There is an absence of what I have grown accustomed to: tension, uncertainty, fear. I am acutely aware of how, next to my Uncle, the world is a good place with good people and I am not something that has already been broken. I am eight-years-old and tired all the time. [. . .]

As anyone who has ever heard a black comic perform or listened to a rap song knows, we don’t do
humblebragging. When you are the bomb, you simply say so.[…]

My feelings didn’t shift, but my body did. I knelt beside you on our bed and brought your head to my shoulder. I repeated her message. But you already knew. You had seen my face change.[…]

Simian Immunodeficiency Virus adapted to live in the body of a person, and then the window was pried
open: open to spread through the villages of Cameroon, and then the rest of Africa, and then the world
beyond, until it found its way to a club in the suburbs of New Orleans and into the lifeblood of the man
who lived next door, my uncle.[…]

During childhood I heard the stories about the shtetls and the pogroms that escalated to become the
Holocaust where 6 million Jews—two thirds of the Jewish population in Europe— were killed for no other
reason than for being Jewish.[…]

In the middle of an IKEA showroom, I agonized over the transition between two sentences. I was wrestling with a second-grade assignment on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. While I knew any seven-year-old could cobble together two statements about Dr. King, bridging together two thoughts about his achievements with one seamless transition proved to be impossible for me. I treated the plywood desk as my own while I sulked in its Örfjäll swivel chair and stared at my elementary school homework with my head in my hands. Unaware that her only child was facing a literary crisis, my mother took her time as she flipped over price tags on the matching bedroom set. She was busy furniture-shopping for our new apartment. I got up from my desk to interrupt her and tugged on her shirt for help.

“Add the word ‘hence’,” she answered. Then, she glanced at the assignment again to suggest a more age-appropriate solution, “Or even ‘henceforth’.”

“What’s that mean?”

“It’s like, uhm…” After a long pause, she handed me back my paper and sighed, “Just write it.”

Explanations were always difficult for Mom. Finding the right words to provide additional context often left her feeling vulnerable and easily frustrated. She was especially annoyed when she had to provide such explanations to her young, American-born daughter who only spoke English. My language would never be quite as seamless for her compared to her native tongue of Tagalog. Although my mom could speak English fluently, she still fumbled with pronunciations out loud as she confused her f’s and p’s—the fine line between foot and put being a classic example. She took long breaks between sentences as she searched her mind for the right phrases in her upcoming thought. She repeated nonsensical errors in her speech when they were left uncorrected. They even bled into my own imperfect English and became the reason why I thought easy over was my favorite style of eggs.

 

Somewhere between fumbled words, botched sayings, and foreign accents, my mother and I were destined to be lost in translation. While there were certain lessons in language she’d be willing to teach, explaining the terminology behind the complexities of love was never one of them.

 

My mom’s written English was an entirely different story. She gravitated toward lengthy formalities and embraced vocabulary that most people would find verbose. It was as if each written document was an opportunity to prove her English was up to par. She could take time articulating her thoughts and flaunting her fluency. In the safety of her handwritten notes, no reader could criticize her mistakes or fault her for having an accent. So, in addition to hence, henceforth, and other advanced adverbs, my mom would teach me to write formally as well. Every time Father’s Day, Christmas, or my dad’s birthday rolled around, she would pick out a card for him. She’d then instruct me to pen the salutation, “Write, ‘Dear Dad’.” After a brief pause, she’d correct herself, “‘Dearest Dad’.” The first few attempts included “Father,” and as she stared at the end of the card, I could practically hear her debating the use of “Cordially” in her head. When signing the card, I’d ask my mom if she wanted me to include her name. She’d politely decline with a shy smile. Her response always confused me, and in the early years of their separation, I think it confused her too.

Like many IKEA shoppers, Mom was living on her own for the first time in America. Because, like one out of every two American couples, she was ending a marriage. While the separation should have upset me, I was more concerned with the details of my paper on Dr. King. At seven years old, I easily adapted to our new normal because my parents hardly spoke about their problems. I took my dad at his word when he told me the change was temporary, and I simply assumed my mom’s silence was her way of agreeing with him. While I was confused when she moved into her new apartment, I took comfort in the reassurance I had been given and focused on other matters at hand. After all, Mom needed my help with picking out new furniture.

The apartment had a decent amount of space to fill as it boasted two bedrooms, a sizeable living room, a terrace, and a kitchen that was much larger than the one in our original apartment where Dad still lived. However, our new Grand Concourse neighborhood seemed different from our former Riverdale home. There, we lived in a co-op that came equipped with a kids’ playground and a modest garden where our elderly Jewish neighbors would sit and quietly gossip with their nurse aides. Mom’s new apartment was in a walk-up with no amenities, and we only had one neighbor named Victoria. A kind woman whose bright blue eyes amplified her sadness while alcohol stained her breath. I’d usually hear her fighting with her husband downstairs, but occasionally she’d come up to our apartment to talk to Mom and ask her for help. Sometimes she’d cry, other times she’d have bruises, but every time, she’d go back to her husband.

Mom eventually stopped allowing Victoria to visit. It became too difficult for her to support a new neighbor while being in the thick of her own marital issues. While I understood that much about the situation, I still wanted to know the details. When I asked my mom to explain the circumstances, she refused. For one thing, the pronunciation of the word circumstances always tripped her up. She’d pronounce the “I” in the first syllable as “ɪr” rather than “ər” so that it sounded more like searcumstances. After avoiding that word, she then told me I was too young to understand such adult topics. These were including but not limited to why married people fight, why they stay together, and why they don’t. She shifted the conversation by asking me if I could higher the volume and close the doors so her cooking didn’t smell the room. She’d leave the conversation at that and go back to preparing our dinner. In turn, I’d make sure the bedroom doors were closed and then raised the volume on our TV to drown out the sounds of Victoria and her husband as they either fought or loudly made up.

Coming back from IKEA, Mom and I lugged our new furniture up the second-floor walk-up. We left the packages of disassembled pieces scattered on the living room floor for us to deal with later. Then, we collapsed onto her bed where my mother smiled and held me so tight. Without any words, I knew she was in a state of bliss. The separation was the start of a life that she chose for herself, and the happiness it gave her was not lost on me. While our apartment may not have been in the perfect building or neighborhood, she took pride in the fact that it was ours. As we cuddled in her new bed, I was surprised when Mom prompted a language lesson. One that would be filled with explanations and translations that usually annoyed her.

“Do you want to learn my language?” she smiled.

“TAG-a-log?” My American-born tongue was too heavy on the “T” and elongated the first syllable, but I was intrigued. My father never wanted to teach me Tagalog. Also raised in America, he feared I would be teased at school like he was for adopting even an ounce of Philippine culture. He made sure my English was like his, smooth and free of any alarming accents. However, my mom presented her language as an opportunity rather than a burden. When I agreed to a lesson, she excitedly propped herself up on the bed and tried teaching me simple numbers.

“Can you say, ‘Isa’?” she asked.

“Ee-sah?”

“Good. Then, ‘dalawa’.”

“Da-LAH-wahhh,” I joked.

She repeated herself, “Dalawa!”

“Your language sounds funny,” I told her.

My mom made a few more reluctant attempts. Her foreign words, odd pronunciation, and strange-sounding syllables were only met with more teasing. It was the first and only time she ever tried teaching me her language. Although my immature responses were said with laughter, they managed to serve as an unforgiving echo of her new reality. She was a foreigner who was living on American soil. An immigrant who was on her own for the first time. A single-mother who was misunderstood by her only daughter. Mom would continue speaking imperfect English while teaching me written words that were several years above my grade level. She would do her best to downplay her accent in public. She would hand me the phone whenever she needed to order take-out. Every now and then I’d hear her speak to family members and certain friends in Tagalog, all the while never knowing what exactly she said.

During yet another round of furniture shopping, Mom explored our options in a nearby shopping mall as she crossed her fingers for a sale at Stern’s. Although I was warming up to our new apartment, I began to develop more questions about my parents’ marriage. I was hearing about a word called divorce that, unlike a separation, was permanent. It was gradually being used more and more along with other ominous terms like custody and attorneys. My family members repeated these expressions in whispers when they thought I wasn’t listening. Even my friends and classmates talked about it as their own parents showed concern. It seemed as if divorce was a bad word that wasn’t so much connected to my mother’s newfound happiness but more so to my father’s sadness and our family’s disbelief. While Mom tried her best to shield me from the complexities of marriage, she couldn’t contain my curiosity as the finality of our new normal began to sink in.

“Why are you and Dad getting divorced?”

My mother got quiet, not expecting the question to come in a parking lot during an afternoon shopping run. “It’s hard to explain,” she replied. I pouted in the front seat. I knew she wasn’t great at explanations, but I wanted an answer. Now seven-and-a-half years old, I deserved to know what was going on. “How about this,” she smiled, “I’ll tell you when you turn sixteen. Promise!” The white lie and allure of a grown-up birthday present was exactly what my mom needed to buy herself some time and to quell her young daughter’s growing curiosity. With child-like satisfaction, I agreed to her offer and held her hand as we walked to the mall.

Somewhere between fumbled words, botched sayings, and foreign accents, my mother and I were destined to be lost in translation. While there were certain lessons in language she’d be willing to teach, explaining the terminology behind the complexities of love was never one of them. While there would be a time when she finally spoke about irreconcilable differences, falling out of love, and other intricate phrases that shaped her marriage, these explanations never took place during my childhood. Or even on my sixteenth birthday, as promised. They happened well into my adulthood when factors, such as time, experience, and patience, would gradually mend our language barrier. Perhaps my mom could have explained things to me right then and there in the parking lot. Perhaps she could have written down the details with her eloquence and precision. But neither of those options were the choice she made. It wasn’t that the divorce and its adult terminologies were too difficult for an immigrant to teach. Rather, they were too painful for a single-mother to convey. Looking back on it, I’d like to believe my mom was simply trying her best to find the right words.

 

Kristen Gaerlan is an emerging writer and native New Yorker. Her home is in Brooklyn, her roots are in the Bronx, and the roots to her roots are in the Philippines. Her work has been featured in publications that include Bustle, Pop Sugar, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. She’s currently writing a memoir about Filipino-American assimilation.

Josef didn’t realize how little I thought about religion—how complete my lack of belief.

“Are you religious?” I asked on one of our New York subway trips. I wonder now why I asked. I didn’t have the slightest premonition. I was making a joke, teasing, the way I might have said, “So, are you secretly addicted to amphetamines? Biting long, slim, feminine necks? Plucking wolfsbane in the middle of the night?” I was tickling. Didn’t realize I was asking a bigger question than I knew. Wanted to see if he’d giggle or flinch. He did neither.

I couldn’t believe how great this guy was, so I thought there had to be something wrong with him. There wasn’t, although his answer threw me—almost literally. I remember clutching my subway seat as though I were afraid I’d hit the floor.

To my surprise he nodded calmly. “Yes,” he said.

Yes, he was religious? Had I heard him correctly? This might be weirder than wolfsbane. An affirmative answer was the last thing I expected. He was a graduate student living in L.A. and somehow that added up to secular—at least to me.

“Really?” I said, after I’d caught my breath. He explained he was Catholic and Bavarian—I had yet to learn how completely these two identities merged. He wanted kids, and so did I, but I hadn’t realized he’d want the kids to be Catholic. He was asking whether this was okay with me. His expression said he wasn’t kidding. I looked him over.

“Yes,” I said. “It’s okay.”

Given his personality, I’d be doing our children no harm. I got that if I were to object, the deal would be off. He couldn’t contemplate raising non-religious children. But I still thought of his religion as a harmless eccentricity, the expression of a deficit: a few more New York Philharmonic concerts, another Alvin Ailey performance, throw in a Swan Lake—and I’d convert him from Catholicism to culture, I assumed.

Dr. Sternbach said when dealing with a schizophrenic patient (he reassured me I wasn’t quite that bad, although, he pointed out often, my brother and father were), he would walk in and announce, “I’m God!” Then, my analyst claimed, the crazy person would trust him and listen to him.

I didn’t consider myself remotely religious. From my frosty heights of presumed superiority, I told myself I’d grown up in a middle-class New York family suffused with art, dance, theater, and psychoanalysis, while he had grown up in a tiny German village to parents whose Second World War experiences and dawn-to-dusk backbreaking farm labor left no room for consolations other than churchly. I figured he grew up the way my father did. Traveling preachers presented the only form of entertainment in Dad’s North Carolina town. No books, no movies, no art, no circuses—just fire-breathing Presbyterian ministers spouting gruesome depictions of hellfire. My father had shaken the dust of old-time religion off his feet when he moved to New York, diving into psychoanalysis almost as soon as he got there. Mom swam in soon after—the two were united by their doting, or scheming, psychoanalyst, who kept a tight grip, bringing in a colleague of her own to manage me the minute I hit adolescence.

Josef had Catholicism, but I had Dr. Sternbach.

My fiancé hadn’t grown up with visions of hellfire, but rather maypoles sporting Bavarian flags, baby clothes and baby bottles—the latter two pagan holdovers meant to encourage fertility. He described huge bonfires on summer solstice—he and his friends, in an inebriated state, leapt over them. Before that, on Walpurgisnacht, a young man could plant a decorated birch tree outside the window of a young woman he liked. The ceremony was technically about St. Walpurga, but that phallic tree was about fertility and witches, drinking and cavorting. Although, he confessed, he and five guys planted a tree in front of the window of a fat, homely girl because they wanted to make her feel better.

His descriptions made me think of Breughel’s The Kermess, especially in the William Carlos Williams version. Jolly, fat peasants dancing, drinking, and doing what my Chaucer professor said peasants do: have sex in the fields so the recently planted seeds get the right idea. For my husband-to-be, religion seemed a merry combination of official Catholic ritual—he drank that wine and took that wafer, under the watchful gaze of plaintive Madonnas and soulful Jesuses hanging from gory crucifixes—and happy-go-lucky paganism. The jolly mood of forgiveness, the singing, the lights, the candles, the gleeful baroque angels, the community, seemed the dominant themes.

I could go for all of those, I thought, in the dreamy unreality of unexpected pregnancy. For a moment, I considered the possibility of miracles, since I was forty-one. Practicality took over: Josef had a home, the likelihood of a full-time job, and the luck of German health insurance, which would extend to his bride. We were to enjoy two more successful pregnancies. To this day, I attribute them to champagne, sex, and our unconventional fertility specialist. Josef doesn’t.

A few weeks after I’d moved to Bavaria, there was the moment when he asked, “But you do believe there’s a God, right?”

Surprised, I put down my cup of tea.

“I’m an atheist!” Where had he gotten this idea? Had I somehow said this?

His eyes widened.

“But you said you believed in the teachings of Jesus!” I shifted in my seat. I had indeed said that, but the one thing had nothing to do with the other. Memories of playing “telephone” as a child were now flooding into my mind.

“Yes, I do, but I meant Jesus is a great philosopher, a great psychologist!” Josef put his hand on his heart.

“Please don’t tell the priest that.”

His eyes traveled to a flaw on the rim of my poly-fleece pullover; I’d gotten too close to a burner while cooking, and a little spot had melted away. You could barely see the burned part, but his thumb gripped it. A bit ruefully, he said, “This is what happens to people who don’t believe!”

“You don’t really mean that, do you?”

I’m not sure he didn’t.

“I hope you can feel God’s love,” he murmured after the mandatory meeting with other betrothed couples and a Catholic priest in a roomy church.

“I can feel your love!” I told him.

The priest, if I remember correctly, talked about finding one’s wife sexy even when she’s wearing an old granny nightgown. The Catholic doctor wearily remarked, “That was too much material to fight with!” He was okay with the pill, since no life had begun, but experienced moral qualms about the IUD, since it worked to destroy a zygote potentially implanting in the lining of the uterus. The church, said both priest and doctor, didn’t like homosexuals “because they don’t have babies! We want children.” On the plus side, they said sex was “the mirror of the marriage,” and since Josef and I were having sex around eight times a day, I figured we’d be fine. We rode home through sunny fields filled with hay bales and had a nice dinner.

*     *     *

As I settled into life in devastatingly quiet Bavaria, taking long walks through the woods, my thoughts got louder. Now I had time to write. But I couldn’t think of a thing to say. I did produce a few half-baked descriptions of my parents and growing-up years, but always, an angry, disapproving face appeared in my mind’s eye—the face of the psychoanalyst whose patient I’d been for decades, and whom I thought of as a father, if not a god. He had raised me, in the sense that I considered my four-to-five day-a-week sessions in his office the central experience of my life from ages fourteen to almost-forty. He knew everything. He said so. Occasionally, I thought him a little selfish, but I felt guilty thinking that. He had done so much for me. I was very grateful to him. He insisted I go to college and graduate school. I had wanted to study dance and theater. He called me his “masterpiece.”

He’d been wrong about Josef. He’d said Josef wasn’t interested in me. When Josef flew to New York just to see me, Dr. Sternbach told me not to sleep with him—Josef would surely never marry me if I did. I didn’t. It took another few years for Josef and me to get together.

Even so, I told myself, walking that ploughed field trail from the shining meadow into the piney woods, the baby a snoring bump on my chest in his bright-blue Snugli, Dr. Sternbach was just trying to protect me. He had put so much effort into me. He said so. He hadn’t wanted me to feel disappointed was all. My marriage was my reward, and the person to whom I would forever be grateful, Dr. Sternbach, had cured me so that I, unworthy though he knew I was, had still managed to get married.

“We don’t ask for perfect,” he had said, looking me over one day when I’d been crying about wanting to be married. I still had many problems, I knew, that he, with a frown and a wagging finger, had daily pointed out to me. He warned me to keep everything about myself and my crazy family a secret from my husband. I had been “a brat” but now I was passable.

*     *     *

If you were to tote up superstition for superstition, ritual for ritual, obsession for obsession, sin for sin, and god for god, my husband’s Catholic faith and my own hidebound devotion to a secular deity irrationally enraged as an old testament prophet, then my husband would come out ahead. Way ahead. His was a god of love, and a relaxed one. Yes, my husband observes Lent, that holiday right before Easter when religious Catholics give up something they really love in order to honor Christ’s forty days of fasting in the wilderness. Just the kind of holiday I used to think of as an unnatural torment for innocent people who don’t know Freud.

My husband always gives up peanuts and beer, his very favorite things. At first, I thought this a cruel thing to do to himself—so out of character.

“Except for special occasions,” he said, smiling. “And… some weekends.”

I was always relieved to see him crunching away in front of the TV, washing down his Lenten peanuts with a glass of Weizen.

Did I have anywhere near the same easygoing self-indulgence in my own religious observances?

Walking from the subway stop on 96^th and Broadway to Dr. Sternbach’s home office on 96^th and Central Park West four days a week, I developed the habit of chanting to myself, “Dr. Sternbach is always right,” and this consoled me, because I liked absolutes and so did he—his absolutely right and my absolutely wrong ways of doing things. I was miserable, but I had the solace of certainty. I feared uncertainty. If I didn’t believe in him, I thought, everything would fall apart. I made sure to chant “he-is-right” in order to prevent what a Puritan would call “backsliding.” I had a need to remind myself that he knew better. I must be wrong, wrong about the boys I wanted to kiss me, the jazz dance classes I loved, and alas, about ballet.

I believed, no matter how miserable it made me, that my psychoanalyst had healed me, not destroyed me. I might as well have been Sister Melissa of the order of Perpetual Humility, devoted to Saint Sigmund the All-Powerful.

“You are not a dancer!” he spat.

My analyst always said he was an atheist, and praised Freud’s atheism, so I read every single thing Freud ever wrote about religion.

None of it’s flattering. But it’s clear that if you don’t believe in the Oedipus complex, you cannot be admitted to the world of psychoanalysis—you remain forever in the outer darkness with the people who believe in religion instead. Naturally, I considered myself an atheist too—I followed Dr. Sternbach’s contempt for religion. Having faith in everything Dr. Sternbach said was just part of the psychoanalytic deal—the only way I could ever be healthy, he said.

I never admitted to myself that I’d put my psychoanalyst in the position of a god, or that he’d encouraged me to do so, even though I joked about doing so, or he did, in almost every session. A Viennese refugee from Hitler, he said I was psychotic.

It’s easy to believe something bad about yourself when you’re fourteen, and when the grown-up spouting such poppycock has an exotic accent. When I was first sent to him, I was desperate to do anything to get away from my father, who drank and threw things, my mother, whose girlish helplessness appealed to everyone but me, and my brother, whose real and imaginary friends frightened me. Dr. Sternbach said when dealing with a schizophrenic patient (he reassured me I wasn’t quite that bad, although, he pointed out often, my brother and father were), he would walk in and announce, “I’m God!” Then, my analyst claimed, the crazy person would trust him and listen to him.

I was just young enough or nutsy enough not to question him. Or if I did, he yelled so loudly that I learned not to repeat my mistake. He loved a story about entering his building on a cold day and running into a patient. As they waited for the elevator in the freezing lobby, she looked him up and down, remarking, “God doesn’t wear an overcoat.” My analyst repeated that anecdote often.

Mostly, he insisted he was always right. I believed him to the point that I chose a college in New York City because he told me I needed psychoanalysis so could not leave him. I believed him to the point that I didn’t apply for a Time magazine internship during my senior year in college because it would have interfered with sessions, and he refused to let me have sessions at any other hours than those convenient to him. When friends expressed surprise or shock at the amount of time I devoted to psychoanalysis or blanched at some remark he’d made that I found amusing and they did not, I brushed off objections. I told myself my analyst knew better. I was smug. My analyst and I: we were the initiated, the ones in the know. I believed him when he said, “I am the only one who can help you.”

Sometimes, now, I look at videos of women in polygamous cults in their identical pioneer-style pastel dresses and hairdos, all smiling, all saying they are happy. I wore my analyst’s ideas, assertions, beliefs. I buttoned them on tightly—I strapped myself into them. I thought I had no idea what I wanted because I didn’t dare think about ambitions he had warned me to forget. He had a therapeutic group, and all members sat quietly when he interrupted, or yelled, that they were wrong and he was right. His expressions of disgust, uninhibited and extreme, seem to have impressed us all as the natural anger of a Jehovah who had every right to tell us what to do. His ideas, his beliefs, his assertions, were righteous. Ours were worthless.

*     *     *

In a village not far from Eichstätt, where Josef’s brother and sister-in-law had a farm, Josef and I visited his old friend, the retired priest with whom he used to have a beer, and who was going to marry us. The priest asked, “So are you willing to raise your children as Christians? With the knowledge of Jesus?” I rearranged some definitions in my head, smiled at the priest, whose face was filled with expectant hope, and said, “Yes.” The look of rapture on his face in the moment that misleading answer fell from my lips astonished me. I felt homesick. I had visions of my children stepping into dark confessionals and being told to say Hail Marys if they’d masturbated. On the other hand, the old priest didn’t look the punitive sort—he now had such an ecstatic look that if he hadn’t been a Catholic old man, I could easily have envisioned him dancing the Hora.

“You don’t actually believe in the devil, do you?” I asked my husband as we made our way back to the car.

“Yes.”

“You mean a guy with horns and a tail?”

“Well, no, but we feel there is evil in the world, right?”

I could go with him on that. There was evil in the world. I decided to leave religion up to him. I remembered to make fish, or anything but meat, on Fridays, and discovered that baptisms and first communions seemed mainly occasions for big parties, good food, and presents.

“Daddy, will I get a camera?” was, to my relief, a pressing question of far greater interest than any doctrinal issue about Mary, Jesus or the Trinity.

Anytime a religious inquiry arose, I deferred to my husband: “Daddy knows about that! Ask him.”

A moment came when the kids wanted to know my religion. I admitted I’d been raised without any. When they pointedly asked what I believed, I confessed to atheism, remarking that Daddy and I had decided Catholicism was the best for them. Secretly, I wished our eldest would become a New York intellectual. Lo: he lives in Berlin and studies law.

“Mom, why didn’t you tell me there wasn’t a god?” he complained at about age sixteen. I started to say we didn’t actually know that, when he interrupted: “When I was ten, I thought there was something terribly wrong with me because I didn’t believe in God. You could have said something.”

And then I realized that I needn’t have worried—our children would make their own way, just like their Dad, who worried the most with our firstborn: “I wouldn’t want him to marry someone Jewish or Muslim.” That was too far from the true faith.

“You mean like you wouldn’t marry an atheist?” A look that was hard to interpret—a slight chagrin? being found out? embarrassment? guilt?—crossed his face. He grew up in a world where his Catholic saint’s day was a far bigger deal than his birthday, yet he and his brother both married non-religious Protestants.

Our younger two children went along with their first communions—they especially enjoyed choosing their costumes, my daughter her lacy white dress and patent-leather white Mary Janes, my son his “real suit!” For them, the church means becoming a grown-up, belonging to a group, and being in on the Christmas nativity scene. I worried all priests would be child molesters, but since German schools teach children about such things, I figured my kids would let me know about any funny business. Benjamin came home from his confirmation class with the information that when he told the priest, “I want to be the best,” the priest had advised, “You should just want to be yourself.”

That particularly good piece of advice was exactly what his fundamentalist Mom had never heard from her psychoanalyst, who was determined to make me over in his own image. My worst fear—that my children would go into religious orders—turned out to be what Freudians call a “projection.” It was I who had entered the religious order. I believed, no matter how miserable it made me, that my psychoanalyst had healed me, not destroyed me. I might as well have been Sister Melissa of the Order of Perpetual Humility, devoted to Saint Sigmund the All-Powerful. Whenever New York City came up in conversation or on TV, I’d get annoyed at my husband’s joke: “I’m glad I got you out of there!” Until one day I realized I was glad, too.

*     *     *

When my husband’s lungs worsened to the point where he had to use a portable oxygen tank and start losing weight in order to be eligible for a lung transplant, when my X-ray revealed a six-centimeter cancerous tumor on my femur, when we realized we had to start thinking about guardians for our young teenagers, I asked him whether he believed that our illnesses came from God, or whether the kind of God he believed in could condone or allow such things. I still don’t believe in a god, but when I’m scared I wish I did. In flights of fancy, I imagine Apollo and Dionysius, sun chariots, grapevines curling around trees, vats of purple wine, dancing fauns, Athena waltzing in with a dove and a shield, Hermes with his winged shoes flying me in some miracle cure. I could pray to all of them. Occasionally, I have. When I walked home in the evenings before I got sick, I loved to gaze at the full moon and recall Shelley’s description of her as a dying lady, “lean and pale,” but I imagined her as some sort of mother goddess and the evening star as the twinkling sidekick of my imaginary pagan companions. I half-believed I was praying when I asked Apollo, “and Josef’s God, if you’re around,” for good health and long life for my whole family.

That particular prayer seems not to have been heard, or maybe the gods resented it. I’m a part-time believer, a person who prays when she’s in the mood, which is not often. I don’t get down on my knees or go to church, except occasionally, to keep my husband company, and I don’t sacrifice sides of beef to anyone. I think of the Old Testament god liking the smell of burning meat. I not only haven’t barbecued a single sausage for him, I’ve forgotten him and all possible divine cohorts for long, happy periods.

I’m a part-time believer, a person who prays when she’s in the mood, which is not often. I don’t get down on my knees or go to church, except occasionally, to keep my husband company, and I don’t sacrifice sides of beef to anyone.

But I asked my husband what he thought, since I wanted to know how he was coping, too. He didn’t think God caused our illnesses.

“It’s fate,” he said.

It took me a moment to realize that wasn’t just his kindly stoicism responding—that was a quintessentially German answer. Fate, for Germans, is a massive, unyielding thing that cannot be fought and must be accepted.

I had a different answer, one I must admit is typically American. These illnesses—they’re a mistake, a fluke. There’s a new cure around the corner every minute, and if I just Google enough clinical trials, raise enough money on GoFundMe, consult enough experts, I’ll live. I’m a can-do gal: I’m American.

But I am still afraid to pray. So far, the gods have given me the opposite of what I requested. I must be doing something wrong. I can’t keep talking to them if they don’t like me, can I?

Then I see I’ve crucified myself on the remnants of my psychoanalytic past. It’s the angry analyst who’s behind my fears. I might as well assume kinder gods out there—like the one to whom my husband prays. He married me after all, though his mother, once upon a time before we met, allegedly waved a pitchfork at a woman not romantically entangled with him, but known to be Protestant. What would his poor mom do if she knew two of her sons married just the kind of women she’d chased with that pitchfork? Luckily for her, she was gathered to her foremothers by the time her youngest, and, I suspect, favorite son proposed to me. But if I know the family, and I should, after almost two decades of marriage, she’d be raising a Weizen, shaking her head merrily, explaining things to God so he wouldn’t get bent out of shape or feel insulted.

*     *     *

A friend told me of the man she wanted to marry, but could not, after meeting his parents. She is Jewish, and he’d grown up with German-speaking parents, in a very non-Jewish mid-western flyover town. His father, a Pole who had survived Auschwitz, and his mother, a German Protestant, both refugees from Hitler who lived in a permanent state of fear, insisted: “Children born of your union must not be Jewish—they’ll never be safe.” This doomed effort to erase identity deeply saddened my friend, who couldn’t imagine raising children with a buried identity.

When I met my husband, he said, “I’m a Bavarian.” He took me to the circus and a local cathedral. He never tried to convert me, but I could tell that secretly he felt sorry for my lack of belief, just as secretly I felt sorry for his entrapment in old wives’ tales. Loyalty, his chief quality, would never allow him to abandon the religion of his parents. But he makes of it what he will.

I, of course, started my marriage with the notion that I wanted my children exposed to the brilliant insights of Sigmund Freud, not the pathetic superstitions, as I saw them, of the Catholic church. But the brilliant insight of the Catholic church lies in the original meaning of καθολικός (katholikos, from two Greek words meaning throughout-the-whole or, approximately, all-inclusive). In the best sense—which reverses what the church as an institution has become—Catholicism means universal love, all-embracing acceptance. Psychoanalysis, meanwhile, has institutionalized a set of beliefs about insight and personality, with the notion that the seeker of truth needs a guide to get through the “underworld” of the unconscious mind, the way Dante needed Virgil to usher him through the Inferno. Dante’s Virgil remained, of course, his own construct—a piece of himself.

You might as well walk that trip through your personal Inferno alone in front of your keyboard, or your canvas, or your big hunk of clay. Costs less.

Now that I’ve relinquished psychoanalysis, I find I haven’t, really. A world devoid of dreams or an unconscious mind is one I can’t imagine; I could say Dante or Shakespeare or Woolf provided these ideas before Freud, but I’d be whistling in the dark. If I’m heading for that very dark place Hamlet calls “The undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns,” I want a pathfinder. You can’t analyze death; analysis is all about distilling the known from the unknown—not the inaccessible. I can’t assume there’s a god out there in the way I can assume I might figure out what makes someone tick using high-tech psychoanalytic tools. I doubt I’ll ever talk myself into religious devotion, and I’m still with the Freudians in the notion that “man creates God in his image.” I can’t seem to exorcise the irritated face of Oscar Sternbach, even after years of happy marriage to someone as far removed from Sternbach’s world as I could find. Take it on faith, however, that I will try to do so.

 

Melissa Knox’s book, Divorcing Mom: A Memoir of Psychoanalysis, was published by Cynren Press in January 2019, and has received advance praise from Helen Fremont, Phyllis Chesler, and Charles Monroe-Kane. Recent essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Streetlight Magazine, Eclectica, and Empty Mirror.

The February I am twenty-six, on the day before I’m supposed to fly to Portland to rent a house, I come down with the most brutal and short-lived flu I’ve ever had. My body aches so badly, I can’t move. When I say this, I don’t just mean that it hurts to move—I worry, when I’m describing pain, even just to myself, that I’m being melodramatic, hyperbolic.

Tonight, I’m frozen by it.

After my first breakup, I was unable to drive on the street where he worked, to eat, to sleep in my own bed at night. Eventually, a little scared of myself, I went to see a husband and wife who practiced Santeria. It made as much sense as anything.

They had a little storefront at a strip mall in Albuquerque, filled with Guadalupe candles, milagros, and Tarot decks. They reminded me of kindly abuelos, until the husband told me that all my suffering stemmed from a spell that had been cast on my mother, that it had been passed on to me.

He told me that he could break the spell if I participated in a cleansing ritual involving a rooster. The cuandero would transfer the black magic into the rooster, and I would be freed. He saw me hesitate, took my hand, and asked me if I was suicidal. I told him I wasn’t, which was true.

“You will be,” he said. “Soon.” Shaken, I scheduled the ritual, but the day of, I chickened out, so to speak, canceled on his voicemail. A few years later, the woman I thought of as a second mother told me that she’d gone to see the couple after a run of bad luck, that he’d given her a similar warning about spells and suicide, recommended the rooster ritual. She went through with it.

“I saw that rooster die,” she told me. She thought maybe the santero had poisoned it, but she couldn’t say for sure.

My mother stops by, briefly, with supplies (she is, as I knew she would be, annoyed by the request), leaves water on the carpet beside my bed. I have to call her an hour later to come back, because by then I am unable to reach down and get it. She’s so good at sighing right into the phone.

It’s terrifying, lying alone in my two-story house, realizing that I physically cannot extend myself enough to pick up a glass, but somewhat gratifying at the same time. I appreciate symptoms I can quantify, point to them again and again: this is how it happened, here’s the proof, it was real.

The first few months in Portland were lonely, miserable. I made an appointment with a tarot card reader in Kenton: she had only five-star reviews on Yelp. I knew I wouldn’t fully believe anything she told me, but I reasoned that she’d have at least one positive prediction, and that this would give me something to hope for. Instead, Miss Renée told me that I was only at the beginning of a years-long struggle. She said that it would be a period of change and growth, but the benefits of these changes would not be apparent until they were complete. I’d be all movement, but it would feel like I was standing still.

“Let me put it this way,” she said. “If a woman is in labor, how many other things do you expect her to be doing?”

My temperature eventually shoots above 103, and my mother calls a friend, a doctor, to ask her what to do.

“Pile on the blankets,” the doctor says. “As many as she can stand.”

My mom asks shouldn’t I take something to bring the fever down instead?

“No,” she says. “Her body needs to fight through it.”

Whenever I tell this story, I mention how that night I’d soaked through two sets of sheets, as though I’d wet the bed. I think this detail makes the whole thing more believable.

The day before my abortion, my therapist advised me not to take the full dose of Ativan they would offer me.

“I worry,” she said, “That feeling removed from your body during the procedure would be more triggering than the pain.” She thought that this could actually be an opportunity for healing.

I followed her advice, skipped the second pill. It took less than ten minutes: three sharp pulls. My boyfriend stood to the right of me, the volunteer to the left; her job, she explained, was to hold my hand and tell me I was doing great. He performed his role not quite as well, too wrapped up in his guilt over my pain. The whole time we were together, I tried and failed to hide it.

I’d start squeezing both their hands before each pull; the doctor warned me when they were coming, every time.

A year later, I would be asked to share my Planned Parenthood story. I wrote about how I’ve rarely felt so cared for and so safe.

Before she leaves for the night, my mom calls upstairs: do I want her to lock the door behind her, and in my fried egg-brain, I tell her to leave it open. I’ll never know why she listened to me, or why she asked at all.

We split up not long after the abortion. I realized I’d rather be heartbroken and alone than pretend that I wasn’t. Our short relationship seemed pointlessly painful, so I went back to Miss Renée to ask what I was meant to learn from in falling in love with someone who stopped loving me the second he felt needed.

“All of it was about his karma, not yours,” she said. “This relationship had nothing to do with you.”

I imagine that people who never go to psychics don’t know how mean they can be.

My mom’s never been much of a nurturer. After she left my dad, she became more attached to her job; less, I felt, to me. Now I realize this was more a reflection of how precarious our financial situation was, the danger of unemployment. I think she was terrified that she wouldn’t be able to support us on her own.

I hated how she always refused to come pick me up when I called her from the nurse’s office, where I spent so many hours lying on that grey vinyl cot with the paper-covered pillow. She never stayed home with me when I was sick either, though, to be fair, I claimed to be sick pretty often.

When I was younger, I would periodically be up all night, nauseous, sobbing, until I finally threw up. One doctor finally diagnosed these as stomach migraines, though no one was ever able to find a cause. They stopped around seventh grade, but I continued to use them as an excuse to miss class through high school.

Many years later, I found an article about how chronic stomach problems can be a way for children to manifest hidden pain. My memories are rarely visual, but I remember sitting at the computer reading that explanation, alone, the house quiet, how the background of the survivor website was inexplicably mauve, that the dogs were napping on the guest bed, and the sunlight was split against tiles.

After I moved back home, I began to see an acupuncturist who told me my body still thought that it was pregnant. In our first session, I gave him the bullet points of my history: when it started, when it was stopped, what I remember. I’ve become good at doing this quickly, at striking a balance of being precise with the more upsetting details without lingering in them. I don’t get emotional, but I try not to sound too clinical either, like I understand the weight of my story, but I’m no longer crushed by it. He told me that they were fucking assholes. I liked hearing his anger.

The D.O.M. put needles in my toes, at the corners of my eyes, and through my underwear, connecting them with a gold silk ion cord. I’d lie on his table, almost naked beneath the white sheet, feeling increasingly nauseous but safe. He’d stand at my feet, speak rapidly in his beautiful British accent about archetypes and mythology, about how I had been trapped as Sleeping Beauty, how it was time to embrace my own wounded inner child. He wanted me to tell her:

I’m so sorry that this happened to you, but I’m here now, and it’s going to be okay.

Sometime in the middle of the night, I hear footsteps coming up the stairs. At first, I pull them into my fever dreams: maybe it’s my mom, or my ex, or my friend Sumitra, already here to drive me to the airport. Suddenly, I am fully awake; I realize that it is still black outside and in my room, that the footsteps are real, and that I am paralyzed and alone in the master bedroom of my two-story house.

“Hello?” I call from under the damp sheets. The footsteps stop.

“Hello?” comes a man’s voice.

“Hello?” I don’t know what else to say.

“I think I’ve got the wrong house,” says the man.

“Yes,” I say.

“I’m leaving now.”

“Yes,” I say.

I hear him go, and I fall back asleep. When I wake up two hours later, my fever has broken. My sheets, still wet, are cold.

Once I was at a sitting by a bonfire, telling someone the story of when the man walked up my stairs. Another guy heard us talking, interrupted me to ask, deadpan:

“Is this when you get raped?” The best punchlines are surprising, yet expected.

There’s an energy worker in Santa Fe who has, at times, almost a year-long waiting list: people say that he performs miracles, though they are unable to explain what it is he does. He charges $120 per visit and doesn’t take insurance, but he won’t see anyone more than three times. If his methods haven’t worked by then, he can’t help you.

I finally made it off the list before I moved away again. I saw him twice. He had me sit straight in a chair facing away from him, repeatedly and aloud asked my heart about its relationship with the electromagnetic field of the sun. He held a vibrating instrument on my lower back. It made my skin tickle until it itched, until I couldn’t stand it. He would knock, with his fists, around my body, call to it:

“Amelia’s left ventricle! Amelia’s left ventricle!”

On the second visit, I lay on his table as he knocked and knocked against my back, and I felt a tremendous pressure building and building, my cheek pressed against the cool white sheet. Finally, something inside of me shifted, broke, and I gasped. He sat down in the chair beside me and was quiet for a long time.

“He hurt you so badly,” he said. I was touched by his sadness.

When, at twenty-six, I decided to break up with my boyfriend and move across the country alone with some vague idea of starting over, everyone in Santa Fe told me that my Saturn return had come early. Every twenty-nine-ish years, Saturn completes its orbit around the sun. This means that in your late twenties, Saturn is approaching the point in its orbit when your life began. Some people believe that this return brings the urge, in some form or another, to see it begin again.

 

Originally from Santa Fe, Amelia Morand now lives in Missoula, Montana, where she serves as a fiction editor for Cutbank Magazine. Her work has been featured or is forthcoming with apt, Brevity’s nonfiction blog, Hobart, and Pithead Chapel.