The Folded Clock: A Diary

Chapter 79: April 23

Today I sought advice from the therapist at my daughter’s school. My daughter and I are victims of a co-produced play that begins and middles and ends with screaming, tears, accusations of heartlessness and disaffection, faked injuries, faked heartbreak that hides real heartbreak. There’s an oxymoronic quality to the unremitting pitch of our relationship; it’s a screeching flat line. Finally I could no longer take this relationship. I am not saying that I am not the crazy person here. I am saying I am the adult. I can throw up my hands and claim powerlessness. As the adult, this powerlessness has serious power.

So I contacted the Feelings Doctor. The Feelings Doctor works at my daughter’s school. We made an appointment, just the doctor and me. Before our meeting, I mapped out what I planned to say to her. I wanted to be efficient. I wanted to provide an accurate history, but mostly I wanted to get down to business. Establishing background exhausts me. I don’t tend to do it. I start talking and the listener can fill in the blanks as he or she chooses. My husband calls me No Context Woman. “ ‘The journey is the goal’ is not the goal” is my motto. The goal is the goal. Let’s start with the end.

To this end, I had a probably bad idea: I could send the Feelings Doctor an essay I’d written about my daughter and our traumatic history together. I thought the Feelings Doctor might get a very good sense, an arguably more thoughtful and comprehensive sense, of this history by reading an essay.

But then I realized how insane this might make me appear to be. A mother contacts a Feelings Doctor to speak about her troubled relationship with her small daughter. Instead she sends the doctor her own writing, turning the therapy session into an opportunity for the therapist to respond to her artistic representation of the problem, rather than the problem itself. How could I appear as anything other than a narcissist, or a writer greedy for more readers, or a mother so self-involved that she pretends to care about her daughter when, in fact, she’s using the appointment as a sneaky means of gaining an intimate tête-à-tête about her own work with a stranger?

I decided against sending the Feelings Doctor my essay; I regret now that I didn’t. I arrived early for the appointment, and good thing, too. I busted the Feelings Doctor lacing up her escape sneakers; she’d forgotten we were supposed to meet. (I seem to have this effect on therapists.) She asked me some questions and didn’t really listen to the answers. She said, “Children these days have so much attention paid to them that they can’t handle a moment of neglect.” I corrected her; in fact, our situation was slightly more complicated. To state it uncomplicatedly, and thus probably inaccurately, I resented my daughter’s need of me and thus punished her by neglecting her.

Then the Feelings Doctor told me everything I already knew about my daughter, everything I’d already written about her. I wished I’d given the Feelings Doctor my essay. Not because we would have wasted less time. Not because we would have reached a solution faster. I think I understand, for the time being, at least, that therapy is unable to tell me anything new about myself or my loved ones. But therapy could tell me many interesting things about a stranger. About a person I hope I’m not. It could tell me something about a woman, for example, who makes an appointment with her daughter’s therapist as an excuse to talk about her writing. What might a therapist be able to tell me about that woman? I wanted to know more about her.