Yours,
Rachel Fischer, MD
Professor of Practice
1 It needs to be said that the court would be acting within its authority if it chose to disregard the report. It could also order sua sponte a new and independent evaluation by another evaluator, one not agreed upon by the parents.
The Child Study Center
MATHER UNIVERSITY
125 PEABODY AVENUE
NEW SALEM, NA 06556
CHILD EVALUATION FORM
Child: Jane Mather Durkheim
Evaluator: Rachel Fischer, M.D., Professor of Practice
Date: September 3, 1999
INTRODUCTION
At the request of Maria Meiklejohn and Daniel Durkheim, a married couple seeking dissolution of their marriage, I was asked to evaluate their daughter and only child, Jane Mather Durkheim, a preadolescent, and to recommend custody arrangements in the event Ms. Meiklejohn should die before Jane reaches her majority. Jane’s parents have agreed that they will share custody and Jane will live with her mother. The circumstances behind the decision to seek a psychiatric evaluation were Jane’s highly emotional response to any suggestion that she might live with her father and not her mother and her acute anxiety over the possibility of her mother dying in the next few years and her living arrangements in the event of her mother’s death.
In the preparation of this report, I conducted eight (8) 45-minute interviews with Jane; two (2) with Ms. Meiklejohn; and one (1) with Dr. Durkheim. In addition, I met twice with Ms. Meiklejohn and Jane together, and once with Dr. Durkheim and Jane. Dr. Durkheim was unable to schedule a second individual interview or a second joint interview with Jane. I also consulted by phone Eliza Wolfe, headmistress of Peabody, Jane’s school, and Victoria Crane, Jane’s 5th-grade teacher. Last, I met with Bruce Meiklejohn, Jane’s maternal grandfather. With permission, all the interviews and phone conversations were recorded.
INTERVIEWS WITH JANE (June 25, 30, July 8, 14, 20, 27, Aug 2, 9)
Jane is 11 years old. She was born on April 23, 1988, Shakespeare’s 424th (1564) birthday, she told me, and the 372nd (1616) anniversary of his death. “He died on his birthday. My father says that’s more common than you’d think.” She is entering 6th grade at the Peabody School. She is an attractive child, on the cusp of puberty, well built and athletic, with the lanky frame of a runner. She is both confident and self-questioning, common indicators of intelligence and self-consciousness. Thoughtful and articulate, she works to express herself accurately. She struggles to be fair to her parents and fair to herself, not an easy task for anyone, let alone an 11-year-old. She loves both her parents very much and believes she is well loved by them, but since talk of divorce began, she has found them to be self-regarding and neglectful. “They want me to be more grown-up than I am. And they both want me on their side. I can’t do that. Who do they think I am, King Solomon?” To a significant extent, her parents’ self-involvement and anger has relieved her of feeling responsible for the separation, though she retains the sense that if she “bucks up,” her father might change his mind.
Both parents are demanding in their expectations of her. Her father sometimes compares her with the very sick children he works with, telling her not to complain or feel sorry for herself. Her mother, the product of a strict upbringing, finds herself passing on some of the rigorous lessons of her own childhood. “In Eloise,” Jane told me, “Eloise is always being told ‘being bored is not allowed.’ That’s House Rule No. 2 according to my mother. House Rule No. 1: no whining. Rule No. 3: no duffers.” She explained. “That’s from Swallows and Amazons. There are four children, the youngest is 5, the oldest is my age. They have a sailboat, the Swallow, and they want to sail it to a nearby island. Their dad’s away in the army doing army things. Their mother sends him a telegram asking him if she should let them go. He sends a reply telegram: ‘Better drowned than duffers. If not duffers, won’t drown.’ I love that line. My mother does too. We use it about people we know, are they or aren’t they?” Jane looked at me to see if I understood. She went on. “There’s a lot of quoting that goes on in our house. Books are very important to all of us, especially me and my mother.”
I asked her if there were any more house rules. She thought for a bit. “It’s not exactly a rule, more of a reminder. Both my parents tell me to ‘know my luck.’ I do know I’m lucky, but it’s hard to know it all the time.” She looked as if she might cry but didn’t. Comparing her parents with other children’s parents, Jane thinks they are “more difficult and more interesting.” Comparing them with each other, she said: “My mother is who she is. My father is what he does.” Although in our sessions with her parents she called them Mommy and Daddy, or Mom and Dad, when speaking of them, in their absence, she always used Mother and Father. It is an oddly and noticeably mature locution; in my experience, a preadolescent would use Mommy and Daddy in both situations.
At our first meeting, all Jane wanted to talk about was an act of recent vandalism at her house by a fireman whose child, a patient of her father’s, had died of cancer. She said the fireman must have been “heartbroken” and “crazy with grief,” locutions I suspect she picked up from her mother. “If I died,” she said, “my mother would never recover. My father would be okay after a while. He sees children die all the time.” I asked her if she thought he might feel differently about his own child. “He’d feel very sad,” she said, “but he’d get over it. He’s used to dying. And anyway, his work is more important on a daily basis to him than I am.” I asked her why she thought that. “He spends all his time with the sick children, and he talks about them all the time. I understand,” she continued. “I’m lucky; I’m healthy. He doesn’t need to fix me. They’re sick. They need him more. He felt terrible about the fireman’s daughter. I remember him talking about her, even before the fireman went crazy. She had a very rare brain cancer. He kept her alive much longer than any other person with that disease.” The last sentence she said with evident pride.
At almost every session I had with Jane alone, she spoke about death or dying. It took a number of forms. She was very worried that her mother would die. Her maternal grandmother and great-grandmother had both died of breast cancer in their 40s. She knew about the breast cancer gene and wondered if her mother or she had it. “My mother says she’s not going to die until she’s old, but she can’t see the future. I don’t like to talk about it though. It makes me scared. I don’t think I could live without my mother.” When I said she’d still have her father, she shook her head. “That’s different.” She spoke often about the sick children her father took care of. “He really loves them, I can tell,” she said. “They’re always on his mind. It’s a very hard job, taking care of sick children. I’m so lucky I don’t have cancer.” With some regularity, she mentioned her mother’s older brother, James, who died of leukemia when he was 11, “the age I am now,” she said sadly. She told me a number of times that she had been named for James. “I’ll be glad when I’ve turned 12,” she said, as if by passing her 12th birthday, she would have survived the deadly parallels that seem to spook her, dying at 11 and dying on her birthday.
The only person she spoke of often whom she didn’t link to death was, interestingly, the oldest, her grandfather, Bruce Meiklejohn. Although she didn’t say this explicitly, it became plain that he makes her feel safe, and for some reason, she thinks he’ll live as long as she needs him to live, “90 at least,” she said. “Poppa is indestructible.” She also said quietly and confidingly that she thought she was “his favorite person in the whole world.” “He’d do anything for me,” she said; “he’d even put toilets in the Martha’s Vineyard house.” After she said that, she hooted with mirth, realizing how funny that sounded. “Our summer house only has outhouses. Really,” she said, nodding her head, as if I wouldn’t believe her, “and my mother and Poppa can’t agree about fixing it. My father says they are at war over the house. But I think I could bring Poppa ’round.” She always called her gra
ndfather Poppa, not “my grandfather.” She felt a little guilty about her preferred status with her grandfather but understood she couldn’t do anything about it. “I wish Poppa loved my mother more,” she said. “We don’t talk about how much he loves me, but she understands. She often says we can’t choose who we love. It’s outside our control.” She sighed after saying this. “It’s a bad system, don’t you think?”
She has apparently negotiated with her grandfather to live with him if her mother dies. She has told her mother this but not her father, though she has told him she couldn’t live with him; she could only visit him. She is actively and more or less efficiently negotiating on her own behalf, not trusting her parents to get it right for her, only for themselves. She tends to see herself as one of the principals of the divorce, as being or getting divorced, not uncommon with an only child.
In our second session, I told her specifically that one of the reasons she was talking to me was to talk about custody, after the separation and/or in the event of the death of one of her parents. She grilled me on this. “What are you going to say?” she asked. I told her I didn’t know yet; she and I would have to talk more about it and I’d have to talk about it with her parents. I asked her if she’d like me to talk about it when I talked with her together with each of her parents. She said I could talk about it with her mother; she wasn’t sure about her father. “I don’t worry about my father dying even though he’s older than my mother. I feel he’s been vaccinated against death, by all those medicines he gives the children.” She looked at me closely, expecting me to laugh or tell her she was being silly. I told her that just as we love whom we love, we feel what we feel. She sighed. “That can be a bad system too,” she said. We agreed.
She is reading Jane Eyre and loving it. “I read a lot,” she said. “I always have. It’s like company.” Most of her favorite books are about children living on their own, situational orphans if not actual ones, proper heroines, in short. When she was younger, she loved The Boxcar Children; now her favorites are Swallows and Amazons, Understood Betsy, and Anne of Green Gables. She has copies of her mother’s books as a girl. She always brought one with her to our sessions in her book bag. Whenever I went to the waiting room to get her, she’d be reading.
Her half brother, Tom, is 22. She loves him and feels sorry for him. “He must feel no one loves anyone very long. Helen, his mother, has been married three times. And now his father is getting married for the third time.” She looked at me knowingly. “He’s got a girlfriend in New York. Grass doesn’t grow under his feet.” I asked her where she had heard that saying. “Poppa. He said it about my father, but then he said it was true for him too because he married his wife Cindy only 11 months after my granny died. I didn’t know my granny.” She is worried about Tom. She thought no one was thinking about him. “He’s close to my mother; she’s looked after him. They have a good relationship. But my father acts as though the divorce won’t bother him at all. Like changing teachers.” She looked at me coolly. “I’ll tell you something about my father. If you’re a child and you don’t have cancer, he thinks you have nothing to worry about, nothing to complain about. It’s only life or death with him.”
She made a point of her own excellent health. “I almost never get sick. I’ve never had strep or flu or an ear infection,” she said, ticking off the common primary-schoolers’ ailments. She realized early on that getting ill but not getting fatally ill would cut no ice with her father. Her brother is less healthy, and as she sees it, less lucky, in the family parlance. Premature at birth, he has had chronic lung problems all his life. He has serious asthma, which has required hospitalization on several occasions, and he gets bronchitis and pneumonia regularly, at least once a winter. When he was 16, his junior year at the Cabot School, he spent a month in the infirmary. He almost lost the term. “Tom isn’t healthy. I think my father thinks he’s a hypochondriac. He’s not. He had to stop playing soccer because of his asthma, and he cried.” She looked as though she would cry.
In our fifth session, I asked Jane if she could tell me why she had gotten so upset the night her father said she could live with him. She looked very sad. “Once, when I was 7, I remember exactly, I had a doctor’s appointment. I told him I didn’t want to go. I hated going to the doctor. It was scary. He said that was ridiculous. There was no reason to be scared. Dr. Foreman was a very good doctor and also a very nice person.” She looked at me to see if I got it. I nodded. “That’s a big difference between my father and my grandfather. If I told Poppa I was scared, he’d ask me if I wanted him to come along as my protector.” She laughed. “I’ll bet, when my mother was little and she said she was scared about going to the doctor, Poppa said to her, ‘Oh, don’t be a ninny. The doctor is a very nice man.’ ”
I asked Jane if she was afraid of dying. Her eyes filled with tears. She nodded. I asked if that was why she didn’t want to live with her father. She looked puzzled. I asked if she thought she would die if she lived with him, like the children he took care of. Her face crumpled. “Maybe,” she said. I then asked her if she thought she might get sick if she had to live with him. “Maybe,” this in a whisper. She started crying. “I always worry about dying or getting brain cancer, that’s the worst, I’ve worried about that for years.” Suddenly she looked so much older than 11. “But that’s not why I got upset.”
She got upset that night not because she was afraid of living with her father—“I wouldn’t stay; I’d run away,” she said—but because she was afraid of telling him. He’d deny it. Her big fear was that if she wasn’t sick, he wouldn’t pay attention to her, and even if she got sick, he wouldn’t pay attention unless she was so sick she’d probably die. And if he didn’t pay her any attention, who would? “It’s hard to get my father’s attention. He has so many things on his mind.” She understands that telling me is a way of telling him, and she plainly wants me or her mother to run interference, to make him understand she can’t and won’t live with him. She felt bad saying this, and it all came out with tears and pauses, but she was very clear about her course of action: she wasn’t going to live with him, and no judge could make her. “We can have a lot of fun together, my father and me. We play games, soccer and squash. I like them okay and I’m getting pretty good. But he just doesn’t see how a healthy child can have any problems.”
I asked her if she would mind staying with her father overnight, on weekends and holidays, or going on vacation with him. She said that was okay, “so long as it wasn’t permanent.” I asked her if Tom had ever lived with her and her parents. She shook her head. He’d come for vacations; and once he stayed a whole month, but then he got an asthma attack and went home.
INTERVIEWS WITH JANE AND HER MOTHER (July 14, July 21)
In my two sessions with Jane and her mother, we talked frankly about Jane’s fears and her insistence on not living with her father. We also talked about her fear that her mother might die. Ms. Meiklejohn turned to her and said with absolute conviction, “I am not going to die until you’re all grown up, with children of your own.” Jane, her courage screwed up, persisted. “But what if you do?” Ms. Meiklejohn smiled at her daughter. “You mean, what if I went to the end of town, like James James Morrison Morrison’s mother?” They laughed but Jane had the bit between her teeth now. “You could get run over or die in a plane crash or,” she added, suddenly looking stricken, in a very small voice, “you could get leukemia or”—she paused and spoke in a whisper, as if the words themselves might bring on the illness—“breast cancer.” Ms. Meiklejohn pulled Jane onto her lap. “I’ll make sure you live with the person you want to live with. That’s Poppa, isn’t it? And I’ll make sure that Daddy knows and agrees.” Jane shook her head. “How can you make that happen?” Ms. Meiklejohn was very clear in her answer. “Your daddy loves you, Jane. He’ll do the right thing. We’ll write it down in the separation agreement. It will be there in print, signed by the judge. It will be official. It will be the law. I will show it to you.” Jane bu
ried her head in her mother’s neck and wept softly. When we said goodbye that afternoon, Jane shook my hand and said thank you.
INTERVIEWS WITH MS. MEIKLEJOHN (June 30, July 7)
In my two sessions with Ms. Meiklejohn alone, we talked about her brother’s death and its effect on her, her younger sister, Cordelia, with Down’s, the marriage, and Jane. She thought that Dr. Durkheim had been drawn to her in part because she had had a brother who died young of cancer. “He thought I’d understand how important his work was. I did, I do, but what he never saw, what he never understood was that James’s death ruined my childhood. It took years for me to understand that I was furious at him for dying, for leaving me alone with a grieving mother, and for occupying so much emotional space in our lives even though he was dead.” She smiled a small smile. “Six years of analysis went into that statement.” She added, “My father didn’t and doesn’t much care for Daniel, but he thought the marriage was good, evolutionarily speaking. We were different ethnicities; our children would likely be spared the afflictions of the inbred. I think he believes James’s leukemia and Cordelia’s Down’s were the product of inbreeding. He once said with grim humor, ‘We Mathers and Meiklejohns, we’re the swank Jukes and the Kallikaks.’ ”
The Divorce Papers: A Novel Page 30
