The mothers who do this commonly have a history of traumatic abuse or neglect suffered in their early life.
I lift my head from my arms. A line of drool pools from my bottom lip down to the desk.
Since the trauma or neglect was inflicted by her primary caretakers, the perpetrator gets a latent parental need fulfilled from interacting with doctors, who are universally recognized caretakers and authority figures.
I sit up.
The doctor rarely finds anything actually wrong with the child, but the mother goes from doctor to doctor, pursuing tests and surgeries. Sometimes the mother fabricates the symptoms, sometimes she causes them. Sometimes the child is maimed, sometimes the child becomes sick from a combination of drugs and surgeries. Sometimes the child dies.
This form of child abuse is called Munchausen by proxy, or MBP.
I TRY TO SHAKE THE HAZE from my head. Shards of glass swarm in from all sides. The sound is deafening as they rush and fuse together. Then silence. The cracked mirror I'm staring in reflects back a sick, lost face, bottom lip gaped open, breath strained.
I jettison my chair and run out of the room. My legs buckle in the hallway and I drag myself into the brick stairwell.
My body, sliced, diced, and probed away from me for nothing.
I dig my fingers into the bricks and pull myself up until I'm leaning against the wall and quietly hitting my head.
They just did the tests, never questioned any of it.
I have all the missing parts to the real truth.
It was her all along.
The pieces are flying through me, trying to slide into their rightful places so I can put it together. I do not want to know.
It was my sacrifice to keep her alive.
I do not want to know.
So I could stay alive.
I do not want to.
Slam.
Know.
If she died, I died.
I do not want to.
CRACK.
Know.
I MAKE AN EMERGENCY APPOINTMENT to see Myrna at the Family Center. She's been my sliding-scale therapist for the last two months while I try to untangle from Ray. I pull the five-dollar fee from my stash, get in the car, and numbly drive to her. I sit in the waiting room, totally blank. I am waiting to come undone. I am barely holding my edges together, keeping myself from slipping away even further.
I sit on her couch and topple onto my side, panting, hysterical. I manage to get out what happened in class, what I learned happened to me. How it must be true because everything happened, everything happened: my mother, my heart catheterization, nobody finding anything wrong, my emergency room poisonings with Grandma Madge, my nose operation with my face in a cast, the tube they shoved in my urethra, and oh, my God, oh, my God, I am just now factoring in what I blurted out to the nurse when I was thirteen and how they sedated the truth away.
Myrna sits calmly, trying to make out the broken details that she's never heard before because we never got past Ray. I think she thinks I'm crazy. She has no comfort to offer, just coolness and detachment. She noisily uncrinkles another cough drop and pops it in her mouth.
Then she folds her fingers over her knee.
“(Suck) You know, Julie, when some of my clients are upset (sluurrp), I suggest they go home and take a nice looonng bath to relax. Have you ever tried to take a warm bath or perhaps to even (crunch) journal?”
You could wake up a Kafka roach and Myrna would still be sucking on her cough drops and telling you to go home and take a bath.
ISPEND THE NEXT TWO DAYS pacing my apartment, pacing the streets in the rain at four A.M., popping Sominex and trying to sleep, even if just for twenty minutes. I go to the grocery store, but my mind has me back in the hospital. People are crowding me, touching me, fingering out for me.
I shrink my shoulders together and walk as thinly as I can. I keep my legs and limbs close to my body. I cannot risk a wrist or an ankle being caught as I walk past. They are watching me shuffle down the aisles of frozen foods, they peer out from behind walls of cocktail onions and baby gherkins. They eyeball me at the checkout line, hold me at bay with their carts, looking me up and down. I can hear their thoughts. They are deciding whether I, with my sickliness and inability to sustain a healthy interest in sports, am worthy of even being alive.
Ray is gone and I don't remember a thing from my psych class one week ago. I link my agitated state to getting a shutoff notice for the electricity in the mail. My hospital flashbacks fall through the cracks into my buried unconscious.
When I collapse onto the floor of my little apartment two nights later, my hands fly before me and curl into crow's feet. The faster I breathe, the more they kink. They curl and curl until they are frozen and knotty, deformed and clawing, right before my face.
I WAKE UP IN A FREE SHELTER for battered and mentally ill women. When I am coherent enough to talk, I try to tell them what happened, how I wasn't sick, how she made it all up. My stout corn-fed nurse goes pat, pat, “Oh, now, that's all right, honey. You don't try to talk.”
My little brother Danny is the person they call. Sitting on my bed, he cries at the sight of me. I try to talk to him, to get a witness, so I know I'm not crazy.
“Danny, do you remember Mom taking you to get asthma treatments?”
Danny shakes his head no.
“Don't you remember the guns? Danny, you put one up to Dad's head that time after the house burned down, when we were all cooped up in the little pull-behind camper?”
“I don't remember, Sis.”
“What about when I was in the hospital for my heart, getting that surgery?”
Danny wipes his eyes and his forehead constricts into thick folds of bottled-up emotion, just like my father's. He squeezes his eyes tight and tries to steady his quivering lip. “Sis,” his voice cracks, “I can't really remember anything from when I was little.” His fists are balled up and stuck on his thighs. “Nothing from before I was about fifteen.”
And that's how old Danny was when he finally got away from Mom and went to live with Dad.
THE INDIAN PSYCHOLOGIST assigned to me thought I was nuts, too.
“Okay. Now vat is this thing you calling mooonch-hazen prozy? I never heard of that.” She eyes me suspiciously from under her bushy brows, looking to catch a glint of my particular delusion so she can prescribe the right psychotropic.
“Can you explain to me one more time?”
I CHECKED MYSELF OUT OF THE SHELTER four days later and moved into a house of mirrors.
MY HOUSE OF MIRRORS is a ramshackle farmhouse that sits just a mile from the hospital where I was operated on. The rent is next to nothing. There's no heat upstairs. Even though I live in the city, the house is isolated, surrounded by woods, sitting on the dead end of a street, its foundation sinking slowly into the dense ravine below.
I stand in the largest room of the house, the walls hung with frameless mirrors salvaged from a dance studio. No furniture. Wood floors. Just me and the mirrors. This is where I live now. There is no one who can help me.
I look in the largest mirror. She's a natural beauty. I'm a sickened beauty. I'm beautiful, but with an inch-thick layer of sick covering me. It's in the dark slashes under my eyes, it's in the dull skin of my face, the flakes peeling from my lips, the cloudy glaze over my pupils, my heavy labored breath, the dampened feel that clings to me.
I could get rid of that layer, I could purge it out and polish myself to beautiful, if I could just stop making myself sick. But I can't stop. I can't stop. It's in my cells.
It's in my blood. It's in my survival instinct that was switched at birth. I've been hardwired for death, or if not death direct, then the absence of a thrust toward health.
Just to cover the basics, I take a part-time job as a receptionist, stuffing my long body under the cramped appointment desk of a natural medical clinic. I got the job thinking I could get discounted health services— nutritional counseling, detox treatments, vitamin supplements. In
stead I work full days making continuous appointments for a steady stream of regular clients who seem to delight in having something wrong with them. One woman excitedly pulls a jar out of her purse with a long roundworm coiled in the bottom of it, showing everyone what the clinic has done for her. The worst part is making appointments for the mothers who stand at the desk and talk to anyone who'll listen about all the symptoms their kid has. I look behind the mother, straight into the faint eyes of the child, and I think we must be like the foster kids, able to talk without words.
“Sorry,” I lie, “we don't have a free appointment for—well—it looks like several weeks.” I schedule them on a day I'm off and sometimes forget to write their names in the appointment book, knowing the medical center will be too swamped to see them if they're not in a scheduled slot.
AS LONG AS I'M BETWEEN home and the clinic I do all right. But out in the real world, I feel like prey. I slink around and can feel people looking at me. I feel their eyes boring into me. I feel what they're thinking: Watch her, she could go off anytime.
But within the walls of my farmhouse, I climb out of the protective shell, my arms slowly rise like a phoenix, and I dance, wail, fly around the room and then collapse, crying, in front of my mirrors. In the winter light that streams through the large windows, I start to see in the mirror what it is I really look like, instead of what I was trained from the womb to see. I do not write about it. I do not talk about it. I do not know what I am doing. But just like a baby bird, I am blinking once-sealed eyes and unfolding damp wings. I cannot articulate the past. A part of me knows it's there, lurking, just behind what I can acknowledge, but it is not within sight. And I am keeping it that way.
I STILL TALK TO MY MOTHER, because I need to. I am a half-formed larva without her. She lives in Montana now, on the reservation, in a trailer with her American Indian lover. I speak to her as if nothing has happened, as if everything is fine. I still try to extract love from her. I still take her suicide calls in the middle of the night and try to talk her out of the gun or the overdose from two thousand miles away. I am the only one who can save her. I could not live with myself if my mother died because I refused to do what she trained me so well for.
Some weeks she calls me soft, ready to open. She says, “Sis, it ties me up in knots, I feel like you got a lot to get out—about the past…”I start to weep, I've got to tell her I know what she did. “… You're never going to justify what happened in the past…” And why. And then I need to hear her cry for me… “I don't understand it.” The words are dammed at the top of my throat, where they've always been since I sat on the examining room table, clucking my protests to Mom's made-up symptoms. The words dam at the top of my throat, with twenty years of river raging behind them, roaring, ready to push, rush, out into her, along with a torrent of tears. “I don't know why he does the things he does. I just forgave him.” I swallow. “A person tries. I tried. To keep the marriage together, to give you kids a good life.” The moment is gone. “Here I am, in my fifties, trying to make ends meet. You know when I was back there last, they didn't buy me one meal, not one meal when I was out there. I mean it cost me a lot, I got two kids in college, but you know I'll do that, take it all on myself.”
Her threads to reality are frayed bare. And her two kids in college are funded by their own sweat and blood.
SPRING THAWS THE FARMHOUSE, and in front of the mirrors, my breasts begin to form. They get white, tigerlike stretch marks on their sides from a burst of growth. My hipbones expand like a time-lapse flower in bloom. I grow like a girl in puberty. The pod I was stuffed into has perforated breaks in the skin, and I, ever so painfully, am unlacing myself from its tight shell. I use my fingertips to tug and pull the laces loose, unfurling myself from the cocoon I've been kept in, folding and falling, jutting the angles of crooked, atrophied limbs out of its hold.
I touch my face in the mirror, study it for hours. I need to see what my face says. What my expressions look like to others, what my eyes do, whether my face twitches, like hers.
Away from the mirror, I do not register that I am pretty. I cannot comprehend I have an attractive body. Or that it holds in its untapped wisdom the potential to heal itself. My instincts are wound tightly into a ball of fishing line, so tangled and knotted that it will take months of daily, delicate picking to see loops in the line and pull them free.
I curl my body up in front of the mirror; skin and bones, the ribs in my back casting curved shadows over my thin skin. I study my tiny, blue veins, fascinated by the light pulse that pushes blood through on its own; an affirmation that I am living. I do not have to pump the blood myself; it is my heart that keeps me alive.
I look at every part of myself through the mirror, wanting to see what anyone outside my skin would see. My hands, they look so beautiful, I turn them around and around in the mirror, mesmerized. I look at my face again, soft and childlike, my body, lean and lithe. I step away from the mirror but nothing comes with me. The moment I lose contact with my reflection, I lose touch with what I see there.
My mind is imprinted with the image of a sickly reverberation of what I felt like inside and believed to be true of myself for all of my twenty-six years: that I am some bizarre, frail creature, destined to die early. My mind's eye sees me as stooped and wasted, with dark greasy hair, a slaughterhouse horse's long, sunken face, drooping bottom lip, absent eyes. Since that is what I believe, that is how I feel. Since that is how I feel, that is how I act. And since that is how I act, that is how the world treats me.
So I step back in the mirror and there she is again, that girl, that strange girl that everyone else sees. I reach my fingers out to feel her face. My eyes cannot get over it. They peer at her suspiciously. Surely this is not me staring back? Truth in my mind and truth in the mirror are complete opposites. And I am split down the middle, straddling the chasm between two worlds, flitting back and forth between the world I know and the one that exists in the glass. It will take three years of pacing between the two before I can finally bring them together.
LIFE IN THIS RAW, NEW STATE is slow and infantile. My developmental levels are stunted; I take the baby steps of a toddler when I live as a walking, talking woman.
And I still can't eat.
When I look in the fridge, I see groceries, but I don't see food. My stomach growls; but there is no appetite.
Appetite and hunger are different. Appetite is the mental prompting that kicks the auto-response into drive so you actually reach out, take the food, put it in your mouth, chew, and swallow. I learned this in my first psychology course. Eating isn't just a physical need; it starts in the mind, generating hunger, which then should trigger the body to ingest food. I have no sparks between these plugs.
Unless I'm touched. Touch me and I'll eat anything for you. Stroke my back, hold me like a baby, grab and maul my body, and I turn ravenous.
I remember from class that when babies are touched, the hypothalamus in their brain is activated and sends out a message to feed. When babies aren't touched, the hypothalamus does not send the signal to eat and they starve. Would it be any different for an adult who was stunted developmentally? If a person is frozen at the level of an infant, why would it be different?
I learn to keep only three to five things in the fridge at any one time so that when I open it, I'm not overwhelmed. So that when I look, I see a meal to eat, not clusters of jars and bottles and bags. I cannot have boxes of cereal sitting cockeyed on top of the fridge, or bread things piled on the countertop, or a drawer full of cutlery and junk. If one thing is too far left or right, I can lose the whole day. Like a three-year-old, I need clean, conceptualized spaces with only one or two choices to select from. I've single-handedly created my own private Teletubbies world.
AND I HAD TO BE ALONE because anyone that came near me invaded me. Only in the absence of people could I boil myself down to a clear broth and add things a little at a time.
Occasionally I would venture out into the world with someon
e else as my escort, but it guaranteed nothing. Each random moment of interaction held danger.
I am in a bar with a new boyfriend, and growing jittery over the heaving crowd as the place starts to fill up. I hug the edges of the room, trying to stay untouched. My boyfriend catches my attention and waves me over. I follow, thinking he's got an island of safety for me to run to, but as I walk through the bar, the crowd closes in behind me. Boys in flannels are pressing against me, pushing in. Boys are clinking beer bottles over my head and laughing with sneaky, wily mouths. I flail and hit out wildly, trying to keep their breath from touching me, my hair slung over my face. My boyfriend is laughing. Laughing at how ridiculous I look; like I'm swatting at an imaginary swarm of bees. Every time I fly close to another's electrical line, I get a wing caught in the wire.
I HAVE LIVED MY LIFE IN A BUBBLE. First it was her bubble. Then it was of my own making. And now, freshly stripped of the delusions that had protectively swathed me for years, I was embryonic—too raw to interface directly with the world. People aren't just influential to me; a thin layer of them fuses onto me like hot cling wrap. Their words become my words, their voice inflections merge seamlessly into my own, their opinions form a transparency over the faint etchings of my own developing ones.
I look back through stacks of photographs of me after the fire. In each picture, I hold the facial tics and expressions of whoever I am involved with at the time. My face adopts the characteristics of the other, their fine lines, the exact way the jaw muscles freeze or flex within their smile. My face morphs to take on their identity.
Then I look at a baby picture of myself at six months old, lying on my belly, a natural smile lighting up my face. My own natural smile, unbroken, intact. This is the only picture I have of my own face, not someone else's. I wonder if I'm destined to drag around the past like a discarded placenta? I wonder how far do I boil back in order to reclaim my self? I ask how many pieces did I lose along the way? Where do I find them? Can I put them back? How many times do you glue a broken vase before you toss it?
Sickened: The True Story of a Lost Childhood Page 16