“But that’s a shame, Mommy. I’d have told Gili and then she would stop coloring her hair with pink markers.”
We continued walking up the mountain towards the large animal cages and the beautiful Noah’s Ark at the edge of the gardens.
Yotam’s hand felt around for mine. The space I’d given him provided enough room for him to return to me. Each time, I’m surprised anew to find out that it really does work, and I’m amazed by how hard it is for me to remember to restrain myself.
“What does it say here, Mommy?”
“The Red Panda feeding is at 5 p.m.”
“Can we watch, Mommy?” My little boy had reappeared.
“Sure, that’ll be in a couple of minutes. We’ll wait.”
The caretakers arrived, equipped with a sack full of bamboo shoots, the beautiful animal’s food. Yotam didn’t move an inch, quietly staring at the feasting pandas.
“Can we get going, Yotam?”
“Just a minute,” he leaned down to tie his shoelaces. “Okay. Let’s go,” he said and ran ahead.
He stopped at the lemur area. “There’s no fence here. Can I go in?” Yotam was thrilled to be so close to them without any kind of separation. “They’re like monkeys dressed up as zebras,” he said.
“That’s right, Yotam. It’ll soon be Purim, so we’ll have to think of a costume for you.”
“I’m dressing up with Gili. I’ll be Timon and she’ll be Pumbaa,” he announced.
I realized that everything was already set. “All right, Yotam. I’ll talk to her mother.”
As long as I wasn’t being asked to dress up along with Gili’s mother as Simba and Mufasa, I was fine with it all. Get used to it, I told myself, your boy’s growing up. And rejoice. He has his own will and his own taste.
Little monkeys with long striped tails were leaping all around us. They, too, just like the rest of us, simply want some space in order to be happy.
Eleventh Meeting
Snoopy came to sit on the couch next to me. I bring him to work with me sometimes. This time, he had worked with Yoni, helping him to talk. For a long while, Yoni had wanted to talk about the time when he was 10 years old. About the period of the adoption that fell apart, and the ground that opened up beneath him. But it was too difficult for him, so I brought some backup with me. Snoopy is a much better therapist than I am. All he does is lay his head down on you, and the whole world suddenly feels like a more tolerable place.
Snoopy now lifted his head. A familiar, timid knock on the door. Dani arrived. She seemed to be on the last bar of battery power, fading away. I held her tightly and didn’t let go.
“We’re not giving up, Dani. We’ll get through this together. I’m with you. I’ll stay with you until you can be there for yourself and process what has happened. Until you no longer have to vomit in order to defend yourself from what the world puts into you. Until we reach our goal − to be our own mothers and fathers.” It’s so difficult to reach that place, and even more difficult not to reach it, I thought to myself.
“There’s no way that I’ll get there. I’m already broken and crazy.”
“You’re deeply hurt, but you’re not broken and you’re surely not crazy.”
“What’s the difference?”
“You’re repairable.”
“How do you know?”
“I can feel it.”
Dani sobbed silently. “But I’m running out of time. My time’s up, Rotem.” Her shoulders trembled. “I have nothing left. You can see that. I don’t know what to do. Please stop me. Why are you letting this go on? I have no more strength left.”
I held her hands, enveloping them with mine. Recharging her. “You’re not alone. You do have strength. You just can’t feel it right now. I’m feeling it for you. I can feel what’s threatening to drown you, and I also feel the dry land awaiting beneath it.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“I know the path, and I know you. If you manage to hate yourself less, and escape from the world less, then we’ll have a chance at living. We have to find a way to eat. We can’t live without providing the body with what it needs. Tell me what can enable you to do that, and we’ll find the way. I know that you want to believe me, that you want to believe in me, and I know that you’re incredibly scared of being disappointed again.”
Tell me what to do, her eyes pleaded.
“Believe. In me. In us. I know that it’s hard to do, and I know that you can do it. That we can do it.”
The sky was hidden by clouds and the air was cold. I didn’t manage to find nearby parking that morning, so I walked all the way to the car, and when I reached the end of the street I got goose bumps from the chill. I wanted to put my sweater on over my blouse. Oh no, I forgot it at the clinic, I thought to myself. Should I just keep going and reach the heating in the car? The sweater can wait until tomorrow. Actually, I also forgot the envelope with the VAT expenses on the desk. Abigail will kill me if I don’t get it to her today. I walked back, put the key in the lock, and then I saw it. Half of it peering underneath the door. A yellow envelope. I opened it as I walked to the couch, took out the paper and read it, still standing.
“Rotem, thank you for everything you’ve done and tried to do. I’m not sending you this because I want to die, and I know that you’ll only see this tomorrow, when everything will already be behind us. I can’t stand myself anymore. This isn’t a cry for help, I just wanted to thank you, and ask that you don’t blame yourself. I can’t be helped anymore. It’s too late for me. Love, Dani.”
A kind of strange love letter, yet again. It threw me back 20 years, to an overwhelming feeling of helplessness that crawls up and washes over everything all at once. He also wrote back then that I wasn’t to blame, and signed it “Love, Yochai.”
I’m not going to let it happen again, I decided. My trembling, yet assertive fingers quickly dialed her number. “Hi, you’ve reached Dani . . . Bye!” She’d waited after our session for me to leave the clinic and then left me the note. What do I do now? Where can I find her, how far has she managed to get by now? Think, Rotem, think fast! Where would she go from here? How does she want to do it? She’ll probably go home. What would she do, throw herself under a train? She usually calls, but this time she really wants it. She’s run out of strength to fight all the feelings that are pulling her down.
“Don’t blame yourself.” That’s what she wrote. She cares for me so much − much more than she cares for herself. The pain sliced through me as I took what seemed to be the longest drive in the world from Rehov Ahad Ha’am to Florentin, her neighborhood. A dense stream of cars was blocking the road, and then a driver overtook me by surprise. Idiot! The lights turned green and I got to the next intersection, only to await yet another set of lights. My legs were tensing up and I tried not to stamp down on the gas pedal, breathless and impatient. I finally reached her building. The ambulance I’d called on the way was already parked downstairs. If she’s still conscious, then she’ll probably refuse to go with them and probably say that she’s fine, I thought to myself.
“Dani!” I pounded on the door. Miko was barking inside. “Dani, it’s Rotem. Open the door.”
A sleepy voice answered me. “Rotem, how did you know? I mean . . . ”
Her hand was on her cheek, wiping off Miko’s licks after he’d woken her up on my behalf. Her eyes fixed on the paramedics behind me, and she suddenly tensed up.
“Rotem, come on. . . Why . . .”
Rotem
I have such a manic-depressive job. On Tuesday I was at the hospital with Dani, helping pump paracetamol and clonazepam out of her stomach. On Thursday evening I was at the Camel Comedy Club when the place was slowly filling up. A waitress in a bright sleeveless top sporting a leather pouch was walking between the tables. “What can I get for you?” she leaned towards me.
True love. All out? All r
ight, then. A Carlsberg.
Jasmine had invited me to her first stand-up performance. The stage filled and became empty intermittently, and it seemed that the entire audience was made up of supportive friends and family, all making even more of an effort than the people on stage, youngsters trying their hand at comedy for the very first time. Jasmine had asked me to come, so I did. She walked onto the stage with a slight smile, cautious, smoothed her purple-streaked fair hair, and shifted her bangs to the right side of her face. My heart was racing. I could never do anything like this. Jasmine’s so brave, I thought to myself.
Dr. Zuckerman would have fainted from the mere idea of it, I amused myself. Arriving at a bar to watch a patient perform. But this evening is all about Jasmine and her dreams − that’s the main thing, not questions of ethics regarding therapy. So I resumed watching the show.
“You know how your shrink thinks that you’re two people? He tells me that Jasmine A is ruining everything for Jasmine B, and then he claims that I’m the one who drinks too much. He prescribed a kind of medicinal cocktail that doesn’t even require a bar. I asked him for a permit for medical cannabis and all of a sudden he now thinks that I’m in great shape. In any case, he recommended that I do what he does − take some from his grandmother. I mean, from mine, not from his. You can even supplement your income nicely from selling the leftovers in your own neighborhood. Suddenly everyone’s become model grandchildren, visiting regularly, helping old ladies cross the street.
“How many kids does it take to help an old lady cross the street? Five. The old lady doesn’t really want to cross it.
“There will soon be elections for the third time this year. That’s it. That’s the joke.
“My shrink says that we need to recruit a coalition, all of the therapists and the people who care about me, along with Jasmine A, the functioning one. We’ll make a coalition and together we’ll force that terrible Jasmine B to become obedient. Now it’s clear why I can’t do it. When was the last time that there was an actual coalition in Israel? Unlike my shrink, my other therapist suggested a national unity government. “Let’s address all of the parts, even the unbearable ones,” she said. I was playing a card game with my six-year-old nephew. He already knows that he has to play the cards he’s dealt without whining, but Netanyahu and Gantz keep asking for new cards, over and over again. Maybe the solution is to appoint a medical nursery school teacher, kind of like a medical clown but without the cannabis. As it is, they’re already on the kind of high you only get before you crash.
“Netanyahu, his son, a blonde female academic, and Benny Gantz are on a plane together. The pilot comes on the speaker and says, ‘Sorry, guys, we’re about to crash. We only have three parachutes. You decide who gets them. Good luck. Bye!’ And then he jumps out of the plane.
“Gantz says, ‘All right, guys, for the good of the country and all of that. I’m one of a kind, no one else says well-known phrases wrongly the way that I do. Good luck to you all. Bye.” And he takes a parachute and jumps.
“The blonde says, ‘Sorry, I’m the blonde with the highest IQ in the whole world. I’m one of a kind. Bye.’ She takes the second parachute and jumps off.
“‘Dad, what do we do?’ Netanyahu’s son stomps his feet, sweating, his head held between his hands. ‘I can’t believe it. This is the first time that I’m being screwed by a blonde girl and not the other way around. She took the second parachute.’
“‘Don’t worry, kiddo,’ Netanyahu tells him. ‘Your genius blonde grabbed a sleeping bag.’
“I made a bet with my shrink that if I manage to make you laugh, he’ll give me a prescription for medical cannabis. So long, and thanks for the prescription.”
Jasmine breathed a sigh of relief. That’s it. She did it, the scariest thing in the world. I felt as proud as a bar mitzva mother. She managed to stand on a stage in front of an audience and make everyone laugh. Now, everything is possible.
Writing Instead of Cutting:
Twelfth Meeting
Snoopy started to bark. Dani was at the door. I could no longer hear her knocks. If it weren’t for Snoopy, she’d stay outside for a few minutes until I’d check the door, or even send me a message. “I’m here.”
What’s left of her is here. She’s getting weaker with every meeting that goes by. She has no strength left to talk about what’s eating her up, so there’s nothing to stop it. We have to find a way to solve this mess, I thought to myself.
“How are you?”
“Fine.”
“How was your week?”
“Fine.”
“What was good about it?” I insisted. The truth is that nothing’s good. I just can’t handle it, so I asked her. Dani remained silent. She walked in, her face expressionless.
“Where are you?” I asked quietly.
“Nowhere. I want to die.”
“What are you feeling?”
“I feel really bad and I just want to disappear. Or injure and hurt myself so that I can’t feel it.”
I waited for a minute. “Can’t feel what?”
“That thing sitting on my soul, suffocating. So heavy that I can’t describe it.”
“Try and find words for it anyway,” I asked.
“It’s very thick, dark, and heavy.”
“Where is it?”
“Over my chest.”
“When do you encounter it?”
“All the time.”
“Are there times when you feel it more strongly?”
“Yes, at night. But the last few days I’ve also woken up with it in the morning. When it starts first thing like that, I just open my eyes and I already know that everything’s bad. I’m scared that it’ll never leave me. That this feeling will never disappear.” Dani recoiled again. Silent.
“What feeling won’t disappear?”
“That I’m damaged, that something’s wrong with me, that I don’t deserve to feel good. And then I try to make myself disappear, thinking that it’s the only way, that I’ll always be haunted if I don’t find a way to end this life already.”
“That’s how you know how to do things, Dani. That’s the way you know to cope with it. As long as we don’t find another way, as long as you’re escaping, it’ll just get stronger. Its force only comes from the fact that you don’t dare confront it. Once you look straight at it, it’ll slowly fade away, because it doesn’t have its own actual existence. The truth is that no one can ever take over you again. That belongs to the past, even though it still feels very real and active right now.”
“That’s right. It happened ages ago, so why am I still not functioning? How come I dream about it every night and walk around with it every day? I have no strength left for anything else. I’m ‘as-if’ living.”
“It may have happened a long time ago, but it still lives within you. The soul hasn’t yet processed the trauma because it never got a chance to do so. You kept putting it off in order to survive and up until now you weren’t able to handle the horror of it’s having happened. Now you want to let it out, and it’s incredibly scary. I’m not sending you off to deal with it on your own. We’ll confront it together.”
“But I can’t manage to talk about it here either. It scares me too much, threatens, as though it’s happening right now.”
“You can write about Adi, and in doing that, distance yourself a little bit from the flood of emotions. Let’s write about it together.”
“What will you get out of it? Who writes with their patients?”
“It doesn’t really happen often. Dr. Irvin Yalom wrote a book with his patient Ginny, ‘Every Day Gets a Little Closer’. Come to think of it, they really are the only example that I’m familiar with. Ginny also helped her therapist get over his writer’s block. Which will be quite a bonus for me, too. You can help me with that.” Dani listened. I could see that it had gotten her attention − the opp
ortunity to help me, too. Pay me back.
“All of the friends I had during my hospitalization eventually killed themselves. It gets everyone in the end. No one escapes it. I never saw anyone recover. They just kept going in and out of the hospital, or ended up in a grave. They all eventually plummeted , one at a time, even those who had managed a bit of relief ended up giving in.”
“They were young and in despair, and they must have not managed to get to the root of the pain. You’re daring to do just that. You’re brave, you’re a real hero, and we’ll overcome this.”
“Why go through all that suffering if that’s the end anyway, no matter what I do?”
“Of course what you do matters. Either we manage to confront the monsters, or your body weakens and prevents you from dealing with it, as it has before. Let’s try to find other ways of looking at it, a bit from the side. This is most definitely a stubborn disorder. But we’re more stubborn.”
Four Months to Solve This Thing
A decisive knock is heard, as unmistakable as a familiar whistle . “Yotam, get the door please,” I said.
Omer popped by for a surprise visit. He occasionally does that when I’m within a mist and can’t manage to answer calls or messages. Yotam leaped onto him and Omer flung him high up in the air, just the way he likes, swinging him around over his head, turn after turn after turn. Maya calls it the helicopter dance, their usual rejoicing ceremony. Only after putting him back down and catching his breath did Omer turn to look for me.
“Now, where’s your mom, Yotam?” He found me sprawled on the couch. “What’s up, Rotem? How’s life?”
“I’m all worn out. I’m beat,” I shot straight at him, no prettifying. “Can you please take Yotam out for a walk with Snoopy? They’ve been driving me crazy all afternoon. It’s been raining constantly ever since we got back from school, and they’re both just climbing the walls. Get Yotam a snack at the grocery store, and bring some ketchup, too. We’ll make French fries for dinner.”
A Room of Their Own Page 12