of his own.
“So this company I want to buy is in Stratford,” he told me.
“Stratford where?” I said.
“Connecticut, Lyn.”
“How far away is it?”
“Oh, maybe a hundred miles or so. I can commute till you find us a house down near there.”
My halfhearted house search bore the same results as any half-hearted activity. It failed. Bill got an apartment in Stratford, and commuted. I stayed home and watched my children grow. I wanted to grow, too. Bill’s energy went into his career, mine into the children. When Bill was home our “mutual affair” with alcohol protected us from ourselves and each other. We drank B & L scotch, a brand we affectionately dubbed “Bill & Lyn’s.”
My prayers had become dusty and dull but the local parish, Trinity in Collinsville, needed volunteers—for everything. Getting involved soothed my longings somewhat. What did I want? I was doing everything expected, I thought, yet I sat in my suburban kitchen baking chocolate chip cookies, a righteous activity that felt clumsy, and dreamed of a job with a paycheck. I reached for the necessary baking ingredients, one by one, from the refrigerator, pantry, and cupboard. In a dreamily narcissistic moment, I noticed my wrist—delicate, lovely, slim. It might, I imagined, have belonged to Princess Grace or a saint or mystic like Dame Julian of Norwich, of whom I’d dimly heard. Just gazing at my wrist caused me to realize—how long had it been, years? —that I scarcely noticed lovely things about myself.
The images of children who would delight in my cookies dashed across my mind’s eye. Bev, ten, a dark beauty who stalked me—her presence closer than my shadow, her gaze intense, seeming to question my right to exist. Jill, nine, also beautiful, with delicate features and an audacious mountain of curls to match her chutzpah. She had issued her declaration of independence at four—“There’s just not enough air in the world for me and Bev!” R. B., six, his face bright, irresistibly pleasing, plaintive, and lightly shadowed with anxious bewilderment. John, maturely handsome for a two-year-old, had a beguiling timidity that camouflaged the inner turmoil of his own miniature life in the shadow of three big siblings.
“Lynnie, the highest destiny for any woman is to be a good mother.” Mom’s fail-safe prescription for happiness sounded to me like a proscription. I had followed her rules but questioned myself mercilessly. Was I a good enough mother? Why didn’t I have orgasms? Very little made me angry. But I went to church. All was well.
All is not well at all. Something is wrong with me.
I had a secret and it wasn’t the old god-man. My secret was a broken heart. It was so broken that half of it fell out that day in my kitchen over cookies.
Why are you doing this?
An inaudible voice inquired, a polite, curious voice of simple candor and blinding clarity. It wasn’t my voice; it was, well, not from my mind. The only thing about this voice that was like me was that it asked a question. I scurried around the kitchen, ordered the utensil drawer, rearranged the canisters on the counter, and was about to go for the vacuum cleaner when I crumpled, sat down, put my head on the kitchen table, and sobbed.
How did you know, God?
The God who had listened to me as a child had found a voice. Jolted out of my spiritual torpor, I followed the cookie voice and waded into the deep turbulent waters of my self—looking for me, looking for God, looking for purpose, life, sex, and meaning beyond motherhood.
Before I embarked on an unknown path, I knew I should have a clean house. I grabbed the vacuum as if to throttle it and buzzed it around. When you’re making a decision you know will go against everything your mother, the church, and the world has set up for you, things get messy. In fact, when you listen to God from your soul’s depths, plan on dissonance. I was scared alive.
I seized life, grabbed for it, slashed wildly at what felt like a large thick oxygen-depriving plastic bag all round me. I rushed from Eden’s safety, apple in hand. This path of disobedience felt obedient to me, “meet and right” as the liturgical prayer said. One of the first things I did was to have an affair with a man, a flirty fling that upped my aliveness. It might not have been God’s will, but it was mine. Who can ever know what God’s will is, anyway? All I knew was that God had asked me a good question.
My next action was to enter bioenergetic therapy. That was just after I’d smashed the small aqua sugar bowl, that went with the aqua-and-white set of everyday dishes, which didn’t go with the two-tone persimmon-and-copper kitchen, onto the kitchen table. It shattered into more pieces than Humpty Dumpty. Sugar mixed with chunks and chips of cheap porcelain fanned out over the table as four astonished faces, with spoons filled with Cheerios poised on the way to hungry mouths, looked up. This was not their mother. Silence as heavy as a dentist’s X-ray apron slapped down on us all. A couple of tears rolled down John’s cheeks and more than a couple down mine. Bev got up and began to pick the broken shards from the sugar. Jill went to fetch her Siamese cat, and R. B. helped Bev, and said, “It’s okay, Mom.”
“You’re getting in touch with your anger,” my new counselor said. He was handsome, bearded, and a Rev. named John. He explained bioenergetic therapy, the brainchild of Alexander Louwen, as body work with deep breathing based on the idea that all the emotions one has ever felt were stored in the muscles. Emotions seek release. Of course!
“You mean my muscles could mess up my happiness, make me smash sugar bowls and scare my kids?” I asked.
“Well, not your muscles exactly, but the unresolved feelings trapped in your muscles. We’ll take it slowly, and talk about everything,” John assured me.
“You’re seeing a psychiatrist, now?” my mother asked. “What ever for?”
“I feel fucked up inside,” I said.
“Lynnie, that’s just ridiculous,” she proclaimed.
I bought a pink leotard and joined a bioenergetics exercise group after I’d stored up my fear in some muscle or other. I followed the instructions with care when suddenly I noticed, out of the corner of my eye, a woman collapse, curl up, and begin to suck her thumb. I kept breathing vigorously and tried not to gawk, or panic.
“I’m not sucking my thumb,” I told John, but didn’t tell him I’d sucked my thumb till I was twelve.
“Don’t worry, Lyn,” he said. “I know this woman and she was returning to her early comfort zone. She won’t stay there. You get in touch slowly.”
What in God’s name would I be “in touch with” next? I grew to detest that concept, but John seemed trustworthy. Some people, I’d heard, worked in the nude or underwear, so the therapist could see the muscles. Would I do that? I lost weight in case. Backbending over a stool released a welter of sorrow hidden under my breastbone. In my original family I’d cried at Christmas when everyone else was happy trimming the tree. I’d cried because Dad wasn’t there or was drunk, which my mother called “tired”; I’d cried because I’d broken my mother’s happiness rule, I’d cried because I felt different and somehow wrong. In therapy I didn’t suck my thumb or talk about the old god-man in the theater, but my body again asserted itself against my will, this time for my good.
Act III was to turn into Brenda Starr, girl reporter. I became a stringer, paid by the column inch, writing for a regional newspaper. My first paycheck was frameable, but I spent it. My byline thrilled me: “Planning and Zoning Commission Labors Over Decision to Close
