“Well, if you behave yourself and don't stir up too much trouble, I might just let you share one of my peanut butter cups. You're practically invisible, ya know.”
Not as invisible as I wish I could be right now, I thought to myself.
“No! I won't!”
Howls from the other bed shook me out of my sleep. The sun was just barely shining through the window. What the hell time was it?
Writhing on the bed next to me was a wisp of an elderly woman, her white hair peeking out from under the covers, clumps of it together, some of it obviously missing—a tiny mess of wrinkles with a voice like a police siren. Two of the graveyard shift nurses were standing over her bed.
“Come on, Alice,” one of them said. “You know better than to scream like that. You're going to scare this poor girl out of her wits. Let's change your bedpan, okay?”
Bedpan? God, this is depressing.
“Go away! No! No!”
“That's it, easy does it. We're just going to roll you over. Easy does it. Now see, was that so bad?”
Why are they talking to her like she's three years old?
With the bedpan changed, the small figure in the neighboring bed rolled over and went back to sleep. By then I was far too awake and disturbed to even think about it.
“You have to excuse Alice,” the younger nurse said from the door. “She's not always conscious of what she's doing, and she can be a handful. Let us know if she bothers you. We'll see what we can do.”
A handful. Like me. Misunderstood. Like me. Giving up on sleep, I pulled my book off the nightstand and began to read.
“You're a very pretty girl, you know.” A voice emerged from the rumpled mound of sheets and blankets a few feet away.
“Excuse me?”
“I said you are a very pretty girl. Pretty eyes, such pretty eyes. I'll bet they just drive the men crazy. So pretty.”
What could I say to that? I just sat and listened.
“You know, I used to be very pretty. Just like you. Men. All kinds of men. My sailor boy, oh, he was so handsome! Almost pretty in a way too. Knocked me out of my socks, looking at him in that blue uniform. He used to tell me I was the most beautiful woman in the world. And you know what, honey? I believed him.”
Alice was smiling now, the shriveled smile of a woman whose dentures were still sitting on the bathroom sink. Despite her thinning white hair and sagging wrinkled skin, I could still see the wide brown eyes now coming to life. She had the marks of a faded beauty.
“My son put me in here, you know. I loved my high-rise, my condo. And the men, oh honey, the men were everywhere. But he decided I was too old, couldn't handle it anymore, and tried to shove me in one of those old folks' homes. What's your name? Why is such a pretty girl like you in a place like this?”
I told her my name and why I was in the hospital.
“Oh, honey, that's just terrible. You're so pretty, and you've got your whole life ahead of you. And you're so sweet, sitting here listening to this old lady ramble. That picture over there—is that your family?”
“Yes, the little boy is Jeffrey. He's four. And Melissa is two. And the big guy is Tim. He's my husband.”
“Oh, honey, they're absolutely beautiful. I'll bet they just love their pretty mommy.”
“I guess so.”
“And your husband. Wow! What a looker. Just like my sailor. If I were five years younger, honey, you'd have to watch out, 'cause I'd be going right after him. You got a man like that, you better hold on tight.”
I couldn't help but grin. “I will, Alice; I will. Tim is a great guy.”
“Well, whatever's wrong, I hope it gets better. You're way too sweet and you've got too beautiful of a family to be stuck in a place like this.”
I found out later that my conversation with Alice was the first time the woman had communicated with anyone in the hospital except in monosyllabic screams. Even when I was moved down the hall to another section with younger patients, I still made it a point to visit Alice every day. I helped her put on her makeup, and I brushed out her hair. She had fascinating stories: a living history of World War II, the trainloads of soldiers pulling into the station, the glamour of the fifties, her life with the “sailor boy” who'd passed away more than a decade ago.
I watched her slowly come back to life. And with her rebirth, a part of me came to life too. She'd called me sweet, and for once, I had actually been that way. We were the two misfits of the east wing, helping each other.
The flashing lights of the fire truck light up the suburban landscape. The smell of the diesel fumes makes me feel sick.
Daddy's enraged. He's taking charge, demanding to know what happened.
Grandma's looking down, her face through the clouds, a horrible scowl on her usually smiling face. She shakes her head and finger to the earth below and yells, “You are a horrible mother! Shame on you!”
Mommy's crying, her face buried in shame. Daddy and Grandma and the firemen are scolding her relentlessly. She's the center, the martyr of the scene.
And off in the distance stand two little boxes. They look like coffins, no, little wooden figures, immobile, stranded there, masklike, frozen in horror. No one pays any attention to them.
It's my older brother. And me.
The drill sergeant was standing over my bed. For once I was happy to see her. It was two in the morning, and I was sweat-drenched, still shaking and hyperventilating.
“Come on now, Rachel. You're awake now. It was just a dream. You need to calm down.”
“It was horrible!” I shrieked through my tears, “Horrible! The fire trucks, and Dad was yelling, and Mom was crying, and Grandma was looking down from the dead shaking her finger. And everyone just left us there. What happened? What did she do? Why were we lying there? What happened? What did she do to me?”
“I can't make sense of what you're talking about. It's a nightmare, Rachel, a nightmare. You can tell your doctor about it in the morning. You really need to get some rest.”
She let me go into the smoking lounge and have a cigarette. I tried to go back to sleep, but the same nightmare roused me again. I finally gave up and stayed awake, waiting for morning distractions to take over.
During this hospital visit I couldn't believe the amount of emotional pain I was in. I hadn't remembered that from the first two visits. This time I was saw the anguish in the faces of the other patients on the floor. This wasn't a retreat. Each person was going through his or her own form of personal hell, as was I. It was a hell so furious that it wouldn't leave me alone. I couldn't distract myself. The pain was so piercing I could feel it physically pressing upon my chest. I knew the isolation had been by design, and I knew it was working. I was feeling, intensely feeling, and wondering just how much of it I could take.
The little oak crib with the duckling painted on the side. My crib. Jeffrey's crib. Melissa's crib. Unmistakable.
Mommy's frantic. Mommy's mad. She's screaming. “Shut up! Quit crying!”
I'm hungry, very hungry. So hungry it hurts.
“I can't feed you. It's not time yet. Stop crying! Shut up!”
Angry eyes, reaching hands. I see them. I reach back.
I'm flying! I see the wall. I'm flying!
Everything goes black.
I was hyperventilating and screaming again. The sweat and horror had become a nightly ritual. I'd endured over a week of this. I was so exhausted I could barely stay awake, yet too horrified to sleep. When exhaustion overtook me and I closed my eyes, the nightmares invaded with fierce intensity, the subconscious mind seizing control. It was a hell on earth with no escape, not even through sleep. Numb by day, possessed by night, an unending sequence of nightmares, pummeling me with their fury. I speculated on what happened but could never come to any certain conclusions. What was symbolic, and what was a real memory? One thing was certain: if my parents had actually done any of these things, they would never, not even in their dying days, admit to it.
Most of the nurse
s, even those whom I'd aggravated before, were supportive through this. They could tell I was sincerely trying this time. In the grips of these nightmares and the anguished tears, the nurses would try their best to comfort and calm me, but only Dr. Padgett and I truly understood the intensity of our therapy and what these dreams might be saying.
It was 2 A.M. again. I hadn't fallen asleep, this time awash in guilt. I had been so caught up in my own little world that I had completely turned my back on my family. I had to see them. I had to see them now. I got up out of bed and went to the nurses' station.
The drill sergeant again. I approached her anyway.
“I need to go home.”
“It's two in the morning, Rachel. Please go back to bed,” she said flippantly, not bothering to look up from her Cosmopolitan.
“Didn't you hear me? I said, I need to go home.”
She glanced up, irritated. “I don't have release orders for you. And I'm not about to get them at this time of the morning.”
“Call Dr. Padgett then.”
“He's not going to release you at two in the morning. As a matter of fact, if you keep trying to pull stunts like this, he might not release you for a long time.”
Funny, the first two times I'd been in the ward such words would have been music to my ears. I'd feared release then, a return to the adult life of responsibility. I had wanted to remain a child of sorts, dependent forever. This time, however, the words were a warning. If I didn't straighten my act up and display some self-control to Dr. Padgett, he wouldn't release me. Now, I wanted to be released. I wasn't thinking as a child; I was thinking as a mother.
Within a week I was released and back home. There would be plenty more fantasies about being an inpatient. Many times I would long to be back in the safe shelter of the hospital. But my third hospital stay was destined to be my last. It had taken three trips, but finally I had opened myself up to the intensity of my emotions and had actually gained something in my stay—not weight, but insight and the drive to keep moving with the journey to get better.
“You're way too sweet and you've got too beautiful of a family to be stuck in a place like this.”
Maybe, just possibly, Alice had been right.
Chapter 8
I'd never placed much stock in the theory that dreams were anything but random entertainment. A jumbled mix of details and snippets of words, sights, and sounds. Meaningless. A horror film or fantasy of the mind that ended with the light of consciousness. Exit the theater, and it's over.
But the nightmares in the hospital didn't end with the credits rolling down the screen. They seized me long after I woke up, haunting me. I could not ignore these messages, and they would not stop until I faced them. My subconscious mind demanded to be heard.
Most of my therapy sessions during my hospital stay and its immediate aftermath were devoted to the feelings these dreams brought about. What was the message? Substance or symbolism? Truth or fiction? Or both?
What could the events have been? What did the flashing lights and my angry and hysterical family mean? Guilt? Retribution? For what? Why were the two little woodenlike figures apart from everyone? Was it abuse? Had things gotten so bad that someone summoned the fire department?
In a family that valued secrecy above all else, even within itself, the details of my early childhood were sketchy. My parents seldom spoke about that era of our family's life, although they spoke freely about later years. Was it just coincidence, or were they withholding dark secrets?
I only knew that it was a particularly stressful time for my parents. My father had been working eighty-hour weeks to get his business off the ground, and my arrival (the fifth child in the family) was unplanned. Worse, I was a girl.
I knew that during my infancy my mother was sick a lot. Psychosomatic illnesses always gripped her in times of great stress. I knew that she had always been a stay-at-home mom, but for some reason, even though all of my older siblings were already in school, they hired a nanny to take care of me for a few years. Why?
The EEGs and MRI and CT scans had all shown that I had some type of lesion and scar tissue on the left side of my brain. We never reached any conclusions. But now I found myself wondering why it was there. Was it an aberration? A fall on the playground? Or was it the legacy of abuse?
These were horrible questions. The possibility of abuse existed, but the only people who would know whether or not it had occurred were my parents. And I knew I could never be certain of their answers even if I directly confronted them. If the speculation were false, they would justifiably deny it. But if it were true, they would also deny it. There was no way I would ever know. Just pondering the reality of that dream was a serious accusation.
After discovering many real memories of my childhood, those I knew had occurred, I was beginning to feel furious toward my parents. The embittered rage of the betrayed. Yet I could not bring myself to condemn them based upon sketchy dreams without firm evidence, evidence I would never have.
Dr. Padgett did not say much at this time. He was cautious not to lead me either way—symbolic dream or memory. As much as I relied upon him now, even a few words could have tilted the balance. Instead he focused on the one thing he believed was real in the dream—the feeling memories. He had always been convinced that, in whatever form it may have taken, my early childhood had been far more abusive than I had imagined. Determining the specifics, he said, was not as important as coming to grips with fact that I was abused, and, above all, feeling the emotions that came with that revelation.
Eating came very hard. But Dr. Padgett did not bring it up, even though I had not gained back a single ounce. He strongly believed that if I could face these fears, eventually the need to be anorexic would dissipate.
For me it was no longer an issue of anorexic body distortion. It was the horror of these feelings, the recognition of a sickening reality so revolting that I lingered on the edge of vomiting.
One day I came perilously close to doing so right on Dr. Padgett's office floor. I was writhing, gagging, the bile rising in my throat as I battled the demons of these feeling memories. I shook and shuddered—every part of my body somehow in motion. I grabbed and twisted my hair and bit my fingers in wild kinetic motion. I was crazed, trying somehow to expel these feelings.
“Sit with them,” Dr. Padgett would say calmly but firmly. “Sit with the feelings. Don't act them out. Don't run away. Feel them. You can do it, Rachel. Sit still and put these feelings into words or tears. Share them with me. They're only feelings. No one can hurt you now. I'm right here with you.”
Words often eluded me, and I could only manage to howl in pain—the bloodcurdling cries of an infant that jolt the mother, wherever she is, to run to her child's aid. No magic words exist to soothe these cries, and Dr. Padgett didn't try.
Instead he sat.
He listened.
He was present and unconditionally accepting. From behind the blank screen I could see the pain in his eyes as he witnessed my suffering. It was a pain he did not try to hide and one I don't think he could have hidden even if he had wanted to. These feelings transcended words and analysis. They simply needed to be felt. And Dr. Padgett simply needed to be there with me, feeling the pain of a parent watching a child suffer and knowing that only time will make it pass.
We would wind up these sessions of raw, primal emotion—unvested with words because the feelings were so early in origin—by gently bringing me back to adulthood.
After one particularly intense session, he chose to unveil pieces of himself. He had two grown children, a boy and a girl. He would tell me stories of his own experiences with these children. His little girl would crawl away, scrambling across the floor giggling as he attempted to change her diaper, him laughing too. He would tiptoe into their bedrooms at night, stand next to the crib, peek in, and watch them in grateful wonder. He would hold his little girl through her tears, his own heart breaking, wishing her pain away, but careful not to let her see too much of this
pain because she needed him to be strong. He loved, cherished, and saw the beauty and the miracle in his daughter as much as he did in his son.
As I emerged from the memories, still in muffled tears, exhausted, he would tell me that this was the childhood I always deserved. While we could not rewrite the past, he could meet my need for unconditional love and acceptance. It could never be a substitute. It could not erase the past. But it could help me become whole in the present.
I listened and fantasized about what life would have been like with Dr. Padgett as my father. They were comforting thoughts, but painful as well. The only way I could conjure them up was to plunge deeply into the depths of vulnerability I felt as a young child. As much as he took pains to remind me that I could never be a child again, I fervently wished I could. The distinction between fantasy and reality was one I desperately didn't want to make.
Chapter 9
I was back home unpacking my suitcase from the hospital when I noticed a pink sheet of paper. It was a form with the hospital logo titled “Patient Treatment Plan.” Several signatures ran along the bottom, including those of Dr. Padgett, a nurse I assumed to be drill sergeant, and my own. I didn't quite recall signing it, but then again, I'd signed lots of paperwork during my stay. Before tossing it in the trash, I wondered, what had I signed?
It contained a lot of jargon about suicidal ideation. A stress scale, whatever that was, showed overwhelming anxiety. I recognized Dr. Padgett's handwriting in the section marked “physician.” He had printed the diagnosis, however. Anorexia nervosa. No surprise there.
But there was a second diagnosis this time. Borderline personality disorder.
Borderline personality disorder! What in the hell was that? I'd never in my life heard of that term. But it sounded sick, twisted, and demented—crazy. Dr. Padgett had mentioned a number of psychiatric terms in the course of therapy but had never mentioned this one. Yet here it was in his own handwriting. How could I have signed that paper without noticing?
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