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time I was hanging out with him, feeling like equals, he was looking at me as a huge star who’d also been his boss! I wasn’t emotionally invested in him at all—I mean, I hardly knew him—so it was easy to be grown-ups about the whole thing and resume being friends within our larger group of friends.
Well, I figured that was that, but that wasn’t that because he started calling me. He really didn’t want things to end. He liked what was beginning, but just got scared. The minute I cut him loose, freed him of any and all obligation, he wanted me all the more. Go figure.
So I guess you can say we very quietly started to see each other. The more time we spent together, the more connected we became. Like me, he always put other people’s needs above his own, and like me he had no clue that this was a way to avoid his own problems and feelings. I think this common denominator became the magnet that held us together. We understood each other because we both behaved the same way. And through this understanding, each of us was able to make huge progress in expressing our wants and needs. It’s not that his original concerns weren’t legitimate or that his desire to be regarded on his own merit and not for his involvement with me wasn’t an issue. It was. By now, however, it was clear we could not stop seeing each other, so we simply kept our relationship a secret.
But my symptoms hadn’t gone away. The regularity with which I was having sex with John made the staining and cramping a constant, though I really didn’t feel comfortable sharing this with him. I mean, I loved having sex with him. The way his long hair tented around my face enclosed us in a dark, private world.
But every time we’d make love, I’d end up with a kind of mini period that was a real negative. So much for being the single swinger.
I didn’t know where to turn, so believe it or not, I decided to 9377 Cancer Schmancer 2/28/02 4:18 PM Page 45
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go back to Doctor #1, the gynecologist I’d been seeing for years. I mean, I had wanted to try someone else and I did—I’d tried four someone elses, to be exact. And no one was offering me any miracles. So I was beginning to think that Doctor #1 wasn’t so bad, and made myself an appointment.
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The Progesterone Blues
S e p t e m b e r 1 9 9 9
iwas never one of those women who dreamed of having a baby.
Not like my dear friend Rachel, who played Val on The Nanny.
She always knew she wanted a baby and ended up giving birth to twins. My friend Donna had three daughters; my girlfriend Kat had three sons. It seemed like almost every woman I’d known wanted to have a baby and had one, including my sister. So why was I different? What was it about having a child that made me so scared? Not so much of rearing one, but of actually giving birth to one.
I used to wonder if I was just different from other women. I used to say, “I take care of Peter, it’s enough.” But really, that wasn’t true. Actually, I think Peter would’ve made a good father.
He always showed a lot of patience playing with other people’s kids, whereas I didn’t. But he wasn’t that involved or loving toward Chester, our dog, which used to make me wonder. Still, none of that was relevant. In truth, the reason I never wanted children, which came out after having spent a lot of time in therapy, was that as a child I’d been told by my mother the story of how she’d almost hemorrhaged to death while giving birth to me.
Because I was so fat.
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When I brought this up with her only recently, she corrected,
“I never said it was because you were fat, Fran. I said it was because you had a big head!” Whatever, be it fat or a big head, the drama that surrounded my delivery was a story I’d been told as far back as I can remember. It traumatized and repulsed me so much that it literally kept me from having a baby of my own. Maybe my mom thought I’d love her more if I’d known what she went through, but all it did was burden me with guilt and a fear that childbirth could be fatal.
Don’t get me wrong—growing up, I felt loved and adored by my parents. I had a happy childhood. But I definitely possessed an overactive imagination, and found myself unable to slough off some of the vivid stories I was told.
Other little girls are told their births were the most beautiful experiences in their mothers’ lives. So naturally, they grow up looking forward to the day of bliss when they’ll become mothers, too. I, on the other hand, could only conjure up delivery-room chaos and blood spilling everywhere. The guilt I secretly har-bored for having almost killed my mother was, without exaggera-tion, life altering.
Plus, she’d always gushed that I was the fattest, shortest baby in the hospital nursery. The fattest baby with the biggest head.
“You were the most exquisite baby, but when Daddy put a comb under your nose you looked just like Stan Laurel,” she’d say, laughing. That’s it! Those are the details of my being brought into the world. Any wonder I never had kids? When I finally put all this together, a huge question mark in my life had been answered.
So there I sat, waiting for Doctor #1 to enter, thinking about John and how much he wanted someday to have children. Maybe for John I could overcome my fear. And babies were getting more appealing now that I no longer mixed them up with my own birth issues of fear and guilt. When Doctor #1 entered the examining 9377 Cancer Schmancer 2/28/02 4:18 PM Page 49
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room, I brought her up to date on the other four doctors I’d seen since my last visit with her. I needed to be up-front with her if we were going to reopen this investigation. She ordered some blood tests as well as an ultrasound. She did a Pap test and a pelvic exam. Same battery of tests, and again, everything normal.
“Well, you’re too young for a D&C,” she said matter-of-factly.
And like an idiot, even though it was just a stupid test, I was flattered to be too young for it. In retrospect, I should have said right then, Why, what would that show? But I didn’t. The only thing that ever showed up on a blood test was an elevated FSH (follicle-stimulating hormone) level, which is the messenger hormone in the brain that tells progesterone it’s time to kick in. Since my FSH
level was elevated, it seemed safe to assume that I was experiencing lower-than-normal progesterone. Doctor #1 once again held firm on the perimenopausal theory and prescribed progesterone pills as a hormone replacement therapy two weeks out of every cycle.
John knew I was experiencing some symptoms that had gone unexplained for some time and was hopeful that this prescription would solve the problem. He was very caring and understanding.
At this point, when my friends began to find out about us, he was just some guy who used to work on The Nanny—one sixteen years my junior and not even Jewish. Believe me, I vacillated over his significance in my life, too. I mean, I knew what a fine person he was. His instincts were always reliable. Good upbringing, I used to think. I appreciated his not wanting to exploit our relationship—many men would have felt differently. But he would have preferred it if no one knew ever, though that seemed too extreme for me. It was one thing to keep our unorthodox relationship private from the general public; it was another to hide it from our nearest and dearest.
Elaine was skeptical of it all, not for a moment thinking it could turn into something serious. “Honey, you worked very hard, you’ve 9377 Cancer Schmancer 2/28/02 4:18 PM Page 50
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been through a lot, enjoy him, he’s a sweet boy.” My friend Donna said, “You’re not serious . . . are you?” And superficially I could see where those close to me might have thought this older woman–
younger man relationship was a phase I was going through.
But I could see where others couldn’t—beneath the surfa
ce.
John wasn’t the first younger man I’d dated since my separation, but he was by far the most special. And even though twenty-six sounded superyoung to Elaine, I remembered being twenty-six, and I felt younger at forty-two. Our friends always used to make fun of how middle-aged Peter and I seemed—already married and owning a condo.
Actually, our late twenties were the pits. A downward spiral of tragic events seemed to plague us. In about a three-year period, I underwent breast surgery, we became victims of a violent crime, both Peter’s parents died of lung cancer, and his only remaining grandparent died, too, wiping out his entire immediate family.
Those were hard years, and the last thing I felt like was a “girl.” So it seemed condescending for Elaine to call John a “boy.” She didn’t even know him. I wondered if telling my friends about us was such a good idea after all. Meanwhile, I was falling for him and consumed over the age difference.
For me the gap in our ages took on heightened significance because I hated being forty-two. The number sounded so old. I didn’t look forty-two, I didn’t feel forty-two, and I didn’t relate to being forty-two. This wasn’t a healthy way to think. I know that now, but at the time I was regretful about not being freer in my youth and getting to know myself better. By denying my age I was trying to deny all the time I had wasted while being ruled by my need to be good.
The age issue wasn’t a big deal for John, but I couldn’t let it go.
I knew we looked close in age now, but worried: What would we look like when he was thirty-five and I was fifty-one? Or forty-9377 Cancer Schmancer 2/28/02 4:18 PM Page 51
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three and fifty-nine? Or sixty-two and seventy-eight? I drove myself nuts with the numbers.
Over and over, I talked about this with my therapist. Old when I was young, young when I was old, and fearful of losing both my looks and my youthfulness. I couldn’t wrap my brain around what a freak I was.
I always thought about Ruth Gordon, the actress, who was so talented and youthful even when she was quite elderly. She always possessed charming energy and a little-girl quality. She was married for a long time to Garson Kanin, who was sixteen years her junior.
On her deathbed he sat by her side and held her hand. He loved her to the end. Suddenly every show-biz older woman–younger man relationship fascinated me.
Ultimately, though, I decided that my worries about growing old, being abandoned and alone, really had nothing to do with John. I’d worried about this stuff all my life. In therapy, I connected these worries to empty threats my mother made to me as a child. Here we go again.
“I’m going to send you away to the home for bad children,”
she’d scream whenever my sister or I would get too out of control.
And I don’t know about my older sister, but I for one believed her!
She never realized how frightened I was by what she was saying.
Maybe on another child it wouldn’t have had the same impact.
But the mental images I created of this home for bad children became the core for all my fears of being alone, being unloved, being abandoned, and being dead. Once again, after I made those connections, I was able to let go of many of my lifelong fears. For the most part, I stopped worrying about getting old, about being alone, about dying. I stopped worrying about the age difference between John and me. I was just going to lighten up and get a sense of humor about it all, like when I first met John’s buddy Nat. Shaking my hand, he said, “I’m John’s oldest friend.”
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“And I’m John’s oldest girlfriend,” I responded happily.
I was able to color my hair in front of him and cover my gray without worrying about all that other crap. We’d joke about my
“blond” growing out, but it was only a joke; we both knew it was gray. John would often tease me, “I’m going to send you away to the home for bad girlfriends if you aren’t good.” It was nice to finally be able to joke about it all.
Meanwhile, I wasn’t the only one who needed to work on her problems. I’d begun to realize that John didn’t like to travel and had a real fear of flying. Every time we made plans to go away, he’d become so stressed his immune system would weaken and he’d get sick. It was impossible to discuss plans with him because the very idea of it made him so nervous. The last thing I wanted was to make comparisons between John and Peter, but in this situation, it was difficult not to. I was running up against the same thing. Here was another man who didn’t share my wanderlust.
“I know once I get there, I’ll have a good time, but it’s the getting there that’s the problem,” he’d say. For me, it was like being in a parallel universe, because those had been Peter’s exact words, too. Verbatim! This was one area where I refused to indulge any man.
“If you give into this fear it will grow into a phobia,” I’d always say. My desire was to always work through a fear rather than give in to it. I wished I could be with someone who actually looked forward to taking a great trip, but it just wasn’t in the cards.
Then there were times when John would scold me for saying something he didn’t think sounded good. Like when I said, “I’m going to the bathroom to take a dump.” He suddenly became very parental and said, “Don’t say ‘dump.’ It’s a turnoff when you talk like a truck driver.” I thought he was joking, but he wasn’t. Now, I’d already gone through this sort of thing with Peter. There was no way, after everything I’d struggled through to get where I was, 9377 Cancer Schmancer 2/28/02 4:18 PM Page 53
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I was going to end up with another man telling me what to do. Peter was a Scorpio, John was a Scorpio, and my father, the man who’d started it all, was a Scorpio, too. Are there no other signs of the Zodiac that I’m attracted to?
Oh my God, what’s happening? I thought. Had I gone nowhere? Had I been standing still all this time? I really began to wonder. Was this part of John’s Italian/Lebanese culture? I mean, where did he come off telling me what to do? On the upside, I liked the way I was responding in contrast to how I’d been with Peter. I didn’t feel like I’d been bad, didn’t worry John hated me or might leave. I never felt like I’d be sent away to the home for bad women who sounded like truck drivers. I simply felt he was more uptight than necessary, and that, for things to work out, it had to stop.
Of course, I needed to stop doing certain things, too. My inability to apologize has always been a problem. It was a problem when I was a kid, and in my marriage with Peter, as well as with coworkers and friends. During an argument I was also prone to name-calling, which John would take offense to. If I called him a baby, silly, or immature—to me, no big deal—he’d get really irritated. “Talk to me, communicate, don’t call me names,” he’d insist. He also made me aware of how many times I had, out of frustration, punched him in the arm. I guess I’d been doing that to boys since my girlhood and never thought much of it, but he didn’t appreciate it at all. He was right. Name-calling and arm punching are immature and childish.
John and I fought a lot and cried a lot. At first we were always defensive about our own positions, but eventually we traced it back to pain in our childhoods, and that was when the tears came. Through our relationship we began to clean out the cob-webs of our past, put the pain aside, and see ourselves more clearly. I don’t know how we were able to get through this time, 9377 Cancer Schmancer 2/28/02 4:18 PM Page 54
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but something kept us together. Whenever we figured out what was really behind a fight, it brought us so much closer. And with each discovery about ourselves, another brick was set in our foundation as we began to feel no one else knew us as well as we knew each other.
Meanwhile, nothing had changed symptomatically. My mood swings were still erratic, and Doctor #1’s being so adamant that I was perimenopa
usal didn’t help. The progesterone pills she told me to take two weeks out of every month might have helped a little, but not much. I was still staining, still cramping, still everything. When I called Doctor #1 and told her the progesterone didn’t seem to be making much of a difference, she said, “Double the dose and see if that works.” So I did.
It was right around this time that I was being honored in Amsterdam with the Silver Tulip Award. This is the Dutch version of the Emmy Awards, and The Nanny is a well-loved television series there. So John and I decided to make a vacation out of it for my birthday. We met my cousin Reid and his wife, Claudine, in Paris first, as well as my old friend Howie. He and I always daydreamed about the time when we would walk through the art museums of Paris together. And good neighbor Jill, who was working in Prague at the time, planned to fly in for the weekend. After about a week in Paris, our plan was to take a train up to Amsterdam, where we’d do the awards show and enjoy the city before returning to the States.
Unfortunately, I was having a horrible reaction to the double dose of progesterone—something I didn’t realize until it was almost too late. If I’d had mood swings before, now I was completely jumping out of my skin. I really felt insane, had no coping mechanisms. My face broke out worse than ever. I felt like I was capable of murdering someone or killing myself.
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Everything upset me on that trip. There were brief episodes when I felt free-spirited, but probably only after a few glasses of wine. The rest of the time I was pulling my hair out of my head.
Nothing was going right for good neighbor Jill, either. She hated her hotel, the cabbie took her to the wrong place, her shoes were killing her, and I was intolerant of her problems. John and I fought, and Howie, having worked with me for so long on The Nanny, knew to keep his distance until the coast was clear. Claudine and Reid had each other and, thankfully, were very independent. I remember John yelling at me, “You’re acting crazy. I can’t be with someone who acts so crazy!” My behavior was cost-ing me my relationship with him, as well as some friendships I very much valued.