Ask Me About My Uterus Read online

  I HAD ALREADY BEGUN TO feel that my own mother was dead. She was supposedly—as it had been not-so-tenderly put by several relatives—“on her way out.” As fate would have it, the very next summer, my mother was still alive, and I found myself once again dwelling in a cabin in the Maine woods. But instead of doing team-building exercises, I was there on a performing arts scholarship.

  The summer-long camp was, primarily, for rich “outta state” kids, and the high tuition meant it had never even been on my radar until someone nominated me for a scholarship. The thought of being away from home for an entire summer was breathtaking enough on its own, but to also be studying dance, music, and theater—plus engaging in summer-camp traditions—seemed too good to be true. That summer was the first time in my young life that I felt like I could be myself free from ridicule. I blossomed both in terms of honing my talents and discovering new ones, and becoming socially confident. For the first time in my life, my hard work was praised. I got the lead in the camp production of Guys and Dolls. Well, Sky Masterson—one of the male leads (my voice was deeper than most of the boys at camp, who had barely hit puberty). We even cut off a few snips of my hair to glue on some side burns each night during the show’s run, which at the time felt very professional to me. The girls I bunked with were all smart, funny, and easily more talented than I was—but we all got along fabulously. My bunkmate, Eve, and I spent many an entertaining evening performing for the others as we imagined conversations between my Eleanor Roosevelt and Virginia Woolf finger-puppets.

  That summer also instilled in me the desire to attend Sarah Lawrence. My favorite camp counselor—the young, gifted, gorgeous woman at the center of every summer-camp teen soap ever written, I’m sure—attended the college. Naturally, my preteen mind rationalized that Sarah Lawrence would be the perfect place for me if I wanted to grow up to be just like her.

  Growing up seemed a very vague, faraway concept that summer, though. I had confided to the camp’s founder that my home situation was as complicated as she had suspected. With each week that passed, that magical summer dwindling right before my eyes, I became more and more anxious. She, unbeknownst to me, had a social work background, and she proved to be a very comforting presence. She was also very supportive when Cass, who had worried about me once school ended and she couldn’t keep an eye on me anymore, wanted to visit.

  I remember that when she showed up, all my friends thought she was my mom. I didn’t correct them. I felt guilty for lying, but for one day I pretended that it was the truth. For one day, I felt like I had a mom.

  As it happened, while I was lying to my friends in Bunkaroo, my real Mum rallied. By some yet-to-be-explained medical miracle, she didn’t die. But she wasn’t exactly what you’d call alive, either. She certainly wasn’t capable of—or even interested in—being anyone’s mother. I had realized by that point that not all of her faltering came from her eating disorder. It went back further than that, to that dynamic she was stuck in with her own mother—with whom I was currently living. In the months after my mother came home and I did not, I grappled with two competing feelings toward her: resentment and empathy. I was angry with her because I felt as though I didn’t have a mother. At the same time, as I woke up every morning in the house where she had been thrown against doors, walked by the room where she had desperately hidden vomit in dresser drawers, I realized that when she had been my age she’d felt motherless, too. She probably still did.

  Cass began to sense my disquietude and would have just as well tossed me into her gray pickup truck and carted me off to her house in a grand gesture of “I’M YOUR MOM NOW!”—if it wasn’t for Nana’s rancor toward her. And me. I’ve found that people are generally willing to admit that parents can abuse children, but they seem to think grandparents are incapable. It’s as though they forget that grandparents are parents, and that cycles of abuse don’t necessarily end when children grow up. As an adult, I’ve come to understand that as terrifying as it all felt, the anger was never really about me. And although it felt directed toward me, it wasn’t as personal as it felt. Because I wasn’t really a person at all.

  I was unable to understand the nuances of all this as a young adult. Honestly, I’m not even sure I understand it much better now. Nana’s anger preceded me by decades and had little to do with me, even though I got the brunt of it. Of course, it didn’t help that she would routinely gaslight me—sometimes even mid-confrontation. Eventually, I wised up and got a tape recorder and recorded her doing it. It wasn’t necessarily that I wanted to prove it to anyone else; it was mostly for me. It was my tether to reality, proof that I wasn’t making it up or imagining it.

  Cass believed me, though, even before I supplied her with hard evidence, because of one instance in particular when I’d hid in my bedroom and called her. The kicker was, Nana was downstairs listening on the other line, gathering intel, I suppose.

  “Maybe you should sleep with a knife under your pillow,” Cass said, her voice crackling through the phone. Tears squeezed between my face and the receiver as I sat shaking on my bed, letting her voice ground me to a reality I was no longer sure I could survive in.

  The next morning, I woke up draped in certitude. I packed a suitcase, slung my backpack over my shoulder, put on my favorite pair of black pumps, and walked to school. When I arrived, suitcase in tow, I stood in the doorway of Cass’s classroom. She looked up from her desk and stared at me.

  I squared my shoulders and said, simply, “I don’t care where I go tonight, but I’m not going back there.”

  She nodded, then stood without saying a word. She unlocked a small storage closet behind her desk and gestured for me to put my suitcase in it. I did, then headed to class, as though nothing important had happened.

  From there, everything unraveled quickly. The life that had wound me up so tightly for almost sixteen years unspooled with the tiniest tug of a loose thread.

  A series of screaming matches ensued. I sat on Cass’s couch, and she held my hand as I fielded a series of irate telephone calls. Even though I hadn’t lived with my mother for several years, she had come to resent the school’s meddling, and I suspect it had a lot more to do with her secrets than mine. I don’t think she particularly cared where I lived. She just didn’t want whatever I did to interfere with her life.

  While I saw Cass during those years as a surrogate mother, as an older woman whom I could look up to and confide in, reviewing it now I see that the greatest lesson she taught me was compassion for my own mother. Had my mother been in a situation where people were rooting for her to have more good days than bad ones, to get the help she needed, people who would stand by her even when things got hard, wouldn’t her life—wouldn’t my life—have been so very different?

  In Cass, I had been trying to fill a mother-shaped void inside of me that only seemed to grow larger and more unruly as I aged. I had mistakenly assumed that as I approached adulthood, that void would close up. If anything, it expanded like the cosmos in a shattering smash of a new universe.

  Sixteen was the age of my anxiety, but for the first time in my young life, many of the anxieties were totally age-appropriate: SAT prep, prom tears, a rollicking driver’s education, boys who climbed out bathroom windows during study hall and girls who wrote mean things about me on the walls of bathroom stalls, late-night confessionals in my best friend’s car over an underscore of bands with names like Something Corporate, and trying to learn how to smoke a cigarette on the beach as the salt air competed for space in my lungs. So many things about growing up, about acting my age instead of someone twice as old, were never the sweet performances of youth I’d hoped they’d be. My friends were all breaking free of their parental control, and together we ran with adolescent fearlessness toward the thrilling promise of adulthood. But when they turned around, someone was always there to keep an eye on them. When I turned around, there was nothing but an empty road.

  I hadn’t run away without a plan, though. For several weeks prior, I’d been
taking shelter in my upstairs bedroom with—it’s true—a phone book, pulled from beneath the cushions of a kitchen chair, where they had been methodically stacked for years. I flipped through the yellow pages and called every single attorney in the county one after the other.

  I’ve always been a thorough researcher, so it didn’t take me long to come across the concept of emancipation. But most of the preliminary Google searches brought back results concerning young actors who wanted to side-step child labor laws or escape their parent-managers, who were cramping their style and stealing their money.

  None of that pertained to me; I’d gravitated toward it as a possible solution because I didn’t want my younger brother, who still lived with my parents, to have his life upended by whatever action I took. This was a lofty judgment for a fifteen-year-old to consider. In the midst of midterms, one-act play competitions, and SATs. I was trying to grasp legal jargon and figure out how much money I would need to have saved up to support myself until I graduated.

  Once word got out that I was essentially a fugitive living in Mrs. McCue’s attic, I suppose anyone who had seen me as a bit odd may have felt somewhat gratified. I was the first to admit that the situation was unusual. Though I was incredibly thankful for Cass and her family, I struggled to understand why other adults in my life hadn’t stepped in, and why they had been bystanders or enablers for so long. Part of it was down to Cass specifically. Many years after she’d taken me in, she found a section of the Teacher’s Handbook that explicitly forbade teachers to “befriend” students in any way, shape, or form. When she told me this, I was dismayed to think that she’d been so close to ruining her career on my account, but she only laughed. As far as she was concerned, it was pretty simple: I needed her help. “Even if I’d known about that rule,” she told me, “I would have broken it.”

  As grateful as I was that Cass didn’t have regrets, her revelation gave me some much-needed insight into why other adults affiliated with the schools I’d attended may not have intervened, even if they’d wanted to. Thinking back, I recalled a few vague but comforting memories of a teacher’s aide named Meredith. I was eight years old when I knew her, and for awhile I wondered if she hadn’t been real at all, if I’d just manufactured her, like an imaginary friend of sorts. So when I was in my early twenties, I decided to use my Internet sleuthing skills to try to find her. Given how much time had elapsed, I was terrified that I would find an obituary, and that in my haste to save my own life I would have missed my chance to thank someone who had made me feel like there was reason to save it.

  As it turned out, Meredith lived a little over an hour away from me. Having found an address to which I could send a letter, I wrote to her. I didn’t expect that she would remember me, and I certainly didn’t expect her to write back inviting me to visit. But she did.

  She was exactly as I remembered her, which was so strange, because I was nothing like how she remembered me. And she did remember me. As we ate lunch on their porch, Meredith said that she and her husband had often wondered what had become of me. I gave them the highlights of my heavy story, thankful we were eating light summer salads, and when I reached the end I couldn’t help but ask them if they ever suspected what I was dealing with at home.

  “You were a shy, unhappy little girl,” Meredith said, her eyes glistening with unshed tears. “I just wanted to take you home with me. I remember saying to you, ‘If you need to talk, or tell me things, you can.’ But I never knew how bad it was.”

  So, aside from those who knew but could not do anything, I can only assume there were other adults whose experiences echoed Meredith’s: they may have suspected, but didn’t know the extent of the problems I confronted. I can understand why, too: I may have been shy and unhappy, but I was also a stellar student who didn’t cause a lick of trouble. Perhaps I didn’t exactly make an effort to seem less odd, but I did make a concerted effort to appear completely in control at all times—which was far more about reassuring myself than about settling anyone else’s worries.

  This effort was remarkably successful—most of the time. The one incident I remember specifically where the veneer may have been compromised occurred at a choir concert when I was fourteen. Directly beforehand, Nana had ambushed me; blindsided, I had a panic attack backstage and hyperventilated so hard I lost consciousness. Consequently, I was carted off in an ambulance in front of the whole school—but by the following week the teachers had all agreed that it had been “an asthma attack.” In the ambulance, Nana had insisted on riding shotgun so she could interrogate the paramedics for the entire twenty-minute ride to the hospital, throwing in the occasional jab at semiconscious me. When I came to, the paramedic asked me, in a low, level voice, if Nana was hurting me. I couldn’t speak through the oxygen mask, so I locked pleading, tearful eyes with him and nodded my head wildly. He nodded solemnly and shot a glance toward the front seat, as if he were expecting her head to twist around like the girl’s in that scene of The Exorcist.

  I don’t know what, if anything, of our turbulent ride was relayed to the ER physician—but the note in my medical record represents another occasion upon which the health-care system inevitably failed me:

  Date: 12/06/2005

  Blood Pressure: 140/86

  Heart Rate: 115 bpm

  HISTORY OF PRESENT ILLNESS:

  Chief complaint: ANXIETY AND DIFFICULTY BREATHING.

  This started today (couldn’t breathe while performing with the choir). Is still present but is improving. Has been upset. Has had suicidal thoughts (in the remote past). Has briefly considered suicide. The patient has had anxiety. She has experienced situational problems related to school (family).

  In spite of these notes, I was discharged home—to my parents, with whom I had not lived for two years. Shortly thereafter, I was returned to Nana’s house. The incident was never discussed, and there was no follow-up. About a month later I tried to hang myself with a dog leash. Nana was on the phone in the other room, yelling at my mother—probably about something that had happened twenty years ago. I put the radio on and fumbled my way through getting the leash over my head, tears streaming down my face as I stared somewhat vacantly at the wall. Despite the tears, I was calm and methodical about it, because it felt like the right thing to do.

  I closed my eyes and stepped off the top step—then nothing. Failure. I was still there. I hadn’t planned well enough, and my body dropped to the floor in a heap. I didn’t get up right away, but just stayed there staring at the pockmarked ceiling. My grandmother yelled to me from the next room, “Stop making all that goddamn noise!”

  Years later, when doctors and others would try to blame my myriad constitutional symptoms on my childhood, I’d want to scream at them that they should have believed me when I said I needed help. That they should have believed my mother and my grandmother when they had needed help. But they didn’t. If they wanted to imply that I had in some way succumbed to the poison of those early experiences, I’d have to beg to differ: when I realized they wouldn’t, or couldn’t, help me, I started trying to find a way to save myself.

  Before I could do that, though, I had to figure out how to protect someone other than myself: my little brother. I’d been living with Nana for a couple of years by then, and it was really that environment that I was trying to escape. Though going back to my parents wasn’t a healthy choice for me, my brother was getting his needs met there. Even at fifteen, I understood that the foster care system would have eaten us both alive. We would have no doubt been packed in with hundreds of other kids, waiting to be adopted, and the fact that he had autism practically guaranteed that he’d be waiting indefinitely. The truth, though it might have been hard for me to understand, was that he loved my parents and they loved him. I was the irreconcilable difference.

  But emancipation would leave my brother untouched, and it allowed me the legal freedom necessary to make decisions that were in favor of getting help (such as seeing a therapist, which my family had refused to allow me to
do, for fear of secrets being let out).

  The lawyers I called agreed with me, as it turned out: the only problem was that it was election year, and they were all running for district attorney. That meant they weren’t going to be taking on any new cases. They all gave me someone else’s phone number and their best wishes. I kept calling. All I needed was one yes.

  And Mr. Fenig gave it to me.

  I’D NEVER REALLY KNOWN ANY lawyers before I met Mr. Fenig. When we first spoke on the phone, he seemed intrigued—and, he wasn’t running for DA.

  One spring day after school, Cass and her husband took me to his office, which was conveniently located near the district court. He was going to talk to all of us, but separately. His office was exactly what I had envisioned an attorney’s office would be: shiny mahogany and enough burgundy to make you regret whatever it is you did to wind up there. I didn’t realize how tall he was until he rose from behind his equally formidable desk, which was, I’m sure, crafted from a grade of wood commensurate to his profession. He was a distinguished man of late middle age who spoke with a clipped baritone, which seemed like it belonged to the canon of every courtroom drama I’d seen. A veteran of the law though he was, he still seemed a bit perplexed by my presence—a fact I gleaned from the way he would narrow his eyes at me with a half-smile that seemed to imply amusement.

  He explained that getting emancipated would be more paperwork than anything else. When I turned sixteen, I would file a petition with the probate court. Included with this would be a statement, to be read by a judge, that would explain why I was seeking emancipation and outline my plan for living if my request was granted. I presumed that he explained the same to Cass and her husband when it was their scene in the Law and Order episode my life had become.

  Over the next couple of weeks, I wrote what was arguably going to be the most important essay of my school career, for which I would receive no grade. I brought that, as well as my petition, to the probate court on my sixteenth birthday.