Ask Me About My Uterus Page 12

  Soon after I submitted my paperwork, I was called in to Mr. Fenig’s office, where he accused me of not understanding the proper procedure—of not appreciating the law: it had been made perfectly clear that I had to write the statement by myself. So why, he wondered, had I clearly had an adult write it for me?

  I hadn’t had an adult so much as spell-check the damned thing. I’d written every word myself. He shook his head, dropping the statement onto a pile of papers on his desk. “No judge will believe a sixteen-year-old kid wrote that,” he said. When the school supplied writing samples as proof, he conceded that perhaps it was possible I had written the statement after all. Still, it probably wouldn’t hurt to make it a little less eloquent.

  Within just a few weeks, my parents were served with papers and a court date was set: June 19, 2007.

  This date landed right in the middle of finals. To be perfectly honest, I hadn’t expected to get a date so quickly. Midsummer seemed hopeful. For several reasons, logistical and personal, I had hoped it would be after school let out, because I didn’t want anyone to know about it. My close friends knew, of course, and were supportive of me, but I didn’t need the entire town to be in on it.

  Unfortunately, there are no secrets in tight-knit communities. Even before the day came, I found myself at the mercy of small-town gossip. Despite the fact that I had been elected class president, was on the National Honor Society, and ranked fifth in my class, people suddenly didn’t want their kids associating with me because I was “divorcing my parents.” School administrators, who had no idea what to do with me, started to treat me like a delinquent, when I didn’t have so much as a detention on my record.

  Luckily, the teachers were, for the most part, very accommodating. They allowed me to take a few of my finals early so that I could leave before the afternoon session on the day of my hearing. Still, I failed my math final: it’s the only test I’ve ever failed in my academic career.

  As pursuant to the court, someone from the school had to accompany me. That’s how Kim, the first-name-basis guidance counselor who ultimately led me to Jane, got involved.

  My hearing was supposed to be in the early afternoon, but when we arrived at the courthouse, we were informed that a particularly nasty divorce hearing had gone into overtime; as a result, my case was pushed back on the docket by a few hours. That was all fine by me, as I’d been hoping to have time to prepare myself, though I didn’t know exactly what I was preparing for.

  I’d been told it would go like this: my parents would show up, and we’d yell and scream for a few hours—which was pretty normal, only this time we’d have an audience. Mr. Fenig sat me in a tiny room with a tall, thin window overlooking the street in front of the courthouse. I looked through the venetian blinds, waiting to see my parents walk up the steps. Kim brought me a glass of water. I shuffled the papers that contained my written statement. I asked Mr. Fenig if there was anything I should know going in. He stood in the entryway with his hands stuffed into the pockets of his suit jacket. “Answer the judge’s questions, read your statement—and don’t cry,” he said, checking his watch.

  When my case finally came up, there was a moment of panicked silence as we realized that my parents had not yet arrived. An eerie sense of relief mixed with disappointment came over me. When I look back on it now, I realize that at some level I had wanted that confrontation with them—I wanted the resulting closure. I was making a very definitive decision about my life, and even if that decision was to ceremoniously cut them out of it, they were still my parents. I still wanted them to care.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my parents’ car pull up in front of the courthouse. My father threw it into park and didn’t even shut off the ignition. He emerged from the idling car, walked up the front steps, then returned moments later, speeding off down the street.

  Confused, I turned to look up at Mr. Fenig in the doorway, but he wasn’t there. When he reappeared a few minutes later, he held a piece of paper in his hand, which he dropped on the table in front of me the way you might a napkin.

  “They aren’t going to contest it,” he said simply, “All you have to do now is go in there, read your statement, and keep from crying. You’ll be granted emancipation by default.”

  I nodded, stilling myself. He was right. If I wanted a judge to see me as being grown up enough to take care of myself, I had to keep it together. Life was no doubt going to be full of unexpected twists. I had to prove that I was stable enough to handle them, change course, and keep going. I had done my research. I’d come prepared. I believed, as did Cass, as did my lawyer, that I was making the most reasonable choice for myself that I could in a situation where, really, there was never going to be a good choice. No choice would have been easy, but I had plenty of evidence to support the high probability of a negative outcome if I made the choice to stay.

  I made the short walk down the hallway from the waiting room to the courtroom in my ill-fitting, secondhand suit, the pencil skirt wrinkled even though I’d tried to smooth it out with the spine of my biology textbook in the girls’ bathroom before I’d left school that morning. I knew I didn’t have a lot of data on the outcome for emancipated minors. There were more unknown variables than known variables. I just had to hope that whenever I solved the equation, at some later point in my life, the answer would be positive. Or maybe I’d never get an answer, but be doomed to be the asymptote, always approaching—but never quite reaching—infinity.

  The rest of my life, whatever it was to become, was decided in less than twenty minutes. I’d been gearing up for weeks, trying to mentally prepare myself for what I had only assumed would be the most profoundly soul-shattering confrontation of my life—and then, nothing. I’d waited longer for a pizza than I had for my freedom. It was the calmest, most reasonable, well-paced event of my entire life thus far. Just as Mr. Fenig had instructed, I went into the courtroom, took the oath on a tattered county courthouse Bible, and numbly read my statement.

  I had read my statement, rehashed versions of it, so many times in the previous few weeks that it had ceased to feel like it belonged to me. When I finished, the judge complimented my writing. I was immediately thrown off by this; it wasn’t like I was in an oration competition. I sheepishly thanked her. She questioned me about my plans, and I explained, in a measured, slightly deferential tone, that I was going to live with Cass and her family, stay in school, and keep working my strange little part-time jobs (which would be full time on weekends, holidays, and summer vacation). I would use my eligibility for Medicaid insurance coverage to, first and foremost, get a therapist, so I could become as well-adjusted as possible before college—which, I added, I was already preparing for by taking college-level classes; I had a stack of scholarship applications already piling up. After a beat she nodded, seemingly satisfied, and wished me luck. I was startled when she banged her gavel, which I hadn’t actually expected her to do.

  Out on the sidewalk, Mr. Fenig shook my hand and congratulated me, though it seemed a strange thing to be congratulated on. He gave me his best wishes and, with a confident stride, headed back to his office. I’m pretty sure there had been Judge Judy episodes that had gone on longer than my hearing.

  “Do you want to get ice cream?” Kim, the guidance counselor, piped as we sat in uncomfortable silence in her car. I must have looked at her with abject horror, because she returned an apologetic glance and started the car.

  She pulled out of the parking lot and headed back to town as I rolled the car window down, gulping down a lungful of fresh air. I knew this was the last moment I would have to breathe easy for many years to come. After a few minutes of uneasy silence, Kim asked me where I wanted to go.

  I choked up and said, though I had no idea what it meant anymore, “Home.”

  YEARS LATER, WHEN I FOUND myself back in Maine, terrified and sick, the only thing I could think to do was call Jane. When I walked in to her office again, she looked a bit sad, wearing an expression of mild disappointment.
It was like the face you might make upon realizing you’d stumbled across your favorite movie on television—forty-five minutes in.

  I had returned to her office pallid, thin, soft-spoken, and tearful—merely a husk of the girl she’d sat across from three years before when I’d first walked into her office. I would like to say simply that we resumed our sessions, but the truth is, I think we started all over again. I wondered if her faint look of disappointment wasn’t directed at me. She couldn’t hide her shock when I walked into her office again: I had shed so much weight that my hip bones jutted out, two angular shivs, above the waistband of my jeans. Her face had contorted into a brief grimace that she was quick to cover up, but I’d seen it. I’d felt it.

  I lay curled up on the couch in her office during our sessions purely out of exhaustion. I simply could not sit upright for fifty minutes straight. She would sit in her chair by the window with her thermos of what I always assumed was herbal tea, and calmly listen while I wept. For several months that winter I saw her fairly regularly—once, maybe twice, during the week. Sometimes she was the only person I spoke to for weeks on end.

  CHAPTER 4

  If you desire healing, let yourself fall ill.

  —Rumi

  HARRY HARLOW, A BEHAVIORIST WORKING in a lab in the 1950s, wanted to better understand the bond between babies and their primary caregivers, i.e., their mothers. He couldn’t use actual human infants, because he knew that if he deprived them of their mothers as much as he needed to for his study, they’d die—an outcome that would do absolutely nothing to advance his research career. So instead, he used rhesus monkeys.

  Essentially, what Harlow did was construct a physical situation for the monkeys that would represent what would happen to human babies who weren’t held or cuddled. Perhaps these babies were in orphanages or were otherwise being institutionally cared for, and were therefore neglected. It was also possible that they had just been born to parents who, for myriad reasons, could not or would not hold them beyond what was absolutely necessary for transportation. Harlow built apparatuses out of wire. Some of the apparatuses had a little plush fur around them that made them kind of cozy, like a mother monkey presumably would be. Others had nothing: just cold, hard wires. Both kinds were terrifying to look at, but the metal ones were particularly unsettling. Those, of course, were the ones that Harlow fed the monkeys from, through a bottle affixed to the wires.

  And wouldn’t you know it, these poor baby monkeys, who had been taken from their mothers not even a day after birth, only used the wire mother for sustenance. The rest of the time, they huddled pathetically against the warm, “cozy” one, trying not to lose their minds. Sadly, most of them did lose their minds. They were being fed, and therefore weren’t in danger of starving to death, but they were being starved in another way. The monkeys were driven into a spiral of anxiety and depression so severe that they could never survive outside of the fucked-up little experiment Harlow had created. They had been profoundly damaged by the separation and the consequent hell in which they had been raised.

  These monkeys, Harlow wrote, “became bizarre later in life. They engaged in stereotyped behavior patterns, such as clutching themselves and rocking constantly back and forth, and exhibited excessive and misdirected aggression.”

  You might be surprised to learn that many of these monkeys, despite their maladjustment, did actually grow up to be adult monkeys, though. As adult monkeys, they mated—though often with significant difficulty. Harlow wrote that many of the monkeys had no idea how to copulate, describing one female as presenting for sex with “a posture in which only her heart was in the right place.”

  Despite their initial confusion, these females could, and did, bear offspring. And although they may have survived their unloving environment in the sterile safety of a laboratory, their young were not so fortunate. The “motherless mothers,” as Harlow put it, “proved to be very inadequate.”

  The monkeys he had raised in isolation “tended to be either indifferent or abusive toward their babies” as mothers. “The indifferent mothers,” Harlow wrote, “did not nurse, comfort, or protect their young, but they did not harm them”—at least not intentionally. Some of the monkey moms, however, were more aggressive. Harlow even went so far as to call them abusive. These monkey mothers were known to bite their infants, “to the point that many of them died.”

  The ethics of Harlow’s experiment have been constantly debated since it was completed. It’s easy to understand why it messed with people so much to see those hopeless little monkeys. Baby primates, after all, are just human-looking enough, with their big eyes, that we anthropomorphize them and empathize with them. We feel for them, not unlike the way we would feel if we were seeing a human baby, and the experiment itself somehow feels inhumane.

  I was first exposed to Harlow’s work in earnest in a psychology lecture at Sarah Lawrence my freshman year, with the dulcet tones of that lovely Scottish prof Elizabeth Johnston leading us down to the depths of depravity. I remember reading Love at Goon Park as assigned reading that semester and often finding myself in tears. I felt bad for the little monkeys, I told myself. They were so cute, and vulnerable, and doomed. Harlow had done this terrible, terrible thing to them. In the name of science, yes—I did understand that much. But still, they were just little babies. And they were scared and alone and clearly in so much pain. An inextricable pain. Maybe not quite a physical pain, but I could see it in their eyes as they looked out wildly from their cages.

  The day in class when we watched Harlow’s films of the monkeys, we were all eerily silent, transfixed by the horror. Abruptly cut, grainy, black-and-white shots of the monkeys injuring themselves in the name of self-soothing, desperately suckling from the wire-mother, always trying to keep even just a little toe on the warm, cozy mother beside it. Their big, dark eyes stared up at me from where they clung to that pathetic piece of fabric that even they must have known wasn’t really mommy. It wasn’t really anything—but it had to be enough.

  Much to my chagrin, I began to cry. After a few minutes, I casually walked out of the classroom and down the hall to the small bathroom around the corner. I locked myself in and sank to the floor, biting my hand to keep from making any noise.

  I looked up at nothing, eyes wide, swallowing those big, rolling sobs as my heart shuttered closed in fearful recognition. In the beginning, it had been the sight of Harlow’s monkeys suffering that had brought me to tears. But in that moment, the anguish I felt was my own.

  THE SUMMER BEFORE MY SENIOR year of high school was a strange one. Freshly liberated, and determined to make as much money as possible so that I could unequivocally attend whichever college I was accepted to, I took on a series of odd jobs. Odd in the sense that they were a mishmash of temporary employment, and also odd in the sense that they were really unusual. The first involved living and working at one of the many Victorian inns in town, the second, starring in a summer stock theater production.

  The arrangement was fine until midway through the summer, when the innkeeper’s son fell ill. The innkeeper announced that she needed to travel to be with him, then left me to run the place alone for a few weeks. I balked at first—I was in high school, after all—but she was either confident in me or desperate enough to be with her son that she left anyway. My money has always been on the latter.

  I was also still attempting to get through rehearsals of the show I’d been cast in, which had an outdoor performance schedule coming up that was more rigorous than I had anticipated. I’d just thought it would be a fun way to make some money, but having one of the lead roles meant that my life that summer boiled down to rehearsing and turning over beds at the inn nonstop. I’d sing scales as I trudged up and down the back staircase from the bedrooms to the laundry, and it probably warded off as many potential guests as it did ghosts (the place was haunted—but then again, what old house in New England isn’t?).

  Once the innkeeper had left and it was truly down to me, I began a manic-fren
zy of playing dual roles: by day, Abby, a twenty-three-year-old linguistics major at Middlebury! to the guests at the inn, and sweet ingenue at night once the show opened. Somehow, I pulled it off—but not without the price of pure emotional and physical exhaustion.

  On top of everything else that had befallen me that summer, I’d started to have trouble keeping my sheets clean. My periods had always been heavy—no matter where I’d been sleeping over the years, I’d carried with me the fear of bleeding on someone’s linens. But they now seemed to be getting mercilessly painful. I quite reasonably chalked it up to stress. In any case, as soon as the innkeeper returned, I left in a rather ungraceful haste, slinking off into the summer heat with my soiled sheets like an estrogen-rich Quasimodo.

  When I took the job at the inn, I’d been living with Cass’s family for a little over a year. Although she’d expected that I’d continue living there until I graduated, her daughter—who had, almost overnight, become a teenager—had started to need Cass in the push-pull way that all teenage girls do, and I felt very much an intruder in that sacred space. When my job at the inn, and the summer, drew to an end, I spent a few weeks living out of my car (a Ford I affectionately called Harrison) that I’d come by thanks to an elderly gentleman named Walter.

  Although Walter had been in my life since the day I was born, I did not really get to know him well until I was a teenager on the lam. Walter had been in a long-term relationship with my grandmother since before I came along, and he was always sort of on the periphery of my life. To many who knew him, he was an imposing figure: tall, serious, bespectacled. He had come of age the same way many men of his generation did: in Germany during World War II, when he was practically still a teenager. And like many men of his era, he didn’t talk about it much.