Innocence Revisited

by Cathy Kezelman

  When my Daddy keeps doing the special thing lots to me it makes me feel different and it makes me feel different when I’m at home and when I’m at school. It makes me feel like I don’t belong anywhere and it makes me feel like I don’t belong with my friends.

  ‘Cathy, what’s wrong? Why don’t you ever want to play with us anymore?’

  I walk away from my friends when they ask me to play because I don’t want to play with them because I want to be by myself. I don’t feel like being with my friends and I don’t know why. My bits hurt all the time, but I can’t tell anyone about it and especially not Mummy because my Mummy will be angry with me. I don’t like my bits hurting. When I’m in my class at school I get into trouble for not paying attention from the teacher and for looking out the window when I should be looking at the blackboard. I don’t like getting into trouble because Cathy never gets into trouble; Cathy’s a good girl. Cathy’s always a good girl and she doesn’t like getting into trouble. But it’s no good because in the classroom I have to keep putting up my hand because I need to go to do wees all the time. Sometimes I don’t even make it to the toilet before I do wee in my pants, but when my pants get wet I don’t tell anyone because Cathy’s a good girl and only bad girls wet their pants.

  Cathy’s a good girl and she doesn’t want her mother to be angry.

  chapter 19

  The moment I took hold of the wheel I felt spacey. I tried to override the fuzziness by giving myself a talking to and proceeded to back out of the driveway regardless. When I clipped the branches of several unsuspecting camellias on the way out, I decided that my head was too fuzzy for me to be driving after all.

  I parked my car outside my next door neighbour’s place and sat quietly for a few minutes. I felt a little clearer in the head after my time out and negotiated my way up the road to Kate’s place. I was completely spaced out by the time I got there and considered sitting in the car for a while before going in, but decided against it. I didn’t want to be late for my session.

  With each step I took down that side drive I felt a little younger. By the time I stepped foot inside Kate’s waiting room I’d regressed years.

  I was a little girl of nine.

  I wriggled as I waited by myself in a big brown leather chair that was meant for grown-ups. I didn’t like waiting; especially alone. By the time the nice lady called Kate called me into her office, I was feeling sad and confused, because while I was waiting, I was thinking how my Daddy hurt me. I didn’t like thinking about how my Daddy hurt me because I love my Daddy and Daddies don’t hurt their princesses.

  I preferred to think about nice things; I didn’t like to think about yucky things. Sometimes when I thought about yucky things or got scared I broke into parts in my head. Then when I wanted to run away, some parts of me could run away while others stayed behind. When I wasn’t scared or thinking about yucky things anymore, the parts could join together and make a whole.

  I’m not me. I’m nine years old. I’m not the same. I’m not the same as before. My Daddy keeps doing this thing and it never goes away even when I want it to. I love my Daddy and I have to do everything my Daddy wants me to do but I wish I didn’t because my Daddy hurts me and I don’t know why. Everything feels different. My room feels different; it doesn’t feel like the same room as before. I want my old room back, the room where I can talk to my toys and where my Daddy doesn’t hurt me. I want a room where I can feel happy and where I can play and have nice dreams and be a princess and whatever I want to be.

  I want to know what is wrong with my Daddy. My Daddy sits in his chair all day and stares. And he doesn’t look at me or talk to me.

  My Daddy cries a lot. When my Daddy cries I don’t know what to do. Daddies aren’t supposed to cry. I hurt my dolly and look at her with her bits missing. My dolly doesn’t cry and I hate her. I hurt her more because I want her to cry. Teddy tells me that I shouldn’t hurt my dolly because she’s my friend. I feel bad for hurting dolly and give dolly a cuddle. I hate her because she still isn’t crying. Teddy doesn’t know anything so I hate him too. I throw him away and I cry because Teddy is my best friend and I don’t want to be mean to him. I pick Teddy up and say I’m sorry and I give Teddy a really big squeeze. And I say sorry to dolly too and I hug her because dolly’s my second best friend.

  Every time my Daddy comes to my bedroom at night he hurts me.

  I don’t like the yucky things my Daddy’s doing; I don’t want my Daddy to be yucky. I don’t want my Daddy to be bad so in my mind, I chop off his head. After that, when my Daddy comes he doesn’t have a head and so he isn’t my Daddy. My Daddy doesn’t come to my room to hurt me anymore because the man who comes isn’t my Daddy anymore.

  One night when the man without the head is in my room and getting ready to do the bad things that he does to me, my door is a little bit open; I think I see Simey standing in my doorway. I can’t see him clearly because my head has gone fuzzy.

  ‘You won’t say anything to Mummy, will you boy?’ My Daddy’s voice comes out of the mouth of the man without the head who is on top of me.

  ‘No Dad’.

  And the boy in striped pyjamas who sounds like Simey, and is Simey, walks away. The man without the head who is my Daddy keeps doing the yucky things to the little girl under him who is me.

  A couple of months later my mother sees us.

  ‘You should both be ashamed of yourselves. Cyril, go back to bed this instant.’

  The man without a head gets off the little girl who is me, puts his pants back on and leaves my bedroom.

  I felt as though my head was splitting in two. Sometimes when I felt it split, one half would feel too fat to ever be able to fit back inside my head, or half of my head would feel as though it was going to explode while the other half would regress and get smaller and smaller until it shrank so much that nothing was left. When that happened, half of my head would feel vacuous. I would feel empty.

  My Daddy doesn’t ever come back at night again and I miss him. He goes back to sitting in his chair and he stays there forever. Sometimes I can’t tell if my Daddy is awake or asleep because his head is always dropped to one side and his eyes are always closed. And he dribbles out of the corner of his mouth like a baby except that he isn’t a baby. The dribble sits in the hair on his chin when he doesn’t shave and when there’s lots of dribble it falls onto his dressing gown. My Daddy’s dressing gown smells bad. I don’t like my Daddy’s dressing gown.

  Sometimes I give my Daddy a push to see if he’s dead and when he groans, I know that he’s not dead. I wish he’d talk to me but he doesn’t, only when I talk to him and only sometimes even then. He never talks to me just because he wants to. My mother gets angry at my Daddy and she screams at him like he’s a naughty child at school. I don’t like when my mother screams and I especially don’t like when she screams at my Daddy.

  Daddy goes to work some days. When he goes to work I know that my Daddy isn’t dead. When Daddy comes back from work he goes straight to his chair and he stays sitting in his chair looking, but not really looking. I know he’s not really looking because when I stand in front of him he doesn’t see me. Nor does he move. That’s when I get worried about him being dead again.

  Kate was talking to me, but not all of my parts were sitting in the chair listening. Some parts were flying around Kate, dive-bombing her without her realising. They weren’t trying to hurt Kate; they wouldn’t ever do that. They were just having fun like little kids do.

  The magic carpet didn’t always arrive in time for when the parts wanted it to. If the magic carpet didn’t come I would have to tell Kate about the yucky things that my Daddy did. The parts didn’t like talking about those things and when the talking got too much, freaky things happened to big Cathy’s head. She would have all sorts of weird sensations, like bits of brain leaving from inside her skull. Sometimes she’d even experience a trap door opening in the back of her head and parts of her brain stepping out to go flying off around the room.r />
  My head is clever because I don’t always want to run away, sometimes I want to have fun. All of the parts are excited. The magic carpet from inside my head zooms in, swoops down and takes us parts for a ride around Kate’s room. The parts think the magic carpet is really cool but they can’t all get on at once; they have to take turns. Sometimes they aren’t good at taking turns; little kids don’t like waiting much. They push each other because they all want to be first but the magic carpet is fair because everyone always gets a go.

  All of the parts enjoy the magic carpet rides because they feel like they are in a fairy tale. They aren’t really in a fairy tale because the magic carpet is not make-believe. It is a real magic carpet, a real carpet which comes from the inside of my head and it whizzes around the room and does flying tricks like figure eights and rollie-pollies. The parts have to hold on tight so they don’t fall off and hurt themselves.

  chapter 20

  For the first fifty minutes of my session I’d been right out of it, deeply dissociated and trapped in an ill-defined, all-encompassing terror. Time was almost up and I still had no idea what was happening to me.

  ‘Cathy, come on now, it’s almost time. You have to start coming out of it.’

  I was slumped in my chair; the water had been poured and was waiting in a plastic cup next to me. I hated sessions like this. Ones where my time was up when I felt no better at the end of the session, than when I had arrived.

  Unable to resolve any of my major concerns I focused on my cup of water. Okay here we go. Come on, come on. You can do it, yes you can! Stretch that arm out. Yes, well done. Okay, okay you found the cup. Now pick it up. Go on! Yes, you have the cup; it’s in your hand. Cup heading to mouth. Drink the water down.

  I was really proud of myself. Not only had I managed to locate the cup and pick it up but I’d finished all of the water inside it and that was quite a feat for a nine-year-old girl!

  ‘Cathy, CATHY! Would you like more water?’

  Frightened, I nodded.

  ‘T…thank you!’ I mouthed politely, just as my mother had taught me.

  I gulped the second cup of water down. I felt like a good little girl! But even after drinking the second cup I didn’t feel any more ready to leave than I had, ten, twenty or fifty minutes earlier.

  ‘Cathy! Come on now. GET UP PLEASE! CATHY! CATHY!’

  ‘Hey don’t shout at me! I’m just a little girl!’ I thought to myself.

  I hated when Kate shouted at me. Not that it was real shouting. Big Cathy knew that Kate was just being firm, but her raised voice sounded like shouting to me and it made Kate sound angry. She wasn’t really angry; she was just under the pressure of time. She had to keep to her appointment times so she wouldn’t run behind schedule and keep other patients waiting.

  I hated Kate shouting.

  ‘Cathy, come on now. It’s time!’ Kate repeated in a softer voice. She must have realised that raising her voice wasn’t having the desired effect.

  I heard Kate get up out of her chair and walk in my direction. She put her hand on my knee; I felt her shaking it.

  ‘Cathy, Cathy come on now! Come on get up, will you. And jump, jump up and down and wave your arms around. Come on!’

  Kate was shaking me by the shoulder.

  ‘Come on, Cathy!’ Kate was speaking loudly, but at least she wasn’t shouting. She took me by the hands and pulled me to my feet. My eyes were shut and I couldn’t open them because I didn’t have any idea where my eyelids were. Kate held me steady.

  ‘Cathy! It’s TIME!’

  ‘Okay, okay. There’s no need to shout!’ I thought again.

  I tried to do what Kate asked; I didn’t want Kate to be angry but I couldn’t because I still felt disembodied. I was a little girl without a body. I waved my arms around as much as I could, and I tried to jump up and down as I’d been told to, but in my state, I wasn’t strong enough to jump around and keep my balance at the same time. I flopped back into the chair and hit my head against the wall as I landed. I came to, momentarily, before feeling pulled further and further back inside my head. I was nine and I didn’t have a body. That meant that I virtually lost contact with Kate’s world altogether, but I was there inside my own head.

  Inside my own head I was frenzied, because on the inside, I was searching for myself. I was searching for all of the parts of me that I needed to make me whole because I needed to be whole to be able to get back out of the chair and leave.

  ‘Cathy, Cathy! Come on now, it’s time! Come on. Come out of it now!’

  I can’t explain how I eventually managed to exit Kate’s office that day, or at the end of the sessions which followed. Since early childhood I had honed the skills required to exist across several states of consciousness. Those skills were accompanied by the mechanisms to flip back and forth between those different states, before finally plucking myself back out to my space in the present.

  On this occasion my skills were found wanting. Losing myself in my entirety left me ungrounded and frantic. I was lost. Not only had I disappeared, but all of my parts had disappeared too, and that had never happened to me before. At one point I couldn’t find any of my parts and that was utterly terrifying.

  Not only did this feeling make it virtually impossible for me to leave my session, but it consumed me long after the session ended. It stayed with me the next day and the next. It didn’t lessen after that and it didn’t wax and wane as these states typically did. I was left locked inside a terrifying space of nothingness, a space in which I searched for familiar aspects of myself, but found none. And with each search I felt more bereft. I could only conclude that no parts of me remained.

  ‘Excuse me, excuse me. Have you seen any part of me anywhere? Hello, hello! Do you know where I’ve gone?’ I asked repeatedly inside my head. But no answers came. I had been delivered an existential blow and ruminated over my predicament for hours. I couldn’t draw any conclusion.

  ‘Given that I don’t exist’, my head reasoned, ‘I mustn’t exist. If I am nothing…’

  I searched all over for parts of myself, for something to connect with, something to hold on to, with which to form a core, an anchor, any anchor with which to ground myself.

  I was scared silly and that state of terror lasted for weeks. Therapy sessions came and went as weekly life passed me by. No ‘self’ returned.

  Without a self you have nothing. You are no one. And without a self you can’t connect with anyone around you. Despite my best efforts I couldn’t connect with my husband or children. When I was with them, I could see and hear them, but I couldn’t internalise any part of the interchanges I had with them. I felt too far removed. Any relationship requires, at minimum, two people engaging with one another. When any one of the two people in a relationship doesn’t exist, or as in my case feels as if they don’t exist, the relationship flounders. With my sense of self gone and the possibility of maintaining my relationships vanishing along with it, I was left feeling bereft and alone. And before long

  On this occasion, the danger arose differently. Despite having lost any real awareness of my self, I developed a sense that one of my parts wanted to destroy me. Convinced that my life was under threat from the inside, I became hyper-vigilant, and kept on guard against myself. It was exhausting. I could never take a break; I was always under threat! I was already spent from searching for myself and now, it was too dangerous to rest. How could I fall asleep knowing that someone inside me was trying to kill me? I couldn’t take the risk.

  I eventually reached a point at which I could not cope any longer; I had no mental energy left. I concluded that I needed to be locked up in a place where someone else would keep guard. I definitely needed protection because the part plotting my demise had been fantasising about a range of ways of finishing me off. It would have to be in a place in which no part of me had access to anything sharp or pointy, broken or smashed, poisonous or intoxicating, high up, or underground or submerged. If left to my own devices, it would only
be a matter of time before the scheming part had its way and finished me off.

  I told Kate about my self-destructive part and explained that I didn’t feel safe. I told her that one of my parts was trying to kill me and that I didn’t feel capable of protecting myself. I begged her to help me. I was desperate!

  Kate listened and understood, and continued to provide more support than her job demanded. With frequent face-to-face sessions and phone calls, she contained my angst as effectively as any one person could. But in my heightened state of desperation, nothing she did felt adequate. The reality was that Kate could not do anything more for me; short of never leaving my side.

  Together we considered all of the options. We discussed hospital admission and seriously considered it. One part of me yearned to be hospitalised and cared for, even if it meant being confined to a ward. I fantasised about lying in bed and having someone else keep me safe. Going to hospital would have been a relief; I would be able to let my guard down. Someone else could do the worrying. But this option had a major downside; Kate wouldn’t be able to look after me in hospital. In hospital I would have to see whichever doctor or therapist the hospital appointed, and in my desperate state, I would have struggled to trust anyone new, even just a little.