The Long Journey Home (26 page)

“Poor John,” Ruth had said to Dr. Turcotte. “He needs her so. This is cruel.”

We were sitting together in Dr. Turcotte’s office. He’d asked her to come talk with him. Dr. Turcotte said that her support of John’s pressuring me to come back to him was undermining his work to effect a safe separation.

He looked at Ruth and retorted: “If you’re nursing a baby and he begins to bite your nipple off with his teeth, you better get your breast out of his mouth in a hurry.”

That was the last time Ruth accompanied me to his office.

Shortly after my release from the hospital, Ruth and I leaned against my car parked in her driveway and smoked cigarettes, while Chris and Tommy chased each other around the yard. She told me that I was much too involved with Dr. Turcotte, and that she thought I was either the sanest or the most insane person she’d ever known and she couldn’t tell which. Then she told me about how once as a volunteer in the state hospital she was engaged in a conversation with someone she assumed to be a staff member. The conversation was interesting, and she had been enjoying it until an orderly came to take the patient to the dining hall for lunch. Ruth was so horrified that she’d not been able to tell a patient from a staff member that she never went back to the hospital.

I assumed she was telling me that she was afraid of me. I called Chris and we went home.

I remember one last phone conversation with her. I told her I had begun to write poetry and read her my latest poem. She said it made her think of Carl Sandburg. She was polite and reserved. She said it was a shame I wasn’t painting. She never called me again, nor did I call her. My son and I had each lost one of our best friends.

Now I was back living in the Shutesbury house with John, from whom I’d tried to get away for years. When I was in the hospital, Dr. Turcotte had brought John with him so I could discharge my anger toward John just as he had done with me when he was in the motel. Even though it was made of anger, the emotional bond between John and me was growing stronger. My pain was so great that I was willing to do almost anything to rid myself of it. If expressing anger at John was what the doctor ordered, expressing anger was what I did.

I stayed in my apartment for a few weeks after I left the hospital before moving back into the house with John. He and I continued to go together to Dr. Turcotte’s office. Usually the doctor saw John for quite a long time before inviting me to join them. Then he would encourage me to express anger toward John. Often I didn’t feel anger, I just felt depressed. But, with the doctor’s encouragement, I would try to find something to express anger toward John about.

Then he would instruct John to say: “Margaret, your anger is beautiful.”

That angered me most of all. I wanted John to speak for himself. He looked like a puppet mouthing the doctor’s words while maintaining an absolutely blank face or sometimes a face twisted with a mixture of pain and rage. But I too was following Dr. Turcotte’s instructions; I too was a puppet.

“What are you feeling now, John?” the doctor always asked. John always replied that he wasn’t feeling “much of anything.”

More and more I felt that Dr. Turcotte was focused on getting John and me back together. A whole family was involved. Of course it would be better for our sons if John and I could get along, if we could remain a family.

But—

The word hung heavy in the air.

My depression made me almost totally dysfunctional. I didn’t know how I would be able to cope with Chris and getting him to and from school. Going to the Laundromat felt like an impossible task. And I was grieving over the loss of Paula, who no longer called me at all. More and more intensely I felt John’s pressure to “come home.” Since he’d been working with Dr. Turcotte, his behavior
had
improved. More important, he had actually taken all the anger I’d hurled at him. Maybe we could find a way to live together after all. Maybe if we built an addition onto the house, a place I could call my own … Dr. Turcotte had given me hope that even my marriage to John might work, that we together with the children might truly become a healed and whole family.

With the great loss of confidence in my sanity, feeling the stigma of mental illness, and brokenhearted by both the loss of my friends and Chris’s, I went home to John. I went home to months of depression so severe that I was hardly able to get out of bed.

One afternoon Chris came home from school to tell me that Paula’s son Bob had told him he was no longer permitted to play with him because his mother was “mental.” Chris was devastated. He and Bob had played at our house or at Bob’s several days out of every week ever since we’d lived in Shutesbury. I couldn’t bear to see his pain when I was helpless to do anything to comfort him.

All the years of friendship between the boys had dissolved overnight. I struggled between feeling terribly hurt by Paula and feeling guilt for having had the psychotic break. Paula’s first husband, Tom, a racing-car driver, had been killed in a car crash. She’d told me there were times she was barely able to function. I remembered the phone calls when she would talk about looking in the bathroom mirror while watching her image slowly dissolving into smoke. Once she called frantic, saying that the trees outside her window had begun to walk across her backyard. I listened, thinking of
Macbeth
and “Birnam Wood do come to Dunsinane,” a soldier hidden behind each moving bough. I wondered what threats hid behind the walking trees in Paula’s yard. I asked her to tell me more about the walking trees, and listened until she had talked herself back into a calmer place.

“You really should go back to school and become a therapist, Margaret. You’re so good,” she’d often said to me.

“No,” I’d always replied. “I want to be a writer and a teacher of creative writing. I don’t want to be a therapist.”

But now I was “mental.” Chris and I were untouchables. The years of friendship were over. Paula ignored Chris’s feelings, and her fear about her own instability had hardened her heart against both of us. But understanding this did little to ease the pain.

L
ONELY FOR MY FRIENDS AND STRUGGLING WITH DEPRESSION
, I
FOCUSED
on writing and in the writing found a renewed sense of life. Despite all my self-doubt and confusion, this much I felt certain of: I was a writer. It was the clearest sense of my identity that I had ever had.

Much of what I had to write was painful. Knowing that I would be tempted to find excuses to avoid the pain, I made an agreement with myself. Monday through Friday, just as soon as the boys and John left for school, while breakfast dishes went unwashed, beds unmade, furniture undusted, I devoted three hours to writing. If words wouldn’t come, then I sat and stared at the paper until an image finally rose from its blank white like something long submerged in the sludge on an old pond’s bottom.

Sometimes what emerged was a phrase, as in,
This is the season of the rain
, when I remembered a slide taken of Chris and me on a sacrificial altar near the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacán in Mexico during the rainy season. Sometimes a compelling rhythm came into my mind so strongly that I followed it as if I were writing lyrics to someone else’s song. Sometimes an image would emerge like that of Mother buttoning my Roman sandals with a buttonhook, or the image of the old battered teakettle hissing and steaming on the
woodstove in Granddaddy’s house. Most of the images were from my childhood.

One day, while lying on my bed, suspended between wakefulness and sleep, I became aware that to unlock my creativity as a writer, I had to connect with the scared little girl inside me, the little girl fighting to hold her feelings inside in order to behave the way her mother wanted her to, the little girl who, even after all those years, tugged at my heart with her immeasurable loneliness.

Perhaps the dream that had told me I was a writer had also given me this information about the connection between creativity and childhood. But how was I to connect with the child when I could hardly remember my childhood at all? This question was on my mind when I lay down that afternoon and began to try to remember. How does one remember what one has forgotten for so long, what has been shoved behind the years and years of living away from the South, away from my family of origin? How could I get through and behind the psychotic visions and newfound rage to find the child?

The creative drive let loose must be like that of a homing pigeon set free on a foreign shore. It must know deep inside its being where home is and how to get there. That impulse in me that wanted to write, that
was
a writer, had been set free and was looking for its source. Somehow I knew that the source lay in childhood.

The afternoon was quiet. Sunlight fell through the glass doors onto my half-asleep body as I began to seem to float backward toward childhood, shadowed images glimpsed in the periphery of my vision. I felt my mind opening like the wings of a magnificent butterfly, all pattern and color, grace and fragility. It was as if time was expansive and moving, yet as flat and still as a broad field in which I could walk or—like a butterfly—move from blossom to blossom, from blade to leaf. Childhood images came and went. Something was growing in my mind, and, while I didn’t know what it was, I lay warm in the sunlight, letting it take form.

When I got up, I went to my desk and wrote “The Child Wakes,” a poem that was included in my first book. Other poems and prose
poems were written in the same way—by lying down and allowing myself to go into what seemed to be a semi-hypnotic state, freeing my mind to release whatever images or memories the quiet gave me.

In the quietness and stillness I was finding myself.

While my psychotic episode in 1971 was the longest and most terrible of all, it was during that episode that I
came to myself
as a writer. Pain like a blade slashed through my brain, releasing not only memories of childhood, but memories of my adolescent attempts at writing as well. I remembered that I had written a poem about my sister that began:
While other children run in fields of daisies and in sand / I’ve often watched her longing eyes and her clenched hands
. I had hoped Mother would like the poem. I’d imagined her sending it off to the cerebral palsy newsletter that she subscribed to. Maybe they would even publish it. But Mother responded to it with her “That’s nice” comment used to dismiss anything that I shared with her that didn’t really matter to her.

Books were one of the most important things in Mother’s world. She loved good writing. But what I wrote either upset her or seemed to fail to touch her. I wrote a long poem that ended with the lines

This last poem was an attempt to find a way to express myself with words and images that would be inaccessible to Mother. It was also written to be mysterious, like the poetry of T. S. Eliot. I’d been reading his poetry and, without understanding it, loved it just as I did my favorite classical music. In the state hospital, too, I’d remembered Mother’s invasion of my private diary and her extreme upset
with me, and how—except for the few poems—I stopped writing then. I was fifteen years old.

But my reason for ceasing to write went deeper than Mother’s reaction to my diary. It went back to the shame I’d thought so much about but had never understood. It was the shame that had made me feel that I had absolutely nothing worth writing about, nothing that anyone would ever want to read. Nothing that really mattered.

After the psychotic experience, the reason for that old shame didn’t matter so much. And unlike my uncertainties and questions about painting, my reasons for writing were quite clear: I wrote because I was a writer. I wrote to find out what my feelings and thoughts were, and to put those thoughts and feelings into forms that would allow me not only to hold them consciously and sanely but to express them to others. I wrote to be myself.

Sometimes I was afraid of what the writing might reveal about me. What if I discovered something unbearably bad about myself? What if I discovered I was bisexual or a lesbian after all? Fear haunted me. Despite it, I wrote. And through writing I discovered a new and deeper understanding of and compassion for my humanity, and for all humanity.

Suzanne and I were graduate students at the University of Massachusetts, both working toward our MFA degrees in creative writing. We were both around forty, both married with children. Suzanne had two girls. I had two boys. John was a professor in the philosophy department at the university. Her husband, Bob, in human services, was director of an Amherst community-living complex. There were seemingly unsolvable administrative problems in the organization, and Bob spent half his time struggling with those, and the other half trying to come up with a totally new profession in middle age. John
was struggling with the recurring and potentially crippling arthritis that had flared up again after several years of respite. Though he’d finally stopped drinking, he still often behaved as if he was drunk. One night he slung the candlesticks across the dining room because I hadn’t baked corn bread.

Suzanne and I were both in crisis.

Suzanne had written off and on all her life. I’d hardly written at all until the dream followed by the psychotic episode in 1971 reminded me that I was a writer. Since that time I’d written constantly, with confident determination. Now we were both looking forward to receiving our MFAs. Suzanne was an organizer, involved in the many lives of the people in the housing complex. I was a more private person, battling chronic depression and episodes of psychosis. I spent most of my energy trying to survive. Often I fought panic as I felt that I’d explode, burst through my skin. Other times I felt like all the protective tissue had been stripped off every nerve in my body. Daily I confronted the stigma of mental illness. I also daily experienced more deeply new feelings of self-discovery.