Fall 2009 Issue

It was the day after Christmas.  My oldest son Henry was two-and-a-half and my youngest Joe was six-months old.   Our furnace hadn’t been working for three days, and because of the holiday we couldn’t get anyone out to fix it.  My husband Michael was back at work, and my babies and I were huddled in front of our fireplace trying to stay warm.  The fireplace was gas and only for show, but it at least provided the illusion of heat.   It was a mild winter so we weren’t going to freeze to death, but we all had red, cold, runny noses and cold fingertips.  I was miserable.   For perhaps the 20th time that day Henry was throwing a tantrum. He didn’t like the color of the sippy cup I had given him.  I thought to myself, “I could just throw him in the fire and all this would be over.”  I imagined the trial – me in the orange jumper.  I imagined the horrific headline in the Denver Post.  Would I be able to pass myself off as insane?  Could I claim the devil made me do it?

I confessed this incident to a girlfriend who is a mother of three.  She laughed particularly liking that my imagination went so far as the actual trial.  This was exactly the reaction I expected.  She understood that I was never in actual danger of throwing my child in the fire.  Her kids were older than mine – she was a veteran.  She knew what it was like to hand a graham cracker to a child and then wait for the screams because there were pieces broken off.  She knew what it felt like to forget to bring water to the park, to discover that the water fountain didn’t work, and to listen helplessly to her kids cry all the way home because they were thirsty.&n bsp; She knew about that strangely painful hour (what my mom calls the “arsenic hour”) between 4:00 and 5:00 in the afternoon when you’re all stuck in the house waiting for the distraction of dinner.  As she liked to say, “My kids slowly eat away at my brain.”

Shortly after that Christmas, my father-in-law, a Freudian psychoanalyst, suggested Henry needed therapy because his sibling rivalry was extreme.  I thought the idea of sending a toddler to therapy was nuts, but Michael convinced me to give it a try.  He had grown up with therapy and believed in it wholeheartedly.  I figured we’d go to a few sessions, the doctor would give us some advice, and we’d be on our merry way.  We got a referral from Michael’s former psychotherapist, and we took Henry to his first appointment.  I had never been to a therapist. I had to ask Michael what one wear s to therapy.  The three of us went into the office with the doctor and he proceeded to “play” with Henry.  He presented Henry with a dollhouse and guided him by asking about the dolls and who they were and what they might do.  Henry was only a toddler and not a big talker.  He didn’t say a word for the entire session.   Eventually, he picked up a little toy dog and put it in the dollhouse toilet.  Michael, the doctor and I all chuckled a little, and then Henry threw the dog in the doctor’s trash can.  We chuckled a little more.  Henry, emboldened by our amusement, proceeded to take all the dolls – baby, dad, mom, grandma, etc. and put them in the trash.  I didn’t realize it at the time, but, voila, the doctor had his diagnosis.

We left the session and I was confused about w hat, if anything, had just happened.  Michael was excited and thought a lot of “work” had been done – that Henry had revealed important information to the doctor through his play.  Michael and I had a session on our own a few days later, and the doctor confirmed what Michael had said.  Henry threw the dollhouse toys in the trash because of his anger over the birth of Joe.  The doctor believed that Henry needed ongoing therapy, twice a week.  I was dumbfounded.  How did they expect a two-and-a- half-year-old boy to play with dolls?  Did they think he would tuck them in bed, read them a story, and get them a cup of milk?  I’d been around a lot of little boys – they don’t tend to play nice.

But, again, Michael convinced me that the doctor was an expert – he knew what Henry needed.  So twice a week Henry met with the therapist for 45 minutes and they would play with toys.  Sometimes Henry wanted me to sit in on the sessions and sometimes not.   When I did sit in, I didn’t see a lot happening.  Often Henry would build towers out of blocks and then knock them down.  I wondered if the doctor thought this was more evidence of trouble.  I would mentally calculate the cost.  Let’s see that’s $185 a session, 8 times a month.  The doctor was always vague about how long the therapy would continue.  Michael’s dad told us it could take years.

Now and then Michael and I met with Henry’s therapist to discuss how things were going at home.  I was naive about therapy and I went into those sessions thinking I had to bare my soul and declare every bad thought I’d ever had about my children.  In one session I told the story about the fire.  Michael chortled nervously while I told the story, but the doctor, with a stricken look on his face, told us he was obligated to contact the proper authorities if he felt I was a danger to my children.

Apparently my story didn’t quite rise to the therapist’s idea of needing intervention – he did not call any authorities.  But thus began a struggle with me on one side and the therapist, Michael and my father-in-law on the other.  They all believed that I was depressed and that it was my depression that was causing Henry’s problems.  Henry’s therapist told me I either needed intensive psychotherapy or psychotropic drugs.  I heard Michael having hushed conversations with his dad on the phone about me.  I wasn’t sure exactly what they were saying, but I could guess.

It’s a cliché in our society that psychoanalysis is hard on mothers.  Think of the Geico commercial with the caveman in therapy who puts his mother on speaker phone.  But the basic precept of psychoanalysis, that an underlying cause can and should be drudged up for a person’s neuroses, is not going to be a boon for us mothers.  It leads to dangerous conclusions like Bruno Bettelheim’s in the 1950’s.  Bettelheim was a psychoanalyst and “child development specialist” who determined that mothers of autistic children caused their children’s illness because they were cold and distant.  He called them “refrigerator mothers.” Then there was Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, another psychoanalyst, who argued that mothers of schizophrenics also caused their children’s disease.  These were doctors who were p racticing decades ago – they could never get away with those kinds of conclusions now.  But aren’t mothers still on thin ice?

I read a little Freud in college but it was from a literary theory perspective, not from a therapeutic perspective.  My feminist, knee-jerk reaction to Freud was that he was insane.  I decided to read up a little in order to have a more informed opinion.  We happened to have a copy of Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria on our shelf so I started with that.    Freud concluded that “Dora” was hysterical because, at the age of 14, when she was lured into an office and grabbed and kissed by her father’s married friend, instead of getting excited as a “healthy girl in such circumstances” would have, she was disgusted.

Okay, so, debunking Freud’s analyses and ideas at this late date is a little too easy.  And Henry’s doctor, though trained in Freudian analysis, was quick to distance himself from Freud.  But I still heard a lot of the same Freudian jargon from Michael, his dad and the doctor – things like, “transference” and “over-stimulating” (as in, a child should never see his or her parents naked.  It’s “over-stimulating”).  Therapy was always referred to as the “process” (as in, we don’t know why the “process” works.  It just does).  This kind of jargon made me want to punch the pillows.

But then there was a big part of me that thought, hey, maybe all these men are right.  Maybe I am a rotten mother and am not good for my children to be around.  It’s true that I could come up with a whole laundry list of my inadequacies.  Henry could bring me to a point where I would just lose it and belt out what can only be described as primal screams.  There were instances when Henry slapped me in the face and I slapped him right back (and not gently).  I wished there were hidden cameras in other mothers’ homes so I could see how they treated their children.  Were they always kind and loving?  Did they do crazy things, too?  What was the standard of behavior and how far off the mark was I?  I stumbled on a few episodes of John and Kate Plus 8 on cable (before they became cheesy tabloid fodder) and did get a sick feeling in my stomach when I saw how unfailingly patient Kate was with her children.  And she had eight.  Were the bad parts edited out?  She=2 0did seem to be mildly sedated.

Was I in fact obligated to submit myself to rigorous therapy in order to protect my children?  But therapy was just not part of my upbringing.  In our dining room, my mom posted a handwritten sign that said, “MENTAL HEALTH IS NOT FOR EVERYONE.”  I always found it comforting.  To me psychotherapy was something you either bought into or you didn’t – like Christianity or Buddhism or Scientology.  It wasn’t real.  If you could buy in, it would certainly be helpful, as it was for Michael.  This requires a leap of faith that is difficult for me.

But the episodes of poor mothering on my part continued to mount.  Then there was the incident that really frightened me.   One day I left Henry and Joe in the living room while I was in the kitchen cleaning up.  Joe had just turned 1 – not walking yet but crawling.  I heard an explosion.  I ran into the living room and Joe was howling and the wall he was sitting next to was blackened with what looked like soot.  I started screaming at Henry, “What happened, what happened, what happened to your brother.”  Henry cried and said, “I don’t know.  I didn’t see.”  I was treating Henry (just barely 3) like he was the babysitter and responsible for the explosion.  After I calmed down, I pieced together the facts.  Joe must have taken the floor lamp plug out of the wall, put it in his mouth, got it nice and juicy, then tried to put it back in the outlet.  Kaboom.  He was totally fine (although I did take him to the pediatrician to make sure he hadn’t melted his brain).  I was ashamed about how I had treated Henry, though.  In my weakened state, I called a therapist (who was recommended by Michael’s therapist) and made an appointment.

But I found myself spending many of the sessions with my therapist complaining about the sessions with Henry’s therapist.  Again, I would tally the cost – let’s see that’s $185 for Henry’s sessions plus $165 for my sessions to complain about Henry’s therapist.  And when I did begin to talk about myself ad nauseum, I had these out-of-body experiences where I could see myself sitting in the chair and hear myself talking.  I looked like a parody of a person in therapy – like a character in a Woody Allen movie (my favorite – the scene in Deconstructing Harry when a man is droning on in the patient’s chair while t he doctor (played by Kirstie Allie) is simultaneously having a rip roaring fight with her husband – hilarious!)  But why couldn’t I just give myself up to the “process?”  Maybe it would help and maybe I’d be a better mother.  It was totally melodramatic and self-aggrandizing, I know, but I’d liken myself to the protagonist in Orwell’s 1984 (quick Google search – his name was Winston Smith).  Couldn’t I just give in – believe in Big Brother.  After all Big Brother loved me and wanted the best for me.  If I just let go of all my skepticism then I could finally be at peace and welcome the bullet in the back of my head.

At one point in my therapy, I recounted an incident that happened when I was about 10.  My mother forced me to practice piano, and to get back at her I pounded out the same song over and over again (I think it was “John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt”).  My mother, driven to madness, broke a yardstick over my back.  When I told this story, my lip started to quiver, my eyes filled with tears, and I felt profoundly sorry for myself.  I thought, oh my God, I think I’m having a breakthrough.  Yes, my problems are all my mother’s fault.  I’m a bad mother because my mom was a bad mother.  But a few days later I revisited that piano incident and remembered that it had actually always made me laugh.  I thought, “Boy, what a little shit I was!  I really knew how to drive my mom crazy!”  I mean can you imagine listening to “John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt” – itself an exercise in repetition – played (badly) 50 times?  Ghandi would have bludgeoned me with a yardstick.  So I quit therapy, and I soldiered on.

One day, I took Henry to one of his appointments (he’d been in therapy for almost two years at this point) and he wanted me to be in the session with him.  I went in with him and the doctor took it as sign that something was wrong between Henry and me.  He asked Henry why he had asked me into the session and if Henry was angry with me.  I had a sudden flash of rage and of insight.  With this man I was always going to be blamed for Henry’s problems – real or perceived.   I realized Henry would only be done with therapy when I said he was done with therapy.  We left the office and I never brought him back.  It was raining that day and we ran down the sidewalk to my car hand-in-hand.  It felt very cinematic and kind of romantic – like I was busting Henry out of the nut house – like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.  My husband and I went back for a final meeting with the therapist where I was berated for my behavior and my lack of dedication to the “process.”  The doctor accused me of being unable to accept help.  I did want help.  I wanted help getting the boys dressed in the morning and out the door.  I wanted help cleaning orange juice from the kitchen floor.  I wanted Jo Frost, Supernanny, to come to my house, verbally slap me around a little, then hug me in her big, warm bosom and make charts for my family.  I wanted a village.

I was recently in an airport waiting for a flight (blissfully without my children).   It was late at night and there was a mother of three little girls at the same gate.  Her youngest child, who was about two, was determined to walk behind the flight attendants’ desk and the mother was trying to keep her away.  The child, who obviou sly just needed to be in bed, was screaming.  The two older daughters tried to comfort and distract the little one by dancing with her, but they only made it worse.   I saw wild desperation in the mother’s eyes.  An older woman sitting next to me leaned over and said, “I feel so sorry for that woman.  But I have three grown children of my own.  I paid my dues.”  Sounds mean, but trust me, it wasn’t.  There was nothing but understanding in her voice.  Something about the woman’s statement reassured me.  Raising kids is difficult for everyone, and it’s not possible to do it perfectly, or perfectly sanely.  You have to pay your dues.

Henry is six now and doing really well.  He’s incredibly loving, super smart, and a total happy ass most of the time.  He’s also intense, prone to fits of pique and has a dangerously low level of frustration tolerance.  He shattered the glass on our plasma TV by throwing the remote at it.
Joe is now four, is adorable, and loves the F word.  I continue to pay my dues.