Through the Shadowlands

by Julie Rehmeyer

  As a child, I had instinctively figured that the place to start on my overwhelming task was to deeply, sympathetically understand my mother’s view of the world. Though she’d formally left the Christian Science church after the scandal broke about my extramarital conception, her religious beliefs hadn’t shifted. For her, the physical world of chairs and stomachaches and paychecks was an illusion: True reality was purely spiritual. Thus the way to achieve what you want in the physical world was to work on this deeper, underlying, real plane, to refine yourself spiritually.

  That meant, for example, that to solve her money problems, she shouldn’t go out and look for a job—she should work on her own thought, creating a more perfect understanding of the abundance that was available to her and coming to more fully know that God provided all that she needed. That internal, spiritual work would produce results in the material world, and the practical solution to her problem, she trusted, would emerge. And it was my job to talk with her as she rooted about in her mind like in a toy box, looking for the rotten belief that was hiding out in there like a long-forgotten ham sandwich.

  Talking with my mother and trying to figure out how to perform my savior’s mission absorbed my full intellectual and emotional capacities. My mother had me memorize the “Scientific Statement of Being,” the tersest summation of the Christian Science religion, read at every Sunday church service. It started out, “There is no life, truth, intelligence nor substance in matter. All is infinite Mind and its infinite manifestation . . .” The words themselves were tricky—what exactly did “manifestation” mean? But it was even harder to relate them to, say, the problem of filling my mother’s bank account. She and I spent hours sitting on her bed, discussing passages from Christian Science texts and considering how they might shed light on her fraught relationships with her siblings, or her aggravation at the paper boy’s repeated failure to throw the paper over the gate, or what she should do with her life.

  If I had a friend over to play, my mother would frequently call me away, wanting me to talk with her about what she was feeling or to “fix my thought.” I would sit on her bed with her, pushing away images of my friend, surrounded by the model horses we had just put into elaborate families. I knew it was essential to suppress my frustration and annoyance—telling my mother she was wrong or unreasonable never worked. It also didn’t work to try too desperately to make her happy. The only thing that seemed to help was full, empathetic attunement, accepting anything she said as truth, allowing my body and soul to resonate with her like an antenna. I had to trust that even though I couldn’t solve her problem directly, my presence and love could help open a path forward, one that could both lead to the freedom to play peacefully with my friend and even, perhaps, eventually, to a resolution of my mother’s problems.

  All these years later, I was listening to my body the way I had once listened to my mother. Carefully managing my activity levels was a practical tool, but it was also a sort of spiritual one, a way of attuning myself to my body’s needs and abilities. Just as I had not allowed myself to be irritated with my mom as a kid, I didn’t let my attitude toward my illness harden into frustration or allow myself to view my body as broken or misbehaving. On a level so deep it was nearly beyond articulation, I believed that being fully present to the experience of this illness, loving myself and my body in spite of it all, would somehow open a path forward, one that I hoped would lead to health, or at least to a détente that would allow me to live my life with the illness peacefully.

  I could imagine that effort being effective on a variety of levels: It might simply help me waste less energy on anxiety and fear; it might directly heal my body, calming my nervous and immune systems; it might work in some deeper, more mysterious way that I didn’t understand. And even if my efforts didn’t impact my illness at all and my notion of some cosmic connection between the inner and outer worlds was bunk, this perspective still made my life richer and deeper. For example, regardless of whether my cyst as a teenager was truly connected to my relationship with my mom, exploring the possibility had helped me draw a needed boundary with her and cast the experience as a meaningful and valuable one rather than as random suffering.

  And as a child, I certainly believed the approach I took to dealing with my mother paid off enormously. The benefit of managing my absurd responsibility for my mother well was that she then treated me with a deep respect for my integrity and autonomy—and I rarely received that from the outside world.

  I knew my mother could look crazy to others and even to me, but the outside world often seemed at least as crazy. I was a child who was born old, and the expectations and constraints the world placed on me because of my age felt like a violation of my basic dignity. Even at four years old, I was outraged when I was forced to take a nap at a new preschool. I was perceived as simply throwing a tantrum—I am not tired! I don’t take naps in the afternoon!—but for me, not being able to control my body in such a fundamental way felt like a deep intrusion.

  As I grew older, the limitations the external world placed on me only felt more outrageous and out of step with my capacities. One day in fifth grade, for example, a girl made faces at me every time the teacher looked away. The other students in the class, who had themselves often been tormented by this girl in the past, discreetly looked away. I ignored her, but her smirks only grew more extreme: She stuck her tongue out, rolled her eyes into the back of her head, and stretched her mouth wide with her fingers.

  My outrage mounted—not just at this ridiculous girl, but at my passive classmates, at the unaware teacher, at my own hot cheeks, at the stupidity of the whole situation. What was I doing, participating in this farce? I didn’t belong here, listening to a lecture on stuff I already knew, while an 11-year-old exerted a petty power over me.

  My aggravation was also fueled by something I couldn’t have articulated: To my mind, school was about helping me acquire the tools I needed for my mammoth task of saving my mother. It certainly wasn’t about performing for a teacher and politely enduring the tyranny of other children. I felt as though my chest were growing with my rage, that I was far too big to fit in these little chairs in this little school full of little people wasting their time on little tasks.

  I felt myself rise and walk out of the classroom. I seemed to be floating above my body, my heart pounding distantly. I watched myself turn right toward the lighted red exit sign and heard the double doors clang as I pushed through.

  I blinked in astonishment as the bright sunlight and traffic noise hit me. What am I going to do now?

  The sensible thing would be to go back in, pretending that I’d suddenly had to go to the bathroom—but I knew I wasn’t going to do that. Hmm . . . Home was a 20-minute drive away, since this was a special program for gifted students that occurred at only a few schools around San Diego. I didn’t have a dime for a pay phone to call my mom.

  I walked to a strip mall a few blocks away and asked to use the phone in a small, friendly looking drugstore. I spun a story to explain my presence in the middle of the school day—I was a homeschooler, I extemporized, and my mom was supposed to pick me up but she hadn’t, so I needed to call home. The cashier told me I could use the phone in the back, but then she kept delaying and asking me strange questions about my family, and I couldn’t figure out why. My chest reignited with rage at my own powerlessness. What kind of messed-up world is this, that just because I’m a kid I can’t even make a phone call? Later, my mother told me that the clerk had called Child Protective Services and was trying to keep me there until they arrived.

  When the clerk’s back was turned, I slipped out and ran. Once out of sight, I settled in for a long, hot walk home: Would it take two hours? Three? The traffic whizzed past me as I walked under a billboard with a giant XXX hovering above two enormous, bikini-clad breasts, twin poster children for one of many strip joints that peppered this Navy-dominated area of town.

  A car pulled up next to me. “Hey, good-looking, want a ride?” It was
my mother, leaning over to open the door for me, her smile easy and teasing. “I figured I’d find you!” she said. Her dark, wavy hair fell on either side of her face, a familiar white streak of hair rising elegantly from her forehead.

  The air-conditioning caressed my sweaty face as I slid into the car. My mom leaned over and kissed me and then reached for my hand, her olive-skinned fingers with their long, painted nails wrapping around my pinker, stubby-nailed hand.

  The school had called her in a panic, she told me as she pulled back into traffic, but she hadn’t been worried. She knew I had a head on my shoulders and could take care of myself. She didn’t ask me what had happened, waiting until I offered the tale on my own. I breathed in deeply, feeling each rib separating, making more space.

  That was the thing about my mom—she never squished me the way the outside world did. My childhood dramas weren’t piddly affairs, to be discussed in that high, altered voice reserved for kids. They were part of a much bigger struggle, even a planetary struggle, so that my decisions were as significant as hers, or my teacher’s, or those of the president of the United States. My fifth-grade tormentor might have been a cosmic cousin of Leonid Brezhnev, her grimaces an expression of the same malign force that led Brezhnev to invade Afghanistan. And my ability to maneuver around her stupidity might, in its own small way, affect the balance of the world, resisting that malevolent force wherever it occurred, even helping democracy outmaneuver communism. My mother’s perspective almost made the culturally enforced puniness of life as a child bearable.

  So I felt as though I were a dual citizen of two universes, or perhaps only a visitor in each. My mother’s world felt more generous, psychologically bigger, with more possibilities, but it came with preposterous responsibilities and could veer into simple craziness. The outer world felt more grounded and comprehensible, and I had to participate in it to connect to others—but it also chained me into a child’s role that I felt violated my integrity, and it rigorously enforced a narrow conventionality. So I performed a kind of mental juggling act, holding my mother’s world in my mind privately as I moved through my day at school. When one of these worlds felt foreign and uncomfortable, I took comfort in the other.

  As an adult, these childhood experiences made the insanity of the outside world’s view of my illness feel entirely natural to me. I was used to such violation. I was used to conventional views being at odds with the most obvious truths about my life. And I was used to dealing with that craziness by taking solace in the world I lived in with my mother, a world based on the faith that deep attunement was a tool that could find unseen paths around seemingly insurmountable obstacles.

  And my childhood experiences had taught me that, at least sometimes, working on that level could indeed be remarkably effective. When I was 15, I managed to—well, perhaps not save my mother, but certainly to help change her life.

  A couple years earlier, I’d told my mother I was fed up with school and wanted to quit. I’d just come home after a semester at a fancy East Coast boarding school that was supposed to be the “best high school in the country,” but I’d hated it, feeling that it had only provided small, high hoops to jump through, when I wasn’t interested in performing at all. “Okay,” she’d said, “but I’m out of ideas. You have to figure out what to do next.”

  I ended up taking correspondence courses for a while, enrolling at the University of California, San Diego, when I was 14, and then making my way to St. John’s College in Santa Fe a year later. At St. John’s, I found an intellectual home for myself for the first time. The college had a Great Books program, so I was reading and discussing Plato, Shakespeare, Kant, Euclid, Newton, and more. Grappling together with the profound questions in these books at last felt like a challenge that could expand my soul. I couldn’t have spelled out the connections between that and my work with my mother, but intuitively, it felt relevant. If I was acting as an antenna resonating both with my mother and the world at large and thus providing a link between them, it felt as though my experiences at St. John’s were lengthening that antenna, making it more powerful and sensitive.

  Just a month after I arrived, I persuaded my mom to join me. She became a graduate student there while I was an undergraduate.

  After she moved to Santa Fe, her playing cards, soft as fabric from all those games of solitaire, sat unused in their boxes. Rather than discussing Christian Science books, we discussed books from the college. She bought a house—far more affordable in Santa Fe than in San Diego—and renovated it beautifully. I would come home to find her chatting with friends on the patio or heading out for a tennis date. She threw dinner parties and displayed a knack for getting people to share their most vulnerable, budding ideas and feelings.

  I felt vast satisfaction, watching my mother live a relatively normal life. My task wasn’t yet fully accomplished—for one thing, she still didn’t have a way to earn a living, and she was running out of money. But her frightening rages had vanished, and I no longer felt like I had to straddle a vast gulf between her and the rest of the world. All those hours I had spent entering her perspective, empathizing with her, looking for threads connecting her to the outer world, seemed to be paying off.

  As an adult, I no longer believed that one person could save another (much less that a child could save a parent), but those experiences nevertheless gave me a kind of stabilizing faith with my illness. I didn’t imagine that some great old man in the sky had sickened me to teach me some lesson, and that once I’d passed the test I would graduate back to health. But I did believe that my illness was opening a window onto an aspect of the world I would never have experienced or appreciated otherwise, and that was something I could open myself to, embrace, experience deeply, allow to change me. I believed that being sick could be an experience worth having. I believed I could function most powerfully with the illness by opening myself to it as fully as possible, just as I had with my mother.

  Most of all, I believed that the world was a vastly more complicated place than our little human minds could grasp, and that just because I didn’t have a rational plan I could spell out that started where I was and ended up in health, that didn’t mean I couldn’t get there.

  CHAPTER 5

  THE GREAT COLLAPSE

  My efforts to manage my illness and fashion a satisfying life for myself with William in Berkeley paid off. By carefully limiting my activities, using bizarre tricks like the swim cure, and expanding my conception of the tolerable, I was able to reduce my illness to little more than a really big nuisance. I could do my work as a freelancer, travel, exercise as I was capable, go to talks and movies with William—albeit with some inconvenient interruptions during bad days or bad weeks. I felt as though I were walking around carrying a hundred pound weight. It slowed me down, but hey! I was strong, I was capable, I could handle it!

  The illness was more than a nuisance, though, when it came to long-term planning. I had wanted children all my life, and William wasn’t sure. He worried that there wouldn’t be enough to go around—enough money, enough time, enough energy, enough love—and my illness sharpened the edges of those worries considerably.

  I brought up “the kid question” from time to time, and William mostly avoided it. Our relationship felt like it balanced on top of a jagged rock, and either we would figure out how to shore it up or all would come tumbling down. My therapist, Chris, told me that William’s continuing ambivalence almost certainly meant that he didn’t really want kids and at most would capitulate to my desires. William denied that, and I chose to believe him. We love each other, I thought, so surely we’ll find our way. But to all appearances, we were well and thoroughly stuck.

  In the spring of 2009, when we’d been together for three years and during a period when my health wasn’t too bad, we took a trip to South Africa. Africa had felt like the land of fable to me since I’d been a child and read books like Born Free and A Story like the Wind and The Flame Trees of Thika. We had to plan around my limitations—I coul
dn’t, say, go on significant hikes, or do a bike trip—but to be able to go at all was intoxicating. Also, William and I both felt in some inchoate way that the trip would get us through our stuckness about the kid question, though neither of us could articulate how this might happen.

  South Africa brought my fantasies to life. On a safari, our bodies vibrated with the roar of a lion just yards away from us; we scuttled back into the Land Cruiser when a huge bull elephant flapped his ears and stamped his feet at us; and we guarded our lunches from glaring baboons. We each flew in a tiny microlight plane—essentially two lawn chairs with wings and a propeller—high over a crystalline bay on the Indian Ocean, then swooped down just feet above hippopotamuses dozing with their heads resting on one another’s backs in a lake. We each suppressed our shock when we talked with an Afrikaner farmer who lamented the end of apartheid, arguing that the country had disintegrated after that. We took an easy bike tour around a township and talked with a black woman running a daycare center who continued to care for the children even when the parents couldn’t pay. William and I enjoyed one another tremendously, and throughout the trip, my body held up so well I hardly seemed sick at all.

  After we returned from the trip, my health improved, spectacularly. Within a month, I was running again. Running! After so many years of not being able to push myself during exercise, every run was a thrill, a small miracle.

  Months went by, I ran faster and harder, and the illness quickly began to seem like a nightmare from long ago. I figured my health problems had just faded away, as I’d always hoped and expected they would. I didn’t have a very compelling explanation for what had happened to me or why I’d gotten better. But of course, one can always generate ideas: I figured I’d set the stage for healing through my aggressive rest, through my care with exercise when I felt stronger, through my careful organization of my life so that I never had to do more than my body could handle, through my healthy diet. Plus, I thought it was important that during the periods when I was doing badly, I’d stayed calm and had confidence in my body’s ability to bounce back. I couldn’t point to any great psychological or spiritual revelation that might have contributed, but still, I figured that it couldn’t have hurt that I’d viewed the illness as an experience worth having, rather than just a big fucking drag.