This is part of an ongoing series where I process things from therapy. Not necessarily linear, not necessarily sequential, but some kind of order seemed necessary. Although I’ve never seen SATC, these are to be read in the tone of Carrie Bradshaw (but maybe? slightly? less insufferable?)
If you want to make a therapist laugh, tell her about your plans. This week in therapy I was prepared. I was carrying a list of what I wanted to talk about and none of it had to do with my family or my childhood. I was fresh off of lots of processing with my boyfriend. We are navigating both a long distance and polyamorous relationship and have hit a rough patch. I was ready to talk about poor boundaries. I was ready to ask for help in coming up with ways to protect myself and my engagement in my relationship. It wasn’t avoidant, it wasn’t that I didn’t want to spend the time talking about family or childhood, it was that these other matters were crucial, urgent. I had gone this long, I had navigated my life successfully, I would have time to explore the shadow self and reparent and all of it.
She asked how my week had been. After our last session, and a little over a year, I had finally called my grandmother. I had finally sent her a piece of writing that was soon to be published, a piece that she made an appearance in. She asked for confirmation that some of the events in the piece did not happen to me. I answered, they did not, they just echo inside me in the same way I sometimes look like my mother. I explained I was investigating all the places inside my body that my mother’s trauma lived, and where in her body my grandmother’s trauma lived. She called the piece “life telling,” my investigation was yielding results. Toward the end of the conversation my grandmother told me she was upset with me and she was scared because of how long we had gone without talking. In a clumsy monologue she reminded me that she doesn’t speak to my mom, that she doesn’t have the best relationship with her other daughter, that her other granddaughter and her great grandson had died, and that she’s getting older and it’s important for us to be in each other’s lives. That as hard as she worked to keep up appearances over the years, (everyone knew) I was always her favorite. She kept mixing up language, going in and out of calling me her daughter. I knew she wasn’t confused, I knew it was because I was, for all intents and purposes, through circumstance and by choice, her daughter. She tried to course correct through me and was for the most part successful. Sometimes it skips a generation.
I had waited to cry until I got off the phone. My tears were hot with shame and guilt for letting so much time pass. I pointed to my grandmother’s new found conservatism, was it Fox News or my grandpa screaming in the background the entire time we were on the phone, as the reason I stopped calling weekly. It hurt too much to confront the betrayal I felt the first time she told me she was starting to understand the anti-choice movement. (There are generations of abortion on my mothers’ side of my family-this is a thing my grandmother taught me to be proud of. That a woman who has undergone the procedure herself could find truth and merit in anti-choice rhetoric is all I need to know about the effectiveness of right-wing media.) After every conversation I’d find a new piece of shrapnel in my chest, her words would lodge themselves inside me and I’d spend days trying to reconcile them with who I had known her to be. Her legacy was being slowly shredded with each phone call, so I stopped calling.
My therapist asked me if this had been the longest stretch my grandmother and I had gone without speaking. During our most recent conversation, my grandmother spoke of a period of time that my mother refused to allow her to see me. I didn’t remember this I told her, and my therapist. As far as I knew this past year and a half is the longest time in my life I had gone without speaking to my grandmother. I offered my therapist a brief summary of what I do remember-
My grandma had been a constant in my childhood. I remember her red acrylic nails. I remember her gold jewelry. I remember how she looked while driving. I remember being 4 years old at Christmas. I remember doing homework in elementary school at the counter in her kitchen. I remember her telling me no matter how much I thought I loved someone to never, ever, share a bank account. It was through her I learned that love often means being chained, and it was through her I learned to savor the places I feel freest. I remember Christmas, my grandpa dancing around in the living room with a lampshade on his head, I was supposed to be asleep but I wasn’t. I remember her getting me one of those princess sets-it had a tiara, a plastic string of pearls, a pair of plastic high heels, and a plastic purse. I remember dressing up in plastic and parading around on the porch of her house in Paso Robles. I remember her dogs, and spending nights and weekends with her in her garden and in her office and in the machine shop where she and my grandfather milled sheet metal. I remember a photo-it’s me around 6 years old, my grandpa, and my grandma. Then I remember the Pacific Northwest, the absence of sunshine, and a hallway closet.
I remember living in Oregon for a year with my aunt M and her 2 kids, my cousins-a boy and a girl both close to me in age. I remember it was supposed to be for a few weeks during summer, a vacation, then I remember I started 3rd grade. I remember I saw snow and collected pogs and cried while trying to learn multiplication tables. My cousins teased me, I read and hated several American Girl books. I remember my aunt M made me sit at the kitchen counter until I finished drinking an entire glass of milk even though I screamed. Sometimes my nana, my dad’s mom, would pour it down the sink and wink at me, my savior in more ways than one. I remember my dad came to visit and gave me $50 in ones and feeling powerful. I remember driving to the beach and dancing to Peter Gabriel, my dad in front of a fire, promising me that oysters tasted good (they did not). I remember going to the dentist to get fitted for braces. I remember my mom’s voice on the phone describing the desert and the house she lived in and that soon I could leave. I wanted to leave.
I remember not starting school when I should have. I remember hushed voices on the phone, my nana talking to someone about something-me and a problem. I remember breaking things and crying all the time. I remember feeling alone everywhere. I remember the hallway upstairs, how dark it was inside, and I swear I remember how long it took to learn what rage was and what rage felt like while hiding inside it. I still think that family means isolation-it’s a group of people you cannot, no matter how hard you try, connect with. No one knew what to do with me, this broken child.
I remember when my mom came. It was night and I heard voices downstairs. I sat up in bed and I knew, I knew it was her and I knew I was finally leaving. I remember running down the staircase, red and blue lights splashing on the walls, circular and repeating. She was there in the doorway, headlights behind her. My nana stood between us, awash in the lights from a parked police car and I pushed past her and into my mom’s legs. She told me to hurry up and get my stuff and I did and we were in a car driving away and what I don’t remember is looking back. We drove down the length of California-Sacramento and Bakersfield, and Santa Barbra, and then San Bernardino, and then we were in the High Desert and my room had stars painted in a boarder that wrapped around it. My mom remembered how much I loved the sky at night, my 2nd grade aspirations of working for NASA and space travel and how overjoyed I was when an astronaut had visited my elementary school.
I tell my therapist that this is where I thought I wasn’t allowed to see my grandma, after my mother had driven her and a friend from the High Desert in California, up the coast to Portland where they picked up police support, to retrieve me from my dad’s sister and mother. I remember taking the train to Central California when I was 12 to spend a few weeks in the summer at my grandparents. Before I was allowed to go I learned from my mother that there was a conspiracy against her, devised by my grandmother, my dad and his sisters, and my nana, and that’s how I ended up in Portland. I would continue to use passive language to describe this time in my life until last year, when I read a novel, Severance by Ling Ma, and realized that it wasn’t a thing that happened, it was an abduction. I remember how I grew to hate the stars that wrapped around my bedroom in the desert like I remember how I grew to hate my mom.
In Severance the main character, Candice, toggles back and forth between the past- recounting her childhood and immigration to the United States, and the present-navigating the collapse of New York City as a virus infects then kills most of the world’s population. When she was a child in China her father took a job as a teacher in Utah. He left first. Her mom followed later, leaving Candice with her grandparents for about a year. Her mother sent for her and when she arrived in Utah, neither she nor her mother were the same. Candice threw temper tantrums while with her grandparents, “the anger was overwhelming.” The first week I lived in Portland I threw a Sega Genesis controller at the television with such force it broke both. I hid in an upstairs closet for hours listening to cassette tapes so loud, my head buried against my knees, my arms wrapped around myself with such a strong grip I couldn’t feel my hands. Candice recounts, “When I moved to the US at six, I was unrecognizable to my mother. I was angry, chronically dissatisfied, bratty… But if I was unrecognizable to her, she was also unrecognizable to me…For most of my childhood and adolescence, my mother was my antagonist.” The excitement of being reunited with my mom didn’t last long. I was angry, disconnected, mean. By junior high I had forgotten the excitement I felt when my mother showed up in Portland, the memory had soured. Somewhere somehow, the neural pathway to that feeling had been rerouted to how it felt when my aunt M made me sit in front of a glass of milk. They were both rancid in my body.
Candice’s parents caused a break of attachment under the idea that a new job in a new country would result in better lives and circumstances for themselves and their only child. In my life, my dad’s side of the family colluded in my abduction under the impression that my aunt M could provide me with a better life than my mother. They told my mother it would be a few weeks, likely offering her time to get clean, and no one told me anything that I can remember. Like Candice and her mother, my relationship with mine did not survive the break. Caregivers are not always interchangeable.
For Candice, her grandparent’s apartment, “the world beyond the balcony was hysterical, uncontrollable.” Her grandparents invented stories about kidnappings, stranger danger, with a morale: “Don’t stray from your family. Don’t talk to strangers. Stay inside. Be good.” This message carries through Severance. At the start of the end, when Shen Fever has overwhelmed the world, Candice agrees to a severance package-she agrees to continue to go to her office for the length of her contract. At its designated end, she would receive her severance pay. The terms are simple, roughly the same as her grandparents’ cautionary tales- “Don’t stray. Answer emails. Stay inside. Be good.” She succeeds and eventually is forced to leave New York City as its decomposing infrastructures make it dangerous to stay, meeting a group of people who are traveling to The Facility. The road on their way is hysterical, uncontrollable, in spite of the efforts of the group’s defect leader Bob-an older man in a button down, who’s pre apocalyptic job was in IT. Once they reach The Facility, a few members of their party short and Candice on the outs with Bob, the rules are the same-“Don’t stray from your family. Don’t talk to strangers. Stay inside. Be good.”
Severance deals mostly in nostalgia. Shen Fever is an illness that removes consciousness from its host and locks their dying bodies in routine. Nostalgia is the symptom that comes before the mind is overwhelmed and life is lost. The reader is left to wonder if Candice has succumbed to the illness as she maintains a routine through the course of the novel, weaving in and out of memories of her childhood as she completes the same actions over and over though the course of the story. The “severance” is her payment for the successful completion of her employment, from the publishing company she works at, reproducing bibles endlessly, an act itself rooted in routine and nostalgia. The “severance”is in her boyfriend leaving her at the onset of the novel, tired of the grind and uninspired by life in New York, choosing to weather the storm on elsewhere. “To live in a city is to consume its offerings”, Candice says. “It is also to take pleasure in those systems because, otherwise, who could repeat the same routines, year in, year out?” Severance continues as she is slowly disconnected from those systems as the city collapses around her. Severance when she leaves NYC. Severance is when she makes a break for it, leaving Bob who has been infected and taken to pacing the aisles of the Facility, to drive toward Chicago. Though the severance most prominent was the separation she experienced from her mother when she was a girl. By the end of the novel, it seems more likely that severance may have been what made Candice immune to Shen Fever .
Severance spreads across my life like a cluster, too. Candice’s parents took a chance, they hoped that immigration and temporary separation would lead to a better life. My dad’s family colluded what was essentially a kidnapping hoping severance would lead to a better life. My mom took a chance and retrieved me, hoping reunification would course correct. It didn’t, but a life grew in the break. The abduction didn’t make me immune to anything, but it did teach me to sever. At the first moment I was able, I severed myself from my mother. A few years later I’d sever my father. A few years after that I would end up walking the same streets that Candice did, and similar to her, New York City would become the closest thing to home I could approximate. Perhaps now, I am severing my grandmother.
This week in therapy I was avoiding nostalgia.I had a plan. I was ready to talk about poor boundaries. I was ready to ask for help in coming up with ways to protect myself and my engagement in my relationship. I was (am) worried going back would undo the work I had done to create safety in my life, the work I started in that hallway closet. I swear it was there I remember learning how to survive a severance I did not choose, and I swear it was there I learned what survival felt like. I don’t want to lose that now, I am hoping for immunity.
