once watched her take cookies out of the oven without an oven mitt. So instead of the agreed-upon text, I received instead a casual phone call saying “Peter, you might come home. I think I am having contractions.” On my way out, I stopped by the vending machine to buy some peanut M&Ms and chat with some friends. When one asked about the baby, I told her that Nikki had actually just asked me to come home. My friend shoved me out the door and confiscated my M&Ms.

I got home four minutes later and found Nikki in active labor. We drove 90 miles an hour to the hospital, Nikki nearly destroying our bucket-of-bolts Toyota in terrifying contraction suppression. Twenty-one minutes after I sprinted and she hobbled into the ER waiting room, we held our enchanting and mysterious little Conti-Brown in our arms.

The baby arrived. And so did debilitating postpartum depression

For twenty-four hours, we felt sacred bliss as our duo became an immediate trio. By the next day, however, it was clear that Nikki was not okay. Her symptoms and what followed in the months thereafter are her story to tell. I’ll say, only, that what followed was an extremely severe case of postpartum depression that required substantial interventions and many months before we found resolution.

My exams were the next week. I barely squeaked by, my worst grades of my life. We spent Christmas in that awful fog. There was no relief. The best we could say is that I had three weeks of vacation, but the new semester loomed like a many-headed hydra.

I remember a talk with my brother during that dark Christmas. He told me that I was born to carry this load and that my reaction to it would define me. I steadied my shaking shoulders and tried to think through what exactly what that would mean. I started to search for jobs with flexible hours and prepared the paperwork for a leave of absence. I have never felt more alone than I did during the Christmas of 2008.

After the New Year, the bishop of our congregation, a loving man a little younger than my mother, sat down with me to strategize. I told him my plan to work at Home Depot until this cloud passed. He took my hand in his, locked eyes, and told me I would do no such thing. The Latter-day Saints would carry us until we made it to the other side.

I had seen the extraordinary magnanimity of the Saints before, in my own life and as a volunteer myself. But the size and scope of our needs were so massive, so great, I didn’t see how we could rely on it, especially since doctors could give us no clarity about when Nikki would return to us in body and spirit. I looked away and pushed back. “I don’t see how you can help with this,” I said, through sleep-deprived tears.

The Mormon brigade

At times, a Latter-day Saint Bishop listens to his members, at times he negotiates, and at times he instructs. This time was a moment for my instruction. He took out a piece of paper on which someone had printed a schedule. It included daily meals and daily shifts for people to be with my wife and our baby for the next three weeks. “Another schedule would replace this one if we are in the same spot in three weeks.” (We were and it did.) “You are not leaving school.”

The Mormon brigade took control on the first day of the new semester. Day after day, one delicious meal after another, a different cast of members of our small congregation taking vacation days to be with my tiny and fragile family so that I could grind onward in my coursework on Bankruptcy and International Trade.

In one particularly tender example, the woman with whom we had starkly different political views volunteered more than any other person to be with us during that period of such acute stress. One day I came home from a full day of studying to find her holding a resting Nikki in one arm and our little baby in the other. The last words I had exchanged with her before that night had been in hostility. Now, my soul full of painful but grateful vulnerability, all I could say was “thank you so much for being here.” Silent tears ran down her aging cheeks. She nodded at me with a sweet smile that brought balm to my heart. She was back again the next day.

It was not just the Mormons who carried us. My best friend in law school, my gay study partner, took November off from me. I didn’t know if we could survive. When she learned what had befallen us, she asked a very specific question: “what is the task on your to-do list that is the most irritating?” It was fixing a busted brake light on our car. She did it the next day. She also committed to covering any notes for any class I had to miss, including those she did not attend with me. The darkness of Christmas 2008 had helped heal a beloved friendship.

The fog lifts

In a few months, under constant and active care of doctors, the fog that had descended over Nikki lifted. The scars would take more time to heal, but we were strong enough to move forward. We moved to DC for the summer for an internship. We attended my best friend’s wedding to her fiancée, dancing with abandon, our little, chubby baby taking turns as the most sought-after dance partner. And we never wavered from our commitment to the extraordinary Latter-day Saint communities to which we were fortunate enough to belong.

I am not sure what lessons there are to draw from this experience. I have a few thoughts I suppose on how important it is not to define our circles so tightly and narrowly as to include only those whose political views coincide completely with our own. I am so glad I did not excommunicate those Latter-day Saints who voted differently from me; I am also so glad I was not excommunicated from beloved friends for whom my membership in a church they did not understand posed fundamental challenges. I have even more thoughts on the awful stigmas that have attached to mental illness, especially in professional circles. And I have a firm conviction that when we reduce religious commitments to parochial esoterica and historicism, we miss some of the most fundamental aspects of religious transcendence.

But as Nat King Cole sings Merry Christmas over Spotify and my boys come rushing in from the cold with pink cheeks and an obviously coordinated (but as easily defeated) strategy for that snowball fight, let me leave you with this conclusion.

I have not seen a Christmas as painful as 2008 since then, by a long margin.

I have, however, had the opportunity to see seasons like spring 2009 many times since then.

I feel incredibly grateful for both.

Peter Conti-Brown is the Class of 1965 Associate Professor of Financial Regulation at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Art by Edward Burne-Jones.