A. Homes - In A Country Of Mothers

At two in the morning, Claire stood at the kitchen counter, waiting for water to boil, going over notes for a lecture she was supposed to give next week on anxiety attacks and their attachment to loss.

It was Claire’s opinion that anxiety attacks were like allergic reactions. They symbolized the body’s insistence on preserving life and occurred in response to direct-conscious or indirect-unconscious experiences. Situations exposing the patient to death and/or loss — the primal-infantile equivalent of separation — resulted in the patient facing extinction, the feared death of the self, and caused an overwhelming flood of response, a chemical pinball racing through the body, bouncing off nerve receptors, the repetitious, ricocheting ding-dinging driving the score higher and higher. Pulse rises, palms sweat, pupils become hypersensitive to light, breathing becomes shallow and rapid. These signals attract the victim’s attention, alerting him or, more likely, her to the state of the body and mind.

The primal fear of being abandoned was the trigger. Claire imagined apes in the jungle separated from their group having anxiety attacks and becoming ferocious. Unarticulated anxiety existed in everything, Claire wrote; and unfortunately, because it is not in keeping with our conception of what is normal, we are not trained to express our anxious urges. She figured that people were supposed to live in groups and were not programmed for extreme independent behavior. She thought back to an internship she had at Hopkins, when she was finally getting her B.S. She worked in a clinic, interviewing potential candidates for surgical sex reassignment. Often the men who had sex-change surgery became depressed and suicidal. Years after Claire left for New York, Hopkins stopped performing the surgery. All along, Claire had suspected that the depression was the result of severe anxiety stemming from a decision to reject the tribe of birth. And although many of the men saw their surgery as a welcoming of the true self, their core self could not be separated from its historical past, ultimately resulting in a rejection of the self. And so on … Claire stood at the kitchen counter writing for two and a half hours in the middle of the night, drinking cup after cup of instant coffee, thinking each one was the last.

At six Adam climbed into their bed and wedged himself between Claire and Sam. Claire refused to let on that she was awake. It was Sam’s turn; that’s what marriage and family life were supposed to be about, alternating, taking turns. Finally Sam got up, turned on the television, and went back to sleep, leaving Adam at the foot of their bed in a cartoon trance.

At seven Claire woke Jake and made the kids breakfast. By the time she got to her office she was exhausted. Her ten o’clock buzzed at nine-fifty-three. Claire heard her patient crying in the waiting room, but waited the full seven minutes before opening the door, hoping the girl would stop.

“Come in,” Claire said, smiling.

Polly gathered up her purse, her own personal box of Kleenex, and her jacket. “I’m pregnant,” she said before she even sat down. “I can’t believe he did this to me.”

“Are you sure?” Claire asked. It was her job to always remain calm. It was what was expected of her. The girl could get angry and scream right into Claire’s face, but that was part of the job as well, acting like a giant sponge. The trick was not to let it really soak in.

“Positive,” Polly said. “He came over Monday night and got the rest of his stuff and yesterday I realized I’ve been feeling kind of strange, so I bought one of those kits and it was positive, so I went back and bought a different kind and it was positive, and then I went to the doctor and he said definitely.”

“What are you thinking of doing?”

Polly glared at her. “Obviously, I can’t rely on Phil.”

Claire was listening more to the subtext of what Polly was saying rather than focusing on the actual words.

“I can’t rely on Phil,” she said. (Or you, she meant.) ‘I’ll have to deal with it on my own.” (I don’t need your help anyway.)

“I’ll just go and take care of it. I’ll get rid of it.” (And myself too.)

“It’s like poison in my body. I just want to scream.” (Fear and truth.)

“I want to scream.” (What would you do if I started screaming? If I sat here and howled? You’d do something, wouldn’t you? You’d kick me out, I know it.)

“The doctor gave me the number of a place to call.”

“How will you feel if you don’t have this baby?” Claire asked.

“It’s not a baby. It’s nothing.” Polly paused. (I can’t deal with it, therefore I deny it.) “Are you telling me I shouldn’t have an abortion?”

Claire imagined telling Polly the truth according to Claire. It never ends. It’s a recurring nightmare where the baby you killed comes back and does all kinds of things to you. There’s the constant remembering; the possibility of not being able to get pregnant later. Guilt. You didn’t know that when you gave it up once, you gave it up forever. What if she had a baby later and there was something horribly wrong with it? What if it died? It might not be a baby now, but what about later?

“Sometimes,” Claire finally said, “it’s not as simple as getting it over with. People have feelings they may not recognize until later. There can be aftereffects, emotional and otherwise.”

“You’re scaring me,” the girl said.

Claire looked at Polly and remembered when she’d first come in. There were patients Claire looked forward to seeing and others that seemed less important; Polly fell into the second group — the unloved. It wasn’t that Claire hated her; but there were others she enjoyed far more. Claire thought she worked hardest with the ones she liked least and was probably less effective with clients she liked because she was too much like a friend, too easy.

“It’s not my intention to frighten you.”

“I cannot have this baby. I don’t want a baby!” Polly screamed. “Change the subject.”

“You’re very angry.” Part of Claire’s job was to point out the obvious.

“That’s right. I’m pissed off. You’re making me feel like I’m doing something wrong, like I’m screwing up my whole life.”

“How am I making you feel like you’re doing something wrong?”

“You’re asking a million questions. I don’t know what to say to make you happy.”

“You don’t have to make me happy. You have to decide what you want.”

“Do I look like I’m in a position to become someone’s mother?”

“Is there someone who could go to the clinic with you?”

“You know I don’t have any friends anymore. Phil made me get rid of them. We already talked about that.”

“What about a relative? Don’t you have a cousin in town?”

“I just told you, I don’t want anyone to know.” Polly started crying again. “I can’t believe this is happening to me. A month ago I was talking about getting married — now I’m sitting here, I don’t even have a boyfriend, and I’m pregnant.”

Watching someone cry was one of Claire’s least favorite moments. She often had the urge to comfort her patients — to squeeze their shoulders, pat them on the back, whatever was necessary — but she knew they had to cry alone. Giving the patient an opportunity to let go was more important than immediate pain relief, so she taught herself to sit like stone when the tears came. Sometimes she handed the patient a tissue, and it came across as a gesture of concern. With certain patients — like Polly — who cried all the time, Claire got frustrated, although she tried not to let on. They came into the office and the first thing they did was burst into tears, every session, for months on end, years. What did they get out of it — release? An excuse not to talk about something? As far as Claire was concerned, the prognosis for a constant crier was not good.