“Take my rabbit. Please hold her,” I plead.
Blumenfeld takes the rabbit and puts her up on his shoulder. He walks the floor with her, saying soft things into her ears.
A middle-aged man in a dark suit and white shirt walks up and down the room. He holds a gray rabbit with a bedraggled green ribbon around its neck. He holds an infant, a toddler, a little girl. He holds me and Galle and Margaret Mary.
My tears begin to flow as I watch them.
“It wasn’t going to stop, not ever,” I tell Blumenfeld. “I didn’t expect that it would stop. When I was older, maybe seven, I would watch my mother at the sink mixing up hot water and soap. I felt by then that I was completely trapped. I didn’t even hope it would stop, because I couldn’t imagine that. I just wanted to stay small so that I could have the hope that someone would comfort me, make me feel alive, pick me up and walk with me like that.”
Blumenfeld, still holding the rabbit, opens one arm to me. I go to him, and he puts the rabbit into my arms. He holds us both close against his starched white shirt, and lightly touches the back of my head.
72
I sit outside in my backyard on a picnic bench after this, watching the shadows splash over the sun-drenched wood. I have carried out some books, good company. I don’t want to be inside and I don’t want to be alone, that is, alone and without words.
I am light, and not a little dizzy. I write on my familiar yellow pad, and go on writing, trying to sustain the lightness and dispel the dizziness.
Virginia Woolf describes an endless wanting toward her mother: “To want and want and never to have.” Writing to her friend Violet Dickenson about her response to the statue of Venus de Milo, Woolf describes the same wistful longing and her feeling of hopelessness about it: “I weep tears of tenderness to think of that great heart of pity for Sparrow [a pet name for herself], for my mother was locked up in stone—never to throw her arms around me—as she would, if only she could.”
Writer and French feminist Hélène Cixous describes a very different quality of love between mother and daughter as the basis for a unique love between women. In this love one is mother and mothered at the same moment, a moment that goes on in all directions without end. Cixous describes this love as, “Having. A having without limits, without restriction, a having without any ‘deposit,’ a having-love that sustains itself with loving; in the blood-rapport.”
I recognize myself and the ways I have loved my mother (and later, other women, including Melanie) in Woolf’s terms: “To want and want and never to have,” and also (often with the same person) in Cixous’s terms: “Having... a love that sustains itself with loving.”
What is clear now is that while these feelings about my mother were held separately by Galle and Margaret Mary, I myself escaped the worst of the terror. I lost the bliss and promise of maternal comfort too. It was Margaret Mary, the child named after my mother, who snuggled up to my mother and heard a story one night—and it was Margaret Mary who had the feeling that this mother was hers, the most beautiful woman in the world, with the finest low voice and laughter. And it was Margaret Mary, and not I, as she listened (I’d tune out my mother’s voice, even as an adolescent and young woman, although my mother was a wonderful storyteller), who wanted to listen for hours.
I think now that this child must have been, in those moments, in a state of “having-love” with this particular mother, her mother. But she was also my mother, even if as a child I was not able to want her or to receive the love she had to offer me. I suppose I didn’t know how to bring this mother to Blumenfeld because she hadn’t really been my mother. I can see now how carefully as a child I kept her, this mother of “having-love,” separate and apart from the mother who sometimes, when no one was around, performed rituals of bodily torture.
Even so, I didn’t experience the most terrifying and painful things she did to me; Galle did, and Galle unabashedly hated her mother, feared and hated her.
But if, as a child, I was “in pieces,” as Blumenfeld says, so too were the people I loved in pieces. I wonder if my own dissociation kept me alive. Whenever my father or mother could not take me in or recognize me, and in their ignorance did terrible things to me, I broke them up into pieces. I could not afford to respond truthfully to them, to show them anything real about their effect on me. So I lost the possibility of loving and being loved by them too.
But my own dissociative skills must have been limited, because I also remember clearly how my mother’s simplest acts, such as preparing a meal, or touching my back to hurry me along, or handing me a bar of soap in my bath, could touch off a nameless terror.
Blumenfeld is making room for me to find feelings and experiences with my mother that have been inaccessible to me.
I haven’t told him everything, but he understands my feelings as a child—terror, want, arousal, love, shame—feelings that go on in the present too. What he sees and knows is my confusion of love with intrusion, a confusion so deep that it takes me out of my own experience and out of my body.
73
In the weeks that followed this session, it became clear that I wanted to see the repeated experiences of entrapment and intrusion with my mother as a kind of love. I told Blumenfeld that my mother loved me, and I wanted to deny the fact that she also often terrified me. Sometimes I simply called the experience of intrusion itself love. But as I sat with Blumenfeld, who was increasingly horrified by what he was hearing and who did not save me from his horror, the picture of my life with my mother became very grim indeed. I forgot her, for a time, as the mother with whom I might have experienced “having-love” if only I’d dared to love her.
In retrospect, how quickly I was able to hold, know and name the most devastating events and distortions of my life! At the same time my “symptoms” were rapidly vanishing. I had struggled for years in therapy with several different women and men to know my past, to fill in missing time, and to bear the traumatic feelings associated with this process. This was the case with Melanie too. At times I’d experienced “flashbacks,” those terrible short flicks the mind replays of terrifying experiences. Often this led directly to visual hallucinations, voices, disconcerting illusions, accidents with my car or bike, unbearable physical sensations, and deep confusion and disorientation. And sometimes, usually once or twice a year, these “symptoms” became so severe that I was briefly hospitalized.
With Blumenfeld this pattern ended. It ended suddenly, in the first three months of our relationship.
And this is a great mystery to me. He certainly wasn’t perfect. He would be aghast at the very idea. He was rather dense about some things, in fact. He and I did not always use the same metaphors or words, and because we were each sensitive to the poetry of spoken language, we sometimes argued about these words and metaphors, much to my frustration. Blumenfeld was a more lively and skilled storyteller than I. I would grow frustrated with his skill when he was definitely telling me a story that was his own story, complete with his own metaphors, as if it were about me. He could be remarkably dense about this. Yet once I showed him how he was making this interchange, he saw what he had been doing and usually laughed at himself.
He was also apt to play his own grandfather at times, taking on the persona of the wise old man, but often he was deeply wise. Sometimes, however, just when I had the feeling he was really quite extraordinary, I had the sense that he was pretending. I could tell because he would suddenly become philosophical and distant, just a little too wise, as if he were hovering somewhere above us. Then I’d tell him to come down “off the ceiling,” or to “land the helicopter, please”—and he would.
Blumenfeld was, and is, perhaps the most defenseless person I know. This in itself made me gentle with him. And when his defenses did come into play in relationship with me, I saw with great relief that he was able to set them aside (with a little nudging on my part) gracefully and easily.
Not only was Blumenfeld not perfect, he was also not very magical. I complaine
d to him often about this. He never had the aura of “magic” about him that Melanie had had for me. Of course, part of her magic was that she reminded me of the mother of “having-love” and held out to me the promise of becoming that mother in reality; that was part of her magic. Blumenfeld once commented, “With her magical aura, she burned you—and I, without any magic at all, show you things by flashlight.” This was accurate too.
All my friends, and certainly Sarah, felt and believed in the magic of Blumenfeld. I never did. He was such an ordinary man to me. Or rather, things that I’d never dreamed could be ordinary were with Blumenfeld. For one thing, I’d never been in any relationship in which I was not, sooner or later, terrified of being abandoned. With him, this was not an obsession, not even much of a fear, though it took me some time to notice that I came and went from my sessions with him without the company of this particular lifelong fear.
Unlike every other relationship in which I wanted to feel loved, I did not doubt his love. Once when I asked (smiling, already sure of the answer), “Do you love me?” he smiled back and said, “Don’t you know, Annie? Can’t you tell love when you can take it completely for granted?” I did, and do, take his love completely for granted. This gave me a freedom with him I’d never dreamed possible. Among many other things, it allowed me to complain to him about him and know he still loved me.
74
June wilted into July, and as the days became consistently muggy and hot, Ben asked to spend more and more of his time with me indoors.
While I was actively recalling my terror with my mother with Blumenfeld, Ben did not play outside, and he did not play any of the variations on the “mama bear” with me either. I don’t really understand why, but it was as if Ben wordlessly understood that I needed a little distance from that particular play with him.
Then I had a dream that made it possible for Ben to go on.
In the dream I see Ben’s hands, very much like my hands as a child, small and bitten down to the cuticles and scratched on the back. We are visiting a firehouse, complete with red engine and dalmatian dog. Big men lift Ben up and slide him down the pole, their pole, and he plays that he is flying fast into fires with them.
But Ben has his own fires to contend with. Next, I see his small hands gripping an axe. I go after him, but he has disappeared. I search the entire firehouse and can’t find him. In the process, it becomes an ordinary house. Then I hear breaking glass, a far-off sound, and follow the sound, calling out, “Where are you, Ben?”
I find him in an upstairs room with the axe in his hands, all the windows broken and his face unreadable. “What are you doing, Ben?” I ask him, needing to understand. He cries, “Breaking out of everywhere!” and he flings the axe toward me, as if to kill me for asking. But he misses me by quite a distance, as if to protect me.
He begins to cry and reaches his arms up. “Carry me, carry me,” he says.
75
One bright July morning, when I come to pick up Ben in his classroom for our session, I am told he is “on the loose.” He threw his workbook on the floor and started to kick another child; when his teacher moved in to intervene, he ran out of the room.
I walk the grounds and search his familiar hiding places, but do not find him. As I come back, I see him struggling to open a heavy door at the back of the building. I offer my hand and he comes around to the front with me easily, saying, “Now can I come to see you?”
“I think you have some schoolwork to do first,” I reply.
“That’s right,” he says. “And I don’t want to do it.”
We meet Mary Louise in the hall. Back in his classroom Ben retrieves his workbook and settles down to work. I go on with my meetings and appointments, saving time for him later in the day.
Within thirty minutes Ben comes knocking on my office door. I am with another child then, but I open the door.
He peers in and is immediately furious with me.
“It’s my time!” he shouts, turning red.
“No. You spent your time running outside,” I say slowly.
“I don’t care,” he shouts back.
“You do care, and I will see you a bit later today,” I tell him.
He begins to cry, and turns and stomps off.
When I come to his classroom to pick him up later, Ben throws his workbook on the floor. He has been working with Mary Louise, who comments on how much work he’s finished and how well he’s done it. Ben listens and slowly retrieves the workbook. He reads a little of it aloud to me, but he still seems very angry. He opens his desk top, puts his head in and pounds the metal interior with his fists. I try to ignore this, hard to do, and talk quietly with Mary Louise. Finally, he closes his desk and sits and stares at me.
“Are you ready to come, bear?” I ask gently. He nods and I hand him the playroom keys.
As Ben walks into the playroom, he reaches down and pulls something out of his pocket. I see that it is an old makeup kit. I wonder where in the world he got it.
“I found this outside. Would you fix me into a clown?” he asks me.
“I believe I could do that. Is that what you wanted earlier?”
“Yes. But I had to do the workbook first,” he says.
“And then you had to wait while I was seeing someone else,” I add, wanting him to take in the whole day.
He nods solemnly, studying me.
“It’s a hard job to wait, isn’t it?” I ask him.
He nods, then smiles. “But now it is our time. Hurry up and fix me!”
On his upturned face I paint a red nose, a smile, blue dots and big round red cheeks.
Then Ben gathers up Tea Bags and the baby bottle and leads me outside. He runs ahead of me to his hideout, where he sits back on his heels and sucks the baby bottle, waiting for me. When I arrive, he tosses the bottle into the grass. He looks all around him, then points to a tree.
“There’s going to be a fire. There. In that house.”
“There is?” I ask, startled by this, given my dream about visiting a firehouse with him.
“Yep, and I am the fireman going to put it out,” he says.
This seems uncanny to me, but I trust it completely.
Ben runs across a stretch of grass to a huge tree, making the high whine of a fire siren.
“Bring Tea Bags,” he shouts back to me. Still surprised, I bring the puppet to him, and Ben places Tea Bags up in the tree. Then Ben turns to me.
“There’s children up there and they will burn,” he says, pointing up and looking at me with wide eyes.
He bends down and picks up a long stick.
“This is the hose with the water gushing to put out the fire,” he declares. He points it into the tree and makes a loud “shhh” sound for the water.
“Hand me my axe,” he commands.
In a bit of a daze, I find a small, stout stick and hand it to him. He chops the air with it.
“Now the long rope,” he says, and I pretend to give him lengths of a rope, which he tosses up into the tree.
Then he drops the rope and reaches up with his hands cupped around something small, and hands it down to me.
“Here’s the baby,” he cries. “He’s on fire. Put it out!”
I beat off the “flames” and hold the “baby” close while Ben watches.
“Here’s the sister and brother,” he says, handing them down.
I take them from him and comfort each one.
“Oh look, Tea Bags is on fire, too!” he shouts.
I take the puppet in my arms too, beat off the flames, and hold him close.
“Is he all right?” Ben asks.
“I think he is, but he is very frightened,” I answer.
Ben comes straight to me and reaches out for Tea Bags. He folds the puppet in his arms and rocks. “Are you all right?” he asks softly. Then he looks up at me and points to the burning house.
“My imaginary mommy is still up there,” he says, eyes wide. I wonder who she is, this “imaginary mommy.”<
br />
“Who is she, Ben?”
“She is a sorceress. She will get me!” And he turns and runs up a long slope.
He hides behind another tree, and when I come up to him, he is crying.
“She’ll get me! Hide me!” he says.
“She can get out of the fire all by herself?” I ask, seeing that she isn’t really trapped, as Ben himself once was.
“Yes. She can, and she will get me!” he cries.
“For leaving her in the fire and wishing she’d burn up?” I ask him slowly.
A startled, puzzled look comes over Ben’s face.
“It is only a wish,” I tell him. “And she is your imaginary mommy.” I emphasize his own word.
“Yeah,” he says, looking relieved. “And it’s just a tree.”
“It’s a tree now,” I tell him. “But it really was a burning house and you really had to get the baby out and leave the mommy in.”
He is still crying, but softly now. I pick him up.
“You’re so brave,” I whisper to him. He is still, just listening.
I put him down and take his hand and we walk back to the classroom building.
Inside it is dark in contrast to the brightness out of doors. Ben wants to go to the boys’ bathroom and asks if I will come with him. I listen to him peeing, then help him scrub his grubby hands and painted, sweating face.
“Wash my arms, too,” he says in a small voice.
I wash his arms with a brown paper towel and cool water.
“You dry me off, please, too,” he asks, and stands limply.
I dry him, taking my time about it.
He appears calm now, but drained and somehow vulnerable. I take his hand again and walk him all the way back to his classroom.
When Ben chooses to escape and run around outside during the time of our session he is implicitly testing my reaction. He has also literally run out on his responsibility for his schoolwork. When I finally find him, he asks if he can have his session. I, however, have spent most of our usual session time searching for him, and do not want to support him in running away. As soon as I remind him that he has schoolwork to do, he remembers this. It might have been better if I’d thought to add that I would see another child and then see him later, and given him a specific time. My guess is that he worked hard and efficiently to get to see me sooner, then was disappointed as well as furious that I was seeing someone else. But, in reality, he had responsibilities for his schoolwork, and I had the responsibility of seeing other children at their regular appointment times. To use a therapy session to brush aside those constraints would be to deceive Ben about the world he and I lived in.
A Shining Affliction Page 21
