No Cars on the Road

boy on floor — By Gina Kelly www.ginakelly.com

By Nicole Matos

My three-year old son and I are on the floor. Bless his occupational therapist, but her daily home-based tasks are killing us. I place blocks in a line and run a car over this road. “No!” Alex charges between me and the blocks and tries to rip the cars from my hands. “No! You don’t! I tell you!”

“Well, you can play your way”—I point to his pile of blocks—“But I will play this way. We can play differently.”

You and I are different, we are different people. His therapist (the “feelings” one, not Speech or OT) pushes me to say this, after I have explained the hairdryer battles, the sign-he-saw-that-I-didn’t-see, his new insistence that I have a penis, although he was fine before with me and my vagina for babies to be born out of. Babies like Alex? Did it hurt? Did we do it in a hospital?

But now his fears and his tantrums have settled around the truth that he and I do not always match. Over and over he tells me that I have a penis—I TOLD YOU, I TOLD YOU, as if his insisting on it will make it so. When I try, “We are different,” he goes crazy: “No! Not different! Not different! No! Please!” I reassure him that I love him, nothing is changing, we are already different, we are, after all—a bizarre sort of Platonic evidence I pull out of my ass—not always in the same place at the same time.

But the cars: “Alex will accept adult variations in his play.” He seems to know that this is an object lesson, a battle of reality paradigms, a showdown. “No! No! I’m so mad at you! I want to poke you in the eye [and does], I want to hit you [and does]!” And I hate my whole life. I hate every imaginary parent who has ever played cars with their imaginary child. I hate all my other imaginary children: those twenty eggs I saw on the ultrasound that month he was conceived. Nineteen other possible Alexes, but none of them here to help us, now.

Why? Why? Why no cars allowed on the road? And yet, the next day—“I want to play cars, Mommy”—he lines up the blocks, runs the car over the top, and eyes me carefully. “This car needs to wait his turn. Uh-oh! We can solve the problem! Look, relax and solve the problem!” Trying again. Showing me. So, what can we do to get second-day Alex on the first day? How do we beat down first-day Alex so second-day Alex can live, live, live?

If I had another child in my house, a child that picked up the car and ran it on the road, easily, heedless, I would backhand that child. I would sink my teeth into his shoulder and suck.

I tell my husband that, in my secret evil angry head, I call the therapy programs that are saving our lives—saving our son, by line items and inches—the Ghetto Where What You Wished Wouldn’t Happen Happened. That when I see the words “Special Needs” (especially if they are surrounded by rainbows or smiley faces), I think they should be renamed “Outrageous Needs.” That is how I think of Alex’s needs, on those days when he is just a bleat of screeching irrational anxiety—“Give me my blanket! No blanket! Take off my sock! No sock! [Hits me.] Mommy, I’m sorry! Mommy don’t go!” Outrageous needs!

And, I tell my husband, I am scared I have a worn spot in my mothering now that just won’t go away—a worn out, sagging, trampoline spot that other parents have time to patch up because it isn’t so often used, so outrageously. And it is holding—it has to hold, I have to make it hold. But what if it breaks? What if my love somehow leaks out?

The next day there is third-day Alex—not struggling, not overcompensating for having struggled, but just himself, total, complete. We have a great time at the park. We ride the swings and the slide and play pretend in the way that feels safest to him, in exaggerated fake voices, with the reminding anchor, “This is just pretend” sprinkled throughout. An old woman gives him a huge lollipop, spontaneously, and I let him take it, not thinking how close it is to Speech.

I spend the ride setting it up: “We will need to say goodbye to the lollipop, for Speech, but I promise it will be in the car when you get back.” And he does it voluntarily, giving it up, even waving the lollipop bye bye. But then he can’t hold it together. He lies down on the sidewalk, telling me with his body, I am overcome. He doesn’t want me to hold him, but I say I love him, touch his hand, and we count to ten and to ten again, calming.

After Speech, his therapist says, “He actually did great today—he used a big word, ‘promised’!” We look at each other, my son and I, co-conspirators.

Back at the car, the lollipop is waiting, and I grind it in for next time, the prophecy I’m determined, through all my human resentment and selfishness, to make true. “If Mommy promises, I will only promise when it is true. I will only promise if I am certain.”

And he says, sincerely, “Thank you mommy Alex promise.”

•••

NICOLE MATOS is a Chicago-based writer, professor, roller derby girl, and special needs mom. Her work has appeared in such publications as Salon, The Classical, The Rumpus, theNewerYork, The Atticus Review, Monkeybicycle, THE2NDHAND txt, berfrois, Chicago Literati, and many others. Follow her on Twitter at @nicole_matos2.

Transference: Love Me, Love My Problems

under desk — By Gina Kelly www.ginakelly.com

By D. Baker

I’m crazy. I have been my whole life.

It was my first inheritance from my parents. On my father’s side, everyone’s a bipolar; they approached their insanity with buckets of alcohol. My mother’s family, though, settled into a nice, major depression, self-medicating through anxious and determined hard work.

I shook out in the middle—a mental illness called “Soft Bipolarity.” I’m too miserable to be a classic bipolar, but too irritable to be simply depressed. Doggedly atavistic, I’ve tried both the family home remedies. Neither worked.

Fortunately (?), I was born in the seventies; I could turn to counseling. In counseling, though, the dreadful reality of transference loomed inescapable: a miserable fact. Transference—like the wily Pan—always led me, unwitting, into inappropriate attachments to my counselors. I felt helpless against the inevitability that I would always pour unintended meaning into the interactions within the confines of four beige walls.

I recall my first experience with this, which was innocuous enough. I wasn’t sure how much older the counselor was than me—probably double my seventeen years. At the time, he seemed ancient. But his gentle and reproachless listening was a gift so deep and wide that none could compare. I came to conceptualize his small, windowless office as a down-coated nest, and I began to regard him as my BFF.

The next one was closer to my age. His office was furnished, audaciously, in black leather. The conflict that knotted inside me entering felt palpable and real. Only moments earlier, I had fumbled out my father’s car—a jalopy that held together through the creative application of wire coat hangers and duct tape.

Without insurance of any kind, how much did my father spend for my hour in air-conditioned luxury, face to face with this man whose chocolate curls and mahogany bookshelves dizzied up my mind? Whether my father expressed resentment at the cost, or whether I imposed it on myself without outside provocation, the money to buy those cool hours left me sick with guilt. Back at my house, there was no leather; the broken down, stained couch hid beneath a garish, threadbare sheet. How could I possibly justify treating my mental malady when, for the price of a few sessions, my parents could have replaced their couch with something clean and sturdy, if not new?

I recall nothing of what he might have said, that second counselor. What remains in my consciousness is yearning. I willed him to pull me close, so I could free his silken hair for my fingers to curl in as he pressed his lips to my throat, collarbone.

He never did.

There were others along the way. Although the impressions that they left don’t stand out in sharp relief, I know that I wanted them all. Because they, alone, understood. They—each of them—cared for me as no others had.

Free, with purchase.

•••

The last in my list of head trippers was a cognitive-behavioral therapist. Over the course of our time together, I went from calling him Dr. Mendenhall to Captain and finally to his first name, Jack.

We knew each other for a long time, if sporadically. The misfortune I faced with him lay in the reality that we had the twin brothers of sarcasm and irony lodged in our brains. Our conversations played out in wit and hilarity.

That was my problem. I wished it were his problem, too.

He warned me of it. I went to see him again after an eighteen-month tour through the depths of hell when my in-laws moved into my house and a dear friend died at the age of thirty-four. “This is dangerous,” Jack said. “When you try to work through emotions this intense, transference happens.”

“What does that mean?” I asked him, unwilling to settle for euphemisms and jargon.

“Well, we have to keep it real. I’m telling you up front so you know. Instead of being unwilling to discuss the giant elephant in the room, we talk about it. Acknowledging your feelings for me will be half the battle.”

When he said that, I both loved and hated him for it.

Loved, because he understood; he knew what would happen to me.

Hated, because I felt shorn of my defenses. He may as well have cut me to my nerves, and then blown cold air over them. The desperate, clutching nature of the lunatic embarrassed me. How I wished that I could pretend that I was not that being, not that irrational woman who would inevitably pine for her mental health care giver! I hadn’t expected to be called out on my junk. If we both recognized it at the outset, how could I pretend it wasn’t happening?

As predicted, the ever-mounting disappointment I felt at the end of our therapy hours seeped through me like a slow leak. And the eagerness that flitted in the space where I once had a heart and lungs annoyed me when I realized I’d traded in vital body parts for time in his presence.

One day, I wept in rage and shame for hating my mother-in-law. Rage, because I had newly stumbled upon an old journal entry made on a Christmas morning after she told me my husband and children were happier in my absence. Shame, because I did not believe that hatred was the right choice.

I importuned him, “Jack, fix me.”

But there was no simple solution for a situation in which one has been truly, deeply, and repeatedly wronged. So he set the problem back in my lap, leaving me with prayer as my ongoing, if ineffective, recourse.

Before he did, though, we laughed, exchanging sarcasms. I told him I didn’t want to kill her; I simply wanted to make her suffer.

“To the pain!” he said, borrowing a line from The Princess Bride. That he should know the movie well enough to quote it made my skin shiver in delight—was this not proof that we were kindred spirits?

“Let’s take away her Xanax,” I said, filled with glee.

“No; let’s not take it away, but replace half of it with sugar pills so she never knows when she’s going to get one that works.”

“No,” I said. “Not sugar pills. Poison.”

“Hmm.” He smiled. “I’m thinking something dark and sexy … what about hemlock?”

“Nightshade,” I said.

“Exactly.”

How, pray tell, could a girl hope to keep her wits about her in the presence of a man who knew to suggest dark, sexy hemlock? As I laughed, a tear slid over my top lip, salting the tip of my tongue. Shields up, I warned myself. You’re looking into his blue eyes far too long.

•••

I don’t see Jack anymore. We worked through so much that he became my biggest problem. I dreamt of him at night and woke to a sodden pillowcase, my eyelashes wet with tears. Catching myself, I choked back sobs, hoping my husband wouldn’t wake.

“Is this hurting your marriage?” Jack asked me. “Coming here?”

“Don’t speak,” I answered.

That night was Halloween. I stood outside in the cold for five hours, miserable at the spectre of the one right choice that faced me. Because, ultimately, my husband didn’t deserve my divided allegiance. Yes, he had failings, but so did I. My husband’s Asperger’s Syndrome was woefully ill-paired with my Soft Bipolar Disorder. Our cosmic mismatch spanned the emotional spectrum—where my husband felt almost nothing, I felt everything to the utmost degree.

The last time I saw Jack, my stupid voice betrayed me with its tremble, and I stared at the crumpled tissue in my hand. “Teach me how to be as unmoved by you as you are by me.”

“Am I unmoved by you?” he asked.

The moment held. I wanted to kiss his eyelids.

Siphoning off the intensity, his voice took on a theatrical tone. “Oh yes. I’m just a cold and unfeeling counselor.”

I cut him off. “I’m not coming back. I can’t do this anymore.”

“You don’t have to make that decision today,” he said. “I know you want everything wrapped up in a neat package, but this is something you have to think about.”

I steeled my resolve. “Do you imagine that I have thought of anything else this week?”

If he felt the same way, his feelings for me would have been called “counter-transference.” Something for which he was trained, instructed on how to remain professionally detached. But though he may have come to our encounters prepared, I owned no such clinical armor.

•••

Last summer, the gamble of life dealt me a heart problem. As I sat pondering my thirty-six years, I marveled that I had it all—a husband, two beautiful children, a house, and a dog. I owned the veritable American Dream. Crowning that, I’d even been published a couple of times. There was nothing of any import that I’d left undone.

So my heart problem brought with it an endowment of gratitude and contentment.

And yet.

And yet, once in a while a certain slant of light or scent on the breeze conjures Jack, unbidden, from my memory. I marvel at how freshly lanced I feel. A part of me wonders if my flight left Jack equally wrecked, if I had somehow slipped under his training and gotten to him, as he did me.

•••

Turns out you can tell this to your husband. All of it. Turns out, he will try to commiserate by telling you about a girl in college that he studied with all the time. And it turns out that all you will hear is, “I fell in love with someone and kept it a secret all these years.” That’s how bipolarity works. That’s the bad news.

The good news is you finally have decent medication. And with the help of decent medication, you move forward. You don’t have to carry it around for decades, mourning from the depths of your mood-disordered soul. After a few days, you can see what your husband’s intent was; in place of subterfuge and infidelity, he was really offering understanding and empathy.

You get to go back to being crazy—incognito. You get to tuck those unwelcome memories of Jack back in the mental box where they belong.

When you wake up and swallow your pretty pills, your handful of Skittles, you can, at long last, live life in the middle. And the middle rocks when compared to the bi-poles.

•••

D. BAKER is a writer living in the Intermountain West.

Red-Handed: On Shoplifting and Infertility

By Jennifer Maher

Resolve, The National Infertility Association of America, lists a variety of emotional and physical symptoms in response to not getting pregnant when you want to get pregnant. They include but are not limited to:

Lack of energy (especially when you have an unsuccessful cycle, on medical appointment days, or when you will see a pregnant friend);
Headaches
Irritability (snapping at people or making mountains out of molehills)
Insomnia
Extreme sadness
Inability to concentrate

Shoplifting is nowhere on this list.

Yet in the nearly three years it took me to conceive, along with over $22,000 in home-refinancing and credit card debt, I also acquired the following:

One black large-ring pullback belt with double buckle
A boxy caramel suede jacket with fringe on the front pockets and hem
Decadent Fig, Orchid Surrender, and Cheating Heart lipstick (Estee Lauder)
Two bottles of 2006 Chalone Vineyard Pinot Noir
The complete boxed set of My So-Called-Life

Much like infertility, shoplifting requires a certain kind of seat-of-your-pants creativity. Some seasoned lifters, for instance, line empty bags with aluminum foil to get past the door sensors; others rig bags with springs or wear enormous coats with hand-sewn secret pockets inside. Whatever the method of concealment, though, recreational shoplifting has long been considered an archetypal feminine vice, an impulsive pilfering of the phallus and the mirror image of castration anxiety. Secreting a skin cream in the feminine folds of your purse couldn’t be more obvious in this respect. Or imagine a necklace up your coat-sleeve, its laminated price tag held fast like a nascent IUD. Think about the fact that just this year in a South Carolina outlet mall, they arrested a woman with over $1700 dollars worth of stolen clothes in an empty infant car seat.

•••

When I finally got caught, it was on the first floor. The first floor of most department stores is the sort of gateway drug of shoplifting because it is full-to-bursting with easily pocketed items such as makeup and jewelry, a whole range of objects no larger than an infant’s palm or a deck of cards. I had just slipped a gold-plated chain necklace with purple lacquer beads into my shopping bag full of already purchased merchandise.

Standing in line to actually pay for something while you steal something else is a trick I thought I was clever enough to come up with on my own although, actually, it’s quite commonplace. Cloaking oneself in the veneer of respectable consumerism has a certain logic: who would suspect someone who is in the middle of paying for something else? The calculations involved in such decisions (how much to spend, how much to steal) are both whimsical and precise, a weighing of the universe against your own held breath and courage. I was actually feeling sort of virtuous that day as I had passed up a display of patterned SmartWool socks, thinking somehow that a pair might be pushing my luck. Then I heard the voice behind me:

“Ma’am, you need to stop right now and come with me.”

Of course I had not choice but to follow him, though he made me walk in front, somehow guiding my elbow without touching me at all. We rose up on the same escalator that, as a child, I used to be afraid would catch my shoelace and crush me. Resort-wear was on sale, and we passed turquoise and pink signs that read “Island Getaway” against a backdrop of pixilated palm trees and sand. I remembered then, oddly, that the first word I learned to read was “Island.” “Is-land,” I pronounced it (with an “s”) to much praise, as I had I tried to sound it out and not just guess, which when it comes to words is just about as much right as wrong. I still cling to this skill—to be able to make a mistake and be redeemed for how I made it—even in the most awkward of circumstances. Perhaps if I just explained to this young man, I thought, as we rode past waffle grills and men’s shirts and thick blue Mexican glassware, that this was all because I was thirty-seven years old and didn’t have a baby. I had made a mistake but I could learn.

Yet I couldn’t speak of these sorts of calculations as we turned right and left nearly a dozen times into the stained off-white recesses of the store, a place where doors no longer whooshed but were opened by punching a code into a metal box above a doorknob. This is where the logic of theft got you, I thought, as I was ordered to sit in a chair with leaky stuffing. This was the place for people like me, people who think the universe runs via a system of payback such that pilfered accessories could balance existential rage.

The gentleman who had caught me on a camera concealed in a mirrored pillar couldn’t have been more than twenty-four years old, with dark hair cut close to his head. He called in a female sales assistant—store policy I later learned—and the only thing between me sitting up straight and passing out in fear was my ability to concentrate on her silver nametag and the garland of irises tattooed around her ankle. Both of them were, I was sure, ridiculously fertile, with at least thirty years of potential baby making between them. She usually worked at the cosmetic counter where they wore white coats. By now I was so used to being administered to by people in white coats that I half-expected her to ask me the date of the first day of my last period and to take out a syringe of Lupron.

“Name?” he asked, as she rotated the ankle of her right leg in a circle and stared at her cuticles.

I learned that if I signed a paper saying that it was my first offense and I agreed to pay the store one hundred dollars and not shop there anymore (though I was allowed, he emphasized, to shop online whenever I wished), I could be let go without involving the police. It wasn’t until he ripped the form off from the top of a pad of them that it really hit me that people did this all the time. I didn’t know why anyone else did it. I only knew that for me it was a way of biding time and ferreting objects away until the empty space was filled. If I had been pregnant, I might call this magpie-like behavior nesting.

•••

I saw a therapist for a while over my anxiety about not being able to get pregnant but not about my shoplifting; it seemed too personal. Her assurances that I had come from “a long line of women who were able to have children” didn’t work for the obvious holes in its logic: anyone who has been born should therefore never suffer infertility. She prescribed me anxiety medication by consulting a laminated circular chart.

Years later, and after I finally had a baby, I learned that she had long been on a kind of informal shoplifting “watch list” at one of the more expensive boutiques in town. She hasn’t been arrested for a number of reasons, I suppose, chief of which includes her being white, in her late sixties, recovering from throat cancer, and recently divorced from her husband of forty years who left her for his Japanese teaching assistant. (In a small college town information like this spreads quickly).

I imagine my therapist, even now, arms full of Academic Woman of a Certain Age clothing—long, flowing caftan-like tops with nubby printed textures connoting either travel or a degree in anthropology—clothes meant to encase their wearers like so much flocked wallpaper. When she hands over her Visa Gold she nicks a scarf, say, or a free-trade wallet whose earmarked profits benefit children in Guatemala with cleft palates. The clerks in the store keep a lookout and try to sense when she might take something in order to distract her, like shaking a bright plastic toy in the face of a crying infant. No one really has the guts to actually call her on it, and the store must make enough money from what she does buy that they can afford to leave her alone but for the watching. My reaction to this information is a combination of repulsion and sympathetic joy.

•••

The fear of getting caught, as any therapist will tell you, is an endemic part of the thrill of shoplifting. The pounding of blood in the arms and neck, the panic-static in the eardrum, the bursting open of the department store’s heavy glass and metal doors and into the air of the known world abruptly accessorized by what you both do and do not deserve. Thus the final steps out of the store are the scariest, and the most thrilling. I would draw this part out, lingering at the edge of tile and concrete, fingering the perfume bottles in an approximation of calm, my attempt to look less criminal and more casual consumer, a hassle-free flaneur with time on her hands and the world at her feet, a pantomime of the person I wanted to be. Not a thirty-seven-year-old academic whose left hip was covered with raisin-sized bruises from hormone injections. Just a woman. A woman shopping, as women do, for something warm and soft.

•••

Of course, the stealing only quelled my pregnancy obsession for short periods of time. I still zealously counted the days of my cycle, took my temperature and recorded it in shaky print on a series of post-it notes next to the bed, bought package after package of ovulation kits and debated on the toilet seat whether the cervical mucous stretched between my fingers was, in fact, an inch or more in length, and if the opening to my cervix felt like more like my lips or my nose (the former connoted the approach of ovulation, or was it the latter?). For three years I would periodically sneak my index finger into my underwear to check for blood as the twenty-eighth day approached, the absence of which would mean I could breathe for the next hour. When my period came, as it inevitably did, the pelvic tugging and the thick molasses cramps became yet one more sign of the fact that the more I wanted something, the less likely I would be to get it, that I couldn’t count on getting what I wanted without subterfuge. Once stopped at a red light (probably on day twenty-six or twenty-seven), I reached up under my skirt with my left hand only to see the man in the SUV next to me raise his eyebrows and smile. You’d think that such embarrassment would warrant something good later to make up for it, but still that month my period came. Later, standing in line buying tampons, I palmed a tin of mints the size of a swallow’s egg.

•••

Statistics vary, but most agree that women are born with a finite number of eggs, somewhere between one and two million. Approximately 750 eggs are “lost” each month and even fertility specialists throw around the term “shelf-life” to refer to the ways in which a woman’s eggs begin to diminish in quality after her twenties. One doctor called it the “dried macaroni problem.” If you have a box of dried macaroni on your shelf, you can expect it to last for years and years. However, the longer it sits inside your dusty cupboard the more likely it is that when you set it to boil, some of the individual pieces will have deteriorated.

•••

I have never stolen a box of macaroni.

•••

Part of what makes shoplifting seem alluring is also that you can pretend that you are striking a blow against the facts, against a world where the age you are able to pay your bills and live without three other people splitting the rent is also the age at which your peak fertility begins its precipitous drop. Stealing then felt to me like a swipe against Mother Nature and Father Capitalism at the same time. After all, that sweater at the Gap? It was made by fertile women at maquiladoras being paid cents a day.

•••

Across the parking lot from my pediatrician’s office is a large department store whose red star signals its function as a space of gratification, both imaginary and concrete. When I carried my son into and out to of my car for his first checkup, I was afraid someone would stop me. I love him so much that I’m still not convinced he will disappear into thin air for everything I have ever done.

•••

Two weeks ago, I saw my old therapist on the front steps of our local organic grocery store. It was October, and she had just tucked her cell phone into her wool pocket after calling (I imagine) for someone to come and collect her. By the time I was finished shopping, I saw her get into a taxi and leave the store’s order behind, turning her back on shelves, radio frequency identification tags, video cameras, prices for objects per can and box and gram and ounce. Before she stepped into the cab, her long linen skirt brushed against a pile of pumpkins arranged by the entrance, their round ridged orange skin fairly glowing in the shadow blue of early evening. They were still sitting there as she drove away. Right out front. Anyone could have taken one.

•••

JENNIFER MAHER is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Gender Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. She has published scholarly and creatively in a variety of venues including Brain, Child, Bitch Magazine, and Feminist Media Studies. She lives with her family in Bloomington, Indiana.