by Abby Norman
PRACTICALLY EVERY ADULT I INTRODUCED myself to once I learned my own name asked me if my parents were Mel Brooks fans, and had I seen Young Frankenstein with Gene Wilder? Well, of course I hadn’t! I was only five or six years old when these conversations started. Many have observed that my given name reminded them of the famous scene in the film where Marty Feldman’s Igor brings a brain to Wilder’s Dr. Frankenstein. Whose brain is it?
“Abby someone,” Feldman stutters.
“Abby who?” Wilder asks.
“Abby… normal.”
He had misread the label “Abnormal”—which was not exactly the kind of legacy I was hoping for. So it was, with the kind of fresh, manic self-awareness that only teenagers possess, that my first order of business, after I became legally emancipated from my parents at age sixteen, was to enter therapy. The way I saw it, if I wanted any kind of “normal” adulthood, it would behoove me to start working on my myriad childhood traumas while they were still fresh in my mind, and I was still emotionally malleable enough to overcome them.
For the most part, I was well adjusted in the ways that mattered: I got good grades, had a good reputation, and could hold down a job. I was surviving. I was showing up and doing what I needed to do by the preordained standards of my provincial hometown. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that I wasn’t exactly living. I didn’t know if therapy was going to be the solution, but it seemed like a pretty good place to start.
I didn’t think I was unsalvageable. I felt that I was very close to self-actualization and, with help, could probably achieve it. I wouldn’t say I had hope, but I did lay my faith in the value of hard work. I was willing to confront my demons. What I couldn’t have realized as a teenager, however, was that my demons weren’t done. I’d approached therapy as salvation, but it turned out to be more like the training for future exorcisms.
There was embarrassingly little thought put into the therapist I would see. One day after school, one of the guidance counselors—the one everyone called by her first name, which was Kim—drove me to the town pier. It was, I’m sure, a peaceful place from her perspective. To me, it was an oasis of memories. My grandmother lived up the street, and I kept looking in the rearview mirror, thinking she’d appear without warning.
The kindly counselor handed me a sheet of paper that had some names on it: therapists in the area who would take Medicaid. The list of names was longer than I would have expected, but I was nervous, so all the letters were blending together. My anxiety about running into my grandmother made my stomach churn. I just wanted to make a decision and leave.
“Would you prefer a female therapist, or would you be open to a man?” Kim asked. Oh, I’d be open to a man all right, I thought, thinking the first item on any therapist’s checklist for a girl my age would probably be the distinct absence of a boyfriend and the motivation to obtain one.
Finally, I handed the paper back to her and said, “Let’s start at the top and work our way down. Just call them and I’ll take the first one with an appointment. If I don’t like them, we’ll try the next one.”
She considered this a moment as she squinted at the paper. Then she smiled, reaching for her indestructible little flip-phone. “Jane Jones,” she said, tapping the paper with her finger, “I know of her. I bet you’ll like her.”
I scoffed, wondering if I’d royally goofed. The name Jane Jones sounded so innocuous that I wondered if it was fake. I thought to myself that there must be at least a million Jane Joneses in the world. That it would have been exactly the kind of name I’d use as an alias once I finally moved to New York City and started having dangerous liaisons with mysterious men in ritzy hotel rooms. Perhaps I had spent too much time in school plays, but as far as characters like shrinks went, I would have expected a slightly more interesting name. As it happened, one of a million Jane Joneses could see me the following week.
When I walked into Jane’s office in my nicest suit, a manila folder in hand containing all my legal papers, I only had one goal in mind: I wanted to grow up to be normal. I was expecting to sit down and have a very Adult conversation with her. Two Adults talking about Adult things with Adult words in their Adult clothes.
Her office was small, a desk tucked into a far corner, the majority of the room filled with things that a child psychologist would have: a doll’s house, books, other toys that were probably meant to act out domestic dramas with. On the wall across from where I lowered myself into a plush, pink wingback chair, there was a painting of a race car, which would ultimately become my preferred focal point.
By way of comparison, dancers have to “spot” their turns—which means finding a focal point that you can very quickly turn your head back to, letting the rest of your body follow. It doesn’t completely eliminate the inevitable dizziness, but it helps keep you oriented to the space. That painting was how I spotted in therapy. When the space would spin and cave in on itself, it was how I found my way back.
I looked unabashedly around the room. It was my nature to take in my surroundings quickly, a tendency I assume I developed as a survival instinct. I memorized every detail of her office in just a few minutes, and years later I can still see it: the way the sun came in through the sheer blinds next to me, the knitted cover of the rocking chair that neither of us ever sat in, the diplomas on the wall behind her desk, and the books on her shelves.
And, of course, Jane herself.
Somehow I’d expected her to be wearing a suit as well, but she was not. I guessed she was in her late forties. She was petite, and pretty in the way your best friend’s mom is pretty. There was a softness about her blonde, blue-eyed mien. Her voice had a balmy, melodic, almost hypnotic quality to it, which is something that I often wondered about. Did therapists get trained to sound that way, or do people who naturally sound like that just end up in social work?
This first meeting was the first of many in which I was overdressed for the occasion. It was summer, and Jane, while still managing to present an air of consummate professionalism, sat across from me in her office barefoot. I don’t remember exactly what she wore that first day, but over the years she’d rotate through a never-ending wardrobe of sundresses and jumpers, with the occasional pastel cardigan thrown in. She either wore no makeup at all, or wore so little that it was barely perceptible—which I found rather impressive. It had never really occurred to me before that cosmetics might be optional. I’d been begrudgingly putting my face on every day since I was around fourteen.
I noticed fairly quickly that she wasn’t wearing a wedding ring, which was something that, at that age, I always noticed about people, despite having no reason to interpret its presence or absence other than to indulge my own burgeoning curiosity about adulthood. My immediate assumption was that she was divorced. She was self-possessed in a way that made her seem unattached, like she wasn’t itching to be somewhere else. People who are intensely coupled always seem to me to have a certain energy; it’s as though they’re being pulled elsewhere—as if they are forever trying to get back to their other half.
I likewise assumed she was childless, as I picked up no maternal vibe from her whatsoever. It might sound strange, but this was actually a great relief to me. Women sometimes looked at me with a certain kind of feminine pity that made me squirm. But I’d only just met Jane; there was still time for her to give me Sad Mom Eyes.
Having reached the conclusion that she wasn’t a mother, I immediately decided I liked her. Never one to enter a situation unarmed, I had read up on what therapy would be like and, upon coming across the term transference, had balked at the idea that I would develop misplaced emotional attachment to some middle-aged woman I was paying to listen to me gripe. My understanding of human relationships (and the foundational principles of psychoanalytic theory, as it were) at age sixteen was founded in dysfunction and inexperience. Therefore every relationship, manufactured or not, I expected to be dysfunctional.
With that in mind, I was anxious to create some kind of emotionally unava
ilable life for Jane. It made her seem less threatening. The thing about therapy is that the entire relationship is built on having only half-truths about your therapist, while the therapist gets to know you intimately. I thought it sounded, in theory, like the strangest relationship two humans could undertake. I was going to be telling her things I’d never told anyone else. I was going to end up vulnerable, which was frightening. I created a sort of featureless life for her in my mind to both humanize and dehumanize her. I was all at once desperate for her to see me and to bear witness to what I had to tell her, and terrified that she would see something more than what I decided to give. I felt the need to make her less threatening, somehow, because I didn’t want to imagine her going home at night to tut about my Tragic Backstory while her husband rubbed her feet and brought her another glass of merlot.
Although my brain couldn’t help but spin its wheels to sum Jane up, I also felt like the early misconceptions I adopted about her were more about distancing myself from the real emotional work I knew would be necessary. By creating this life for her—which, I would find out later, couldn’t have been more wrong—I was attempting to make her safe. I was trying to fortify myself so that I wouldn’t just get up and run out the second it got hard. I wanted therapy to work. I wanted to change.
The first thing Jane did that day was lean over the low, glass-topped table that stood between us so that she could inspect my emancipation paperwork. She stared at it for what seemed like forever, and I cavalierly crossed my legs, looking down the bridge of my nose at her. The moment burned out slowly, like a cigarette, and I swallowed back the ache of melancholy as it bloomed in my throat.
“If you have any concerns about their validity, you can contact my attorney,” I announced blithely, stretching my fingers out long so that I could pretend to be entertained by my well-trimmed fingernails.
She shrugged, setting the paperwork down on the table and looking at me with a sort of benevolent amusement.
“I don’t question their validity at all,” she said evenly. “I only asked you to bring them out of curiosity.” She tipped her head slightly, settling back into her wingback chair as her gaze settled onto me. “I’ve never seen emancipation papers before.”
Over the first few months, I saw Jane weekly after school, dutifully regaling her with my tale of woe. Starting, I suppose, with all the pain that had come before me; that I had come from. Starting—with an all-too Freudian aplomb—with my mother.
SHE WAS ALWAYS MUM—NEVER MOM, never Mama, never Mommy. When my life began, she was living with my father in a trailer park near where he worked as a lineman for the power company. Thus, all my childhood memories of my father involve steel-toed boots, the scent of diesel fuel, and that particular brand of working-class masculinity that includes metal lockers adorned with swimsuit models and break rooms full of finicky soda machines.
Dad’s job was not a cushy one. Maine winters can be unforgiving. During The ice Storm of ’98, I came to understand just how hard my father worked. He was gone for months cleaning up the aftermath of that storm. The entire state became a desolate, frozen hellhole. There was no school. People had lost power, and many of them, in the now arctic northeast, had no running water. Dad and his crew set out to clear downed trees that groaned and snapped under sheets of solid ice, and to restore power to thousands of households along the East Coast. He and his crew climbed telephone poles in subzero temperatures, worked long hours that would probably be illegal by today’s standards, and slept in their trucks. They relied on the kindness of strangers for warm meals and encouragement.
When he finally came home, he seemed to have aged about ten years. He was in his early thirties at the time, but I’m pretty sure that storm took a few years off the lives of everyone who lived through it. I understood, then, what it meant to have a good work ethic. Dad was often called into work in the middle of the night during storms, worked endless hours of overtime doing backbreaking and, in fact, dangerous work. Yet I can count on one hand the number of times he called in sick—and when he did, he always really was sick. Or, in the later years, taking care of my mother when she was.
Dad never said any of this to me. He was, and remains, a man of few words. Most of my childhood memories of him are from the side—looking at him in profile as he watched television or stood in front of the bathroom mirror to shave. My fondest memories of him are riding in the front seat of his old white pickup listening to The Brian Setzer Orchestra, willing him to look up and see me.
Of my parents, it was my mother who saw me, although I spent the better part of my childhood wishing she couldn’t. From the moment I implanted into my mother’s womb, I became a statistically improbable event. Mum had been told that because she was at such low weight, she wouldn’t be able to get pregnant—yet I manifested. I was an unlikely child, sure, but did that mean I was inherently unlovable?
Mum, at barely twenty-four and extremely ill, was in no position to care for, let alone love, a baby. To add insult to injury, my beginning was not auspicious: the first thing I did as a human infant was shit all over the place. Poor Mum lay semiconscious from hemorrhaging while I exercised my newfound lung capacity and began a lifetime of questionable bowel function.
Apparently, I cried inconsolably for the first few months of my life, and eventually went on to become insufferable in other ways that grated on Mum’s already fragile nerves. She coped the only way she knew how: she vomited. A lot.
Anorexia and bulimia often occur together in a cringe-worthy symbiosis. Mum started out restricting her food when she was just a preteen. Her grandmother, who had been her only solace, had died, and it sent Mum into a massive clinical depression. One that, unfortunately, went unnoticed and untreated—in large part because her mother, my grandmother, had untreated mental illness as well.
Mum’s life was an unfortunate, but not uncommon, perfect storm: my grandmother was a poor, working, single mother with untreated mental illness and limited social support. It’s a tale as old as time. Rural, small-town neighborhoods are often enablers of abusive homes. The one Mum grew up in was no exception, and all her life she’s remained bitter that no one—no neighbor, no teacher, no family friend—ever stepped in to help her.
My mother’s struggles really solidified when she was in high school in the 1980s, about four years after she had begun restricting her food intake. At the time, bulimia was becoming somewhat fashionable. A few girls in her class had “tried it out,” and a few weeks of purging later, the scratchy throats, bloodshot eyes, and uncomfortable hunger were enough to turn them off from it.
Mum, however, had found it rather soothing; it provided the comfort she’d been seeking since her grandmother’s death. Purging gave her a sleepy, contented feeling that mitigated the anxiety and fear at home. It was never about weight: the dopamine-producing binge-and-purge sessions rendered her environment, and herself, tolerable, her life survivable.
When she married my father in her early twenties, she’d already had an eating disorder for nearly a decade. It wasn’t that he didn’t know about her bulimia, he just didn’t understand the significance of it. In his defense, in the late 1980s and early 1990s there were few people who did. This was thirty-some years ago, when these things weren’t discussed on daytime talk shows. There were no “pro-ana” websites or Dr. Phil specials. I don’t think my father really understood what she was doing. Her family knew, and had known, but they were ashamed of it, and disgusted. Getting her help wasn’t necessarily their first priority—keeping her “filthy habit” a secret was.
As the challenges of growing up gripped her psyche, her weight quickly began to plummet. When she was twenty-three years old, just before she got pregnant with me, she was five-foot-five and weighed less than one hundred pounds.
By the time my brother was born a year and a half later, from the beginning something wasn’t quite right. Then again, Mum had hardly been healthy during her pregnancy. She’d been running after a toddler—me—and hadn’t exactl
y recovered from her eating disorder. If anything, motherhood had made the bulimia more of a necessity than before.
As a little girl, especially after my brother was born, I spent a lot of time with Mum’s mother, who I called Nana. When I was very young my relationship with her was a good one: she took me to flea markets, we baked cookies, and puttered around in the garden. She lived a short walk from the bay, and I could play on the shore with the neighborhood kids until dark. I came to prefer being at her house over being at home for these reasons, though as I got older the dynamic began to shift. In the same way I would eventually come to understand that my mother’s treatment wasn’t based in hatred, I don’t think Nana’s mistreatment of her, and eventually of me as well, was about hate either. My mother was deeply afraid that she would repeat the same abusive patterns with her children that her mother had subjected her and her siblings to. Although my mother was beaten repeatedly throughout her childhood (and, on a few occasions, even after she had grown up, moved out, and gotten married), she never beat me or my brother.
In that way, if not others, she had broken the cycle. Though sadly, as I grew up, I’d come to realize that one reason she had so little to offer me was that she had never truly been able to escape the unhealthy dynamic she had with her own mother. Everything in her life, including herself—including me—was viewed through that warped lens.
Consequently, I learned the word “manipulation” fairly early in life, having existed in a disordered triangulation between my mother and grandmother. I figured out many years too late that I was a pawn in their dysfunctional relationship. It was, at times, almost like being in the middle of two bitterly divorced parents: whenever I was with one of them, they spent a lot of time and energy disparaging and undermining the other. It seemed I existed only to make them miserable—that is to say, I was used by both of them to make each other miserable.