Chapter 13 Terrycloth Mom
THIRTEEN
Terrycloth Mom
This is a children's story.
Once upon a time on a perfect fall day when I was in third grade, I fell asleep in school. Not for the first time. Like usual, I was taken to the nurse’s office where they gave me an extra dose of my awake medicine. As I dutifully swallowed, I heard a girl throwing up in the bathroom.
Most people don’t know what it’s like to be truly sleep deprived.
The word tired doesn’t begin to encompass the way thoughts seem to jiggle like Jell-O in your head, or the way light scratches at your eyeballs, or the way sounds penetrate and bounce around your skull and make you think some really weird, jiggly thoughts.
But genius is born of a certain madness they say, and on rare occasions, a solid thought would form and take over.
My mad brain would latch onto random things and not let go.
That day, the need for sleep overwhelmed me like a compulsion.
I would sleep no matter the consequences.
If sleep was good and right, then the pill was bad and wrong.
The puking girl gave me my best idea ever.
When she came out, I went into the bathroom. I thought of the bitter pill I swallowed. I thought hard about it. I pictured it there, lodged in my throat, making me gag until the imagined taste of it overwhelmed me. I threw it up.
I showed the evidence of my stomach contents to the nurse. She gave me a cool rag, but instead of forcing another pill on me, she showed mercy and laid me down. She tucked me in and let me sleep. It was the best sleep. It was the nap that saved my life.
When I woke up, my mother was pinching my nose shut.
Adrenaline shot through me—cold like fear.
Laughing playfully and giving my nose a gentler squeeze, she said to the nurse, “It’s a game we play.
” She moved like she was about to caress my face, and I knocked her hand away.
I sat up, distancing myself. She only ever touched me in front of other people, and it made me angry because her touch was a lie like everything else about her was a lie.
I sat up and looked at the sympathetic nurse’s face—the woman who’d let me sleep. I spoke in front of my mother for the first time in three years. “She keeps me awake. The medicine is poison.”
The nurse startled at the sound of my small, raspy voice.
My mother turned to me, all shock and amazement. “He’s confused, sleepy boy. Off to the doctor again, I’m afraid. I’m exhausted, too, you know?” She said that last part mainly to the nurse, though she was facing me when she spoke.
In the car, she fumed. How dare you. Humiliating. Sick. Twisted. Pathetic excuse for a little boy. We’ll straighten you out once and for all. “You’re talking now? Great. Tell me why you’re hell bent on ruining my life.”
Those words were a mistake, because they gave me an even more solid idea. “Okay, Mommy. I’ll tell you everything when we get to the doctor.”
“We’ll see about that.”
And I thought to myself, I know something you don’t know.
Everything I know about my early childhood I learned in child psychiatrists’ offices as my mother wept and begged and made herself the ultimate martyr for the cause of mothering a special needs child.
I learned I was a preemie, and had been a poor feeder as an infant. I’d had to be tube fed. I learned I never slept, not even as a baby, and had been subjected to countless brain scans at numerous facilities over many years. I learned my mother was hospitalized for suicidal thoughts more than once.
The story was familiar. This was not the first child psychiatrist’s office I’d ever been in, or the twentieth.
I’d heard all my mother’s stories before.
Many, many people had. She loved to share her suffering.
She spoke about my sleepless nights and my narcoleptic days.
My abnormal circadian rhythms. My brain disorder. She left something out, though.
The new psychiatrist handed my mother a box of tissues, and she took them with wide, grateful eyes.
“Sounds like you’ve had a rough go of it,” the doctor said so sympathetically, and I remember being jealous. Why does she get the sympathy when I have to take the pills?
It occurred to me that day, in a way it hadn’t ever before—again, I credit the nap—that the doctor wasn’t asking me anything.
I thought we were here because of me. I thought I was the one who needed help.
The wheels in my mind were suddenly unstoppable.
Slowly, I raised my hand like they told us to in school if we had something we needed to say.
The doctor turned to me with a welcoming expression on her face. “Yes, Archer?”
“I’m tired.”
“That’s why we’re here, darling,” my mom said. “We’re all tired.”
“Then why won’t you let me sleep?”
She sighed, exasperated, and attempted to share a knowing look with the doctor.
I raised my hand again. “Am I supposed to take the awake medicine in the morning or at night?”
“The morning, Archer. Do you think you’ve been doing it wrong? Getting the pills mixed up?” She glanced at my mother. “Maybe you could watch him take his medicine for a few days? Make sure he’s getting it right?”
“I do,” my mother said, ruffled and offended. “I watch him take it every day.”
“Then why can’t I sleep at night?” I asked in case the doctor was so taken in by my mom’s tragic story that she missed the mistake she just made.
“Because, Archer—the nighttime medicine doesn’t work on you.”
“But you never give me the nighttime medicine. It’s blue. The awake medicine is white. Why do you grind up extra white pills and put them in my food?”
My mother barely blinked. “Archer you’re confused. Those are just vitamins.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I watched the psychiatrist pick up her pen and turn a narrow-eyed gaze on my mother.
“But I take gummy vitamins.”
“Archer. Be quiet. You don’t know what you’re talking about.” She turned to the doctor. “Maybe we should reschedule when he’s a little more lucid.”
“I’d like to do a sleep study,” she, the doctor, said suddenly.
I almost rolled my eyes. Sleep studies didn’t work on me either, and I was about to explain why that was, but my mother shut the conversation down quick.
“We’ve had plenty of those. No help yet.
” Then she sighed her long-suffering sigh.
“I guess he’ll just have to grow out of it, right?
Because none of you people seem to know how to help. ”
“I want to talk to you alone,” I said quickly to the doctor, afraid I was about to miss my only chance. Once I got home, it was going to start all over.
“Archer, I don’t trust this woman. Let’s go. Excuse us.” She reached down and pulled on my arm.
“Get me away from her,” I said as my mother yanked me to standing.
The doctor was stunned speechless.
Guess who I never saw again?
My mother was good at not getting caught. She was good at spinning her tale of woe but stopping just at the point where the lie could string her up. Factitious Disorder by Proxy. Pathological narcissism. Munchausen’s. She was one sick bitch.
I do not understand how I am the way I am.
Not when I was raised by that psychopath.
All the research I’ve done, the psychology classes I’ve taken, tell me I should be a junkie dead in a ditch or a serial killer.
I have the ways I cope—art is one of them, sex another, but I didn’t start painting until I went away to boarding school, and I didn’t have sex until I was fifteen, so that doesn’t explain it.
I didn’t have any friends until I met West, or a brother until I was already old enough to understand I was the only person I could depend on to keep myself alive.
All I had—all I remember having—was a soft, blue blanket to rub against my cheek during my infinite childhood of sleepless nights.
There was this famous study done in the sixties by a psychologist named Harry Harlow with baby chimpanzees. Harlow was trying to prove the existence of love. The way he did it was kind of twisted, but it changed a lot of people’s minds about how children were raised at the time.
What he did was, he separated infant chimps from their mothers hours after being born.
He gave them two “moms.” One was made out of a wire cage with a bottle positioned in it to feed from.
The other was a wire cage with no bottle, but it was covered in terrycloth.
Guess which one the babies wanted? Surprising a lot of people, it wasn’t the one with food.
It was the one they could hold onto. The one that felt like it was touching them back.
The babies clung to the terrycloth mom twenty-two to twenty-three hours of the day.
They took what they needed to survive from the wire mother but immediately retreated to the terrycloth mother as soon as they’d had enough to keep them alive.
They chose love.
Needless to say, after the experiment was over, the chimps didn’t do so well in life.
They sometimes failed to thrive, and other times, when they did all right with the cloth mom, they didn’t do well around other chimps later on.
Meaningful interaction turned out to be too much for them, which might feel familiar at this point in my story.
Anyway, when we got home from the psychiatrist’s office that day—the last appointment she’d ever take me to—my mother burned my blue blanket in the fireplace while I stood and watched.
“I’ll be sending you away,” she said.
“Good.”
Devastated as I was to lose the only thing that meant anything to me, I did not allow a single tear to fall down my face.
It was a valuable lesson on the perils of attachment, watching the one thing I loved turn to ash. I’ll never forget it.
On September 10th, I walk into the courtroom where West will be judged guilty and sentenced to prison. Sitting in the row behind the defense table is a tall white woman with long, blonde hair tied into a low ponytail. In six years or a thousand, I would know her anywhere.
“Hey, Nell.”