Mukoli

Maternities

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What Moved the Judges

“…we don’t write enough about how hard it is to find peace and connection between different economic classes of people. These women managed to do that and both found more peace and strength as a result.”

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“You must do this,” she said. 

I sat before her suspended in a stupor, like an overdosed patient. Dr. Patel, my clinical supervisor, was an incandescent goddess. She strolled through our mental health clinic with saris the color of rainbows speaking quietly in her posh, refined English accent. Perhaps she was in her senior years, but she seemed to transcend age.  

My supervision hour with her each week was my first encounter with stunning wisdom. She was a psychiatrist and trained in London by Anna Freud, Sigmund Freud’s daughter. It was Anna Freud’s compelling therapeutic approaches with children that guided me toward a specialization in child and family therapy. I felt the blood of Anna Freud pulsing through me when I was in Dr. Patel’s presence. I was an awestricken trinket, and she was a dazzling diamond. 

“You have to do this,” she repeated. “It will deepen your clinical experiences, and you were hired to work with children and families.”  

“But I cannot. I am not trained to work with this type of population,” I responded as respectfully and cautiously as I could and then once again in an octave higher. 

“Why would she be this dictatorial, a characteristic atypical of her,” I considered.  

Dr. Patel  was my queen, my mentor, and I was now disappointing her and failing in ways I could never have imagined five minutes ago. But at the same time, I was furious with her for thrusting me into a lion’s den of criminals. “She knows she is important to me. Is she exploiting this attachment I have for her?” I wondered. My fury increased. “These women assault children, and I will not collude with them. I was not hired to live in a therapeutic relationship with child abusers who should be locked up,” I pronounced. 

I was blind to the ways in which contradiction and entitlement shaped my lens of understanding. I was contracted to provide psychotherapeutic care to patients who needed our services. There was no luxuriating in choosing patients who were clean, well-spoken, and with the potential to comfortably overcome whatever crisis they presented. 

I could feel the sting of tears settling in my eyes and my chest tightening, but Dr. Patel remained resolute in her directive. “There is no choice here. We need you to do this. The Department of Family and Children’s Services and the court need you to do this,” she said with her velvet-like voice. Her luminous yet blazing eyes focused on mine reminding me of the nuns in grammar school who were about to strike me with a ruler for sinful behavior. “Let’s both take a breath now, come back to my office for a sip of tea (she always modeled British civility), and I will describe your first case,” she said in her pragmatic, unemotional manner.

I did return to her office and sipped the Masala Chai that will forever resurrect memories of this forceful yet graceful woman. I left the clinic that day with one of the six case files to review.  

Kathie was an 18-year-old, white, married, mother of two with a history of child abuse and neglect. She was relegated to the front burner of the Department of Family and Children’s Services and was one step away from the loss of her children. No relatives reported in the file, a detached husband, little education, and residing in an impoverished environment. I read and re-read her file vacillating between disgust and sadness until Iwas suddenly jostled away from this despair by the sound of my phone. 

 “Congratulations! Your pregnancy test is positive,” my midwife said.  

I could envision her perky enthusiasm, and I was angry again—with her, my husband, and myself. My husband wanted a child, but I was ambivalent for ten years. He was now ecstatic, and I was not.  

I am stuck in sticky clay reminiscent of my pottery days. “Why did I stop the pill? Could I have been more assertive or at least negotiated more time with my husband to think about this?” My anger now migrated toward a fear I had not felt since my childhood days when the nights were long and dark, and demons played tag in my bedroom. The demons were now back. 

“Can you tenderly attach to a baby you do not want? What if I don’t love this child? Will my resentment transfer to my behavior with this baby?” My questions were building and unbridled. 

These queries stirred like a tempest in my body as I met Kathie for our inaugural session that would become a one-year expedition with semi-weekly, one-hour therapy meetings—and sometimes more.  

Kathie entered my office with a gait resembling a death march. She was an adolescent waif with a grey, sandpaper type complexion and faded eyes similar to the hues of her jeans and shirt. Her hair was tussled with a detectable odor that appeared to permeate every cell of her body. A darkness filled the room similar to threatening clouds that warned of a storm. She finally agreed to sit and straggled herself on the edge of the chair as if this chair had no cushion. Her trembling hands crawled up and down her thighs like hover flies refusing to land, but her thin arms seemed prey to other insects that, in fact, did land leaving pustules. I noted the green and yellow infected scabs and the purple like hues of bruises on her neck. These did not come from flies nor insects. 

Like an animal calculating an escape path, her eyes darted around my office. She would occasionally pause to look at my large floor to ceiling windows. In this reflection was a prestigious private school nearbywith children playing in the yard attired in crested uniforms of white shirts, pleated plaid skirts for girls and dark blue pants for boys. At times she seemed to observe my walls lined with books and shelves filled with toys, games, and stuffed animals for play therapy with children. My favorite meditative music softly played, and a white tea essential oil diffused the air. Each of these privileged artifacts mirrored the lands of the haves and have nots. 

We distrusted each other immediately. Kathie saw me as part of a threatening system that would eventually pilfer her children. I saw her as a perpetrator of the worse kind. For more weeks than I care to remember, we would sit across from one another in monosyllabic exchanges—brief questions from me and terse answers from Kathie. Neither of us was ready to give to the other nor listen with our hearts. 

I would continue to meet weekly with Dr. Patel for my supervision hour. She was salve for my soul and a professional support that tasted like nectar on bitter days. Few individuals in my life have been as present and attentive to me as she was. It was this presence that held me as I stepped into the rough seas with Kathie. Although Kathie never met her, Dr. Patel would be the third member of our expedition into these turbulent waters. 

Kathie continued to show up for virtually every session as I did in the midst of a nausea characterizing my early maternity and Kathie’s fatigue and profound sadness characterizing a depressed maternity. As I sat with Kathie day after day, week after week, I began to see a child-woman trying to make her way in the world as a human being and mother with no resources— socially maladapted, financially and educationally impoverished, living with an abusive husband, and lacking in family and friends to put their arms around her.

We continued with our uncomfortable laconic exchanges until a critical conversation in our course altered the direction we were forging. And it was Kathie who navigated the waves. 

“Are you feeling ok?” Kathie asked one morning as she sat down for our session. She thought I looked pale. “How odd she would be concerned about me. She rarely looked at me nor expressed interest in our sessions,” I reasoned. 

Without thinking about professional boundaries and inappropriate disclosures ingrained by graduate school courses, I told her that I was pregnant and spontaneously shared my midwife’s concern that my fetus was not moving as it should. “I am worried”, I remarked. 

In an astonishing move, Kathie reached over and placed her hand on mine. “You will be fine, I just know it. This happened to me also,” she replied. 

In that moment I saw the hierarchy and inequality of our relationship capsize and a new relationship begin. I had partitioned my life and my own maternity into the safe silo of difference. The mental stream of I am not like her flowed through me when, in fact, I was like Kathie in some significant ways. 

 Without intention, I merely opened the door, and Kathie walked in with bravery and compassion. As a bewildered mom-to-be and a petrified mom of two young daughters, we began our voyage.  Like an expedition ship, we would trek into foreign territories and turbulent seas confronting a psychic pain neither one of us knew we owned. Slowly Kathie shared epiphanies, tears, anger, and sadness that would erupt like a volcano’s molten rock screaming to reach the surface. 

She grew stronger as the months marched on. Through our individual sessions along with parent education classes and group therapy with other court mandated mothers, Kathie rallied. I began to include her children in our final months of therapy, and it was clear that they were attached, loving, and playful with one another. They were growing into a healthy threesome. They were a family. 

Kathie trusted that I would guard her skeletons and the darkness of her therapy hours carefully. Of course, I would. And so, this ends the therapeutic hours of a remarkable and courageous young woman.  

I left this mental health center at the end of the year. Kathie was ready to continue her sail without me. Excited over my pregnancy and impending motherhood, the six court mandated mothers, for whom I had grown to care deeply, surprised me with a baby shower. Cookies, punch, and crepe paper streamers filled our clinic conference room. We ate, laughed, and remembered our voyages. Kathie gave me what became my most cherished baby gift, a teddy bear.  

On the last day of my time at the clinic, Dr. Patel also gifted me a gold paperweight inscribed with the words often credited to Audrey Hepburn: “People, even more than things, have to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed and redeemed. Never throw anyone out.” I was uncertain as to whether these words applied to me or Kathie, perhaps both. 

Kathie called me when my daughter was born, and she sounded wise beyond her years and happy. She was soon to be divorced from her abusive husband, had found a job that she liked, and bragged about her daughters. We commiserated over my experiences with infant jaundice, sleep schedules, and breast feeding. She was now my mentor. 

I often think of my last sessions with Kathie and the ironies surrounding the two of us. Each of us had morphed from our chrysalis into new beings, and we had done this together. We were Mamas holding hands and birthing ourselves into maternity—mine a new maternity and Kathie’s a redeemed one. Kathie’s teddy bear is now 46 years old and sits on my grandson’s bed. The paperweight from Dr. Patel still remains on my office desk. Both stand as a tribute to Kathie and a reminder of the wise words: “Never throw anyone out.”

 

*All names, locations, and specific circumstances were changed to maintain confidentiality.  

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