Scratched

by Elizabeth Tallent

  Part III

  Because it was three-quarters of an hour when I could think, and thinking was as close as I had come to writing since being hired to direct Stanford’s creative-writing program, I loved the commute home from day care with my son in the back seat, and if my head hadn’t been full of my own concerns, he might have entrusted more news to me about what being alive was like for him, at six.

  A part of mothering that gave me trouble was the power of frustrations that should have been minor, easily dealt with, to evoke the dicey fractions of an instant when my mother’s long-ago anger emerged. Often the evocation was visual—her flat-open hand swung out of black space. It didn’t connect: the image lunged toward me and paused. This liminal teetering, pre-violence, offered a double vantage point, mother’s and child’s, which a completed blow would have dispelled, locking consciousness into one or the other, assailant or assailed, and within this double vantage point her anger was a taste I could taste, an exhilarated bitterness, even as the emotion that had actually been my own swept in, shock, and within shock, readiness for the worst she was capable of—that’s what’s strangest, that mischief glee of mine at havoc’s being about to materialize. The gladness with which some aspect of my psyche greets eruptions of violence, seeming almost to experience them as a resumption of the real life running along below lesser, disguising existence, confuses me, and my every attempt to wish it away has failed: it exists, for me—in me. My trouble was with these tiny scenes’ sense-flooding vividness, their attempted saturation of consciousness. For instance if my son did something that would have earned a harsh word from my mother, I not only heard that word but experienced the haywire animation that was the character of her anger. Was that being her? By the odd means of rushes of anger I regained the young mother I had loved—I was sunk in her, made to recognize that whatever harm she had been capable of, I was capable of as well. Again a sort of duality pertained, because I was both inhabited by her emotion (so it felt) and pitted against the behaviors it had inspired. The margin of my self that was pitted against, I nursed, I guarded, I spoon-fed with self-help and object-relations theory, communing with the mother I carried around inside my head, proving over and over See, this is how to love a child, and—this phenomenon yields a multiplicity of doubling—I found that through resisting the repetition of various violences I seemed to reach the child I had been, and even to comfort her. After seeking for so long, with the help of my series of therapists, to restore this child-self to wholeness, I found her accessibility now astonishing. Unfair, too—suppose I hadn’t become a mother, would she have gone on sulking in the unreachable depths? Strange to encounter in day-to-day mothering the original occasions for long-ago wounds, to feel something set right. But of this covert, reparative involvement with my child-self—who kept pace as my son grew, her age corresponding to his—I was a little bit ashamed, as of some secret greedy practice like hiding the good chocolate from my six-year-old. Patience and consolation should be between him and me, not bestowed on some forlorn little ghost of myself. But there she was. Whenever some hurt of my son’s invoked a far-distant hurt of my own, I had the chance to hold not only my son but the child-me: gestures of care she had pined for materialized simultaneously in the present and in the past. The template for each gesture was the shape of her longing, the tone of voice that would have soothed her tears was the one I spoke in, to my own boy. These gestures, that tone went against the grain of vivid inheritance. I made them up. They partook of the happiness of making in general. “For the perfectionist,” Adam Phillips writes, “to be ‘good enough’ is no good. For the perfectionist, for example, there could be no such thing as a good-enough mother,” but ordinary though my good-enough care-gestures plainly were, nothing to write home about, my being able to make them aroused the possessive incredulity I would have felt at suddenly being able to write sonnets or perform heart surgery.

  At my worst I felt jealous of my son, steadily loved as he was.

  I had the luck of finding him tremendously interesting, a luck originating for me, as it had failed to do for my mother, in his newborn gaze; and for me, made as I am, interest proved to be the best possible antivenom for perfectionism—perfectionism is in a sense the failure to be interested in things as they are, or people as they are, the mortal loneliness of perfectionism originates in its blindness to what is right before one’s eyes, to sentences as they are, a newborn’s gaze just as it is; the perfectionist’s interest is reserved for a fixed destination, the perfect version of the page or child, toward which the actual sentence or child can be forced to move, and because the preternatural attunement of a child craving love divines that destination, the parent’s perfectionism can imperil the child’s ownership of herself and warp her into an ally in the pursuit of the unreal, a deformation of the soul object-relations theory calls compliance, of which the creation of the false self, the self designed to fit parental specs, is an extreme form. According to what writers call the logic of the story, meaning the expectations a narrative generates as it goes, which the narrative needs to be conscious of as it unfolds (even if it ultimately chooses to dodge those expectations, or upend them), my first sight of him ought to have been a gamble, I ought to have searched him head to toe for the flaws that would alienate me, but I didn’t, I didn’t even properly fear the risk of being blindsided by revulsion for him as my mother had been for me, I just, when it came down to it, couldn’t work up any dread about how things were going to go for the two of us, for the odd reason that I trusted him. While I was pregnant it didn’t matter to me that my conviction that the baby was rooting for me to be able to love deeply was a faculty I dreamed up and attributed to him, and it doesn’t matter to me now, if in reality—“in reality”—his contribution was not telepathic but merely—“merely”—hormonal, physiological, the him-and-me pairing of pregnancy created a love I knew myself to be incapable of, and I mean that with the most vehement literalness: incapable. In one third-trimester dream he did cartwheels across the lawn of my childhood, in another, he and I had a long talk. Ultrasounds had revealed his snub-nosed, bulge-eye-lidded face, in there, sucking his thumb. One session we watched as his lips parted and the thumb escaped and he roused himself, bowing his head toward the hand adrift nearby, nuzzling after it. He had a will. His quest for the companionship of his own thumb, there in the solitariness the ultrasound waves flexed through, moved me to tears. And then he was held up naked in white operating-room light, and when his father shouted My boy! his blood-streaked head swiveled toward the familiar voice, and if my wrists hadn’t been fastened down with restraints for the cesarean, I would have reached for him.

  From early on he had a sturdy sense of his rights, a funnily intense apartness I worried originated in his fear that as a single mother I might require shows of affection or a precocity flattering to my mothering; though given an audience he was transformed and became boldly entertaining, when he and I were alone, especially in the car, we could pass through intervals of musing silence; because he’d sometimes shown weird flashes of eloquence it was always worth waiting for him to speak. This chance could be ruined by my inadvertently broadcasting distress. Because look at me behind the wheel in my heels and pencil skirt, distracted by the mayhem of the about-to-be divorced, run ragged by my new job directing a famous writing program whose faculty is riven by feuds. As far as the job of director went, my ambition to be a wise conservator of the extraordinary creative-writing program smashed headlong into my deficiencies. Among my shortcomings was a tendency to the intense dislikes characteristic of other-perfectionism, which judges others with perfectionist righteousness and finds them wanting, and they of course naturally dislike the disliker. Right alongside my growing sense of doom as director ran my distress at my slipshod mothering. I burned toast, lost keys, forgot stuff right and left—Band-Aids, ingredients necessary for dinner, the times of playdates, and, once, a class field trip to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, which he missed due to my getting us to his school just as
the bus full of his classmates turned the corner and disappeared; and if at the last blink of those taillights I did not rest my forehead against the steering wheel and weep, it was purely from the awareness that tears would mean my kid’s trying to console me and I wanted him to have the right to anger and dismay and blame, a right he was likely to exercise only if I gave every sign of being able to handle them, from him—such, anyway, was my thinking, but he had known how wretched I was, anyway. He could tell.