I tell her that Ben’s play in the first weeks of my return has centered around being a baby and coming to terms with my absence and return. He seems even more ready to include me in his play. I tell Rachael about Ben’s “remember” statements. In the most recent session, it seems as though his reminder to me to come get him at the appointment time and his familiarity with the key lead up to the more central question: “ ’Member the mama bear?”
Rachael smiles and nods, “Yes, Ben is reminding you of many levels of his experience. He is saying, ‘Remember how we used to play together, remember how the mama bear left me, and remember how you also left me?’ That mama bear is always an important cue in his play, isn’t she?”
“Yes, and she also is so very real. He plays with a different intensity when she is around.” I pause. “But, you know, since I’ve come back, he also plays with a different intensity with me. I’m not sure I can articulate how, or why this should be so.”
Rachael’s face lights up, her dark eyes crinkle. She likes this. She comes to life thinking about Ben and the others with me. I wonder if she has missed me.
She puts her glasses on and looks over the pages of notes I have handed to her, reading and nodding. She slips her glasses off and they hang from a light chain on her sagging breasts.
“The mama bear is symbolic of Ben’s desertion and, of course, the cause of his rage.”
I nod. “Do you remember, last February, how Ben played out hunting her and killing her, and then taking her and her baby bears home?” I assume Rachael does not remember, and try to remind her gracefully of this again.
“Yes, now I do,” she says. “That mama bear is an internalized good and bad mama Ben took home.” Rachael looks at me sharply. “And now he has to approach her again. Because you’ve been away, she overlaps. with you too now. You have also left him.”
I look down at my hands, wishing I could tell her how much I have gone through to return, how much was at stake in making it right for Ben again. But she has her head back in my notes.
She looks up, slides her glasses to the tip of her nose and peers at me over them, a familiar gesture. She smiles, a real and radiant smile. “Look, Annie, you use Ben’s question as an opportunity to make a ‘corrective’ interpretation here. Do you know what that is?”
I nod.
“You are changing Ben’s internalized story of his abandonment when you say to him, ‘Yes, she did go away, but sometimes a mama bear comes back.’ Oh, yes, you have good instincts, Annie!” She looks at me intently and again asks, “Do you know what I mean?”
For the first time with Rachael, I am near tears. I feel them in the edges of my eyes. Sheer relief? Gratitude? Longing? I don’t know. I shake my head, and she goes on, slowly and gently.
“By ‘corrective’ I mean that you make an attempt to modify Ben’s internalized representation of ‘mama’ figures—from those who are callous in their desertion of him to someone who is sensitive to his pain and does return to him. Of course such a modification doesn’t happen instantaneously, and Ben will need to continue to work and rework these themes.”
I already know this definition, but the sound of her voice, its inflections, softened now in response to my near tears, is a familiar comfort to me.
“There is something that is new with Ben that I don’t yet understand,” I tell her, finding a new focus. “In this last session he directs me to feed him and he allows me to sit close, to hold him and stroke his bangs. There is a new intensity and directness in him.”
Rachael looks off into space. “Yes, you are right, Annie. Both the request and his ability to enjoy physical affection underscore his attachment to you. You are his therapist, and here you are also his mother, but you must always keep in mind that you are also not his mother.”
I want to tell Rachael my dream. I want to describe the old woman who stitched our shadows to our heels and told us he was my lost child. I want to tell her of our intense happiness. But the moment passes. “Why is it important to keep in mind that I am not his mother?” I ask.
“That you are his mother and also not his mother,” Rachael clarifies. “Because he is struggling with the matter of loss, he is now seeking physical nurturing, but at the end of the summer you will leave him. You are a surrogate, Annie, a mother but not really his mother.” She looks at me.
I nod, again wishing I could tell her my dream.
“Ben doesn’t just ask for nurturing from you either. He is testing you as a mother. Will you accept a new set of themes in his play, the toilet-poop-messy themes?” She laughs. “You were clever about interpreting that cigar!” I laugh too, remembering my thoughts about her during the session.
But I do not wish to be clever. I want to understand Ben and, if I can be, to be his mother, at least for now.
Rachael goes on. “What strikes me here is his ability to tease you. He takes ‘bait’ off the hook and returns it empty. He likes the way you tease him back, saying, ‘Oh, what a beautiful big fish, I think I’ll eat him up!’ ” She smiles to herself. “You know it is really remarkable how far he has come, and how quickly you have regained his trust.”
We set up a new schedule of appointments, twice weekly, as before. I realize, as I am leaving, that this is a parallel arrangement, that at the end of the summer, when I am not seeing Ben, I won’t be seeing Rachael either.
Walking down the stairs in the late sun, I suddenly feel very much alone with all the pieces of my experience. I don’t talk about Ben in any detail with Blumenfeld, and I don’t talk about Blumenfeld at all with Rachael or Mary Louise. Melanie is lost altogether and yet near. And they all live together, intimately, within me, alongside Emily and Erin and Telesporus and Galle and an unnamed little girl, and others, some of them angels.
I invented Rachael once, I remember. When was that? Was it last January? She was a grandmotherly crone who tucked in the strands of my braids, she was a fierce and feathered creature who flew through the night skies, she was a protector who settled me under her wing in a soft bed. If she was my supervisor still, and that certainly seemed the case, she was also really and fully this invented creature too. The limitations of who she could be in supervision couldn’t undo that.
I fervently wish I could tell her how playing with Ben changed and expanded my understanding of myself, and of her too.
69
In early June, Ben began to sneak away from his class and explore the Glenwood grounds until someone came to find him. The phrase “Ben is on the loose again,” passed on to me between my seeing other children and attending meetings, was becoming a common experience.
One memorable Friday, Ben was “on the loose” and no one came after him. In his frustration, he threw a stone at his classroom window and broke it, which certainly brought his teacher after him! By Monday morning he was tense and contrite. He came to school with his piggy bank full of pennies and presented it to Mrs. Engle to pay for the window.
I learned this from Mary Louise as she stood in the doorway of her office that morning, and she thoroughly enjoyed telling me this story:
Ben asks to go outside as soon as he enters the playroom. When I agree to this, he picks up Tea Bags and the baby bottle and goes back out the door, without hesitation. I follow.
Outside it is a warm day, the sky bright blue, angelica blue, the grass vibrant green and still a little damp from the rain the night before. Ben hands me Tea Bags and breaks into a run across a stretch of grass to a clump of bushes. There he stands and starts to pick raspberries, dropping them into his large bag. When I catch up with him, he turns to me and says, in a rather impatient tone,
“You pick all those berries high up, Annie.”
“You want to be the boss of me today, hmm?” I ask, amused.
“I’ll be the boss; that’s how it will be,” he says, but seeing me hesitate, adds, “No, I know what, Tea Bags can be the boss.”
I have Tea Bags on my hand already and I animate the puppet, imitating Ben’s bossy manner.
“Go pick some flowers for me, Ben,” the puppet says.
“Nope. Nobody will be the boss today,” Ben declares, ignoring Tea Bags and returning to his berry picking.
I sit down on the grass several feet away and wait for him to finish picking his berries. He adds several rocks and leaves to his bag, then comes over to me to show me. I peer into the large grocery bag and admire everything in it.
Ben decides he wants to go to “our hideout,” and I am quite willing to go with him.
He walks a pace ahead of me, silent and somewhat tense. When he reaches this familiar place, he kneels down on the grass, sits back on his heels, and briefly sucks on the baby bottle. He looks up at me.
“You go get wood for our fire,” he says. “I’ll wait here.”
I take note that he has returned to delivering imperatives, but I decide to follow them and see what he will play out.
I move away and begin to pick up small twigs and larger sticks too. Ben finds this irresistible and joins me. We return with two bundles of sticks. Again, he sits back with the baby bottle and sucks on it. Suddenly, he puts it down in the grass.
“You make the fire over there. A big fire,” he says. I have done this many times on camping trips, and as I begin to arrange the wood, Ben wants to see what I am doing. In no time, he is helping me.
“Now you light it with a match,” he directs.
I pretend to light the fire, even blowing on it to get it started.
“Now I will be a baby raccoon,” he says.
“You are the baby raccoon and I have found you?” I ask, knowing variations on this play.
He nods solemnly, hands me the baby bottle, and finds a place to lie down in the grass on his back.
“Feed me?” he asks, very tentatively.
I offer him the bottle and he sucks on it noisily, putting his hands up to hold it with me.
“You want to hold it by yourself?” I ask him.
He nods, and I let him feed himself, but stay close by, keeping eye contact. When he finishes sucking, he matter-of-factly puts the bottle aside in the grass. He gets up and crawls down by the “fire.” He looks back at me when I don’t follow him.
“Get me away from the fire. The baby will get burned,” he says.
I go to him quickly and physically pull him back, taking him by the hand and admonishing him, “No. That’s fire. You may not play so close to the fire.” He struggles a bit, but I do not let go. When he sits down in the grass where I have taken him, I let go of his hand. He sits for several minutes and then crawls away in another direction on all fours. A short distance away, he again turns and looks back at me.
“Stop me from running away,” he says. “I could get lost.”
I go to him and pull him back by the hand as he whines and pulls in the opposite direction. Again, when I release him, he pauses and waits. Then he runs off, this time to a mud puddle.
“Come get me out of this mud,” he calls to me. I run to him and pull him out of the mud, getting my own shoes a little muddy in the process. “No. You stay out of the mud. Wipe off your shoes on the grass,” I say sternly. He wipes his shoes. I hold fast to his little hand and do not release it as I add, “And now it is time to stop and go inside.”
Ben wants me to intervene and set limits in his play, but he doesn’t want to give up control to come inside. He tugs hard against me, telling me he has “something secret to show” me in the woods, that he has to “pick just those few leaves” and “climb that one little tree.” But each time I say, “No, it is time to go in,” and continue to pull him along. Finally, he falls silent and walks along beside me.
I hold his hand all the way to his classroom. Once there, he lets out a big sigh and says, “Bye, Annie,” and goes in.
I settle into the playroom with my coffee and yellow pad to make notes. I have only thirty minutes before I see my next child.
Ben is struggling here with impulses which typically get him into trouble. His play is an extension of his “on the loose” behavior, an almost daily attempt to get adults to set limits, as well as to undo his feelings of being lost or unwanted. When he escapes, he is typically missed, and then someone comes and finds him and brings him back; thus he is found and wanted. When this expected sequence did not happen, he broke his classroom window.
He begins by testing me with his old bossiness. Since this behavior is now rare with me, I comment on it, “You want to be the boss of me today, hmm?” Ben confirms and then disconfirms this, handing over the boss role to Tea Bags. When he discovers he doesn’t like to be bossed, he takes the role away from Tea Bags. Ben is seldom “oppositional” with me, but here he stands and picks berries for a long time, as if to defy Tea Bags’s (and my) request to do otherwise. I choose not to pick berries “high up” for him because I am curious about his response to my refusal. He simply ignores it, but it sets a stage for us, because my refusal is also a limit.
When he plays at the hideout place, giving me “bossy” directives, I follow them because I want to know what he will play out. Interestingly, he joins me in a collaborative effort to do the task he has just ordered me to do! In this context of our relationship, his bossy behavior is so uncharacteristic that he cannot maintain it. But he is certainly struggling with the issue of who controls whom. This is also clear in his ambivalence about my holding the bottle to feed him. He wants me to nurture him, but he wants to control it. For my part, I want him to feel in control of his own feeding, but I don’t want to break emotional contact as he does so.
Then he is ready to get down to the major work of the session. This child, who has been labeled as having “oppositional personality disorder,” plays out the possibility of giving over control of himself to me. He not only wants outside controls, he wants protection from fire and from getting lost, as well as from his “naughty” impulse to get muddy.
By telling me how I am to intervene, he controls his fear of giving up control. More important, perhaps, he asks me to play a new part with him, one he senses I am ready to play—to stop him, to set limits he wants set for himself. I push him one step further, a step I sense he is ready for. When he does not want to go inside, he is no longer playing an “as if” situation, and I am no longer following his “orders” to control him. My behavior parallels what he has just shown me he needs and wants from me, including to be allowed to test me and struggle against the imposed limit. His behavior parallels his play of trying to get away from me. He is able to accept my limit and come inside. This is a huge step for the little boy who flies into temper tantrums when he doesn’t get his way.
I pause in my notes, knowing I will go back and fill in the details of our dialogue later. I feel something is missing in these notes—I don’t let the full range of my experience into them. I run my yellow pencil under my nose and let the pause grow into a silence, a stillness in the day’s work.
I remember, just the other day, waiting outside a cafe for Sarah to meet me. A small boy in corduroy overalls was wandering about, scuffing up a few scattered leaves. He looked up suddenly and I saw —“lost,” that terrible feeling of everything toppling. He scanned the crowd, holding his face perfectly still, as boys learn to do so uncannily well at a young age, and then his whole face lit up. I followed his eyes and saw a woman’s face, her eyes alight too, looking at him and waving.
Ben. Of course you want to look up, to find that face, those shining eyes, in the midst of feeling so lost and abandoned. Beyond whatever issues of control Ben may need to work out with me now, I feel his need to be found—in a face that lights up to see him.
Telesporus found me in the hospital when I was lost like that, coming in to ask for lemonade in the winter, something he knew would catch my attention, I suppose. I smile to myself, remembering.
Ben is a little boy, human in his willfulness and his pain, but like Telesporus, he brings me more fully back to myself. Ben is giving me back my life.
A shiver runs down my spine as I realize this is not someth
ing I imagine. There is a sympathy outside ourselves that knows, carries, and protects a message sometimes long enough for it to be delivered successfully. I file my notes, brushing tears aside to go and meet my next child.
70
During these weeks in June I do not lie down on Blumenfeld’s couch. I need to sit up in a chair, feet firmly on the ground, to sort through the intensity of my memories and dreams, going over and over the same things. I feel the need to find Blumenfeld’s eyes, like pools of deep water, to drink deep from them.
The process of going over the same material reminds me of playing with Ben and the other children—going over their plays, overturning time, drying tears, changing characters and point of view, sorting through yet again, preserving, discarding, until finally what has been so relentlessly fascinating and puzzling in their playing becomes ordinary.
Sometimes I sit by myself with a photograph of my father.
My father’s ears are close to his head, like my sister’s, but his lips and chin are mine. I am about nine months old, and he is holding me on one knee and my sister on the other. This black-and-white photograph, mostly white, contains a secret. I see my tiny hand resting on his arm, and the long arm, covered with hair, holds me under a white dress.
I see him in this photograph the way someone sees the world after a catastrophe, with the kind of sight you develop after being trapped in circumstances and implicated in actions beyond your own design and control. I see with my “blue lenses,” as Blumenfeld would say—I see into essences.
There is a silence and sorrow in my father’s face that is indescribable. Some feeling surrounds him, comes up in me, that I can’t bear. Seeing this, seeing something I know already that I can’t let myself know, I look from my father’s face to my mother’s face.
A Shining Affliction Page 19