by Amy Irvine McHarg
(To be published by Counterpoint Press in 2012)
“… it’s quite amazing how I’ve gone around for most of my life
as in the rarefied atmosphere under a bell jar.”
~ Sylvia Plath
You see now how you have carefully cultivated a life of surfaces.
On any given day, while the rest of the nation shopped, mowed lawns, and perused bank statements, you could be found prostrating to the grit and salt remains of an ancient, sagebrush-studded seabed. Supplicating before a blue tongue of ice in a high alpine couloir. Or murmuring devotionals while clasped to a pink and glistening cliff face of desert sandstone.
This merging of yours, with untamed, daring planes, felt intensely intimate. So titillating were these acts that they had you counting them as mystical. For every climb, every trail, every river run or canyon entered, you could swear you had felt the ardent kiss of grace.
Indeed, you fancied yourself as some kind of elite monastic; with a near-pious kind of smugness you sought both solitude and austerity—in landscapes and lifestyle. Hence your love of the desert. Of big mountains. Of the unavailable men that roamed them. And in this way, you gave the impression that you weren’t fragile at all.
It’s something of a marvel, really—the way you have managed to circumvent the delicate, crystalline sphere of knowing what you are really made of. You not only achieved this feat in its entirety, you prevented breakage by maintaining a paradoxical vigilance for the fissures, the hairline fractures, which would inevitably form. And whenever one was detected, you deftly filled it in, smoothed it over—shoring up what felt too thin, too friable. It was not unlike applying spackle to gauges in a wall—all the while looking the other way lest you see the thing you are working so hard to cover up. For each word and gesture were designed with the express intention—covert as it was—to avoid contact with the dark and viscous depths of your being.
You see now: what you were really avoiding was humanity—Yours and others—with all its requisite intricacies. But at some point, your brand of living got too easy. Like a one-night stand, only your flesh and senses were required for each transaction. So you upped the ante. You raised your fist in the air, joined the forces that had declared themselves the official protectors of places—places you had roamed and loved so exquisitely. You marched, protested, and wielded the pen as a kind of sword—all on behalf of the natural world. You found kinship within the crusades for their salvation. You found definable enemies at which you could point the finger. In this war, you felt whole. Holy.
For awhile.
But now, with the pretenses shattered, the dark viscosity has bubbled up into the light of day. Or perhaps you have fallen down into it—it’s really hard to say. It’s strange, how it’s always been there—and yet you haven’t really gotten a good glimpse of it until now. This is despite having had several mental health professionals who, over the course of a few decades, have framed it out for the health insurance companies that paid for your couch time; Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder was the term most often used—usually frosted with extras such as “borderline personality features,” and “psychotic episodes.” You don’t dispute this—although you are sure you were born this way because everyone has told you that your childhood really just wasn’t that bad. And yet you have also been pegged as being bi-polar—which you figure is somewhat better than the previous diagnosis and much preferred to the chronic depression which runs in your family because at least you get the euphoria and bravado for a spell. You remind yourself of the strong connection between creative genius and such mental disease; you flatter yourself by counting all the greats who have fallen, if only posthumously, into this category—the Van Goghs and O’Keeffes, the Axel Roses and Cole Porters, the the Plaths, Woolfs, Faulkners, and Hemingways—and their company makes the label feel more like a badge of honor than anything else. And truthfully, even if you could have managed another way, you were loath to give up the highs, of which Benjamin Haydon, a painter and friend of John Keats, wrote “I have been like a man with air balloons under his armpits and ether in his soul.”
You know this sensation better than you have known any person in your life. You have lived for it. You would have died for it. The only downside is, it doesn’t last forever. Robert Lowell referred to this place as “the magical orange grove in a nightmare.” For after you revel in the sensual, citrus bliss, there is always the brutal crash and burn.
Often, you have taken others down with you. But it was a small price to pay for the intensity and abandon, for the way the forces of nature seeped into your skin and made you feel more animal than human—and you find that even after you get married and have a baby that you can’t quite give it up. For the way you can leap, lithe and feral, from one hour to another and feel, for a time, highly capable and invincibly alive, feels way too good. Whatever label the shrinks want to give you, your peripatetic, animalistic way of being in the world has suited you and so it’s not until you almost kill your kid that you are willing to do much about it.
~
Admittedly your diagnoses have always varied somewhat, depending on the therapist, depending upon the time of day, week, or year—depending even on the lunar cycle, your menstrual cycle, the credit card company’s billing cycle. So widely has your mental state ranged that, for most of your adult life, you have not only dismissed the labels, but outright forgotten they apply to you. Not that you have something better to call your way of not-being-quite-like-everyone-else; admittedly, you are ignorant on this topic since you haven’t really ever experienced normalcy (a word that lands on your inner ear like leprosy). But apparently, your whacked-out way of being in the world means you are in a near-constant state of fight-or-flight. That you have no idea where you leave off and others begin—be they lovers or lichen, sidewinders or snowflakes. And that your entire experience is drenched in extreme thought and feeling: In one instant you are soaring with angels; in the next you are bedding right down with the devil.
The result is that nearly everyone balks at your balderdash—and they have done so since your earliest, toddling memory. Even now you remain truly perplexed by this. After all, you were just trying to mimic what was going on around you and isn’t it clear that the whole damn world is off-kilter, spinning wildly—with each passing year, the revolutions feeling faster? But somehow, everyone around you seems to be keeping up. You look at the slick way that folks are wired in, plugged in—how they work forty hours, and still manage to make it to take a pilates class, cook authentic Indian food, DVR an episode of American Idol, wash out the Starbucks car mug, and pick up the kids’ Legos. Then, after the children have gone to bed, men and women you know still have it in themselves to make love (okay, maybe not with their original spouse) and conjure from their computer those photo albums with exact dates and nice little one-liners that sum up the family reunion, or the dog’s first trip to the groomer.
But you, you can barely boot up your dinosaur of a PC. You fail to pay bills, or put air in the car tires. You’re lucky to get your child’s teeth brushed—and you can just forget about your own. Then there’s the way everything, and everyone, seems so neatly divided: The left and the right, the haves and have-nots. Those who believe in climate change. Those who want a sex change. And the wars: In divorce courts, on Capitol Hill, across the fence, across oceans. There seems to be no middle ground. And so, in your manic opinion, your way of hanging out at the far ends of the spectrum of society feels perfectly in synch with the ways of the world.
Your most recent therapist, Marc Bregman, refuses to label you with any specific form of psychopathology—although he sees how others have fit you into several forms. He will say that you are indeed traumatized, neurotic, and sometimes even psychotic. He will also say that you are stuck in “The Grand Gyroscopy,” in which you and the thing that you oppose—be it your spouse, your neighbor, your Congressman, or Wal-mart—become locked in an endless spin of ideological, even emotional, combat. The adversaries are different for each person, but in your case, they include all of the above and a whole lot more. You pit yourself against that which you oppose, and most often, the other side takes the bait because you are so good at incendiary speech and action. Then the two of you circle round and round—rigid bodies revolving around a fixed axis on the surface of a whirling dervish of a world. The momentum you build together is self-sustaining. You find you hardly exist, that you lack definition and direction, without one another.
When Marc first explained to you the problem of being stuck within such circular forces, and had offered to show you a way to break out—one without the aid of pharmaceuticals—you had failed to imagine such a possibility. Or perhaps the more honest thing to say is that you were damned if you’d give up the wild ride willingly. You cherish your madness—in fact, had you not been so agnostic in your beliefs, you would have thought of your brand of lunacy as Socrates did, as “a gift from heaven... a nobler thing than sober sense…[which] comes from God, whereas sober sense is merely human.”
So it’s not until you hit four decades, when your daughter turns two and your husband confesses to an infidelity the year before, when the fragile continents of your being break apart—leaving great gaps and gorges in which all your substrata are made visible—that you truly begin to question your way of being in the world. But by now, you have moved beyond the bell jar, from merely maintaining the veneer to mastering the art of projection—the hurling of fanciful fictions beyond the glass, into the distance, so you look like someone else, somewhere else. The Self has collided in space and time with the Other. Out there. Somewhere. Anywhere but right here—inside your own heart, your own body. And so deft at this trick have you have gotten that you now believe it is innate.
You had believed, until now, that this was a good thing—since it’s the only way you have known to keep those close to you—some of them anyway—from disowning you. Since it’s what you thought you needed to be—another woman altogether—to win back your husband. Besides, it was the only way you can imagine your daughter being able to read your words when she’s old enough to see them.
~
You’d like to think that, had you really grasped the extent of your volatility, if you’d dared to stare into that deep well of liquid darkness, you never would have uttered the vows of marriage. You tell yourself you certainly wouldn’t have birthed a child. But somehow, despite all the red flags of your broken life waving in your face, the fact that you were dangerously out of balance continued to elude. Before you fell in love—I mean really fell in love—first with your husband and then with your daughter, there simply hadn’t been enough at stake; you simply shrugged your shoulders while admitting wholeheartedly that the endless sessions of talk therapy and drugs, the attempts at yoga and meditation, the flirtations with biofeedback and hypnosis—all these efforts at finding your center were not nearly as interesting as running pell mell both in the world and in the mind. Truth be told—and among your league of friends it seems heretical to say so, but the Buddhist notion of the “middle path” eludes you. Bores you even. You know exactly what Edgar Allen Poe meant when he quipped “I became insane, with long periods of horrible sanity.”
But then you conceived a life. And looking back at what should have been an utterly miraculous time, you were alone so much when pregnant that no one really noticed when you went from being unstable to stark raving mad. More truthfully, no one realized it, because you hardly realized it yourself—until it was too late, until you were too far gone. But almost from the moment of impact between egg and sperm, something was dreadfully wrong—even more wrong than before. Something that put your child on red alert long before she wriggled out of your body. Something that sent your husband running for refuge because you demanded that he be your savior as well as the sole cause of your suffering. Not that you’re charitable enough to make excuses for him, but you have to admit here that he had been working an all-consuming job at the time, as well as building the house that he intended as his greatest gift to you—on five of the loveliest acres you’d ever seen. He’d had three guns to his head: his day job, the house-building (during which the bank barked at him without pause, threatening daily that if he failed to meet certain deadlines, they’d take back the loan), and then of course, his nagging, despairing wife. So he wasn’t there to put it all together; he only knew that, whenever he walked in the door, he became the target of your rage and despair. Sadly, his own instabilities were mounting at that intense time; and thus your own shoestring of crazy and his became so entangled that it became impossible to sort out who was responsible for the massive breaches that resulted.
But his side of things is not yours to reveal. And if you start, you run the risk of pinning the whole thing on him.
And so you wrench it back to you—which is no small task. You do this kicking and screaming, and Marc insists that it’s the only way to get past the infidelity and so you are learning: Not how to stick to your own side of the story, but how to dodge the narrative altogether—the pathetic one we all know about the neglected husband who is out playing the field while the abandoned, victim-of-a-wife is at home with child. But it’s hard, in a nation of sharp divisions with a 52% divorce rate—where such a tale is the norm. In its place, Marc has you clear the space of words—and let it fill with big, nearly unbearable lightning bolts of feeling—and you let them hit you with full force—if not by the minute then by the hour. And in this way you have decided maybe the Buddhists had something going after all: Like a string of prayer beads, you finger each bauble of pain until you come to some imagined end and then you begin again. Such a rote and narrow practice keeps your mind from spinning off into spheres in which it has no business—into realms from which it could not possibly find its way home again.
Marc warned you—even before that day in the canyon. He had explained how mothers of your unsteady make-up are predisposed for developing post-partum psychosis—a league of one-in-a-thousand for which there is a severe and abrupt exit from reality at some point after bearing children. Indeed, when you later read about that which you have become, you’ll learn that five percent of you actually manage to kill yourselves and/or your offspring.
In hindsight, you are not surprised.
But when he originally imparted to you this alarming piece of information, you had snorted. Yes, you actually snorted. For what mother hasn’t wanted to throw herself, and her screeching kid, out a window? You had written it off as a little hormone imbalance—nothing more than the “baby blues” because that’s what everyone but Marc told you it was. Buck up, other mothers would say, when you tried to voice your darkness. It will be over before you know it, so savor it while you can. You had stood there, frozen in horror, wondering what kind of monster you were that you were unable to relish your time with and care for this small miracle of a being. Indeed, when you encountered those blissed-out kinds of moms, everything in you wanted to pinch them, hard. Until the bones in your fingers snapped.
Your husband will say he should have known how bad it was getting when, after his big confession, you chased him into the bathroom in a rage. He had locked himself in until you could both calm down—because he doesn’t react well to your histrionics. You had stayed at the door, kicking it repeatedly, singing over and over “You are my Sunshine” (your father’s favorite song), in a really creepy voice. But you have zero recollection of this incident. You will both agree later that you don’t know which is more disturbing—the fact that you were able to exhibit such bizarre behavior or the fact that, afterwards, you hold no part of it in your memory.
And slowly there will be the understanding about the other signs that things weren’t right: For example, it wasn’t that you were short on sleep; it was that you didn’t sleep at all—partly because you were so fearful that the baby would stop breathing, and indeed, you will come to find out, six years down the road, after many doctors tell you that it’s all in your head, that in fact, the baby wasn’t breathing well—that her airway was largely obstructed by tonsils that extended all the way down her throat, causing airway trouble that was nearly impossible to see or hear. You will eventually feel vindicated for all the nights you spent scanning her body, watching her inhale, then exhale, again and again. You will rejoice when, at nearly seven-years-of-age the poor kid finally has enough lung capacity to dive to the bottom of the pool—and we’re talking about the shallowest end—three feet at best.
But there is still the fact that the sleep deprivation and worry drove you over the brink. This happened slowly, as you watched her breathe not in the way that new parents do, with love and awe, but methodically—the way a professional gambler watches cards being dealt and drawn. You also never left, for fear that nobody, not even the child’s father, could be trusted with her. Instead you concocted bizarre excuses to take her from anyone that tried to hold her; you even tried to nurse her when sometimes that was the last thing she needed—especially because she was sucking out not so much milk as cortisol—that stress hormone that is toxic in high doses. Thankfully, for the baby’s sake, you lost a great deal of much-needed weight and your teeth started crumbling in your mouth, so there was little choice but to put an end to the breastfeeding.
So you transferred the anxiety to rigorous and incessant housekeeping, and the irony was in your generous slathering of surfaces with nasty chemicals because you, Miss Natural—a rather compulsive woman who was typically prone to nothing more than vinegar and baking soda—was trying to keep the baby from getting sick. But she did get sick, a lot, and so you had all the more reason to do nothing for yourself. You didn’t even dare go for a walk—you, who have lived most of your life in the outdoors, roaming the most rugged of places without a care for map or trail. All because you, who have hiked and camped since you were a small child, became obsessed with the notion that some deranged man would grab the baby from the sling on your chest and run off with her. And on the rare occasion when you finally convinced yourself to venture out, the sound of a car coming made you dodge off the road into the trees. Most days though, you simply hid inside, pitching back and forth furiously in the rocking chair your sister loaned you, a chair which, had there been an odometer on it, would have registered the equivalent of a trip to Mars and back. And as you rocked, in the same pajamas you’d worn for a week, you constantly scanned the windows and doors—which were locked at all times in one of the nation’s lowest of low crime neighborhoods. Then you checked them repeatedly throughout the night, as you did laps through the dark rooms, gripping the baby tightly, worrying about what was out there, trying to get in.
~
It is hard to accept that, as a new mother, you may have had far more in common with Andrea Yates, the mother who systematically drowned her five children in a bathtub, than you ever could have imagined having. You remember how, at Yates’ trial, the psychiatrist described Andrea as having had delusions before the murders; these included the deep-seated belief that she had “somehow damaged her children irreparably” and that she “wasn’t a good mother.” When Andrea committed those darkest of deeds, having a baby was, for you, such a far-off concept as to be in another galaxy. So, right along with the rest of the nation, you had shuddered in merciless judgment. For such a heinous act seemed the very antithesis of mothering, and you could not fathom an absence of the uniquely primordial, unconditional bond that exists between a woman and the child she has harbored and nourished with her own body.
And had you been able to be honest about it, you could have seen that you could fathom it with precision. And after that day in the canyon, it was clear just how intimately you understood the fine line between creation and destruction. How things could be brought up into the world, only to be taken down into the belly again.
Of course hindsight is a perfect view. It’s tempting to say now that, had you believed in some sort of supreme being—and we’re talking about one who actually gave a shit about you, or (heaven forbid, no pun intended) or at least one in whose image you were made—maybe none of this would have happened. Then again, when asked if she thought of heaven as she forced each of her children’s heads under the water, Andrea Yates replied “I was praying they would go there.”
Many have never suspected your condition because, if anything, you could put on such a good show. And you’ve probably survived this long without extreme treatment or hospitalization because whatever it is that you suffer from, wherever it is that you go when your mind starts to slip, you have at least had the good sense to ensure that there was always some kind of mental health professional in the wings, someone you paid dearly to keep you at least running parallel to society if not actually in it. It’s been costly—and even though you have no assets to your name, no retirement at all to speak of—at least you are still here. Along the way you have fired a therapists; it was amazing how many trained eyes were bedazzled by your slick and shiny surfaces—how many missed just how closely you flirted with both the gutter and the grave. But a few got it, and for them, it was no small task to keep you alive and out of a padded cell. Still, you also deserve some credit here, for you were always the model patient—the one who could pull it together after each breakdown and return to the couch and say with a cheerful voice how well you were doing. And at times, you did do quite well: At fitting in. At managing your life. At being present in your relationships, and maintaining appropriate boundaries. There were even respites that lasted long enough that you appeared successful. It was during these times that you’d work at fabulous jobs and get your stories published and have lots of friends and get lots of exercise and host dinner parties and keep your house looking like the cover of Good Housekeeping. Everyone would applaud and swell with pride for having been there to help you with your struggle. You’d respond by feeling deeply grateful, indebted even. It helped you to shake off each dark period as a “rough patch,” to apologize to all affected, and to convince yourself, and them, that you were actually fairly normal.
So good are you at this game of rebound that, even after your dramatic entrance into the Emergency Room, even after your confession of suicidal and homicidal tendencies, when you had regained your composure and returned to your daughter’s side you found the hospital staff acting as if your actions weren’t that far out of the ordinary. You saw then that you were so used to casting the problem away from you like a fish let off the hook, that you convinced even the staff there that you were far better off than you were. And that’s why, once they had determined your sick child was only mildly dehydrated and that she hadn’t yet suffered from any sort of secondary infection, it was quickly concluded that you had done everything right, that you were simply exhausted. And when the social worker sent in to evaluate the situation declared you and your girl free to leave, you stood there and stared at her, your mouth hanging on your face like a hammock.
“You mean you aren’t going to call Child Services? Take my daughter into protective custody, for safe measure?”
You had practically begged.
The woman had half-smiled, as if you were merely asking for if she’d watch your child while you ran to pick up a pizza.
“How about me? You’re taking me, right? For evaluation? Or you’ll at least prescribe something—a mild sedative? Just for a few days?”
Couldn’t the woman hear the way things were trembling beneath the surface? How they were about erupt and rearrange everything in the room? But with each plea, she had merely shaken her head.
“As soon as you get a little sleep, you’ll be just fine,” she said. “I see mothers like you every week.”
As she was leaving the room, she patted your shoulder. Then she winked at your daughter, who had made an astonishingly rapid recovery, and sat on her best behavior, smiling far too sweetly.
~
Ever since your daughter was in utero, you have faithfully called Marc each week, so he could help you sift through the duff of your dreams. From the beginning, you placed merit in these calls, for the dreams you had of your father and your daughter were so vividly real, so excruciatingly personal, that they affected you far more directly, more profoundly, than any sort of counseling or medication ever had. To describe loosely the dream therapy that you do with Marc is to say that you are being treated as a patient of depth psychology, which seeks to access and engage with the unconscious realm of the psyche. This is a region that lurks far beneath the conscious layer, covertly influencing daily lives with whatever feelings and experiences have been stored away there—things deemed too intense, too traumatic, even too delicious for the conscious mind to bear. The doorway to the unconscious is through dreams, and to step through it is very different than entering into the general treatment of clinical psychology—which prides itself on a much more conscious, rational, and scientific approach to mental processes and human behavior. According to James Hillman, a prominent depth psychologist and contemporary of Marc Bregman’s, such therapy “starts neither in the physiology of the brain, the structure of language, the organization of society, nor the analysis of behavior, but in the processes of imagination.” In other words, depth psychologists are interested in the images that bubble up from the catacombs of the mind, the metaphors they might suggest, and the individual dreamer’s associations with and feelings about those images—be they sex organs, tornadoes, or talking heads of broccoli—all of which you have glimpsed in your sleep, all of which impressed themselves on you in ways that really grabbed your attention.
Or not. I was learning how much I didn’t want to see what I was being shown.
Ultimately, the depth psychologists want to know how such images affect conscious waking life, and many seek to unite the two realms so that the waking world and the dreaming world are congruent—so much that the lower one can seamlessly inform the upper.
Before Marc Bregman and James Hillman, there were the founding fathers of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Freud thought that the unconscious was to be heavily interpreted, often in sexual terms, which proved to be limiting. Still, he was ahead of his time in that he understood “there is a tangle of dream-thoughts which cannot be unraveled… This is the dream’s navel, the spot where it reaches down to the unknown.”
Jung, who was Freud’s prodigal son for a few years—until he began to question the heavy hand that his mentor laid on his patients’ tender psyches—better understood the sensory “literal-ness” of the dream. “I once experienced a violent earthquake,” he wrote. “[A]nd my first, immediate feeling was that I no longer stood on solid, familiar earth, but on the skin of a gigantic animal that was heaving under my feet. It was this image that impressed itself on me, not the physical fact.”
Your dream therapist also insists that the image is sovereign, that it stands on its own and you, as the dreamer, must encounter it directly, on its terms. So there were times when a dog in your dreams was something that Marc pressed you to follow. But on at least one other occasion, a dog was a coyote, a scavenger, circling in warily, feeding off the garbage you had left behind. In this instance, Marc warned you away from him.
In your gut, these responses to each dog, each context, had felt like a custom-fit job.
Sure enough, it was this process that showed you something so inexplicable that you hesitate even now to put it into words: By turning away from the surface, by dropping into the profundity of the dreams, it would become clear something else was at work, something far below the troubled terrain you stumble around on. For the night after your drive up the canyon, after your daughter’s fever has broken and you have finally managed the first deep sleep you’ve had in days, you will dream that you are a kind of Cyclops, with an additional eye, bulbous and unblinking, smack dab in the middle of your forehead. In the dream, your first inclination is to feel monstrous at the sight of it—as you do most days anyway—but the eye is gold and glittering, and you can’t stop admiring its radiance.
You will awaken with a start, and too quickly you will begin to dismiss the possibility that the eye might be a symbol for some kind of divine opening in you—or that it might be the lens through which you will at last be able to look at the black strata beneath the surface.
But here’s the kicker: Despite the nay-saying power of your waking intellect, something will begin to shift. That night, all the pronouns, personas, and subjectivity will begin to fall away and you will start to view things without the narratives that overshadow them the minute they are inscribed on the object in question. Unable to shake that sensation of a golden orb burning brightly in the middle of your head, you will finally come to this deep knowing that, no matter what all the previous therapists have warned you about erecting and maintaining “healthy boundaries” between yourself and the world, you cannot afford to keep it at bay. No, you have always needed the contrary: Permeability. Transparency. The far-flung tales may have an alluring and high-brow literary quality, and people may be more attracted to them than anything else you might try to say, but really, what you need now is to be brazen now in your presentation—more appallingly so than you’ve ever been.
You need to have direct contact. No prophylactic in between.
And you will wake knowing that there’s something you must get to, something arduous to access, something lodged deeply in the depths of your being. Dredging it up to the surface will become paramount. On it, your survival, your marriage, and your daughter’s well-being almost exclusively depend.
And this is what allows you to finally say it like it is. This is what allows you to admit that the woman—the hideously hysterical, self-absorbed bitch who actually combed the canyon road for a place to drive off, the one who made it as far as the ER’s front desk before walking away from her ailing, frightened child—was I.
I. Eye. Aye.