Therapist leaves an apartment after visiting a mother and daughter. Therapist decides she can no longer participate in this charade where children are assigned mental illness because its convenient for their parents. Therapist wonders about the ultimate consequences of simply being truthful about who the patient really is and refusing to pretend she is "doing therapy" with people who don't want it or need it. Therapist envisions herself working as a housekeeper at the Hyatt where nobody speaks her language and never being heard from again.
Therapist has a fantasy between Reno and Truckee while stuck in construction traffic:
"So, Lola, I'm thinking that it isn't actually your daughter who could benefit by therapy." Lola sits on her sofa in her living room which is so clean that I feel I should suspend myself over the furniture so I don't make a dent in the upholstery. All the items in her refrigerator face the same direction. The towels are folded, but she re-folds them every few minutes and scolds her daughter if one is incorrectly folded. She smiles at me after I tell her this.
"Oh?" she says forcing a worried smile.
I tell her that her daughter doesn't actually have a discipline problem. I tell her that it's too much to ask of an eight year old to organize all her dolls so that they face a certain way, that every piece of lint is picked up of the carpet and to make sure every book is in alphbetical order. And I tell her that this level of regimentation and pressure on her daughter will result in horrible disaster,I would guess right around 12 or 13, when she realizes she can loosen her chains and run away into the arms of her dark side. There, she will explore her own underbelly in ways her mother never thought possible even when she herself was a crack addict living on the strip in Vegas, cocktailing to feed her habit. This little girl of hers, now so clean and tidy, not a hair out of place, will suddenly turn and become very messy somewhere inside. Maybe a raging eating disorder? Anorexia to act out her starvation and to manifest how the quest for perfection has dried her out and made her wither inside. She will get smaller and smaller, closer to death, disappearing from this noisy world of folding towels perfectly and peering fearfully from her perch of perfection into the abyss of disapproval. Or maybe she'll burn and cut herself, marking herself as a separate being from her mother. She will carefully take the cigarettes and leave perfect circles on her arms and legs, alternating them with careful carvings which she will leave in her flesh, each one telling a story of unspoken rage. Or she might curl up inside and retreat, becoming withdrawn, closed and dark, like a snake preparing to shed her skin. She will be dusky and silent and in time, she will be unable to distinguish between reality and unreality. Or perhaps she will turn on all her faucets full force, spewing psychic blood and vomit everywhere, thereby reminding her mother that the dark side never goes away. One cannot exorcise it with three hours per days of Bible study, or take a dust cloth and polish and polish and polish hoping the shine will hide the shadow. She will be everything her mother is fearful of and she will not be discreet. She will smell like every dirty mattress she sleeps on with men she doesn't know and she will only live at night. By day, she will sleep it off somewhere while her mother paces and calls the police to find her...again.
Monday, July 26, 2010
Thursday, July 22, 2010
Who the F**k do I think I am? And who do THEY think I am?
Yesterday was my day at a half-way house in Sparks. It occurs to me that every time I have to go there, I am not sure what it is I am supposed to do. I was given the instructions to "go there and do therapy," with whomever happens to be thrown into the mix that week. All the residents are boys 18 or older who have been released from kiddie prison. The "house managers" are a couple who seem only to be present to put food in the fridge and monitor the rules, which include curfew and cleaning chores which appear to me to be absent altogther.
These boys do not run to greet me exclaiming, "Oh goody, it's therapy time!" They are polite and they cooperate with me, but they are all understandably guarded and most definitely not really that interested in exploring their deepest emotions. They do not show outward signs of any mental illness, most have conduct problems arising out of horrible childhoods and institutionalized life. They all have parole officers and some have a crew of so-called treatment providers to help them launch into adulthood without boomeranging back to prison.
This half-way house is dismal. It's dirty, it has no soul or warmth, and the house managers are not interested in participating in any way to help me know what exactly it is that I am here for. I just know I have been instructed to "do therapy." I feel like a surgeon who gets scrubbed and shows up to the operating theatre ready to work. There is a patient on the table and the surgical teams says, "Just do surgery." "On what?" I ask. "We don't know...but do surgery." I ask the patient, "Do you know why I am here? Does anything hurt? Do you have a tumor I can take out?" The patient says, "No nothing hurts and I don't think I have a tumor. They just told me I need surgery."
I tear off my latex gloves. "Goddammit," I curse and leave the theatre, pissed off that I have wasted an entire afternoon preparing.
I walk into the half-way house after getting a phone call from Derwood the house manager who tells me I need to be there as soon as possible because he needs to go somewhere. And could I please change my schedule around to come earlier because it isn't convenient that I am coming later in the day. "I arranged it this way because Jose works until 4PM." I tell him. "Oh well that changed and he now has Wednesdays off." "Well people need to inform me of these changes," I say brusquely.
I leave a message for Edward, whose role I am uncertain of. He seems to be a case manager of sorts who is there a lot of the time. I have told him before that I can't really "do therapy" with people who don't want it. In fact I won't. It's a waste of time and tax payer money and it's unethical to excavate a person's psyche against their will. The boys are in the half-way house for up to three months to learn basic life skills, to get treatment for emotional and mental health problems if they need it, and to re-integrate themselves back into society. They are expected to find jobs or get into school, save enough money to get a place to live and obey all the rules of the house while they are there. One boy has Asperger's Disorder which is a form of autism, not quite as severe, but still, most with Asperger's have difficulty understanding social cues. They are eccentric and odd in their behavior, which isn't a bad thing, it just puts people off if they don't know. Although he is very bright, he has the classic spectrum of behaviors I would expect which means he is an anomaly here in this half-way house. He has weird tics and habits, which include binge eating because he has no impulse control; excessive masturbation because he sits in his room most of the day with his computer and nothing to do, and intrusive behavior with other boys, who, having just been released from prison, have no patience and no way of understanding him.
When Edward presents me with this set of problems with this boy, I tell him that he will not respond to traditional therapy because he does not know me or trust me and he will deny that he has any problems with food or masturbation. He casually told the other boys that he would like to have sex with the house manager's Chihuahua but she was too small. He eats without attending to cues that he is full and is unconcerned that he is eating other people's food. He eats until he vomits. Edwin would like me to perform some kind of therapeutic magic. I envision myself a surgeon again in the operating theatre. "Just remove whatever it is that causes him to want to have sex with the dog," the team tells me. My first thought is of course to go right to the most obvious source.
I tell Edward, "This client does not feel comfortable enough with me yet to have discussions about deviant sexual behavior and its consequences. Therfore, I suggest that you, as the person he feels most comfortable with, tell him that having sex with animals or any other living thing without consent or cooperation is against the law and unless he wants to end up in prison where he'll get plenty of non-consensual sex, he'd better knock it off. And furthermore, the kid needs to get off his ass and do some hard work for about eight hours a day; then he'll be too fucking tired to sit in front of his computer jacking off." Edwin blushes and shifts around in his chair. He wasn't expecting me to say "jacking off," I could tell. "And as far as the eating behavior, the medicine slows his metabolism and increases appetite which is even more reason for him to quit sitting around, so I suggest you get him into a fitness program as well. Got it? That's my "therapy."
I leave the operating theatre.
I walk into the grungy, disgusting kitchen where the other boys are searching for something edible. "So, Lozado, I hear you fucked up and didn't come home last night," I say. Edwin complained that he wasn't following house rules. Lozado is a tough kid. I weigh about 110; he weighs about 160, all muscle, teeth and memories of knife fights. But his eyes soften when I catch them. "Yeah...I was trying to get home but my bus transfer expired," he says in his gang-twang Mexican tinged English. We sit down on the dirty sofa. His father was deported the other day and he is uncertain that his mother will be able to pay rent. She has three other children including a daughter who at fifteen, has just aborted her second pregancy. Nobody is sure whether she did it on purpose, it happened in a bathroom at the mall. I ask him if it helps to talk. "No, talking don't really help. It just makes it worse," he says wincing. He talks anyway though. He talks about how the food is disgusting here; Derwood makes rice and beans without any flavoring. The kitchen is disgusting and there is never any food. "Let's go look," I say. We take a tour of the rotting food in the fridge and the layers of scum on its shelves. Tins of catfood with crusted edges, containers of putrefying salad dressing, the stench of soured dairy products make my stomach turn.
Lozado and Fish, the other boy,newly out of prison, are preparing to make chicken. The mother in me arises and the therapist leaves my body. I notice the fouled sponges and dish scrubbers sitting by the sink. "Those will kill you," I tell them. Don't use those to wipe counters or dishes, they are loaded with bacteria. Lozado says, "I usually try to find a rag and some bleach." I want to hug him for knowing this. "Good!" I exclaim, now fully engaged in kitchen coaching. We look at all the food that should be tossed. "Do you think Derwood would kill me if I threw all this shit away?" I ask. They laugh. I realize that what is needed here is a sense of community and a cooperative environment where evryone feels valued. "Does Derwood involve you guys in deciding the menu for the week and preparing meals?" No he does not. He makes the same fuckin' thing week after week. The cupboards are filthy. I see two boxes of the cheapest and least nutritious cereal there is, a container of white flour, a couple of cans of what used to be corn before it was robbed of its nutritional value by processing, and some Top Ramen, which has the nutritional value of a cardboard box.
So who am I now? Not a therapist. I am a mother who wants to create a home place. I imagine these boys would love a chance to particpate and decide about meal planning and preparation. I promise Lozado I would bring my cleaning gear and some real Mexican spices next week. He smiles. "Thanks. I feel better now," he says.
These boys do not run to greet me exclaiming, "Oh goody, it's therapy time!" They are polite and they cooperate with me, but they are all understandably guarded and most definitely not really that interested in exploring their deepest emotions. They do not show outward signs of any mental illness, most have conduct problems arising out of horrible childhoods and institutionalized life. They all have parole officers and some have a crew of so-called treatment providers to help them launch into adulthood without boomeranging back to prison.
This half-way house is dismal. It's dirty, it has no soul or warmth, and the house managers are not interested in participating in any way to help me know what exactly it is that I am here for. I just know I have been instructed to "do therapy." I feel like a surgeon who gets scrubbed and shows up to the operating theatre ready to work. There is a patient on the table and the surgical teams says, "Just do surgery." "On what?" I ask. "We don't know...but do surgery." I ask the patient, "Do you know why I am here? Does anything hurt? Do you have a tumor I can take out?" The patient says, "No nothing hurts and I don't think I have a tumor. They just told me I need surgery."
I tear off my latex gloves. "Goddammit," I curse and leave the theatre, pissed off that I have wasted an entire afternoon preparing.
I walk into the half-way house after getting a phone call from Derwood the house manager who tells me I need to be there as soon as possible because he needs to go somewhere. And could I please change my schedule around to come earlier because it isn't convenient that I am coming later in the day. "I arranged it this way because Jose works until 4PM." I tell him. "Oh well that changed and he now has Wednesdays off." "Well people need to inform me of these changes," I say brusquely.
I leave a message for Edward, whose role I am uncertain of. He seems to be a case manager of sorts who is there a lot of the time. I have told him before that I can't really "do therapy" with people who don't want it. In fact I won't. It's a waste of time and tax payer money and it's unethical to excavate a person's psyche against their will. The boys are in the half-way house for up to three months to learn basic life skills, to get treatment for emotional and mental health problems if they need it, and to re-integrate themselves back into society. They are expected to find jobs or get into school, save enough money to get a place to live and obey all the rules of the house while they are there. One boy has Asperger's Disorder which is a form of autism, not quite as severe, but still, most with Asperger's have difficulty understanding social cues. They are eccentric and odd in their behavior, which isn't a bad thing, it just puts people off if they don't know. Although he is very bright, he has the classic spectrum of behaviors I would expect which means he is an anomaly here in this half-way house. He has weird tics and habits, which include binge eating because he has no impulse control; excessive masturbation because he sits in his room most of the day with his computer and nothing to do, and intrusive behavior with other boys, who, having just been released from prison, have no patience and no way of understanding him.
When Edward presents me with this set of problems with this boy, I tell him that he will not respond to traditional therapy because he does not know me or trust me and he will deny that he has any problems with food or masturbation. He casually told the other boys that he would like to have sex with the house manager's Chihuahua but she was too small. He eats without attending to cues that he is full and is unconcerned that he is eating other people's food. He eats until he vomits. Edwin would like me to perform some kind of therapeutic magic. I envision myself a surgeon again in the operating theatre. "Just remove whatever it is that causes him to want to have sex with the dog," the team tells me. My first thought is of course to go right to the most obvious source.
I tell Edward, "This client does not feel comfortable enough with me yet to have discussions about deviant sexual behavior and its consequences. Therfore, I suggest that you, as the person he feels most comfortable with, tell him that having sex with animals or any other living thing without consent or cooperation is against the law and unless he wants to end up in prison where he'll get plenty of non-consensual sex, he'd better knock it off. And furthermore, the kid needs to get off his ass and do some hard work for about eight hours a day; then he'll be too fucking tired to sit in front of his computer jacking off." Edwin blushes and shifts around in his chair. He wasn't expecting me to say "jacking off," I could tell. "And as far as the eating behavior, the medicine slows his metabolism and increases appetite which is even more reason for him to quit sitting around, so I suggest you get him into a fitness program as well. Got it? That's my "therapy."
I leave the operating theatre.
I walk into the grungy, disgusting kitchen where the other boys are searching for something edible. "So, Lozado, I hear you fucked up and didn't come home last night," I say. Edwin complained that he wasn't following house rules. Lozado is a tough kid. I weigh about 110; he weighs about 160, all muscle, teeth and memories of knife fights. But his eyes soften when I catch them. "Yeah...I was trying to get home but my bus transfer expired," he says in his gang-twang Mexican tinged English. We sit down on the dirty sofa. His father was deported the other day and he is uncertain that his mother will be able to pay rent. She has three other children including a daughter who at fifteen, has just aborted her second pregancy. Nobody is sure whether she did it on purpose, it happened in a bathroom at the mall. I ask him if it helps to talk. "No, talking don't really help. It just makes it worse," he says wincing. He talks anyway though. He talks about how the food is disgusting here; Derwood makes rice and beans without any flavoring. The kitchen is disgusting and there is never any food. "Let's go look," I say. We take a tour of the rotting food in the fridge and the layers of scum on its shelves. Tins of catfood with crusted edges, containers of putrefying salad dressing, the stench of soured dairy products make my stomach turn.
Lozado and Fish, the other boy,newly out of prison, are preparing to make chicken. The mother in me arises and the therapist leaves my body. I notice the fouled sponges and dish scrubbers sitting by the sink. "Those will kill you," I tell them. Don't use those to wipe counters or dishes, they are loaded with bacteria. Lozado says, "I usually try to find a rag and some bleach." I want to hug him for knowing this. "Good!" I exclaim, now fully engaged in kitchen coaching. We look at all the food that should be tossed. "Do you think Derwood would kill me if I threw all this shit away?" I ask. They laugh. I realize that what is needed here is a sense of community and a cooperative environment where evryone feels valued. "Does Derwood involve you guys in deciding the menu for the week and preparing meals?" No he does not. He makes the same fuckin' thing week after week. The cupboards are filthy. I see two boxes of the cheapest and least nutritious cereal there is, a container of white flour, a couple of cans of what used to be corn before it was robbed of its nutritional value by processing, and some Top Ramen, which has the nutritional value of a cardboard box.
So who am I now? Not a therapist. I am a mother who wants to create a home place. I imagine these boys would love a chance to particpate and decide about meal planning and preparation. I promise Lozado I would bring my cleaning gear and some real Mexican spices next week. He smiles. "Thanks. I feel better now," he says.
The Good Enough Mother
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
The good enough mother
Once upon a time, back in the spring of 1978, I had a really beautiful dog named Summer. She was a purebred Viszla, amber colored short hair, amber eyes and a fluid, graceful gait. She was really neurotic and made my life hell when I left her alone. But when she came into heat in the early spring of 1978, suddenly, she wanted to get away from me as much as possible so she could get laid. I was in Grand Junction, Colorado one day, selling a Porsche 924 I had to right to own in the first place. I was trading it for a VW squareback which fit my situation a lot better. So Summer escaped out of the car and got laid like a million times by a lot of different guy dogs. I whistled and whistled for her and she finally came toward me, slinking low to the ground with her cropped tail as far between her legs as it could reach. She stunk of mongrel dog sex.
"Get in this car right now you little hussy," I hissed at her. She jumped in and curled up in a ball, exhausted from her afternoon of wild sex. I had problems of my own that spring. I was trying to extricate myself from yet another relationship with a narcissistic sociopath. This one was beating the crap out of me on regular occasions and since he was such a nice guy out in the world, nobody believed me when I told them he was a violent savage whose eyes changed form blue to black when the rage came on. I kept thinking I could love him enough to make him stop hitting me, but I realized that I might die after the third beating which resulted in a bloody nose and welts on my rib cage that made it hard to breathe.
Several weeks passed and Summer gave birth to nine puppies, all of whom represented aspects of all the males she gave herself to on that spring day in Grand Junction. Summer began to nurse them, but I saw the desperation in her eyes. She really wanted to kill them all but nature prevailed and she gave her swollen nipples to them with a great sigh of resignation. I couldn't tell her, "I told you so," at least out loud. She knew I was thinking it. Some of the puppies were frail. One even had some kind of weird disability, like doggie Down Syndrome.
I left town to save my own life when the puppies were old enough to travel. Summer had her bed in the back of my VW squareback which was made cramped and tight by all my belongings. We were headed back to California the quickest route possible, which from Telluride, Colorado, meant a trip through the desert plains of Utah and then the real deserts of Nevada. It was hot and the VW didn't have the greatest air conditioning. Summer was panting and the puppies were crying incessantly. I rolled down the windows in the back and kept looking in the rearview mirror at Summer, panting at an increasingly rapid rate and drooling, her eyes frantic and wild. Suddenly, she just had to go. Right there in the middle of nowhere, she just quit.
She leapt out the window while the car was going at least 50 miles per hour. I slammed on the brakes and saw gallop into the desert canyons. She just couldn't listen to one more whimpering puppy; she had no more milk to give, and not a single shred of patience left in her fragile, bony body.
I whistled and whistled in the heat of the Moab sun. Finally she answered, limping from the shadows of the badlands.She fell into a heap at my feet and I knelt and stroked her forehead. I told her we would just find the nearest place to put the puppies to sleep. "It's okay", I told her stroking that anguished head as she looked up at me with amber eyes full of remorse, "We sometimes think sex has no consequences, don't we?" For I too had my day of running screaming into the wilderness after discovering my desire for union resulted in a pregnancy I was not in the least bit prepared to undertake.
So I stole into an animal shelter with an armful of puppies and begged the person at the desk to take them from me quickly. The mother was not able to care for them and neither was I for that matter. And Summer was free.
I have a client with a disabled son and there is so little help for her nowadays. She is all alone in her house in an isolated subdivision nortn of Reno. Her son has a seizure disorder which has caused a significant developmental delay. He cannot be left alone because his seizures can come at anytime without warning despite anti-seizure medication. She re-married when he was about five and had another son with her current husband. Her days begin at 5AM when she gets up and steals a half hour of time on her treadmill. "My body isn't mine anymore," she laments. She has gained 60 pounds over the past 13 years. Her husband works in law enforcement and is gone 15 hours per day. Her attention is divided ten different ways every second of the day, especially in the summer when both boys are out of school. She also runs an in-home daycare because they need the income. Natalie, age nine months, arrives at 6AM sharp. She spends her days, reminding, directing, feeding, wiping, picking up, reminding, scolding, redirecting, feeding, wishing, longing, crying, monitoring a grand mal seizure, and hoping her husband doesn't leave her which he threatens to do because of "the retard," as he has come to refer to his step-son.
When I arrive, her eyes are frantic, like Summer's eyes. "Am I a monster for wanting to get rid of him?" she askes through tears of exhaustion. Her son is chronologically 17 but developmentally, he is about 8. He overhears his step-father's contempt and has recently reacted to it by having fits of rage at his inability to do what other kids do. When he rages, he tears at his own flesh and throws things, crying himself into exhaustion. His mother, strong and Amazon-like, holds him down so he doesn't hurt himself. She grits her teeth as tears roll down her face. His limbs are long, skinny and unweildy, like a newborn foal and he flails until he is limp.
She finds her little corners of sanity. She calls her mother to give her an occasional hour of respite. And she goes and gambles at the penny slots. She wants to ride her motorcycle, dress in leather, leave forever. She wants to disappear into the badlands and reclaim herself.
"This was what I used to be," she says showing me a picture of herself before the 60 pounds. her life is weighty and she swallows more than she can handle. She holds it all in her body and feels it sucking her downward into the undertow where there is no way out. Her soul paces like a wolf or a tiger in a zoo, and she pants, just like Summer did right before she went out the window of a moving car.
I hold her in the heat of the summer sun and we go outside to her little lawn in the back yard. I tell her to sit with me and we rock back and forth with our eyes closed. I tell her to imagine herself free. Anytime she wants, she can come here to this place of freedom; freedom from self-hatred and judgment she heaps on herslf for longing to be free, freedom from criticism, freedom from some standard or perfection imposed upon her by the culture or some socially constructed image of "the good enough mother." We don't talk often enough about the secret we keep so well hidden that we aren't sure we can really make it through mothering and that we hate it so much sometimes that we want to just run and run, far away into the shadows of the badlands where can can ride motorcycles, wear leather, swear, spit and not wear underwear. The dirty side where we don't measure up to anyone or worry about what he will say if the house is a mess or shame ourselves because we're fatter than we used to be because we've just swallowed way too much.
The good enough mother
Once upon a time, back in the spring of 1978, I had a really beautiful dog named Summer. She was a purebred Viszla, amber colored short hair, amber eyes and a fluid, graceful gait. She was really neurotic and made my life hell when I left her alone. But when she came into heat in the early spring of 1978, suddenly, she wanted to get away from me as much as possible so she could get laid. I was in Grand Junction, Colorado one day, selling a Porsche 924 I had to right to own in the first place. I was trading it for a VW squareback which fit my situation a lot better. So Summer escaped out of the car and got laid like a million times by a lot of different guy dogs. I whistled and whistled for her and she finally came toward me, slinking low to the ground with her cropped tail as far between her legs as it could reach. She stunk of mongrel dog sex.
"Get in this car right now you little hussy," I hissed at her. She jumped in and curled up in a ball, exhausted from her afternoon of wild sex. I had problems of my own that spring. I was trying to extricate myself from yet another relationship with a narcissistic sociopath. This one was beating the crap out of me on regular occasions and since he was such a nice guy out in the world, nobody believed me when I told them he was a violent savage whose eyes changed form blue to black when the rage came on. I kept thinking I could love him enough to make him stop hitting me, but I realized that I might die after the third beating which resulted in a bloody nose and welts on my rib cage that made it hard to breathe.
Several weeks passed and Summer gave birth to nine puppies, all of whom represented aspects of all the males she gave herself to on that spring day in Grand Junction. Summer began to nurse them, but I saw the desperation in her eyes. She really wanted to kill them all but nature prevailed and she gave her swollen nipples to them with a great sigh of resignation. I couldn't tell her, "I told you so," at least out loud. She knew I was thinking it. Some of the puppies were frail. One even had some kind of weird disability, like doggie Down Syndrome.
I left town to save my own life when the puppies were old enough to travel. Summer had her bed in the back of my VW squareback which was made cramped and tight by all my belongings. We were headed back to California the quickest route possible, which from Telluride, Colorado, meant a trip through the desert plains of Utah and then the real deserts of Nevada. It was hot and the VW didn't have the greatest air conditioning. Summer was panting and the puppies were crying incessantly. I rolled down the windows in the back and kept looking in the rearview mirror at Summer, panting at an increasingly rapid rate and drooling, her eyes frantic and wild. Suddenly, she just had to go. Right there in the middle of nowhere, she just quit.
She leapt out the window while the car was going at least 50 miles per hour. I slammed on the brakes and saw gallop into the desert canyons. She just couldn't listen to one more whimpering puppy; she had no more milk to give, and not a single shred of patience left in her fragile, bony body.
I whistled and whistled in the heat of the Moab sun. Finally she answered, limping from the shadows of the badlands.She fell into a heap at my feet and I knelt and stroked her forehead. I told her we would just find the nearest place to put the puppies to sleep. "It's okay", I told her stroking that anguished head as she looked up at me with amber eyes full of remorse, "We sometimes think sex has no consequences, don't we?" For I too had my day of running screaming into the wilderness after discovering my desire for union resulted in a pregnancy I was not in the least bit prepared to undertake.
So I stole into an animal shelter with an armful of puppies and begged the person at the desk to take them from me quickly. The mother was not able to care for them and neither was I for that matter. And Summer was free.
I have a client with a disabled son and there is so little help for her nowadays. She is all alone in her house in an isolated subdivision nortn of Reno. Her son has a seizure disorder which has caused a significant developmental delay. He cannot be left alone because his seizures can come at anytime without warning despite anti-seizure medication. She re-married when he was about five and had another son with her current husband. Her days begin at 5AM when she gets up and steals a half hour of time on her treadmill. "My body isn't mine anymore," she laments. She has gained 60 pounds over the past 13 years. Her husband works in law enforcement and is gone 15 hours per day. Her attention is divided ten different ways every second of the day, especially in the summer when both boys are out of school. She also runs an in-home daycare because they need the income. Natalie, age nine months, arrives at 6AM sharp. She spends her days, reminding, directing, feeding, wiping, picking up, reminding, scolding, redirecting, feeding, wishing, longing, crying, monitoring a grand mal seizure, and hoping her husband doesn't leave her which he threatens to do because of "the retard," as he has come to refer to his step-son.
When I arrive, her eyes are frantic, like Summer's eyes. "Am I a monster for wanting to get rid of him?" she askes through tears of exhaustion. Her son is chronologically 17 but developmentally, he is about 8. He overhears his step-father's contempt and has recently reacted to it by having fits of rage at his inability to do what other kids do. When he rages, he tears at his own flesh and throws things, crying himself into exhaustion. His mother, strong and Amazon-like, holds him down so he doesn't hurt himself. She grits her teeth as tears roll down her face. His limbs are long, skinny and unweildy, like a newborn foal and he flails until he is limp.
She finds her little corners of sanity. She calls her mother to give her an occasional hour of respite. And she goes and gambles at the penny slots. She wants to ride her motorcycle, dress in leather, leave forever. She wants to disappear into the badlands and reclaim herself.
"This was what I used to be," she says showing me a picture of herself before the 60 pounds. her life is weighty and she swallows more than she can handle. She holds it all in her body and feels it sucking her downward into the undertow where there is no way out. Her soul paces like a wolf or a tiger in a zoo, and she pants, just like Summer did right before she went out the window of a moving car.
I hold her in the heat of the summer sun and we go outside to her little lawn in the back yard. I tell her to sit with me and we rock back and forth with our eyes closed. I tell her to imagine herself free. Anytime she wants, she can come here to this place of freedom; freedom from self-hatred and judgment she heaps on herslf for longing to be free, freedom from criticism, freedom from some standard or perfection imposed upon her by the culture or some socially constructed image of "the good enough mother." We don't talk often enough about the secret we keep so well hidden that we aren't sure we can really make it through mothering and that we hate it so much sometimes that we want to just run and run, far away into the shadows of the badlands where can can ride motorcycles, wear leather, swear, spit and not wear underwear. The dirty side where we don't measure up to anyone or worry about what he will say if the house is a mess or shame ourselves because we're fatter than we used to be because we've just swallowed way too much.
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
The good enough mother
Once upon a time, back in the spring of 1978, I had a really beautiful dog named Summer. She was a purebred Viszla, amber colored short hair, amber eyes and a fluid, graceful gait. She was really neurotic and made my life hell when I left her alone. But when she came into heat in the early spring of 1978, suddenly, she wanted to get away from me as much as possible so she could get laid. I was in Grand Junction, Colorado one day, selling a Porsche 924 I had to right to own in the first place. I was trading it for a VW squareback which fit my situation a lot better. So Summer escaped out of the car and got laid like a million times by a lot of different guy dogs. I whistled and whistled for her and she finally came toward me, slinking low to the ground with her cropped tail as far between her legs as it could reach. She stunk of mongrel dog sex.
"Get in this car right now you little hussy," I hissed at her. She jumped in and curled up in a ball, exhausted from her afternoon of wild sex. I had problems of my own that spring. I was trying to extricate myself from yet another relationship with a narcissistic sociopath. This one was beating the crap out of me on regular occasions and since he was such a nice guy out in the world, nobody believed me when I told them he was a violent savage whose eyes changed form blue to black when the rage came on. I kept thinking I could love him enough to make him stop hitting me, but I realized that I might die after the third beating which resulted in a bloody nose and welts on my rib cage that made it hard to breathe.
Several weeks passed and Summer gave birth to nine puppies, all of whom represented aspects of all the males she gave herself to on that spring day in Grand Junction. Summer began to nurse them, but I saw the desperation in her eyes. She really wanted to kill them all but nature prevailed and she gave her swollen nipples to them with a great sigh of resignation. I couldn't tell her, "I told you so," at least out loud. She knew I was thinking it. Some of the puppies were frail. One even had some kind of weird disability, like doggie Down Syndrome.
I left town to save my own life when the puppies were old enough to travel. Summer had her bed in the back of my VW squareback which was made cramped and tight by all my belongings. We were headed back to California the quickest route possible, which from Telluride, Colorado, meant a trip through the desert plains of Utah and then the real deserts of Nevada. It was hot and the VW didn't have the greatest air conditioning. Summer was panting and the puppies were crying incessantly. I rolled down the windows in the back and kept looking in the rearview mirror at Summer, panting at an increasingly rapid rate and drooling, her eyes frantic and wild. Suddenly, she just had to go. Right there in the middle of nowhere, she just quit.
She leapt out the window while the car was going at least 50 miles per hour. I slammed on the brakes and saw gallop into the desert canyons. She just couldn't listen to one more whimpering puppy; she had no more milk to give, and not a single shred of patience left in her fragile, bony body.
I whistled and whistled in the heat of the Moab sun. Finally she answered, limping from the shadows of the badlands.She fell into a heap at my feet and I knelt and stroked her forehead. I told her we would just find the nearest place to put the puppies to sleep. "It's okay", I told her stroking that anguished head as she looked up at me with amber eyes full of remorse, "We sometimes think sex has no consequences, don't we?" For I too had my day of running screaming into the wilderness after discovering my desire for union resulted in a pregnancy I was not in the least bit prepared to undertake.
So I stole into an animal shelter with an armful of puppies and begged the person at the desk to take them from me quickly. The mother was not able to care for them and neither was I for that matter. And Summer was free.
I have a client with a disabled son and there is so little help for her nowadays. She is all alone in her house in an isolated subdivision nortn of Reno. Her son has a seizure disorder which has caused a significant developmental delay. He cannot be left alone because his seizures can come at anytime without warning despite anti-seizure medication. She re-married when he was about five and had another son with her current husband. Her days begin at 5AM when she gets up and steals a half hour of time on her treadmill. "My body isn't mine anymore," she laments. She has gained 60 pounds over the past 13 years. Her husband works in law enforcement and is gone 15 hours per day. Her attention is divided ten different ways every second of the day, especially in the summer when both boys are out of school. She also runs an in-home daycare because they need the income. Natalie, age nine months, arrives at 6AM sharp. She spends her days, reminding, directing, feeding, wiping, picking up, reminding, scolding, redirecting, feeding, wishing, longing, crying, monitoring a grand mal seizure, and hoping her husband doesn't leave her which he threatens to do because of "the retard," as he has come to refer to his step-son.
When I arrive, her eyes are frantic, like Summer's eyes. "Am I a monster for wanting to get rid of him?" she askes through tears of exhaustion. Her son is chronologically 17 but developmentally, he is about 8. He overhears his step-father's contempt and has recently reacted to it by having fits of rage at his inability to do what other kids do. When he rages, he tears at his own flesh and throws things, crying himself into exhaustion. His mother, strong and Amazon-like, holds him down so he doesn't hurt himself. She grits her teeth as tears roll down her face. His limbs are long, skinny and unweildy, like a newborn foal and he flails until he is limp.
She finds her little corners of sanity. She calls her mother to give her an occasional hour of respite. And she goes and gambles at the penny slots. She wants to ride her motorcycle, dress in leather, leave forever. She wants to disappear into the badlands and reclaim herself.
"This was what I used to be," she says showing me a picture of herself before the 60 pounds. her life is weighty and she swallows more than she can handle. She holds it all in her body and feels it sucking her downward into the undertow where there is no way out. Her soul paces like a wolf or a tiger in a zoo, and she pants, just like Summer did right before she went out the window of a moving car.
I hold her in the heat of the summer sun and we go outside to her little lawn in the back yard. I tell her to sit with me and we rock back and forth with our eyes closed. I tell her to imagine herself free. Anytime she wants, she can come here to this place of freedom; freedom from self-hatred and judgment she heaps on herslf for longing to be free, freedom from criticism, freedom from some standard or perfection imposed upon her by the culture or some socially constructed image of "the good enough mother." We don't talk often enough about the secret we keep so well hidden that we aren't sure we can really make it through mothering and that we hate it so much sometimes that we want to just run and run, far away into the shadows of the badlands where can can ride motorcycles, wear leather, swear, spit and not wear underwear. The dirty side where we don't measure up to anyone or worry about what he will say if the house is a mess or shame ourselves because we're fatter than we used to be because we've just swallowed way too much.
"Get in this car right now you little hussy," I hissed at her. She jumped in and curled up in a ball, exhausted from her afternoon of wild sex. I had problems of my own that spring. I was trying to extricate myself from yet another relationship with a narcissistic sociopath. This one was beating the crap out of me on regular occasions and since he was such a nice guy out in the world, nobody believed me when I told them he was a violent savage whose eyes changed form blue to black when the rage came on. I kept thinking I could love him enough to make him stop hitting me, but I realized that I might die after the third beating which resulted in a bloody nose and welts on my rib cage that made it hard to breathe.
Several weeks passed and Summer gave birth to nine puppies, all of whom represented aspects of all the males she gave herself to on that spring day in Grand Junction. Summer began to nurse them, but I saw the desperation in her eyes. She really wanted to kill them all but nature prevailed and she gave her swollen nipples to them with a great sigh of resignation. I couldn't tell her, "I told you so," at least out loud. She knew I was thinking it. Some of the puppies were frail. One even had some kind of weird disability, like doggie Down Syndrome.
I left town to save my own life when the puppies were old enough to travel. Summer had her bed in the back of my VW squareback which was made cramped and tight by all my belongings. We were headed back to California the quickest route possible, which from Telluride, Colorado, meant a trip through the desert plains of Utah and then the real deserts of Nevada. It was hot and the VW didn't have the greatest air conditioning. Summer was panting and the puppies were crying incessantly. I rolled down the windows in the back and kept looking in the rearview mirror at Summer, panting at an increasingly rapid rate and drooling, her eyes frantic and wild. Suddenly, she just had to go. Right there in the middle of nowhere, she just quit.
She leapt out the window while the car was going at least 50 miles per hour. I slammed on the brakes and saw gallop into the desert canyons. She just couldn't listen to one more whimpering puppy; she had no more milk to give, and not a single shred of patience left in her fragile, bony body.
I whistled and whistled in the heat of the Moab sun. Finally she answered, limping from the shadows of the badlands.She fell into a heap at my feet and I knelt and stroked her forehead. I told her we would just find the nearest place to put the puppies to sleep. "It's okay", I told her stroking that anguished head as she looked up at me with amber eyes full of remorse, "We sometimes think sex has no consequences, don't we?" For I too had my day of running screaming into the wilderness after discovering my desire for union resulted in a pregnancy I was not in the least bit prepared to undertake.
So I stole into an animal shelter with an armful of puppies and begged the person at the desk to take them from me quickly. The mother was not able to care for them and neither was I for that matter. And Summer was free.
I have a client with a disabled son and there is so little help for her nowadays. She is all alone in her house in an isolated subdivision nortn of Reno. Her son has a seizure disorder which has caused a significant developmental delay. He cannot be left alone because his seizures can come at anytime without warning despite anti-seizure medication. She re-married when he was about five and had another son with her current husband. Her days begin at 5AM when she gets up and steals a half hour of time on her treadmill. "My body isn't mine anymore," she laments. She has gained 60 pounds over the past 13 years. Her husband works in law enforcement and is gone 15 hours per day. Her attention is divided ten different ways every second of the day, especially in the summer when both boys are out of school. She also runs an in-home daycare because they need the income. Natalie, age nine months, arrives at 6AM sharp. She spends her days, reminding, directing, feeding, wiping, picking up, reminding, scolding, redirecting, feeding, wishing, longing, crying, monitoring a grand mal seizure, and hoping her husband doesn't leave her which he threatens to do because of "the retard," as he has come to refer to his step-son.
When I arrive, her eyes are frantic, like Summer's eyes. "Am I a monster for wanting to get rid of him?" she askes through tears of exhaustion. Her son is chronologically 17 but developmentally, he is about 8. He overhears his step-father's contempt and has recently reacted to it by having fits of rage at his inability to do what other kids do. When he rages, he tears at his own flesh and throws things, crying himself into exhaustion. His mother, strong and Amazon-like, holds him down so he doesn't hurt himself. She grits her teeth as tears roll down her face. His limbs are long, skinny and unweildy, like a newborn foal and he flails until he is limp.
She finds her little corners of sanity. She calls her mother to give her an occasional hour of respite. And she goes and gambles at the penny slots. She wants to ride her motorcycle, dress in leather, leave forever. She wants to disappear into the badlands and reclaim herself.
"This was what I used to be," she says showing me a picture of herself before the 60 pounds. her life is weighty and she swallows more than she can handle. She holds it all in her body and feels it sucking her downward into the undertow where there is no way out. Her soul paces like a wolf or a tiger in a zoo, and she pants, just like Summer did right before she went out the window of a moving car.
I hold her in the heat of the summer sun and we go outside to her little lawn in the back yard. I tell her to sit with me and we rock back and forth with our eyes closed. I tell her to imagine herself free. Anytime she wants, she can come here to this place of freedom; freedom from self-hatred and judgment she heaps on herslf for longing to be free, freedom from criticism, freedom from some standard or perfection imposed upon her by the culture or some socially constructed image of "the good enough mother." We don't talk often enough about the secret we keep so well hidden that we aren't sure we can really make it through mothering and that we hate it so much sometimes that we want to just run and run, far away into the shadows of the badlands where can can ride motorcycles, wear leather, swear, spit and not wear underwear. The dirty side where we don't measure up to anyone or worry about what he will say if the house is a mess or shame ourselves because we're fatter than we used to be because we've just swallowed way too much.
Monday, July 19, 2010
Western medicine....We will make you sick (if you want)
Clinical Staffing, July 19, 2010...Kimball walks in late as usual, because she would rather be out running on this beautiful day. Meets Dr. W., psychiatrist from the University of Nevada, Reno. Kimball has the presence of mind to make sure her cell phone is on "silent." I ask Dr. W if it possible to diagnose a child of 12 with schizophrenia. I ask this because of a case I have taken on, mentioned in my last blog, involving a 12 year old girl. Her mother talks about her thusly, "Oh yeah...she's schizophrenic AND bipolar AND ADHD." I suspect Munchausen by Proxy becaus ethe mother has the system wired. The mother has simply given up and I, in my idealism, am certain this misperception of herself can be fixed. The mother needs to be sick, and she needs her daughter to be sick, and so far, psychiatrists from the county have cooperated nicely. This kid has been on Lithium, Depakote, Abilify and Zyprexa interchangeably for several years. She doesn't really know who she is. She's been told who she is, but she really isn't sure. Her definition of herself gels only in a quiet stare into her lap. "I'm crazy." she says, scraping at the blue nail polish on her chewed nails.
"Well...rarely." says Dr. W. "In fact, NAMI is looking for case study subjects right now because childhood schizophrenia is very rare." I am not seeing symptoms of schizophrenia in this child I see on ce a week way out in the desert. Instead, I see a child with a marvelous imagination who is desperate for human contact. She hears voices, but her mother actually hears voices as well. And it's not like the voices are harmful, just dead relatives who want to stay in touch. She tells me that her grandmother appears at her door every now and again just to say hello. I am more curious than alarmed. Her grandmother was a full blooded Cherokee. Lithium and Zyprexa silence the voices. Yay for Western white medicine. Medical community colludes with mother in giving up on herself and her children. Therapist wants to know more about the mother's spirit animals and what the grandmother says when she comes out of the desk at night. Therapist secretly wants to work at strengthening the mother's connection to her ancestry thereby eliminating the need to "be sick." Therapist wants to go to the psychiatrist who prescribes unececessary meds for little girls and smack her face until it's purple.
My son needs a lot of dental work. No dentist in the area will agree to a payment plan. I cannot afford to spend $4,000.00 on dental work and neither can he. At 22 years of age, he does not qualify for state medical benefits, nor could he be on my insurance because he is not in college. And at 22, he makes all of $12.00 per hour, which is barely enough to live on never mind medical expenses. So Transitional Age Youth (TAY) as they are called in psychological research are the most underserved population in this nation. Young men and women from 18-25 are more likely to go untreated for medical, dental and psychological problems than any other sector of the U.S. population. These young people will replace us when we are all dead if they live that long. They may be toothless, diseased and slightly off center, but they will replace us. those who serve the underserved are few and far between, especially in affluent communities like the Lake Tahoe area communities. There is a three month wait list at Placer County Public Health Clinic for those needing dental work. The wait list in Nevada County is about the same. My 67 year-old sister recalled a time when her children were young that she paid her dentist $10.00 per month so her children could receive dental care. She wonders why I can't just set that up now. "Are you for real?" I ask her. I decide to try, so I call 17 dentists in the Tahoe area. Not one is willing to work out a payment plan because they don't have to. Why take the risk when you can have guarantees? Oh I don't know...maybe because it's the humane thing to do.
My dad used to make house calls on snowshoes when I was a kid. I know that getting paid was important to him, but it never seemed to take precedence over caring for the people he would run into at the grocery store. Maybe that's why we never had much money.
My ex-husband, bless his heart, took care of people when they were having hard times. He had his own physical therapy clinic and pretty much did what he wanted. He'd see people who couldn't pay but could get him free basketball tickets or a year's worth of free ice cream for his kids. He sold his clinic to a corporation because he thought it would be easier just to be a PT and not an owner. I was helping him manage and we decided that our PT aides should get paid more because they were so valuable to us. He wanted a dollar more per hour for each and the corporation balked. Since he sold the clinic on an earn-out agreement ($80k over three years if he made EBITDA), he stood to lose a lot. But when the corporation told him he couldn't pay his aides a dollar more per hour, he told the regional director to go fuck himself and walked out. He left $160,000 of potential gain on the principal that people deserve to make enough to live on and the corporate belly should shrink in order to support that.
I loved him for that. There were plenty of things I didn't love, but I really loved him for that. And I loved my dad for that, too. He cared for people first and that is the mark of a healer whose heart is in the right place. I have never forgotten that.
"Well...rarely." says Dr. W. "In fact, NAMI is looking for case study subjects right now because childhood schizophrenia is very rare." I am not seeing symptoms of schizophrenia in this child I see on ce a week way out in the desert. Instead, I see a child with a marvelous imagination who is desperate for human contact. She hears voices, but her mother actually hears voices as well. And it's not like the voices are harmful, just dead relatives who want to stay in touch. She tells me that her grandmother appears at her door every now and again just to say hello. I am more curious than alarmed. Her grandmother was a full blooded Cherokee. Lithium and Zyprexa silence the voices. Yay for Western white medicine. Medical community colludes with mother in giving up on herself and her children. Therapist wants to know more about the mother's spirit animals and what the grandmother says when she comes out of the desk at night. Therapist secretly wants to work at strengthening the mother's connection to her ancestry thereby eliminating the need to "be sick." Therapist wants to go to the psychiatrist who prescribes unececessary meds for little girls and smack her face until it's purple.
My son needs a lot of dental work. No dentist in the area will agree to a payment plan. I cannot afford to spend $4,000.00 on dental work and neither can he. At 22 years of age, he does not qualify for state medical benefits, nor could he be on my insurance because he is not in college. And at 22, he makes all of $12.00 per hour, which is barely enough to live on never mind medical expenses. So Transitional Age Youth (TAY) as they are called in psychological research are the most underserved population in this nation. Young men and women from 18-25 are more likely to go untreated for medical, dental and psychological problems than any other sector of the U.S. population. These young people will replace us when we are all dead if they live that long. They may be toothless, diseased and slightly off center, but they will replace us. those who serve the underserved are few and far between, especially in affluent communities like the Lake Tahoe area communities. There is a three month wait list at Placer County Public Health Clinic for those needing dental work. The wait list in Nevada County is about the same. My 67 year-old sister recalled a time when her children were young that she paid her dentist $10.00 per month so her children could receive dental care. She wonders why I can't just set that up now. "Are you for real?" I ask her. I decide to try, so I call 17 dentists in the Tahoe area. Not one is willing to work out a payment plan because they don't have to. Why take the risk when you can have guarantees? Oh I don't know...maybe because it's the humane thing to do.
My dad used to make house calls on snowshoes when I was a kid. I know that getting paid was important to him, but it never seemed to take precedence over caring for the people he would run into at the grocery store. Maybe that's why we never had much money.
My ex-husband, bless his heart, took care of people when they were having hard times. He had his own physical therapy clinic and pretty much did what he wanted. He'd see people who couldn't pay but could get him free basketball tickets or a year's worth of free ice cream for his kids. He sold his clinic to a corporation because he thought it would be easier just to be a PT and not an owner. I was helping him manage and we decided that our PT aides should get paid more because they were so valuable to us. He wanted a dollar more per hour for each and the corporation balked. Since he sold the clinic on an earn-out agreement ($80k over three years if he made EBITDA), he stood to lose a lot. But when the corporation told him he couldn't pay his aides a dollar more per hour, he told the regional director to go fuck himself and walked out. He left $160,000 of potential gain on the principal that people deserve to make enough to live on and the corporate belly should shrink in order to support that.
I loved him for that. There were plenty of things I didn't love, but I really loved him for that. And I loved my dad for that, too. He cared for people first and that is the mark of a healer whose heart is in the right place. I have never forgotten that.
Friday, July 16, 2010
Has anyone seen "Healthcare Reform?" Blessed Rain....I have not seen it...
I dread Fridays in rural Nevada and I am trying not to. I try to tell myself I am doing some good in the world but I don't believe myself. Somehow, all my calm, zen-like feelings around generating goodwill and cultivating generosity evaporate when I am worried about covering my basic expenses. I should trust the goddesses more, but I keep falling off that wagon too. I meditate each morning, but on this morning,even as I chant RAMMMMM calling upon this ancient God to center me, I keep wandering away worrying about whether I am crazy for trying to actualize health care reform in my own way since I am seeing damn little evidence that it's happening anywhere else. Example 1: My son (now 22) has a rotting tooth that is causing him great pain. He doesn't make enough to pay for dental care, his employer does not offer insurance benefits, and dhe oes not qualify for state or county assistance. No dentist in town is willing to take payments. I wonder if they know that people aged 16-25 are the most underserved population in this country when it comes to health care? These are young adults who, unless they are in college or in the military, most often go without health insurance or access to healthcare. Yet these young adults are our future. Example 2: I am a 52 year-old professional woman who should be making tons more money with healthcare benefits.Instead, I choose to light my own path which means I will not be able to afford health insurance because I don't make enough money. God help me if I have a terrible accident right now because I am not eligible for any state funded insurance and I can't afford regular insurance. What I can afford carries with it a $5,000.00 deductible so what's the point?
Anyway, on the journey out into the desert, I listen to Pema Chodron talking about awakening Bodhichitta. In the path of the Bodhisattva (warrior for the way of the peaceful heart)one must practice awakening all the time. I chose this path of giving myself to those most in need and I chose to offer healing therapeutic service to people according to the Buddhist Paramita of generosity. But I don't feel very generous today. I feel stingy. Like Ebenezer Scrooge. I feel scared that I won't be able to pay my rent and other living expenses. In between steering my galloping brain back to center, I curse myself for not being more practical and smart like my half-sister Joan who at 67, worked like a Trojan for thirty years, carefully squirreling away her savings and now has a well-earned healthy retirement. I will probably be more like our dad who was an idiot with money and worked until he was 80performing medical procedures with antiquated skill and questionable cognition.
I travel into the desert to see families who request therapy or who are told they have to have it by some other agency (usually Child Protective Services)and I am paid only for the time I actually see clients; I am not paid for travel time (except mileage)or time for completing paperwork. If I show up to see a client for whom I have driven 70 miles and they choose to blow me off, I don't get paid. The Paramita of generosity is really only a Paramita when it stretches you and awakens you into the spirit of giving without strings attached. Strings like hoping you might get some kind of reward for being a really good girl, or hoping that maybe someone will want to give something back. It's just giving because that's what the world needs most. Okay....deep breath...let's try this again.
Today, I drive out into the desert and the temperature soars almost to 100 degrees. I am not looking forward to seeing Mae's daughter. First of all, some psychiatrist has given this child a diagnosis of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder AND AD/HD. She is medicated with Lithium and Abilify and a few other drugs. I didn't think schizophrenia could be diagnosed until a person was at least 18 because it seems to manifest right around that age. But the mother is adamant. She seems to need her daughter to be mentally ill. "She hears voices. Has since she was real little." I gently introduce the possibility of a very active imagination. Mae takes a deep breath and looks at the dragon statues she has lined up on her bookshelf.
"Well I see my dead mother a lot. She lives in that desk over there." Her ashes are kept in the desk in the living room. It seems that Mae's Cherokee roots might possibly be shining through the wall of medicalization. She adjusts her position on the stained, sagging sofa and brightens up. "Yep, all of us women in this family hear voices and see things that ain't there. I know stuff before it happens and my oldest daughter is the same way. I have conversations with my mother all the time."
There is a loud clap of thunder outside. Mae whoops with delight and smiles. "Oh man I love thunder and lightening!" She notices my necklace of Tourmaline crystal. "You like crystals? You know how to re-charge 'em?". I tell her no. "Well you put 'em in a shell like maybe an Abalone or somethin.' You gotta do it in the new moon an' then you let em sit there for thirty days until the moon is new again. And don't let nobody touch 'em!"
Mae's youngest daughter puts on her bathing suit and goes out to dance in the rain. Mae leads me into a cluttered spare bedroom filled with dusty china dolls and collections of what appear to be rocks. She carefully opens a little cabinet on the wall, and takes out beautifully polished crystals of amethyst, jade, tourmaline, rose quartz and opal. She understands the healing power of all which makes me wonder why she relies on Western medicine to treat her for gout. Her 12 year old daughter, the one who allegedly has schizophrenia, is fascinated and asks question after question, one in particular about the crystal ball which sits in Mae's shelf covered in two inches of desert dust. Mae answers irritably. "You wanna have yer fortune told? Well ask yer Aunt Maude!Now quit interruptin'!"
She blows dust off stone after stone revealing the pearlescence of each one and then works her way over to her cluttered closet where she pulls out a deerskin dress with a fur-lined hem. "This was grandma's dress. And I got the moccasins too...right here" She digs out a pair of curled leather moccasins from her crowded closet.
She has pictures and statues of wolves all over her walls and shelves coated with duts intermingled with the crystals and other artifacts of her Cherokee heritage. "The wolf is my spirit animal," she says fingering a dusty photo of a wolf pup she raised.
"What is my spirit animal mommy?" her daughter asks, desperate to engage in something that gives her a sense of belonging. "Oh hell I dunno. You gotta go through a whole ceremony to find that out. Like this here eagle feather was presented to me by a medicine man when I went through ceremony." She carefully lifted an eagle feather down from its dusty place on her shelf. "I always knew it was wolf though."
Was I doing "therapy?" It didn't seem like it. I was the learner and Mae was the knower.
I took her daughter out into the rain. Blessed rain which cooled the earth and brought the smell of sage and grass so fully into my senses. Blessed rain that reminded me that the desert has beauty. We just have to look a little harder, like Mae when she made all those tirps out to the old Rawhide mines and the old abandoned mines outside of Fallon and looked for treasure in rocks that appeared to be so dead on the surface. Undderneath the graying, pocked crusts, were treasures of unfathomable beauty, with more aspects that the human eye could ascertain. Ancient and pulsating with the energy of millions of years of extreme heat and cold, they radiate beauty from behind such plain and simple exteriors.
Blessed rain that kisses the parched earth and liberates the scent of life in the sage and grasses. Blessed rocks that hold the energy of life itself. Nature teaches me today that nothing can be ascertained and appreciated without the patience to liberate potential.
Anyway, on the journey out into the desert, I listen to Pema Chodron talking about awakening Bodhichitta. In the path of the Bodhisattva (warrior for the way of the peaceful heart)one must practice awakening all the time. I chose this path of giving myself to those most in need and I chose to offer healing therapeutic service to people according to the Buddhist Paramita of generosity. But I don't feel very generous today. I feel stingy. Like Ebenezer Scrooge. I feel scared that I won't be able to pay my rent and other living expenses. In between steering my galloping brain back to center, I curse myself for not being more practical and smart like my half-sister Joan who at 67, worked like a Trojan for thirty years, carefully squirreling away her savings and now has a well-earned healthy retirement. I will probably be more like our dad who was an idiot with money and worked until he was 80performing medical procedures with antiquated skill and questionable cognition.
I travel into the desert to see families who request therapy or who are told they have to have it by some other agency (usually Child Protective Services)and I am paid only for the time I actually see clients; I am not paid for travel time (except mileage)or time for completing paperwork. If I show up to see a client for whom I have driven 70 miles and they choose to blow me off, I don't get paid. The Paramita of generosity is really only a Paramita when it stretches you and awakens you into the spirit of giving without strings attached. Strings like hoping you might get some kind of reward for being a really good girl, or hoping that maybe someone will want to give something back. It's just giving because that's what the world needs most. Okay....deep breath...let's try this again.
Today, I drive out into the desert and the temperature soars almost to 100 degrees. I am not looking forward to seeing Mae's daughter. First of all, some psychiatrist has given this child a diagnosis of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder AND AD/HD. She is medicated with Lithium and Abilify and a few other drugs. I didn't think schizophrenia could be diagnosed until a person was at least 18 because it seems to manifest right around that age. But the mother is adamant. She seems to need her daughter to be mentally ill. "She hears voices. Has since she was real little." I gently introduce the possibility of a very active imagination. Mae takes a deep breath and looks at the dragon statues she has lined up on her bookshelf.
"Well I see my dead mother a lot. She lives in that desk over there." Her ashes are kept in the desk in the living room. It seems that Mae's Cherokee roots might possibly be shining through the wall of medicalization. She adjusts her position on the stained, sagging sofa and brightens up. "Yep, all of us women in this family hear voices and see things that ain't there. I know stuff before it happens and my oldest daughter is the same way. I have conversations with my mother all the time."
There is a loud clap of thunder outside. Mae whoops with delight and smiles. "Oh man I love thunder and lightening!" She notices my necklace of Tourmaline crystal. "You like crystals? You know how to re-charge 'em?". I tell her no. "Well you put 'em in a shell like maybe an Abalone or somethin.' You gotta do it in the new moon an' then you let em sit there for thirty days until the moon is new again. And don't let nobody touch 'em!"
Mae's youngest daughter puts on her bathing suit and goes out to dance in the rain. Mae leads me into a cluttered spare bedroom filled with dusty china dolls and collections of what appear to be rocks. She carefully opens a little cabinet on the wall, and takes out beautifully polished crystals of amethyst, jade, tourmaline, rose quartz and opal. She understands the healing power of all which makes me wonder why she relies on Western medicine to treat her for gout. Her 12 year old daughter, the one who allegedly has schizophrenia, is fascinated and asks question after question, one in particular about the crystal ball which sits in Mae's shelf covered in two inches of desert dust. Mae answers irritably. "You wanna have yer fortune told? Well ask yer Aunt Maude!Now quit interruptin'!"
She blows dust off stone after stone revealing the pearlescence of each one and then works her way over to her cluttered closet where she pulls out a deerskin dress with a fur-lined hem. "This was grandma's dress. And I got the moccasins too...right here" She digs out a pair of curled leather moccasins from her crowded closet.
She has pictures and statues of wolves all over her walls and shelves coated with duts intermingled with the crystals and other artifacts of her Cherokee heritage. "The wolf is my spirit animal," she says fingering a dusty photo of a wolf pup she raised.
"What is my spirit animal mommy?" her daughter asks, desperate to engage in something that gives her a sense of belonging. "Oh hell I dunno. You gotta go through a whole ceremony to find that out. Like this here eagle feather was presented to me by a medicine man when I went through ceremony." She carefully lifted an eagle feather down from its dusty place on her shelf. "I always knew it was wolf though."
Was I doing "therapy?" It didn't seem like it. I was the learner and Mae was the knower.
I took her daughter out into the rain. Blessed rain which cooled the earth and brought the smell of sage and grass so fully into my senses. Blessed rain that reminded me that the desert has beauty. We just have to look a little harder, like Mae when she made all those tirps out to the old Rawhide mines and the old abandoned mines outside of Fallon and looked for treasure in rocks that appeared to be so dead on the surface. Undderneath the graying, pocked crusts, were treasures of unfathomable beauty, with more aspects that the human eye could ascertain. Ancient and pulsating with the energy of millions of years of extreme heat and cold, they radiate beauty from behind such plain and simple exteriors.
Blessed rain that kisses the parched earth and liberates the scent of life in the sage and grasses. Blessed rocks that hold the energy of life itself. Nature teaches me today that nothing can be ascertained and appreciated without the patience to liberate potential.
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
Rescuing Psychotherapy - July 2010-White Woman Boots
The vessel has been built and has been pushed into the water. Sierra Agape Center was incorporated on May 13th but I only just got the notification. It is early July and I am trying to balance my work in this community with contract work that earns a steadier income. The contract work takes me into the homes of families who have little money and whose children often speak the language of despair. As the unwitting carriers of the trouble for the whole family, they behave accordingly and of course, are then identified as "the trouble." I travel in my little car around Reno and out into the desert into the towns where white people have left their usual mark upon the Native Americans. The shacks pushed into dried up corners called "reservations" where I feel a palpable emptiness for which I always feel partially responsible. Surprisingly,the families warm up to me after only an hour or so. Postures soften as I acknowledge my whiteness and ask permission to enter into the protected areas of the family's history. I suspend everything I am told about each family by social workers, child protective services and probation officers; it's always the same slant. They often speak of the children as if they are disease carriers who have no right to be obstinate, angry and defiant. They speak of twelve year old girls as if they are the creators of destruction in their families without considering the amounts of garbage they are forced to contend with as a result of their parents decisions to use drugs, to choose violent partners or who are not equipped to offer loving, supportive guidance to the children they produce often from multiple fathers and mothers. The children are taken into the grim reaches of county or state mental health and socials services offices and issued diagnoses, given psychotropic medications, and sentenced to therapy to improve their behavior. As one of the therapists assigned to cases like these, I walk tenderly, realizing that I will look into the eyes of children and adolescents who feel silenced, and whose hearts and stomachs hold unarticulated rage and hurt at being identified as "the trouble." And I will look into the eyes of parents whose shame or lack of insight prevents them from seeing how much sense it makes that their children are angry, depressed and teetering on the edge of implosion. My daily practice of meditation may be helping me sit steady as an old oak as I listen to a 31 year-old Mexican woman, pregnant for the third time speak to her barely 13 year-old daughter. Her daughter was removed from her home because of her meth and alcohol use which resulted in a DUI. Her son, then 4 and her daughter, then 10, were both removed and placed in foster homes. Her daughter has been back home for two weeks. The mother does not understand why her daughter, now physically developed beyond what 13 year old girls looked like before hormones were injected into our food sources, is angry and beligerent. She threatens to pick up the phone and call the CPS social worker and have her daughter dragged off to a holding facility for foster children. I watch the girls eyes fill with tears as she struggles to maintain the facade of anger and toughness behind which she feels at least some power over herself. "Go ahead, I don't care," she says chewing on a plastic bottle cap. The girl's eyes are heavily made up. She wears multiple pieces of decoration pierced through her ears, nose and bottom lip. Her mother blames the girl for having sexual intercourse with a man twice her age and for giving blow jobs to guys in movie theatres, calling her a 'ho. I take a breath and speak, trying to channel what this barely out of little girl-hood teenager must be feeling. I remind the mother that twelve year-old girls cannot make informed decisions and "choose" to have intercourse with older men even if they think they can. They are victims of sexual assault, coercion and rape. They do not know how to say "no" to offers of attention in any form is what they are so hungry for. I check in with the girl to see if she resonates. Am I echoing her or am I echoing myself? Or both? Do we, despite the abyss in age and ethnicity between us, share at some bone deep level the same pain and emptiness? She catches my eye and I see myself. She sees herself in me and she allows a slight smile.
On the other side of "planet therapy," in a town far away, I see a white, upper middle class family who has a facade of its own now crumbling into ruin. Once financially solvent, this family is now looking into the unfamiliar chambers of bankruptcy court. Although the SUV's and boats are still in the driveway of their luxurious home, the appearances defy the realities. Their 16 year-old son, the eldest of their four children, a star skier and the pride of the family made a u-turn when he was about 13 and began to deviate from his proscribed path. He kept it well hidden that he was molested by a coach as boys often do. Instead, he began to find ways to get away from the thoughts and memories. His favorite way was to smoke a lot of marijuana. His family, disappointed and dismayed that he seemed to be self-destructing and ruining his chances to become an Olympian, did what most parents do when they feel loss of control. They tightened up and cracked down in a frightened and frantic effort to keep him from klling himself. More structure, anything to stop the behavior. Predictably, the more they tightened, the more angry and defiant he became. The secret he kept began to bloat with its own toxicity and like a virulent, vicious tumor, it wound its way into the boy's mind, his stomach, his heart and his soul. His behavior became darker and infected the family to the degree that they just wanted him to go away somewhere and be healed of his addiction and behavior.
Several visits to juvenile detention centers, various camps, treatment facilities, begging, pleading and a succession of therapists only had the effect of intensifying his desire to avoid reality. In my visits with children and adolescents who have spent time in juvenile detention centers, none say their experiences taught them how to love themselves more or how to love others, envision a future free of violence and drugs or be a part of transforming a world that has silenced them and crushed their imaginations. While there are some adolescents whose lives have been so informed by insitutionalization that they may never habituate to anything else, I have only seen those whose toughness and anger belie hearts aching for some softness and a place to let their guard down. Each boy on my caseload, all of whom are on parole from places like China Springs or other juvenile detention facilities far out in the deserts of Nevada, tell me they want to be of help to younger boys headed down the same road. In the words of one who first saw the walls of a juvenile prison at the age of twelve and is now 18, "I feel real protective, you know. I wanna tell 'em, you know, it ain't cool to be locked up. It's not what you think. It's bad man...you don't learn nothin' in there except to be more angry...how to kill or be more like...violent...you know?"
Yes, I know.
On the other side of "planet therapy," in a town far away, I see a white, upper middle class family who has a facade of its own now crumbling into ruin. Once financially solvent, this family is now looking into the unfamiliar chambers of bankruptcy court. Although the SUV's and boats are still in the driveway of their luxurious home, the appearances defy the realities. Their 16 year-old son, the eldest of their four children, a star skier and the pride of the family made a u-turn when he was about 13 and began to deviate from his proscribed path. He kept it well hidden that he was molested by a coach as boys often do. Instead, he began to find ways to get away from the thoughts and memories. His favorite way was to smoke a lot of marijuana. His family, disappointed and dismayed that he seemed to be self-destructing and ruining his chances to become an Olympian, did what most parents do when they feel loss of control. They tightened up and cracked down in a frightened and frantic effort to keep him from klling himself. More structure, anything to stop the behavior. Predictably, the more they tightened, the more angry and defiant he became. The secret he kept began to bloat with its own toxicity and like a virulent, vicious tumor, it wound its way into the boy's mind, his stomach, his heart and his soul. His behavior became darker and infected the family to the degree that they just wanted him to go away somewhere and be healed of his addiction and behavior.
Several visits to juvenile detention centers, various camps, treatment facilities, begging, pleading and a succession of therapists only had the effect of intensifying his desire to avoid reality. In my visits with children and adolescents who have spent time in juvenile detention centers, none say their experiences taught them how to love themselves more or how to love others, envision a future free of violence and drugs or be a part of transforming a world that has silenced them and crushed their imaginations. While there are some adolescents whose lives have been so informed by insitutionalization that they may never habituate to anything else, I have only seen those whose toughness and anger belie hearts aching for some softness and a place to let their guard down. Each boy on my caseload, all of whom are on parole from places like China Springs or other juvenile detention facilities far out in the deserts of Nevada, tell me they want to be of help to younger boys headed down the same road. In the words of one who first saw the walls of a juvenile prison at the age of twelve and is now 18, "I feel real protective, you know. I wanna tell 'em, you know, it ain't cool to be locked up. It's not what you think. It's bad man...you don't learn nothin' in there except to be more angry...how to kill or be more like...violent...you know?"
Yes, I know.
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