"There were times when we'd try to repair." Karen and I went through a self-imposed separation for three months. During that time I was sitting in the living room at 1201 and said, "I've been gone." Ed was encouraged to hear me say that, that I realized that. We talked at the kitchen table about maybe trying to repair, to get together again, but he said, "I'm thinking of my woman in Washington, her breasts that fit into champagne glasses." I know it sounds insane, and I've never forgiven myself for it, if that's any comfort to you girls (if you're reading this), but I couldn't stand it that he'd said that, that that was what he was thinking, that I could feel the excitement in him. I suppose he was punishing me; I can't blame him for that. But, worse, he wasn't even punishing me, he was just rejecting my body, unable to give up his 'woman in Washington who had breasts that fit into champagne glasses.' I couldn't get over the narcissistic injury, it sent me away from him again, inside. I'd always been self conscious about having small breasts and even considered breast enhancement surgery at one point, but I didn't make it past the interview with the surgeon because it included taking pictures of my current breasts and the whole thing felt pornographic.
I see in writing this how fragile, how confused I was. I was just spinning in my own fragmentation, while my kids were in or entering puberty. Terrible timing, terrible trauma for them. I remember announcing the divorce to them in the upstairs bedroom at 1201, not that Ed hadn't already mentioned it in the car on the way home from the Unitarian Church some weeks or days before. I remember Jenny saying, "Oh no, we'll have to be in therapy forever." And when I talked with them about where they wanted to live, Jenny had said, "Mom, are you kidding? We don't have any choice! Dad's crazy!" I had thought they might be so ashamed of me, they wouldn't want to live with me. I figured their father could at least give them a more stable life.
In the early days of this mess, before or after I'd asked Ed for the divorce--I think after--I was trying to get Karen to see how bad this was for me. There was a way in which I felt I couldn't get to her, couldn't get her to feel the pain I was in. I wrote down on a small piece of paper what I was experiencing, just bullet points:
- I could hold it together inside when I was mowing the acre of lawn outside the house, not with the tractor but by hand; when I'd finished, the desperation moved in again.
- Everything felt unreal to me; only contact with my kids felt real.
That was one moment in which I felt that she could stand to be in touch with my pain.
After she'd told me that she'd been in a reenactment and that she thought it was based on her own prior experience of having been seduced by a therapist when she was in her early twenties, I'd thought and felt so many things, but among them was, "Now she needs me."
I should absolutely never have gone into treatment with her, nor should she have let me. But for both of us, it was a way, perhaps, of going into a relationship that was structured and in that sense 'safe.' I didn't have to deal with feeling attracted to a woman; I could be attracted to a good therapist instead. And of course she was protected by my becoming her client, so she didn't have to take seriously any 'real' attraction to me.
But the vaunted protections of the psychotherapy structure didn't work; they didn't protect us from the underlying need to feel close and valued by one who understood us profoundly. And I did begin to understand Karen profoundly, and it goes without saying that she understood me profoundly as well.
Yet nor did we have protection outside the psychotherapy, since as soon as we admitted that we were involved in a 'real' relationship, we entered a whole new world of pain. Now Karen was not my therapist, and her full needs could blossom. Oh, there's way too much to say here....the sexual relationship, the power relationship, the family relationships, the financial stuff, the struggle between her paranoia and my grandiosity and narcissism, not that she didn't have plenty of those too....at least I'm less paranoid, but she couldn't stand my getting my feelings hurt all the time. But though my getting my feelings hurt sounds like paranoia--since I attributed malice at times when there was none--the quality of my doubts and Karen's was and is profound. For instance, before she was in psychoanalysis (and she'd had years of treatment before that), she often believed that I would suggest a course of action simply because I was trying to control her--or that I would object to a proposed course of action on her part simply because she had proposed it. She once said to me, "I never have any needs, so if I ever want something, you should let me have it."
She was a strange combination of primitivity and genius; on the emotional level she was and is a genius, everyone says so, yet unable often to use the emotional insight she so easily has into others to analyze her own emotions. Then again, I want to say that she understands her own emotions as profoundly as she does those of others--it's more like she can't stand to see, to acknowledge, what she really thinks and feels. She has a problem with guilt.
However, as we've lived with each other these thirty years, she's come so far in being able to know, acknowledge, tolerate, understand, and, sometimes now, even empathize with her own feelings. And it makes her a different person to live with--a better person.
And I've improved, too....I have been able to conquer my separation anxiety almost completely. I say 'almost' because when I was taken in to check my heart, when it was beating too fast, I got quite anxious the next day when 'no one came to pick me up'--there is a direct reference to childhood here. Maybe I'll try to write that here:
I am eleven. There is a terrible pain in my stomach. My mother and my older siblings, whichever group of them were living at home at the time, are standing around uselessly as they peer down at me writing on the couch in the front room of our three-room apartment.
"Connie has a broth, she says it will help her," Bill says, carrying up from the apartment of our neighbors below a quart jar with a dark brown liquid in it.
My mother gives me a cup of the broth. The pain gets worse. Now I can't stop staggering to the toilet on the back porch. Everyone gets scared, an ambulance gets to our house, although we have no phone and I have no idea how they got it there. I am being carried down the long staircase, then down the concrete steps of the porch to the high landing, now down the steps on the side, finally to street level. I am aware that it is my brother Bill who carries me.
The hospital room at Denver County is big and empty, the ceiling looks a long way off from where I am lying on the flat bed. There is a screen made of cloth stretched over tubing at the foot of my bed. The walls are a bleached yellow. The skimpy hospital gown ties in the front and is partially open. Mama stands in the room; she averts her eyes.
"I'm embarrassed," she says, "your knees are dirty."
A young man with glasses stands enters the room, stands over me. He has one hand behind his back; I know there is a cigarette in that hand. He opens my gown and runs the tip of a safety pin over my lower right belly.
"Can you feel that?", he asks.
I wonder why he is running the sharp end of a pin over my stomach I tell him I can feel it, it kind of tickles.. The pain I had felt at home is gone. He turns to my mother.
"When did your other girls start their menses?", he asks.
I don't know that word, but I know what he's asking.
"About 14," Mama answers.
The next thing I know there is a needle.
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