When I was about the age my kids are now, my family had been undergoing upheaval for a few years. We uprooted in early 1975 from our Phoenix home, where I’d been since birth, and transplanted to Pittsburgh, in relation to my father’s work for the aluminum-fabrication company Alcoa. We were just getting semi-adjusted to our new life there in Highland Park when, in summer 1976, my father left my mother (and therefore also his two children) for a secretary he knew at work.

I remember 1976 primarily as the year my parents’ marriage dissolved, the year of our nation’s bicentennial, and the year I began to behave badly at school, brimming with anger and rage I didn’t understand. Ordinarily a cheerful and bright child, I’m told, I became something of an occasional beast with a nasty, stubborn temper.

The time-outs I received in kindergarten are still etched in my memory, the most salient one resulting from a spat with a fellow student over a particular magenta crayon. I recall crayon colors figuring so prominently at that age, for some reason; the magenta crayon was a coveted one, and it was almost as though we children could taste their hues as delicious, varying flavors. Vibrant colors stood in for other cheerful things lacking in my life, such as at home, where my mother’s natural buoyancy flagged deeply for a long time, and everything seemed shrouded in shades of brown, rusty orange and avocado green, including the wall paint, the couch upholstery, the dining room furniture and the wall of cork.

Somewhere in this time period, my mother made the admittedly poor decision to leave me home alone for a short time while she went out to do an errand. She had left chicken simmering in a pot of water on the stove, but neglected to tell me to leave it alone and that she had done it intentionally. Being five, my eye level was at about the stovetop, or just below. I have a visceral memory of standing there staring at the blue gas flames gently licking the bottom of the pot while steam, frothy bubbles and chicken-smell wafted aggressively from the slightly askew pot lid. I wondered if there was anything I should do about it, and felt paralyzed for an eternity; in the end I did nothing, and my mother came home, and I didn’t express my feelings about the incident until years later as an adult.

Such a numbness descended upon me during these intense months, which stretched to years, that I lost much ability to express how I felt, even when I was concerned for my safety; this is possibly why, at the age of five, I was taken to see a therapist, which I took to mean that I was somehow the source of the problem in the home or at school.

No amount of books about divorce and audio tapes of I’m OK, You’re OK and its cousin, TA for Tots, could convince me that the adults in my life didn’t completely blame me somehow for things crumbling apart.

My certain knowledge simmered silently inside just like the chicken boiling on the stove, and I refused any cooperation with the therapist. She played games with me to try to crack my code, like the inane Trouble, with its annoying loud pop whenever you press the clear plastic dome to roll the dice. Being a game of luck, the experience only sealed my rage further inside, as the therapist would win and watch me squirm like a pinned butterfly with the anxiety of losing in such a frivolous, pointless exercise where no strategy helped me—at the age of five.

Was I supposed to be good at losing? Was it really any mystery why I was so pissed off at the world? Are there other five-year-olds who lose well, and brush it all off, and say something chipper afterwards?

Instead, losing only reminded me further of loss, and things out of my hands, beyond my influence, like my parents’ relationship.

It was as though the therapist’s job was to be there for me, observing smugly as I struggled and failed to maintain composure. If I handled losing well, it was because I was smothering my true feelings, which would have prompted me to attack the therapist physically and perhaps attempt strangulation; and in any case my self-control was merely a demonstration, in the condescending adult view, of my own stubbornness and unwillingness to “let go” of my feelings. If handled losing badly, it was more opportunity for the therapist to point out how bad I was at losing, and to regard me individually with the infuriating, calm condescension that extracted me, the child, out of context of them, the dysfunctional family with an absent, withdrawn, emotionally-abusive alcoholic father.

Did I need help? Yes. But what could possibly help me? There was seemingly little to “fix.”

The therapist’s approach only cemented my childhood view, which extended well into my adult years and through more than one therapist, that therapy was pointless, lazy and over-simplistic, because it attempted to isolate a person from what is potentially and often a problem having to do with relationships. Relationships, too, essentially did not work; people were unreliable and mostly just selfish beings trying to do their best and often not bothering to ask if what they were doing was of any good or not. And so we proceed through life, stumblingly, or so I thought, in whatever ways a young child captures such thinking, and I felt mostly like a victim, trapped.

I did not have a mental or emotional defect. I had a spiritual crisis, because the family was falling apart. And yet no one seemed interested in salvaging the family per se, with or without both parents involved, or in analyzing it to see what could be changed to help meet the needs of each and all. The realization of the therapist that indeed, I was upset, feeling as though there was nothing within reach that I could master or enjoy—essential to a child’s healthy development—was somehow cyclical, returning to itself to find no particular immediate solution. As my mother later remarked of my sessions with the well-meaning therapist, “You were beyond her.”

One exercise I enjoyed with the therapist was the doodle game. She would take a pad of blank paper, and with a pen she would make some random, brief doodle with her eyes closed. Then she would hand the pad over to me, along with the pen, and she would have me create some coherent drawing out of the doodle. Perhaps she saw through to the inner workings of my psyche with these doodles—learning, perhaps, that I was merely a bright, cheerful child underneath layers of suppressed frustration with my parents’ separation and divorce after a recent move to a city that disoriented the family—but I saw these exercises as a chance to do one of my favorite things, simply drawing. It was a much preferred activity to the pop-crack and luck-of-the-draw stupidity of Trouble.

My parents attempted couples therapy themselves for a while, but the tale I have heard was that it did not succeed, maybe because one person was striving and the other had given up.

Before he left the family, my father had seemingly spent a perhaps dull, depressed winter crafting glass tumblers out of recycled green glass beer bottles that marked the bicentennial. We kids were supposed to think this was pretty cool, but in my memory he did not spend much time smoothing the lip of the glasses, and I was always afraid of cutting myself trying to drink out of them. The emblems on the glasses were patriotic as well as manly, some celebrating the nation’s independence and others featuring the names of football teams. When he left, my father did not take these glasses with him, but he perhaps regarded them as a kind of gift we could remember him by.

Not long after he was out of the house, he invited my older brother and me to come to his new second-floor apartment in Shadyside, a short drive from our house in Highland Park. He did not tell us that the secretary would be there, but instead sort of surprised us with her. She sat on a rocking chair in the living room of the small apartment, a room that bizarrely would, years later, become part of my future step-sister’s bedroom suite in a separate iteration of my father’s marriages, with other people occupying the small apartment building in the intervening years. On this day, she sat there and quietly and unsmilingly greeted us, and to make things easier, my father offered sour hard candies from a tin in the cabinet in the dreary kitchen.

We endured the visit in the tiny place, and my mother came to pick us up a few hours later—maybe it was even the next day. My father sent us downstairs perhaps unescorted. Somehow back to my cheerful self, I’m told I asked my mother, “Have you met Dad’s new girlfriend?” The day evidently began with a lingering hope on my mother’s part that things would still work out, since she didn’t know about the secretary either, but I somehow helped to seal the deal with my remark; years later I learned about it, not remembering this at all. A small voice inside my adult head, recalling the terrible significance of magenta crayons, the outrage of Trouble, and the helplessness of simmering chicken, occasionally likes to say to itself, “See? Your fault.”

To be continued.

Posted by Heather B on 18 October 2007 at 8:17 pm.