“The big elephant says: Leave me alone, go over there with the other small elephants.”
“And the small one?”
“The small one says there are no other small elephants. It’s the only one there.”
“So, the small elephant is alone?”
“Yes, all alone.”
“What does the big elephant say to that?”
“It doesn’t say anything. It also realizes there are no other small elephants.”
“How does the big elephant feel now?”
“It’s sad. Very sad.”
“What would happen if the big elephant also went on its way and left the small elephant?”
“A catastrophe. The small elephant would kill itself. It would drown itself in the bucket of water. For sure.”
“So, there’s no solution?”
“No.”
“Then whose attempt is useless?”
I know, I know, all right. I got it. You don’t have to keep jabbing the screwdriver into my kidneys.
I remember how, at the beginning of this session, I told her I didn’t want to repeat the concept of women-martyrs, which runs in our family so naturally, as though it belonged there and nowhere else. Now I get the urge to bash my head against the wall and swallow my own words, along with everything else I said about the years I spent analysing my mother’s behavior. Questions like: why she does the things she does, how her parents treated her, whether or not she got the love she needed, how she felt when she got a younger brother, and whether or not she was forced to grow up too soon. I heard her say many times that she never had time to be a child. My mother doesn’t like cartoons. She doesn’t have a great sense of humor. And she loves talking about illnesses and potential catastrophes. This is all because the child within her is acting like a grown-up, I explained to my therapist.
“It’s odd,” she said, “how much effort you put into finding excuses for her….”
“You don’t understand! By searching for excuses for her, I was actually searching for something that would make me feel better. Because, if she’s behaving the way she is because something was also missing from her childhood, then her behavior is not directed towards me. Then it’s just the result of her own personal pain, then she didn’t really have a choice!”
I was practically screaming.
“All right, I understand that, but it’s still a bit odd. When did you switch roles? Usually it’s the parents who look for excuses to justify the actions of their children. Only in rare cases do the children think about their parents in this way.”
What is she trying to say? That my mother is behaving as though she was my spoiled, selfish, capricious child whose actions I’m trying to justify? I was persistent.
“She is the one who benefits from this. It’s her game. She always has to be in the right. If she upsets me, she benefits. If I don’t let on that she had upset me, she benefits again because she knows it’s an act and that I’m just suppressing my anger. She wins either way.”
“And what do you get out of it?”
“Me!?”
“Yes. What do you get out of it? If this is a recurring pattern of behavior, then you too must also be getting something out of it.”
I stared at her, not knowing what to say. What the fuck do I get out of it? High blood pressure? An ulcer? Chewed up nails? A big phone bill? What?
“I don’t know,” I said. “I really don’t know. I never really thought I got anything out of it. Do you have any suggestions?”
“The truth is only what you perceive to be the truth.”
“Yes, but still… you probably have some idea….”
“I can only assume, but it doesn’t necessarily mean I’m right.”
“All right. Tell me what you think.”
Sometimes, we ask a question knowing we’ll get an answer we don’t want to hear. And still, we ask. We can’t help ourselves.
She looked me straight in the eyes and said:
“Pain. That’s what you get out of it. Pain. You’re used to it and that’s why you repeat the pattern over and over again. To get your portion of pain and uphold the family tradition of the woman-martyr.”
I was silent, I don’t know for how long. Maybe a minute or two. Maybe much longer. To me, it seemed like I was quiet for a long time, and she didn’t interfere. I stared at the small and the big elephant without saying anything. Finally, I looked up and asked:
“All right, how do I stop doing this? How do I get better?”
She placed her cup on the table, sighed, and said:
“By doing just this. By talking about it.”
“It is possible to resist the effects of pheromones, unless you’re under the influence of alcohol,” says a clever girl on TV.
I guess she just assumes we want to resist the pheromones.
There were a few more excellent sentences. Something about how it’s a good thing we’re not in love all the time because, if this were the case, many of us would die of sexual exhaustion, followed by the futility of bathing. In other words, you can wash away all scents, but not the cunning pheromones! For your information, there is a small organ at the top of the nose, which can detect them regardless of the amount of expensive perfume you use.
And wait till you hear this statement: “Romantic love begins taking root in our brains even as far back as our earliest childhood!?” According to the girl on television, this is called a neurological correlate, whatever that is, and it basically means that we form a picture of the one we will later fall in love with very early in our childhood.
So, I can stop blaming myself, and my neurotic and inconsistent taste in men. My childhood is to blame, as always. First, some sort of picture was formed in my childhood (I’m not responsible, that’s general knowledge, go to my parents if you don’t like the picture) and then, while walking calmly along without suspecting a thing, I ran into someone’s pheromones and – click. I basically have very little to do with this, right? And, if on top of that, I was under the influence of alcohol, which is quite possible, then I also have scientific evidence proving that I couldn’t resist myself – several times, in fact.
Pheromones. Under the influence of pheromones, I once wallpapered an entire room and painted the kitchen chairs red, all by myself! Today, I can’t even get myself to do the dusting or iron his shirts. I also used to put a few drops of perfume along with the detergent when I did the wash – my little trick; a way for him to always feel like I’m by his side.
We painted the apartment together and sat on the floor, all dirty, drank beer, and then made love on some old newspaper because the furniture was pushed together in the middle of the room and covered with sheets. Today, there’s so much to watch on television, work to be done for tomorrow, and then there’s the fatigue, that, in fact, isn’t really fatigue but more a state of mind. All in all, I’d rather go to sleep, my darling. You turn the lights off and just quietly crawl into bed later, after all your work is done….
It’s not always like that, of course. Don’t write me off so easily. Still, I don’t know how you deal with these thoughts. I myself have a hard time with them. In my head there’s always a saboteur on call who, at a certain moment, pushes me into thinking about diseases.
For example, my husband and I are making love.
He runs his hand over my breasts.
I’m thinking about that commercial: Visit your oncologist every six months, blah, blah, blah…. I haven’t seen my oncologist in ten years. Who knows what could be growing inside me. There, I can feel it here, under my fingers. Even under his fingers. But, truth be told, I can always feel something. After you pass the age of forty, you start getting lumpier anyway, and then you don’t know which lumps should be there and which shouldn’t.
And this is how it is with every part of your body.
I can hear my lungs wheezing. Cigarettes.
I feel a pain in my right hip as I raise my legs.
And I wonder what it’s going to be like in the next ten or tw
enty years.
Sex reminds me more and more of general body deterioration. More explicitly, of death. Hospital smells. The callous faces of the doctors. The instruments they shove into your body shouting: “Relax, for God’s sake, I can’t examine you!” Meanwhile, I could never relax in their examination rooms, and even here, I find it increasingly difficult to do so.
Where can you get pheromones at four in the morning? Can they buy pheromones at the corner drugstore, let’s say, in the States? Is there someone willing to inject you with them at this hour, to end your withdrawals? Why don’t they sell bottled cocktails containing pheromones, serotonins, dopamine, and other hormones that make us happy? Is it all really that trivial, simply chemicals playing around with my brain which then sends signals to the body telling it to lie listlessly, or jump around, or sleep, or shrivel from weakness? Do I get a say in all this?
This is not exactly how I pictured myself growing old. I thought middle age would be different. That it would eliminate fear. Eliminate the wavering. That absolute control would take the place of indecision. I thought the order of things would somehow be established naturally and painlessly, telling us precisely how to deal with each part of our body and our every thought.
But, I haven’t experienced anything of the kind. The only difference is that now everyone expects more from you. And no one is prepared to make any allowances for anything you do because you are young.
Maybe this is why I’m trying to run directly from youth into old age in such a panic. I’m in urgent need of new extenuating circumstances. Something new I can use to justify myself. I’m sorry, but I’m not ready for this new you-are-held-accountable-for-your-actions situation. And I don’t think I ever will be. Besides, why should I even be held responsible for my actions if everything is – we heard it loud and clear – just a game played out by our hormones and the pictures created in our childhood? Maybe, if we’re clever enough, we’ll be able to combine these pictures in a more useful way. Is that it? That’s a laugh! I’d like to see you do it! And we’ll line up the hormones in rows and then use them according to need, circumstances, and as the situation dictates. Right.
I give up.
I trust that in my lifetime, a few people will love me enough not to leave me, in spite of everything.
I trust that all of the fears haunting us don’t necessarily have to come true. Or is that precisely what’s going to happen?
I trust that I will die before I even realize I’m dying.
I trust that tomorrow will be a nice, sunny day and that I’ll forget all this.
Above all, I trust in the pheromones. There must be another large supply somewhere. All we have to do is locate it in our brains, dig them up, and let them jump around as they did before.
I trust in the ability of self-deception.
I trust in the new diet, and the face and breast lift cream.
I trust that, because today I felt no aches and pains, it’s probably all in my head, as usual.
I trust that the movie I’m going to watch tonight will be interesting enough to distract me from my thoughts for two hours. And that no one waiting in line behind me will start to cough and remind me again of death. And that there won’t be a lonely, old lady sitting in the back row to make me feel deep and helpless sorrow.
I trust in the fact that this is not the first time I feel this way.
“I want to tell you about the dream I had last night. I think it might be important.”
She nodded.
“In this dream, my mother is giving birth. I’m there somewhere, nearby, watching. I’m even giving my mother some useful tips. I tell her to lie on her side because that’ll make it easier for her to squeeze the baby out. I think about how everything is going smoothly and without any problems, how very brave my mother is, and how she’s not making a sound. At one moment, the baby starts coming out of my mother’s body. It’s inside of a kind of semi-transparent membrane, similar to a balloon, but I can see its face and I’m very excited. The baby’s head is coming out – the baby opens its eyes and looks directly at me! Then, the doctors take the baby out and place it on the table next to my mother. The baby is still inside the membrane and I’m worried about whether it’s going to start crying, whether it’s even alive. It seems like no one intends to remove the membrane from the baby. Finally, we hear a faint cry, but it sounds like it’s coming from a distance, because the baby still hasn’t inhaled the outside air, only the air inside its membrane. I’m worried, and I ask someone if the baby is going to be all right. Someone answers me: Yes, the baby will be fine, but I can’t say the same for the mother. At that moment, I look at my mother again, and I see them putting towels between her legs to collect the gushing blood. This is where the dream ends.”
“All right,” she says, “which part of the dream was most significant to you?”
“The moment when the baby looked at me. And then, my concern about whether the baby was going to be all right, whether it was going to live.”
“And the least significant?”
“Well, probably the fact that it was my mother who was giving birth. In my dream, this was normal to me, not at all unusual.”
“Now try to imagine that you are the baby being born. You’re inside the membrane, you open your eyes, and… what do you see?”
“I see a face smiling at me, the face of someone close to me. I see someone who is concerned about me.”
“Good. Now they put you down on a table. You’re still inside the membrane. What are you thinking now?”
“I’m thinking about how I can’t wait for them to remove the membrane. I want to be able to move around more. I want to breathe in the fresh air. I want to hear every sound, and experience the richness of every color and scent. This membrane is restricting me.”
“All right,” she says again as she makes one of her usual gestures – when she slides her hand from her forehead to her nose, moving slowly down to her lips. “Now go back inside yourself, the self that is watching the baby on the table. What would you say to that baby?”
“I would say: You’re small and weak and you need to be extra careful until you grow up. All options are open to you, you haven’t made any mistakes yet, and you’re like a brand new notebook that has yet to be filled. I’ll help you avoid making the same mistakes I made.”
“And what does the baby say to that?”
“The baby is strangely wise. Even though she has had no previous life experiences, she seems to possess some sort of innate knowledge. The baby says: Everyone needs to make their own mistakes. You can’t protect me from that.”
“Aha,” she says with a little smile, which I don’t know how to interpret. “So this is a wise baby.”
“Yes,” I say, at the risk of being mocked by her. “It’s a wise baby.”
“Then what do you say to the wise baby?”
“I tell her that that’s not completely true. That not everyone has to go through the entire repertoire of mistakes. Some can be left out. All we need to do is find the right way to explain how to avoid them to someone still young. I would tell the baby I didn’t have anyone to tell me this, but that now she has me.”
“Aha. So, you’re not giving up and you’re prepared to teach the baby. Do you like teaching in general?”
“No, no I don’t,” I try to defend myself. “I’ve never taught anyone in my life.”
I know this is a lie. But at this moment, I don’t want to be someone who teaches.
“You mentioned some mistakes. Which mistakes were you referring to? What are the things you don’t want the baby to repeat?”
I think about this for a while. I try to come up with something original, something worthy of a writer, but my mind won’t budge an inch from the banal. All right, I think to myself, if the essence of life lies in banality and stereotypes, then let’s say it all out loud.
“I wouldn’t want this baby to suffer because of people who are not worthy of it. I want it to love itself, to be good t
o itself first, and then others. To be happy.”
She gets up, takes a pillow from one of the chairs, and throws it on the floor in front of me. Then she says:
“Imagine that this is the baby. It’s lying there in its membrane. Now, try to imagine that you are the membrane. What is its role, what do you think the membrane would say?”
“But the membrane is not alive,” I say. “It’s made of some kind of matter that’s similar to parchment, it’s taut and brittle. If someone were to pierce it, just once, it would crumble and disappear.”
“Nevertheless,” she insists, “if that parchment-like membrane could say something, what would it be? Anything, just say the first thing that comes to your mind….”
I’ve never done anything so silly in my life, there’s no doubt about it. I’m a parchment-like membrane, which is preventing a baby from taking a breath of fresh air. What do I want to say? What?
“I’m the membrane and I have power. My power is short-lived, but while it lasts, it’s enormous.”
She asks me again:
“What is the basis of your power?”
“This baby is mine and mine only. No one else can see it clearly.”
“Perhaps there’s also something good in this membrane, something useful?”
“Yes, I protect this baby from the outside world. I provide a kind of transitional period between the time spent in the mother’s womb, and complete exposure to the world.”
She’s on her feet now, walking around the room. She throws a glance at me and then at the pillow-baby on the floor – like someone who is trying to come up with a plan. She thinks she’s close to discovering something, but I already know that she won’t succeed. I don’t know how, I just know.
“Look at this baby. Go back inside yourself and look at it. Try to picture its future, its character, its destiny. What will it be like, what kind of person will it turn out to be?”
Until a moment ago, I was protecting it, because it’s fragile and tiny and pure. But suddenly, I know; I know exactly what it’ll be like, and I know it doesn’t really need my protection. I say:
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