The Fourth Child

by Jessica Winter

  Session 4—Role-Playing, Second Module

  Notes from session: Therapists attempted to direct the focus student’s anger toward birth mother. (Prompt questions included “How does it make you feel that she left you?”; “Why did she leave you?”) Adoptive mother expressed concern that drama practice was inappropriate for focus student’s age and English-language skills. Fourth holding therapy session commenced during rage response, again requiring therapist and two co-therapists. Therapists introduced use of blanket during holding therapy as precursor to forthcoming rebirthing session. Adoptive mother expressed concern that focus student could be injured during holding therapy.

  Session 5—Minding the “Baby”

  MODULE: Therapeutic return to state of infancy using bottle-feeding, cradling, swaddling, rocking, lullabies.

  Notes from session: Focus student’s deflective response to first set of babying tactics converted immediately to rage response when swaddling was introduced. Responded well to bottle-feeding and sweets. Responded well when given a teddy bear she was “in charge” of. Repeatedly told therapists throughout the session that the teddy bear belonged to her. Adoptive mother again expressed concerns about potential injury to the focus student during holding therapy. Adoptive mother also expressed concerns about the next day’s planned rebirthing session.

  Carolyn Dewey, founder and clinical director of the Arden Attachment Center, shrugged her marathoner’s arms out of her lavender blazer. She folded her hands on her desk, which contained two short stacks of papers, plaques and awards to her left, wood-framed photographs to her right. She took a lip gloss and a compact mirror out of the mauve leather handbag on her desk, flipped the compact open with her left hand while glossing her lips with the right, pulled her lips over her teeth and kissed them together twice, pop-pop, baring her teeth at the mirror to check for stains, and slipped the gloss and compact back into the bag—all in one flowing vapor trail of a gesture, without breaking the line of her monologue.

  “When mothers bring their children to Arden, I want them to see something to aspire to. To see it inscribed in me. To be sure, it’s not about me or what I have done, it’s not about envying me—I’m not that vain—but rather envying the time, wanting the time back, seeing the intent and the effort expended, and thinking, If I had all the time she had to work on myself, I would walk across all the deserts of the world, or I would rekindle three friendships I lost to the parenting years, or I would read all of Proust, or whatever it would be.

  “I see my upkeep, if you will, as a pact I keep with myself and with all of my fellow Arden parents. I see myself as one of you, and I want you to see yourself in me. In all this paint and coiffuring and visible workouts I want you to see a clock, and the hands of the clock are moving backward and giving you back your life. Not the life you had before you were the mother of an attachment-challenged child. You’re not getting that life back, and you wouldn’t want it back. But a life where you come first again, because if you’re not taking care of yourself, then you can’t take care of anyone else.”

  Carolyn started almost imperceptibly, as if sensing a mosquito somewhere behind her right ear. Her frosted blond hair was brushed and blown to curl under, tickling at the places where her slim shoulders met her neck; a front curtain swooped out of a deep side part and over a thinner translucent canopy of wispy bangs. In another compound gesture, Carolyn put her hand inside the mauve leather to retrieve a small aerosol spray can. If Lauren were here, she might scold Carolyn for ripping a slightly bigger hole in the ozone layer. Carolyn misted the area in question with a spiraling flourish, and patted the calmed zone with one hand while slipping the can back inside the bag with the other.

  A few stray particles of the spray misted onto Jane’s face, and with them a memory. The party at Rhonda’s. Brad Bender swinging the cheerleaders around, Pat setting his hand on fire with the hairspray and the lighter, Colin screech-laughing at Pat in pain. And yet nobody whisked them off to Colorado for behavior modification therapy. Fifteen years later, a patch of Pat’s left hand was still raw pink and mottled where it had gone up in flames.

  “Sore paw?” Carolyn asked, and Jane felt a momentary calm surprise that Carolyn’s clinical training equipped her to read minds. But it was Jane’s own bandaged hand that Carolyn was pointing to.

  “Oh, this—it’s nothing. I caught it in the door . . .” Jane said.

  Carolyn nodded, eyes wide, lips pressed together significantly. “I judge no one who comes here, though I do invite them to judge me,” she said. “Because no one failed like I did at putting myself first. When my boys were four and six, when we hit that first wall after I adopted them out of foster care, I lived on Hershey’s bars and Wonder bread. Literally, when I was hungry I would take a piece of bread out of the wrapper and ball it up in my fist, like I was returning it to its primordial dough state, and take bites off it, or if one of my boys was about to light the other one on fire I would cram the whole lump into my mouth at once and start yelling at them with my mouth full. I mean, sell the movie rights, right? I wore the same grubby sweatpants for days. I didn’t leave the house except for therapy appointments—not appointments for me, God forbid I do something for me, only for my sons. Sometimes I didn’t bother brushing my teeth. I thought that I didn’t have time for me to matter, which is the same as saying that I didn’t matter. And if I didn’t matter, then how could I possibly matter to my boys? How can someone who doesn’t matter be a mother? You get to a point where you think, I’m a wreck because my boys need help, when it’s really My boys need help because I’m a wreck.”

  Carolyn twirled a strand of iridescent beads around one finger. An artful tangle of gold and brass nestled against her chest under the open collar of her silk blouse. “I took women’s studies in college. Bryn Mawr. I know, I know. The clothes, the jewelry, the dieting—it’s all a trap. I read the books. I know the theory. But I was also learning how to live in it. You start to see living in the prison as a form of rebellion. I mean, if you’re in jail, you must have done something transgressive to get there, right? I used to only wear clothes I didn’t care about, dark machine-washable fabrics that didn’t stain—now I wear creams and pastels. I wear white, for goodness’ sake.” She motioned to her blouse. “I wear stuff you only want the dry cleaner to mess with, because I now refuse to see myself as an object you can puke or piss or shit on, pardon my language. I wear a lot of jewelry because I now refuse to accept that someone is going to rip my earrings out of my ears or try to strangle me with my own necklace. I eat well and sparely because I refuse any longer to self-medicate with food, I refuse any longer to eat ice cream straight out of the pint over the sink for dinner because that’s all I have time for and that’s all I deserve, stuffing sugar and fat into my mouth like a pacifier, like a drug—shove it all in the garbage disposal that is me, grind it up, fill the empty hole inside.”

  Carolyn patted her collar and smiled. “I hope none of this is shocking to you. I can speak to you like this because I am no longer that person. She no longer exists, so I can’t hurt her feelings. And, again, none of what I have to say is a judgment on others. Everyone should wear what they want and eat what they want. But whatever one does should be a conscious choice. What I’m saying is that every Arden mother needs to choose her own forms of resistance. Smart, tactical, self-affirming resistance. You have biological children, yes?”

  “Three,” Jane said.

  Or four. Had or have. She was never sure which to say.

  Two choices here

  She had had four babies inside her.

  It wasn’t that she hadn’t had four children.

  Mirela is her fourth child.

  Mirela was her fifth child.

  With her good hand, Jane rummaged around in her own handbag for a mint or a stick of gum. Like the version of Carolyn that no longer existed, Jane had not brushed her teeth that morning. Her fingers curled around something unfamiliar: the Bugs Bunny lighter. She couldn’t remember how it had g
otten there. Had Mirela been playing with the lighter? Her eyes darted to one side as if the girl would appear beside her, laughing and on fire. But no. Mirela was down the hall, in another room, in front of another one-way mirror.

  “You must have questions,” Carolyn said at last. “What are they?”

  Jane stuck a piece of Juicy Fruit in her mouth with the hand that held the lighter. Carolyn’s eyebrows sat up. “Do you smoke?” she asked.

  Jane smiled as she put Bugs Bunny away. “Maybe I should start,” she said. “So—your literature has prepared me well so far, and I recognize a lot in it—a lot of Mirela, a lot of myself—but can you explain the idea behind the holding therapy?”

  “I’m so glad you asked,” Carolyn said. “We are in the process of trademarking holding therapy, in fact.”

  “Oh, congratulations,” Jane said. “So is it like—like holding her down, like showing her who is boss, breaking down her ego?”

  “That’s a way of putting it,” Carolyn said.

  “Because that starts to feel like corporal punishment, and we don’t do that in our house, we don’t spank—”

  “Oh my goodness—”

  “—we wouldn’t ever use any kind of physical coercion with our kids—”

  “Jane, please, do let me interrupt. Holding therapy is not corporal punishment, it’s not abuse or coercion; it couldn’t be further from it. Holding therapy is also known as compression therapy, which, come to think of it, might be the preferable term.”

  “You could trademark that one, too.”

  “A good idea. Think of applying pressure to a wound when a patient is bleeding. Under normal circumstances, pressing an artery against bone is the last thing you’d want to do, because you’re keeping the artery from working properly. But in an emergency, your only option is to suppress it, shut it down—temporarily, of course. Same goes for the unattached child. Under normal circumstances, holding down a child, inhibiting his movement, goes against everything we think and feel about caregiving. But the children who come to Arden express their trauma through their bodies, through movement: the hitting out, the rocking, the spinning. These are memories activating at the cellular level. The memories and trauma are kicking the kid around, jerking his arms and legs like a master puppeteer. It’s an emergency, and so in holding therapy, we step in and apply pressure to the wound. We stop the trauma from working.”

  “But the holding is—what? What does it do?”

  “There are several different techniques. One that you’ve seen is the basket hold: the child has his arms crossed in front of him, his back pressed against the therapist’s chest, and the therapist is either holding his hands behind him or has her arms wrapped around him.”

  “I do this with Mirela,” Jane said. “I didn’t know it was a—a technique—”

  “You used your intuition. Because you’re a born mom.”

  “I get her turned away from me and hold her tight—not tight but firm, and I rock her and sing to her until she calms down. I showed my older daughter how to do this, too. Mirela rocks and hums and holds herself when she is upset, so I’m kind of mirroring what she does anyway, but in a way that gets her more under control.”

  “Yes, you’re doing the basket hold.”

  “I call it the squeeze.”

  “Basket hold is an easy one—it’s rather like the Heimlich maneuver. It gets results, simple as that.”

  “I don’t know that it does. Maybe Mirela would calm down on her own without it. But it helps me feel as though I’m doing something.”

  “There are also the prone positions, which you’ve seen. The position where the child is laid out on a therapist’s lap, looking upward at her, with perhaps a co-therapist helping to apply pressure. Or the child laid out on the floor, with a second or third co-therapist applying therapeutic pressure.”

  “Yes, this is what concerns me—Mirela flat on the floor, these people on top of her. It’s just—I know I’m new to this, but—”

  Carolyn nodded. “It is intense. But it’s a perfectly safe, evidence-based therapy carried out by trained professionals.”

  “But why is it done?”

  “Well, the child doesn’t want to be held, right? And that refusal affords us an opportunity. As the child—”

  “Mirela.”

  “—as Mirela strains against the hold, she feels on the cellular level that she herself is both powerless and profoundly safe. The universal condition of the loved infant. In this powerless and safe condition, she can release her rage against the absent mother, returning the rage and pain back where it belongs.”

  “She’s giving the rage back to Mom.”

  “Well, she’s giving it back to bio-Mom. Bio-Mom, or absent Mom, or abusive Mom will always be in the room with her, but she can no longer get a seat at the table. In the holding position, the rage of the child—I must speak in generalities, forgive me—the rage eventually succumbs to exhaustion, and the child surrenders to a feeling she hasn’t experienced before, sinking into rest in her loving caregiver’s arms.”

  “But she’s being forced to do it. She’s not coming to it on her own.”

  “Think of infancy. During the baby stage, the mother is the baby’s prisoner, you might say, but the baby is the mother’s prisoner, too. The baby didn’t choose that, but she’s mostly okay with it. In fact, being okay with that arrangement is the foundation of her whole life to come—because that’s the beginning of attachment, and attachment is the name of the game.”

  “But these are—you’re talking about it like it’s surgery, but really it’s metaphors. You know? How does such a small child grasp these metaphors? Somehow this narrative is taking shape through her own experience?”

  “On an intuitive level, yes. You talked about intuition before, and she has it, too. On a cellular level, most definitely she can grasp it all. The body knows these things even if it cannot put them into words. Words aren’t everything, you know. But the thing is happening even if you can’t articulate it. You have to temporarily make something stop working in order to save it—break down cells in order to give birth to new ones.”

  “And rebirthing? That’s what’s on the schedule for tomorrow.”

  “I think, as with your questions about holding therapy, that what you’re really asking is Why does she need that? and I can’t tell you exactly until we’re in the middle of it. Attachment therapy, for all its rules and protocols, doesn’t necessarily follow a script. It’s more of an improv class.”

  “But what are the basic, I don’t know, principles of rebirthing? The brochure didn’t say.”

  “Well, we can’t fit everything we do into one brochure.”

  “How does rebirthing grow out of holding therapy?”

  “So when we talk about attachment—what was the first attachment? It was the embrace of the mother’s womb, yes? But for the child who comes to Arden, that embrace may have been poisoned by—well, let’s back up. What do we know about bio-Mom?”

  “Not much. Mirela had hep B, but we don’t know where she got it from.”

  “But—was the mother dead? Unfit? Did she sign away her rights?”

  “I adopted Mirela out of an institution. An orphanage.”

  “But that can mean so many things. A lot of kids in Eastern European orphanages aren’t orphans—rather, their parents have signed away their rights. I mean, you know this.”

  “Yes, I do, and I didn’t meet anyone claiming to be Mirela’s mother. What I have are reams and reams of paperwork.”

  “And what did the paperwork say?”

  “I don’t—I’m sorry, but I don’t see how this is any of your business.”

  “My goodness!”

  “I’m sorry, I just—I don’t know if anything in her medical records is accurate. I don’t know what happened to her before I met her. I do not. I never will. I can only imagine, and I imagine the worst, and it’s unbearable, so I don’t. So—so we just have to deal with what’s in front of us.”

&
nbsp; “I see. Well, then. We can keep to generalities. The embrace of the mother in utero may have been poisoned by drugs, alcohol, or nicotine; by poor nutritional choices; by abuse or trauma suffered by the mother during her pregnancy; by a difficult delivery. These environmental toxins were force-fed to the baby during her earliest stages of development. But it goes back further than that. It is no coincidence that we say a sperm ‘attaches’ to an egg: the journey of attachment begins at that moment of conception, in the nature of that mother-father relationship. So what was its nature? Was it abusive? Loving? Respectful? A one-night stand?”

  “Like I said, I don’t have any answers. I know nothing about Mirela’s mother. The biological mother. I mean, I’m—I’m her mother now. I’m the mother she has known.”

  “And there is rage born there as well, because Mirela deserved better than that. By which I mean that she deserved to find her mother—to find you—sooner than she did. Deep down, she knows that, and she’s angry about it, and that is only right and rational. And then to be torn from whatever family she did know, whatever its shortcomings. Being ripped away from the only body she ever knew. Familiarity is its own privilege.”

  There is one further point; his own mother was really his, because he invented her . . . From Johnny’s point of view, however, when he was born this woman was something he created. That was Winnicott.

  “Well, Mirela doesn’t remember any of it, or she wasn’t aware of it in the first place. There’s no—there’s no history.”

  “She is aware of all of this on the somatic level. The cellular level. That’s where her history is inscribed, although we can’t read it. She knows, at the very least, that something went very wrong. Otherwise, why would she be here at Arden?”

  “So—so what you’re proposing is a sort of do-over. She was born once into bad circumstances, and now, here, she can be reborn into something else?”