Fever dream

The fevers were a hallmark of our son’s sixth year. Each attack announced itself with a headache, sore throat, and vomiting. His temperature shot up, often hovering around 101℉ for three to four days, with three weeks in between the bouts if you counted from the first day of symptoms. We had no idea why these fevers were happening. They came on like clockwork, were not related to a virus, and were not contagious. Ibuprofen, when he could keep it down, helped bank his internal fires, but it didn’t change the frequency or length of his mysterious life-interrupting slow burns.

Between October 2011 and June 2012, the boy was “sick” in this way for over 40 days. I had no job outside of the house, and grad school was barely a twinkle in my weary eye. My time was the boy’s time, and time was our prison. We had a drill. Come headache, come stomach pains, come the conflagration, and the boy and I would retreat to our guest bedroom (aka the back room). I would set him up with ice water, a just-in-case bowl, movies, and endless runs of Curious George. We sat next to each other in bed, the boy’s cheeks flushed scarlet, patchy with heat. He watched TV, sometimes read. I scoured the internet looking for answers.

I became a medical sleuth. My father provided me with a (sobering) family medical history, heavy on depression and autoimmune diseases. Based on bloodwork (the result of a terrible trip for a blood draw, the boy mid-attack, that ended in him vomiting in the car), the boy’s fevers did appear to be inflammatory in nature, his immune system gone awry. Was a paternal great-aunt’s hospitalization as a child in the ‘30s, two years of adolescence lost to “Saint Vitus Dance” one clue to the boy’s struggles? Or did my grandmother’s years of mysterious, debilitating illness, eventually attributed to Addison’s disease and lupus, contribute? The family history of diabetes (grandfather, father, aunt) or thyroid issues (father, me) may also have been precursors to the boy’s fever attacks.

My mother’s family health history remained remained a mystery. Adopted as an infant, later denied contact by her birth mother, her biological father a mystery man, her background was a blank slate. Finding out more about her history, our history, became the second part of my focus that year. I had her mother’s likely name and hometown, ancestry.com DNA leads, and practically unlimited time. As Jack Sparrow sparred his way out of sticky situations for the umpteenth time and Mr. Fox outsmarted Boggis, Bunce, and Bean yet again, I mined the vast information stores of the internet to identify our genetic antecedents.

It doesn’t take much to track someone down. There are sites out there that do the dirty work for you for a low price. If, like me, you have an obsessive, curious, and determined mind, as well as the time to indulge it, these sites are superfluous. When caught up in a search, I leave no link unclicked. In previous, non-family focused deep dives I uncovered an arrest record for a former middle school crush, gawped at an awkward high school yearbook photo of myself at barely fourteen, and cringed at the fundamentalist ravings of a former classmate. In this case, I was helped by census records from the 1940s, which taught me more about my grandmother’s family and, along with DNA-informed hunches, helped narrow down the potential name of my grandfather. News stories and other records revealed that my grandmother, who was seventeen when she had my mother, married less than two years later and had another daughter a couple of years after that. I also located a marriage announcement for that daughter, my half-aunt, and discovered she had become a psychotherapist.

On a typical feverish March Tuesday, the back room pulsating with the usual feelings of boredom, anxiety, and frustration, I was paging through hundreds of hits on my grandmother’s family name and hometown, another search in the dark. This time I uncovered something surprising. It was news story from (oddly) a Canadian paper. The article described a late July afternoon in Delaware, a girl’s older brother, fifteen at the time, hearing her screams from a cornfield. The brother runs into the house, grabs a shotgun, runs back out again, and unloads the gun in the direction of his sister’s fleeing assailant. I imagined that green expanse of corn rippling in the humid breeze, the moment of realization on his part, the endurance and fight on hers. The girl’s attacker, an Army private, was later discovered with a shoulder wound at the local base. The girl, who was named in the article (as was her brother), required treatment at a local hospital. She was eleven.

My pulse quickened. The room, stuffy with the remains of picked-over nachos, heavy on the jalapeño and congealed cheese, suddenly seemed even more oppressive. Curious George snickered from the television. Glancing over to see if I was paying attention (I was not), the boy emanated heat. The kids’ names checked out. They were the right ages. This was my grandmother and great-uncle.

My initial response was one of disbelief, that I had found the article, that she had experienced such a traumatic event. The second was a complex, strange brew of feelings, two parts guilt to one part thrill. Trauma isolates. It separates you from others. You feel unseen and unwitnessed because you were unseen and unwitnessed. The places where I expected overlap between me, my mother, and her mother became more complicated. Trauma in its various permutations was a new connection. I felt less alone. I felt horribly sad. I also had more questions. Did her family help her make sense of the traumatic event, did they rally around her, or was she buried in shame? Did the attack make her vulnerable to other traumas, perhaps leading to the sex (consensual? nonconsensual?) that resulted in my mother’s conception?

My grandmother’s sexual assault (as I eventually learned it was) likely had nothing to do with the boy’s fevers. It would be a stretch to connect it to his overactive immune system. It wasn’t a fact that was necessary to find to find her. But it was a stark detail, a bit of traumatic personal history that I later learned she had kept secret (from her husband, from her daughter), much like she suppressed the fact of my mother’s existence. It deepened my curiosity about the ways trauma gets passed along, not only through experience and exposure, but through our DNA. What potential epigenetic traces does trauma leave across generations? The answer for the moment is unclear. In addition, research around the ways trauma is expressed genetically currently focuses mainly on complex traumas or those experienced by large swaths of the population. But the question continues to intrigue me.

The time of fevers ended the summer between first and second grade. It is unclear why they stopped. It may have been the “bad medicine” (aka cimetidine, which the boy originally took in its bitter liquid form) he was prescribed on a hunch that he had periodic fever, aphthous stomatitis, pharyngitis, adenitis syndrome or PFAPA . He may have simply grown out of it. Over a decade later, I can look back on those lost weeks with a certain nostalgia—all that time with the small and cuddly version of the boy, the lack of responsibility for almost anything else, the world outside the back room flattened and unreal, a memory of a hallucination, a fever dream. In the process, I uncovered a personal history and piqued my curiosity about the unspoken connections between my grandmother, mother, and me. We were young once, and vulnerable. We were unprotected, unseen, stumbling along into the future, ignoring the pain within. But maybe we weren’t as alone as we felt. Maybe a witness after the fact is better than no witness at all.

Reverberations

Sixteen. What does it bring up for you? If you took an elevator to your sixteenth year, what scene you would walk in on?

My elevator brings me to an early morning in November 1985, a room tinged with kerosene, sweat, and mildew. A girl and a baby lie on a bloodied bed. The girl is naked from the waist down, the baby still attached. This is liminal moment, the quietness between the drama of birth and the eventual arrival of paramedics. There is no way to escape. I am hollow inside.

My mother’s elevator travels to an early summer evening in 1966. The doors open to an emergency room, the nose-pricking scent of charred flesh cut with colloidal silver and antiseptic surrounding her father. He lies on a bed, his face green, his ears melted away. Fighting the urge to flee, she freezes in place.

These scenes, moments of stillness after trauma, allude to larger stories embedded in complex lives. I suspect the two events are linked, that my mother’s trauma at sixteen was fuel for my own. It didn’t start with my mother, of course (my focus here is matrilineal). The experiences of my adoptive and biological grandparents filter through my mother to me. Soaked in experiences of loss, abandonment, and the stark knowledge that safety is not guaranteed, my upbringing has informed my relationships. It can show in the ways I express love, trust, and affection, in how I interpret others’ intentions and emotions.

We cannot fully escape the pain of those who came before us – and we sometimes benefit from their good fortune and joyful, empathetic ways. Experiences, emotions, and patterns of coping get transmitted across generations. They emerge unconsciously in how we relate to others, expect to be treated, and in the faith we have in the world. Often these patterns assert themselves without our awareness. They bloom to life unexpectedly, appearing in a shifting mood, an intense reaction, in some of the choices we make to kick free of familiar ties.

The trickiest way my past expresses itself within me is in my often unconscious, unprocessed responses to my child. The boy is 16 himself now, almost through that delicate, liminal year. The neglected 16-year-old in me, wounded and alone, sometimes emerges in our interactions. She’s fiery and small and full of shame. This girl feels shut out, unimportant, excluded. She carries the weight of neglect, the knowledge of her intrinsic badness, like a chunk of anthracite suspended in her hollow chest. She knows that love is not guaranteed, that she will be abandoned eventually, that she doesn’t matter. It takes self-awareness and inward-facing love to soothe her while continuing to parent like an adult. Sometimes I don’t succeed.

The stillbirth I had at sixteen was embedded in a series of circumstances. The paramedics eventually took me to the hospital. My baby was cleaned up and briefly placed in my arms. I was back to school in a week, with most of my friends and peers none the wiser. I returned to my unchaperoned living situation, returned to the room in the cottage where it all happened.

My grandfather survived the industrial fire that burned over 90% of his body. He lost a foot and his hearing, spent nine months in the hospital and nine with an at-home nurse. My mother returned to school in the fall, did the things that teenagers do, went on with life as usual.

These events reverberate. They echo. I write them down to capture them, to subdue them, to fully embed them in the past.

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The idea of taking an elevator to a particular age was as a prompt in a recent poetry retreat my mother attended. One of the first images that came to her was seeing her father in the hospital immediately after his accident. Though I grew up knowing the general story, hearing about her reaction in that moment brought home the horror and pain of it all. My own story of sixteen, something I’ve written about extensively and yet still find difficult to engage with emotionally, came to mind. What does a kid do when the unthinkable has happened? How does it affect them going forward? How does it show up in their parenting later on? And how can the intergenerational transmission of trauma be interrupted?

These topics are on my mind, both as they apply to me and to others. I’m still working through them, so think of this as a draft.

The word artist

Back in my early twenties, when I was teetering into adulthood on not-quite stable legs, a film-making coworker approached me with a proposal. It involved smoldering and smoking, silence and tension, a bottled-up version of me filmed in black and white, riding scooters, taking deep drags off cigarettes, and enigmatically letting the smoke obscure me further.

We never made the movie. The point of it all escapes me, though in retrospect he clearly had a smoking fetish. But I do remember this idea of my containment, how I kept parts of myself under wraps. I carried tension just below the surface, ready to blow.

Thirteen years ago, I exploded. Words thrummed from my fingertips. I was compelled to create. In the process, I worked through some trauma, put a lot of my past to rest, went back to grad school, and became a therapist. The turmoil I created in my personal life during this intense time eventually died down–as did the writing.

I recently reread some early entries from this blog, writing from those gritty days of lava and ash, long since deleted from the online repository. Intensity and longing vibrate off the page. I no longer identify with that version of me, caught up in words and feelings. Or perhaps parts of that person feel too messy and unpredictable. To give in to her intensity would shake up my current equilibrium. Stability trumps emotional and artistic expression.

I grew up with an idea about what it meant to be a writer, about what went into being a word artist. Real writers were cruel and chauvinistic. They relied on the support of those whose self-sacrifice they both expected and insulted. Writers dealt in instability. Unprocessed trauma was their bread and butter, and they fed off anger and lust. My early writing didn’t totally spring from this dysfunctional well, though I was angry and desperate to be seen, bruises, scars and all. Through my writing, I did not ignore my trauma. Instead I processed it, worked through its antecedents, and fully entered adulthood. Writing had done its job. My life was in order. I boxed away my aching need for expression and exposure.

Muffling creativity and emotion, however, does not eliminate them. I continue to struggle with the tension between the creative, emotional life I crave and the comfort and solidity of being a stable, reliable person. Though this is a false dichotomy, the model of writer as a self-centered blunderer still operates in the shadows.

What happens when parts of you remain disavowed? They creep out at night. They laden your dreams with bizarre symbolism, cars that sink into waterfalls, men you once knew stalking your sleep. Traces remain in your waking hours, tingles of limbs gone fast asleep and trying to return to life. A heavy numbness weighs down your mind and traps your fingers. Weekends pass in a stupor of work and static.

I must approach this life one word at a time, one mundane, but important task at a time, one alive thought followed up by action at a time. I hold these disparate pieces of myself, the melodramatic, the calm, the wounded, the creative, the egotist, the self-sacrificer while I continue to create a whole life. A writer’s life. A mother’s life. A partner’s life. A psychotherapist’s life. To live fully, I have no choice but to create some sort of balance, to make space to write and be myself authentically.

The things that don't exist

Some days are lucky, rippled with sweetness. Yesterday afternoon, me on the couch, a dog to either side, my 16-year-old son decompressing across the room, my husband working nearby … It was sweet proximity, availability, warmth. This morning, we are in a similar configuration, each working on our own stuff, each present. Here we are. We are alive and healthy, we are family, and there are others here and there, a small group, but existent and walking the earth.

At night when I can’t sleep, or when I wake up at some ridiculous time, barely post-midnight, I am thrust into my deepest anxieties. I envision a future completely alone, family dead, the boy (god willing) living his life to the fullest in the faraway. This night-thinking future is inevitable. Come daylight, it returns to mirage. But primal anxiety leaves its mark, its mood discolorations. My wellbeing is perpetually contused and tender.

I know enough of the signs to recognize depression. My energy levels are low, my sleep is shot. Sometimes I feel hopeless, worthless. I imagine the relief of death (without a desire to make that a reality). Getting stuff done is difficult. Some days are better, some worse. The feelings ratchet up over my work week as each day intensifies and emotions build up with no relief. 

Then Friday arrives, a day when I don’t see clients. I start to decompress. I see more of my family. Sometimes sleep improves, sometimes it doesn’t. Other worries and meta-wounds emerge from my subconscious, friendships on the fritz, feelings of being unseen, unheard, unknown. By this time on Saturday, I’m a little more clear-headed, though so much remains to do.  

I don’t want to do it. I want to return to the good parts of childhood, a slow afternoon and a good book, an expanse of future, a person in the kitchen making me dinner, a dog I don’t need to walk or feed lying across from me on the floor, brown eyes gazing into mine, and nothing is real, except for the things we don’t talk about, which, for a moment or two, my fingers against the dog’s fur, our expressions intent and serious, don’t exist.

The Brontës and me

Jane Eyre was one of my favorite books as a kid, the memorable Joan Fontaine and Orson Welles movie version providing the visuals for its gothic intensity. In the taffy slow early days of the pandemic, I reread Charlotte Brontë’s classic, as well as her sister Emily’s harder-to-stomach Wuthering Heights. I went on a Brontë binge, reading biographies and articles about the family, their quirks and talents. The Brontës lived hard lives in hard times, none of the siblings making it to 40. Lately I’ve gotten caught up in the topic again, my 1:30am (or earlier!) insomnia bouts spent reading Claire Harman’s biography of Charlotte, A Fiery Heart.

Paging through the book feels strangely familiar. I already know the facts. Is this a re-read, my first go-round wiped out by pandemic stress? Did I crack open some similar biography between then and now? Everything new is old again. What strikes me this time around is the determination of the three spinster sisters, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne. Stuck at home with a dissipated brother and uninvolved curate father (their mother and two other sisters long dead), these women knew they had to take care of business. Money was tight. Remaining governesses or schoolteachers was unappealing. So the sisters decided to become published authors. Their first step was to have a collection of their poetry printed pseudonymously. From there they worked together (and sometimes separately) to write and shop their subsequent manuscripts out to publishers.

As the siblings were working on their publishing plan, their brother died of tuberculosis. Not long after their books were published, Emily and Anne succumbed to the disease.. About six years after later Charlotte passed away at 38, likely due to severe morning sickness.

The Brontës were a peculiar, self-contained set of siblings, from childhood onward caught up in writing elaborate and fantastical stories. Creation was part of how they navigated and tolerated the world. But why am I so taken their determination and penurious circumstances? Perhaps I need inspiration, a reminder to stay the course (or to at least get on the boat).

 I, dear reader, am also about to become a published author. What I have written has little in common with Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights. Because it is in the self-help and self-development genre, it does not tell a melodramatic story or dazzle the mind with its extended and deep metaphors. But I worked hard at it, tried my best to make it useful and well-written, and got paid to do it. Having a deadline and a writing structure kept me going. It got me published by an actual publisher in a way that this blog, something I’ve been writing in for almost fourteen years, did not. 

Over the years, I’ve grappled with how I could do the sort of writing I enjoy, the stuff that shows up on writing survive, in a more public way, to allow the personal to exist within the professional. This brings up internal conflicts and questions. What does it mean to share my inner thoughts as a psychotherapist? What if this is terribly unprofessional? What happens if a client or a colleague reads this blog? Will anyone, outside of the perhaps three people who are longtime readers, care about what I write? What is the point of writing—here, or anywhere else? How do I make this authentic and yet appealing to others? What if my authenticity is unappealing to others?

Perhaps I think too much. Ultimately, I’d like to write here more often, and not completely anonymously. I don’t want to make a big deal out of this tentative plan or spend too much time crafting my posts. But I hope to slowly meld the personal and professional into something that has a shape and form, has a life of its own, and is authentically mine.

(Oh – and my book is called 52-Week Grief Journal:  Prompts and Reflections for Navigating Loss. For more information, take a look at amazon.)