by Ariel Leve
HE HAD HIRED an attorney who said he would never win custody. How could he put me through that? When he knew there was no chance the outcome would be in our favor.
But he didn’t want me to think he wouldn’t try. We decided on a plan. I would write my mother a letter at the end of my stay and explain to her why I wasn’t going home. He must have known she would never accept this, that this attempt would be in vain, but maybe not. Maybe he believed if I expressed how much living with him would make me happy, she would relent. She always said she wanted what was best for me. Maybe he believed she meant it. He was willing to try. And that willingness, despite the pressured outcome, was proof that he wanted me with him. That he was not passive, that his desire became an action. This is what mattered. He tried.
I SECRETLY SAID good-bye to my friends. I told them I was going to live with my father with the elephants and the Buddhas. I said good-bye to my dentist and my toys. Josie knew about the furtive plan to stay with my father, and though I don’t believe she thought it would work out, she sanctioned the attempt and kept the secret. When I said good-bye to her in June, it was tearful.
In July, I sat down with my father and wrote a letter to my mother. He was living in a house on Soi Phiphat. There was a garden and we sat outside at a white cast-iron table. The letter was a plea to let me live with him. I would go to an international school in Bangkok. I implored her to let me stay in Thailand because that is where I felt happiest. We sent the letter. I wasn’t aware of the potential consequences. There was only excitement, optimism, and anticipation for my new life.
I HAD A fever of 103. I remember the thermometer pointing to that number and having a cold compress on my forehead. The ceiling fan was on, stirring the humid air, and outside, there was a monsoon with rain so dense my skin felt clammy. The woman who looked after me when my father was at work—Tootie—was with me. She was from Holland. Tall, slim, with short-cropped gray hair and tanned long arms. She was kind.
When my mother appeared in the room, I thought it was a hallucination. It wasn’t. Tootie didn’t know what to do. “Ariel is very sick,” she said. “You can’t move her.”
Upon receiving the letter, my mother reacted immediately. She went berserk, called her lawyers, and booked a flight the next day to Bangkok. She had recruited a traveling companion because she couldn’t handle the crisis on her own. Salvatore, her tennis pro. She’d paid for his ticket to keep her company and give her support.
Within forty-eight hours, she had shown up. She said, “Your father has tried to kidnap you, but it’s not going to work. I’m here to bring you home.”
MY MOTHER WAS in my bedroom. My father was not present. My passport was missing. My mother said that my father had stolen it. She arranged for the consul general to issue another passport so that I could leave the country. She was arguing with Salvatore, whom she called “useless” and an “idiot.” There was a scene in a hotel lobby, where she hurled obscenities at him; luggage was lost. Who packed my bags when I left Thailand?
THE AFTERSHOCKS CAME years later. The feeling that I will never be free from her. I will never know peace. Her menacing presence will govern my fate. No matter where I am in the world, there will be no escape. She will track me down, she will not let go.
In Thailand, I had been safe. I had been sheltered. And then yanked, like a weed from the garden, I was gone.
AFTER THAILAND, MY father and I had secret phone calls where we talked freely. Sometimes we were in the middle of having a conversation when suddenly my mother’s voice would barge in. “That’s a lie!” she’d shout. She’d been listening in on the other extension.
“Did you speak with your father?” my mother often asked. The interrogation was relentless. No, I lied. It was easier than giving her an inventory of what we spoke about and carefully editing out what would anger her. Before Thailand, after Thailand, this is the way it had to be. Managing her feelings was paramount. If she didn’t feel abandoned, she would not attack. It was compulsory to assuage her fears. Hearing my voice made her happy, not hearing my voice made her unhappy. If I had a different opinion or a different feeling, she felt threatened. Not giving her what she wanted provoked her wrath. There were no limits to how far she would go.
“I have to see you.”
SHE WILL HARASS others for information about me, have them write to me and tell me she’s dying. She’s not dying. She will call Interpol and tell them I’m missing. I am not missing.
Now, in Bali, it has been ten months since I’ve been untethered from my mother. And in this respite, I have been free.
30
Where were you?” I ask my father. I don’t want him to feel guilt. He is eighty-five now. We are having lunch at his house and I am asking for details to explain what happened that summer. I am protective of him, as I have always been. He did the best that he could with what he had. My father is thinking. “I was,” he begins thoughtfully, and I can tell he is putting it together as he says this, “in America.”
“You were in America?”
HE DOESN’T REMEMBER my account of what happened. “Memory is selective,” he says. He looks away for a few seconds. He is searching. But I am looking for something he can’t give. He says in a placid and solemn voice, “At that time, I was not in control. I was not well. Not managing.”
For years after it happened, my mother said, “Your father tried to kidnap you and he failed and had a breakdown.” That is the story she told.
I ask him to tell me the real story.
What happened when my mother showed up in Thailand?
“I was,” my father begins, “in a hospital in America—in Utica, I believe. I’d had a relapse of hepatitis, which I had initially contracted when I was in the Marines.”
He veers off and tells me the story of how he got hepatitis. His face softens.
“Actually, I remember this part quite well. Second Marine Regiment, on cruise duty in the Mediterranean. In the fall of 1953, we put in at Taranto [the Italian naval base in Apulia, southern Italy] for R&R, and we were playing softball. As I ran the bases, I got tired and I remember thinking, ‘This is what it’s like getting old!’ I was twenty-five.”
He laughs ruefully and I think about how in the moment when he knew something was wrong, he didn’t assume the worst—and still doesn’t.
“What I remember are the pleasant memories. The trip we took to the British Virgin Islands.”
“It was Virgin Gorda,” I say.
“I can still see the beauty of the bay.”
WHEN MY MOTHER reclaimed me from Bangkok it was a traumatic time for him, but that’s as far as it goes. There is a blackout—emotional amnesia for any negative memory. It’s how he coped. The pain and the stress and the strain have been deleted. As if it didn’t occur. He remembers uncomplicated, joyful times; sunshine and white sand. The darkness of this memory is mine alone.
31
It wasn’t the loudest and scariest explosions that caused the most damage. It wasn’t the discernible traumas: the sudden death of my surrogate mother, nor the physical violence I endured—being slapped, punched, kicked, pinched, and attacked during arguments. It wasn’t the vile and abusive words that were sprayed over me like an ice-cold sprinkler I couldn’t jump out of into the warm dry air.
Nor was it the embarrassment and shame from a cavalcade of scenes. In the apartment. Or in the restaurants. Or in the lobby. On the sidewalk. At my grandmother’s house. Or in the car with Donald, driving back from my grandmother’s house. Or anywhere, at any time, when she didn’t get her way. Nor was it being woken up in the middle of the night by a thunderclap of screams from her debauched and drunken exploits. Not even seeing her arrested and restrained by the police in handcuffs.
What did the real damage was buried beneath the surface. Her denial that these incidents ever occurred and the accusation that I was looking to punish her with my unjustified anger. The erasure of the abuse was worse than the abuse.
WE ARE NOT calling it bra
in damage. We are calling it an altered brain. A brain that was denied nutrients such as stability that were needed to feel safe and grounded. Emily believes that a therapy called EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) will help me. She says, “Early childhood trauma has a profound effect on your ability to function as an adult.”
The consequence of my childhood trauma is a bespoke suit of armor that can’t be discarded. Love is unreliable. Joy does not sustain. Good things will go away. I need certainty in an uncertain world, and the tyranny of the past dominates the present.
JUST BEFORE I started EMDR, I had given up the flat in London. My contract with the Sunday Times Magazine had ended after ten years, and I found myself back in the apartment in New York. I had lost my family at the magazine, my sense of being a part of something larger than myself. Even though it was professional, it had been mooring. I had no steady income, no escape, and my mother on my doorstep.
I was sinking, steadily and with little resistance. At forty-four years old, I was chest-deep. Extricate myself or be engulfed.
EMILY FEELS THAT by reprocessing some of my earliest experiences and memories, my nervous system will recover. She uses the word regulate. It sounds clinical. But this word means the difference between moving forward and being stuck. This inability to regulate makes for a defective operating system. A twisted mess of wires that needs to be untangled. My mother’s inability to regulate was out of her control. Is it out of mine, too? Emily has no reservations that EMDR will help me. “You are,” she tells me, “still an emotional hostage to the way you were as a child.”
I TRUST EMILY, which allows me to defy my innate cynicism about this form of therapy. I research it for weeks. It was developed by Dr. Francine Shapiro in 1987. It was intended for treatment of post-traumatic stress disorders (PTSD). Dr. Shapiro’s theory that the experience of trauma results in an overly stimulated part of the brain correlates with what Dr. Teicher said about pathological changes to brain chemistry. I read about brain hemispheres and cortical regions and neural pathways and what happens when cortisol (the stress hormone) excessively floods the amygdala and hippocampus—parts of the brain where thoughts and emotions are formed. I read about bilateral stimulation. And how enlarged amygdalae are linked to childhood anxiety. I read about interrupted attachments when the primary caregiver dies.
IN EMDR, THE patient focuses on a disturbing memory or thought while undertaking a repetitive series of eye movements. He or she follows a series of blinking lights while listening through headphones to a variety of beeps, all while talking through a memory and exploring the negative beliefs associated with it. The bilateral stimulation from the lights and sound rewire the brain, gradually eliminating the emotional sting from lingering memories. Thoughts and emotions are reprocessed and the patient is healed from the psychological trauma. At least that is the theory.
I’M AFRAID I will suffer a psychotic break.
“You won’t,” Emily says reassuringly. “You’re not a candidate for that.”
“How can you be sure?” I ask.
I want guarantees. Nothing bad will happen. I won’t lose my mind. I won’t be out of control.
She is staring at me with a look that suggests she would roll her eyes if it wasn’t unprofessional. She lets out a sigh. I can tell from her aplomb that nothing catastrophic will happen, but I have regressed. You promise? You promise it will be okay? How do you know? The seven-year-old looks down into the lap of my adult body. My arms are listless and my hands rest flat on my upper thighs. After a few seconds, still not looking up, I begin to make a swooshing movement with both of my hands. A deliberate and rhythmic move where I brush off an invisible layer of silt that rests on top of my jeans. Sediment from the erosion of childhood. This silt is resistance to change. I sweep it away. Just like that.
EVERY WEEK FOR nine months I make the trip on the subway to the Upper West Side. Like a migrant carrying around my only possession: a passport of pain.
I walk from the train station to Emily’s office. I pass the pharmacy, with expensive face creams in the window. I pass smiling parents on the street, pushing children in strollers, even in the snow and the sleet. I stop for a cold bottle of water on the corner. And enter Emily’s building, ready to put things in order.
ON SOME DAYS, this is all that I do: wake up, make coffee, believe it will get better, go to EMDR, believe it won’t get better, walk downtown on West End Avenue afterward, thrusting my fists deep into the pockets of my coat, crying. The broad sidewalks are ideal for these tear-soaked extended walks. I try to process the reprocessing. Passing pedestrians pay no attention to me. I am no one. Just another crying woman wandering in Manhattan.
THERE ARE TIMES I’ll be walking down the street and wonder: What do I look like to other people? Do I look like someone I’d want to talk to? Do I look like I could be Irish? When I visited Dublin, people there thought I was Irish. I have dark hair. I have blue eyes. Why not? I like the feeling of walking around and having a secret. I like that I have something all to myself. I can be standing next to someone on the sidewalk, waiting for the light to change, wondering how it would feel to be hit by a garbage truck. I can think “That’s an ugly baby” and smile. Sometimes there will be a sensation, a fracture of the moment, and I will have a wave of understanding how in the absence of learning what was appropriate, I devised my own interpretations. I will walk along thinking about this until it gets dark. Thinking how there are some people who will never be seen or known or found.
EMDR REMINDS ME of a neurological do-over. The trauma—which I don’t even recognize as trauma but for me was everyday living—I envisage as dense and intractable ice sculptures on display in my brain. I have maneuvered around these obstacles. The angles are pointed and sharp. These ice sculptures are past events that prevent positive beliefs from getting through. They’re on permanent exhibition in the prefrontal cortex and cause conclusions to be drawn and reactions to be had that should not be there. They don’t melt with time or age. And their presence informs how I feel. Now these ice sculptures can be thawed.
I WEAR A hooded sweatshirt to each session so that I can pull the hood up over the headphones. This becomes ritualistic. The sweatshirt functions like a cotton talisman. I sit down on the leather sofa. The lighting in her office is soothing and pleasant. For weeks in advance we have discussed “targets”—negative beliefs associated with traumatic events.
Emily’s notepad is full. She flips through the pages on the white legal-size pad and chooses memories where I felt helpless. We banter back and forth about them, and I object to the memories she chooses. The time when Kiki died. The time when my mother came to Thailand. “They’re all anecdotes,” I say. “I don’t feel anything.”
Isolating a particular memory seems useless because the trauma wasn’t an incident but a state of being. How do you make the feeling of aloneness a target memory?
SHE IGNORES MY question and brings out the EMDR “machine.” I call it the light saber. A rectangular metal bar sitting on a tripod and resembling a flattened crowbar with small holes dotted along its length, it looks like something that belongs in the bedroom of a teenage boy. She plugs it in. The holes light up and begin flashing the luminous green of a stoplight. The lights then move in a linear fashion, one hole lighting up at a time. My eyes follow the green light as she works to adjust the speed. Back and forth. Left to right. Right to left. “Slower,” I say. “It’s going too fast.”
She dials it back. Now my eyes adjust.
The headphones are also connected to the machine and there are syncopated beeps as my eyes follow the lights. “The beeping is too loud,” I say. She turns down the volume and they become fainter.
The lights are slow and the tones are dim, so we proceed. We have talked about what I want to change. She is trained to do EMDR, and she follows the protocol exactly. I try to delay by asking questions or making witty comments, but she won’t have it.
I TAKE A deep breath. My eyes are moving. Emily s
peaks to me and I am responding. I give an unemotional, detailed observational account of witnessing a violent scene. I am in danger. My fist is clenched so tightly I can feel my nails digging into my palm. I take another breath, my eyes are moving, I am describing a situation where my reality was canceled, and as this happens, my cheeks become flushed and burn with rage. I am powerless. Devoured with a tension that is so intense, there is a lump in my throat and I can’t swallow.
“Keep going,” I hear her say. “Just a few seconds more.” We stop. I exhale. We start again. Eyes moving left to right. The sensations are strangulating. Betrayal. Loneliness. Neglect. Panic. I begin to sob. Back then, there was no escape. We stop. I take a deep breath. We start again. This time as I describe what happened, the sensation of helplessness is less powerful. I see my mother for who she is.
THE SESSION ENDS with a final round of installing a positive feeling to replace the negative ones. My mother couldn’t help herself, but I can. I took care of myself.
The machine is turned off. I feel hollowed out and tired.
But before I leave the office, Emily wants me to do a visualization exercise. “Come on,” I say, wincing. But it’s part of the protocol, so I reluctantly agree. She tells me to picture myself somewhere where I feel relaxed. We run into trouble. I can’t come up with anywhere. “Okay,” she says, “somewhere you feel good.”
I settle on seeing myself in Bali, because when I have visited my father there in the past, it’s a place in which I feel relatively at ease.
32
Nearly two years have passed since my EMDR sessions and my days are filled with what I can’t imagine. I can’t imagine telling the girls to shut up. I can’t imagine snapping at them “Stop whining!” even when they are tired and the whining gets on my nerves. I can’t bring myself to scold them without considering what to say and my tone of voice. I’ll be confused for a few seconds as to what is right. Am I responding to them fairly? I will say, “Please don’t shout.” And they will stop.
