My mother is a psychotherapist

One of my daughters wrote this piece and I post it here with her permission, along with some name changes to preserve privacy.  

My mother is a psychotherapist of the psychoanalytic variety. She’s the kind of therapist you’d explain your childhood to, your dreams, perhaps your repressed sexual fantasies. My mother would never describe herself as a Freudian, but he is the ‘grandfather of psychoanalysis’, so he’s hard to escape.

I first learned about Freud’s life and work in Grade Six. I'd seen his name in my mother’s consulting room, on the spines of books that were all the same, but had different numbers at the bottom.  I’d heard her say his name.

When I picked up a book in our classroom with Freud’s name and face on the cover, I knew I had to borrow it. It was one of a collection of books on important people’s lives and work. Churchill was there, and Marie Curie, among others. But Freud was a guy I needed to know about. He reminded me of photographs I’d seen of my grandfather. A serious European gentleman with dark framed round glasses.

I took Freud home with me, and my mother was tickled by my interest. I felt this was the first step to understanding the adult world, my parents’ world. I can’t remember what I read in that book, except for the chapter on ‘Penis Envy’, because I showed my friends and we giggled. But I knew this man was important. He knew things about people and how they worked, and my mother had his books in her room, and I wanted to know about him.

My mother practices from home. Ever since I can remember, the doorbell rang on the hour, and my mother travelled down the hallway, opened the front door, and let her patient in. The patients sat, or sometimes lay down on what my mother called a couch, but was more like a bed, in the front room of our house. 

The room was beige, red and brown. On one side were two large chocolate brown armchairs. They sat like giants, facing each other, silent and solemn. As a child I saw in them crinkled faces, broad arms, and solid legs. Sitting in them swallowed me.  

On the other side was the large red bed, with a hard pillow at one end and an itchy throw rug at the other. It was not like my bed, there was no doona or soft toys. A beige carpet covered the floor. It was the only fully carpeted room in our house – the rest was parquetry.

This room was different, special. In the centre, a rectangular coffee table stood on top of another carpet – Persian with swirls of colour. I squished my bare toes into the carpet, or lay on the Persian rug, arms and legs spread like a star. It was the softest, and cleanest rug in the house.

The cats were not allowed in here. Between the two chairs there were two high windows. Rich, velvet red curtains draped the sides, but they were never drawn. Instead, lace curtains and frosted glass blocked out the sticky beaks.

The door to this room was mostly closed, but I was allowed in when it wasn’t in use. 

I would push down the door handle – it was different to all the others, you didn’t twist it, you pushed it. The door squeaked open; the sound buffer at the base lifted off the floor. I often walked around the room, picked up and inspected objects I had seen many times before. A small glass vase with a tiny opening held dried flowers, a wooden bowl my father had made, and a table lamp with a push switch underneath the shade.

These objects seemed deliberate and meaningful, like the bits and pieces I kept in a special box in my wardrobe. But the objects in my mother’s consulting room were serious and adult; they held a different kind of power.

They were always in the same spot. Perfectly placed on a table, or shelf. In my box I kept a friendship bracelet, my sister’s old mobile phone, and a gold plated frill-neck lizard pendant I bought at Sovereign Hill. I tried hard to make them mean something, to make them important and significant.

Sometimes I picked them up, one by one, and placed them back in the box. I inspected them, contemplated their purpose, and outlined the reasons why I kept them. But the mysterious objects in my mother’s consulting room had seen and heard things that I could only wonder about. They had absorbed the mystery and the adultness the room, and my mother’s occupation, held.

My siblings and I, and my father, weren’t allowed to leave or enter the house when patients arrived. My mother is a reasonable woman. She didn’t make rules unless they were needed and I respected that the things she decreed were important, even when I flouted them.

But patients were off limits. We weren’t supposed to see them, or interact with them. We avoided them. If I asked my mother about her patients and their lives, she told me of the importance of patient therapist confidentiality, of boundaries, of the sacred privacy of her work. I understood. I could take on the responsibility.

The rhythm of my mother’s sessions ran my day as a child, and I respected and enjoyed the pattern. It was always the same. At ten to the hour, she let her patient out. I heard the outside come in, the sounds of trams and cars, and then the front door clicked shut and the patient was gone. In the ten minutes between her sessions, when she sometimes gobbled down a snack or skulled a cup of tea, I snuck in to see my mother. That was our time – the ten minute increments allotted to me.

“Mum, I hate Helen,” I often told her. Helen was my nanny when I was seven or eight. She cried a lot because the father of her child was “a real arsehole” (as mum told us), and had left her. Helen’s son, Ben, was the worst kid I had ever met. He broke things, he screamed, he ran around our house shrieking. I hated him. I hated being left with him. He was snotty and out of control, and played with my Lego without asking.

When I told my mother how much I hated Helen and Ben, she told me that life was hard for them, and I needed to understand this. It made me cross that Helen cried and that she didn’t tell Ben off when he was naughty. 

This was not how things should be. She was the mother, and he was the child. Mothers were supposed to help people. They were supposed to help their children be better.

At this point in my life, I didn’t know exactly what my mother did, but I knew she helped people. She talked to them and they talked to her, and sometimes they cried. She did what she was supposed to do, as a mother, and I accepted her role, and her fifty-minute absences entirely. I see her room as sacred, it was where she did her work, and saved other people, helped them be better. I didn’t mind sharing her.

My mother worked on Saturday mornings. She had two sessions and finished before 10am. One Friday night, a girl from school, Ellen, slept over. We were friends, but I found her annoying, and she only came over when her mother asked if she could. Ellen was a ‘difficult’ child, my parents told me. But we should be kind to her, and be her friend. 

I dobbed on Ellen in Prep when she stood on a table while the teacher was outside the classroom.  She was sent down to Kinder for the day. I didn’t like the way she flaunted the rules, but Ellen and I had fun together, most of the time.

One Saturday morning after our sleepover, my mother was with a patient, I told Ellen, and when we were in the hallway we must be quiet, and we must keep the door closed when we’re in the kitchen because the noise will carry. 

We played on the floor in the kitchen with my Barbies. I liked dressing and undressing them, putting shoes on their tiny pointed feet, brushing their hair. I was preoccupied with tasks such as these, so I didn’t notice Ellen stand up and walk towards the hallway door.

By the time I realised, it was too late. I looked up and saw she had gone and the hallway door was open. I got up to try and find where she was. I looked down the hallway and saw Ellen at my mother’s consulting room door, hand poised to knock.

The door opened and I saw my mother’s blonde curls poking out. I couldn’t hear what they said. She closed the door, and Ellen walked back up to the kitchen, and to me. 

My face was red and hot. My throat was claggy and it was hard to swallow. I looked at Ellen and I wanted to hit her, to punch her, until she said sorry. 

How could she violate the sacredness of my mothers’ room? How could she dare to attempt to pass the threshold? I was so angry I almost couldn’t speak. 

“Why did you do it?” I said.

“I wanted to know what the room looked like,” she said. 

Ellen’s mother came to pick her up an hour later, and I spent the day in my room with the door closed, simmering with rage.

When people find out what my mother does, and where she practices, they ask me if I’m comfortable with it. “Aren’t you worried about these people coming to your house?”

“They’re just people like you and me.” That’s what my mother always said, when my siblings and I asked about the strangers who rang the doorbell.

Sometimes people ask, “Aren’t you curious about the people your mother sees?” 

There isn’t room for curiosity  The constant reminder of confidentiality and privacy I received since a child dampened my curiosity. The line was drawn, thick and strong. 

Even as a child, when I picked up those objects in the consulting room, hoping to absorb some adult sensibility from within them, I stopped myself from trying to discern what they had seen and heard. 

I know my mother worried about how her children, the offspring of a therapist, would turn out. Would we feel neglected or ignored? Would we feel these other strangers who rang the doorbell were more important to her?

In fact, my mother’s work provided me with a structure, a pattern, and an authority that comforted me as a child. She was a mother, helping people, as mothers should, and Freud was the man who told her how to do it.

I see things in a different light now, obviously. The world is messier, less black and white. Old men don’t often connect with authority to me anymore, and women aren't always maternal.

Little did I know, when attempting to absorb the power of those objects in my mothers consulting room, I was trying to enter a world that I would have found far too confusing, far too complex than I could have coped with then.

My mother’s consulting room is still beige, red, and brown. She refuses to change it because it might disturb her patients. The chairs are different, but they are still large and brown. The bed is new, but it is still the same shade of red. It holds few mysteries to me now. I know it well. Its musty smell is unchanged.

The objects are still the same, same vase, same lamp. When I enter our house through the front door I pass the two high windows of her consulting room. Sometimes I take a quick look through the window and see the outline of a figure lying on the red bed. The frosted glass and the lace curtains prevent me from seeing a clear picture. 

That’s how it should be, though, so I look away.

Religion, sex and psychoanalysis

‘You gave up the church for psychoanalysis,’ my mother says, during one of our many arguments about my leaving the church.  ‘It’s just another form of religion but it has no moral core.’  She points her finger at me and waggles it.  ‘And that fellow who started it all.  Well, what can I say?’

My mother first warned me against Freud when I was at university doing an Arts degree and majoring in psychology. 

‘He had cancer of the jaw.’

‘From smoking,’ I said. 

‘No’, she told me, ‘much worse.’  Never once did she spell out what worse was.  I knew she was hinting at sexual peculiarities and perversion.  Little did my mother know, I gave up the church long before I began my analysis.

I was nineteen years old, home alone, cramming for my first year exams.  My philosophy lecturer had telephoned to tell me I’d failed the previous examination because I didn’t answer the question.  It was on the issue of ethics.  One of those exams where you’re told the question beforehand and sit for an hour under exam conditions to write the answer.  I thought I had it all worked out, even rote learned my response.  It was the first time I’d failed anything, apart from mental arithmetic in grade six, and that didn’t count.

If I tried hard in the next exam, my lecturer told me, I could still pass.

On the third day of swat vac, a friend telephoned.

‘Come down to my place,’ he said.  My friend was a failed dietetics student who worked in a city bookshop where we met.  We worked together during the university holidays.  He was downstairs in general fiction while I worked upstairs with the other casuals flogging second-hand textbooks.

‘It’s a glorious day,’ he said.  ‘We can spend it together here.’

‘But I’ve got to study.’

‘One day off can’t hurt.’

I walked to the train station in the crisp spring light.  The train rattled its way to Edithvale.  I could see the bay from my window, a strip of blue and silver.  Guilt hung heavily but I shrugged it off.

My friend lived with his parents in a pale green weatherboard halfway down a street that ran off the Nepean Highway.  All the houses in the street looked the same.  Long concrete driveways down one side, and in front, neat lawns of cropped couch grass, bordered by hydrangeas and ti-tree.

Inside, three porcelain ducks flew up one wall and a couple of round, stand-alone tables served as ashtrays, beside two his and hers Jason recliners that were propped in front of the television.  The place reeked of stale cigarettes.  His mother worked as a supervisor in the delicatessen at Safeway.  His father, a returned soldier who drank too much beer and spent most of his time at the RSL, grew orchids in a hot house attached to the back. 

My friend had taken the day off work while his parents were away.  He used to bet on the horses and by the time I arrived, the second race at Sandown had already run.  I could hear the drone of the race caller through the open window when I pressed the doorbell.

Although it was not a hot day, he answered the door in his shorts with no shirt.  He was stocky, with a round face and a delicious cherubic smile.  His boyishness belied the fact that he was several years older than me.  I melted at the sight of him.

‘I’ve won on two races,’ he said, as he ushered me down the hallway, ‘and I’m looking for a third.’

He led me to his bedroom, pulled off his shorts and climbed into bed.  I’d never seen a man naked before; I had to look away.  I sat on the bed’s edge, my hands in my lap and eyed my sandals.

‘Come on,’ he said, ‘ get in.’

‘I don’t think I should.’

He’d kissed me before, once or twice.  He’d held my hand when he took me to the Spring Racing Carnival at Caulfield.  I’d argued with my mother when he first asked me out.  He’d wanted to take me to Fellini’s Satyricon. 

‘You can’t see a film like that,’ my mother said.

‘But he’s going with a group of friends specifically to see that very film.  I can’t say no.’

‘If you can’t say no now, when will you ever be able to?’

I went to the film. 

It was a clumsy seduction in a tight single bed.  More than once I hit my head on the bedstead above.  It served as a bookshelf and held Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and a book on chess.  My friend stopped briefly to listen to the results of the third race and crowed when his horse won again.  Then he turned off the radio. 

Although God came into my mind, He didn’t stay for long.  I’d learned early not to touch myself or let anyone else touch me for that matter.  I had two holes below, or so I chose to believe, one for peeing, one for shitting, no more, no less.  I was content with that.  Then one day my sister told me about the third hole and its function, the making of babies.  She didn’t mention pleasure. 

I hadn’t felt any.

There was a line of blood on the sheet when it was over.  My friend stripped the bed and threw the sheet into the washing machine then offered me a cup of tea. 

The next Sunday, my mother and I sat in the front pew of the Church of Mary Immaculate.  Head bowed, I considered the possibility of taking communion.  I was in a state of mortal sin, for the first time in my life.  Any guilt I felt was outweighed by the pleasure of knowing I was now a woman. 

As much as I feared committing a sacrilege, I feared my mother more.  I lined up alongside her as the priest in white and gold tipped the host onto outstretched tongues.  I was convinced at the instant of contact between my tongue and the host I would shrivel up in a burst of flame.  When nothing happened, no heavenly voice spoke and my mother failed to notice the telltale blush on my cheeks, I decided it was all a hoax.  Same as when I was ten years old and they abolished the ban on eating meat on Fridays and stopped requiring three hours of fasting before communion.  How could it be, I pondered, that such well-established rules, sanctified by the Pope in Rome, could be so readily dropped?

I had wrestled with impure thoughts before.  It was never enough simply to admit to them.  In the dark of the confessional my cheeks burned whenever I tried.  The priest always wanted more detail and I could never find the words.  I gave up trying.

A month later my friend took a job in the pub at Tocumwal and I never saw him again. 

Ten years after that seduction, I entered analysis.  The consulting room was full of the scent of aromatic oil and Christmas lilies.  There was always a bunch of fresh flowers.  It reminded me of a church.  My analyst sat still and silent in her high-backed chair. 

When I was little, I saw a nun eating spaghetti.  I had knocked politely on the staff room door to leave a message for one of the teachers.  Through the corner of my eye I saw her, Sister Perpetua eating tinned spaghetti.  She forked the soft strands into her mouth.  Until that very moment I thought nuns did not eat nor did they use the toilet.  Under their habits I imagined clockwork bodies, fuelled by love of God.

Although she had a toilet in the back of her garden specifically for the benefit of her patients, I refused to use it.  My analyst lived some distance from my house and everyday I visited her, I allowed enough time to stop at the shopping centre near her consulting room to relieve myself.  I wanted to be nun-like too. 

I visited my analyst five times a week.  She lived in a double storey weatherboard perched on top of a hill three houses from the beach.  Her consulting room stood beside the house, a separate apartment with high windows shielded by trees.  Her sloping garden was carefully tended, in some places even restrained with neat beds and close-cropped bushes.  Freesias and jonquils fought for space in wild clumps across her lawn.  Elsewhere, like her, my analyst’s garden could surprise me.  It was wild and spontaneous like the crooked arms of the ti-tree and geraniums that entwined along her rocky front wall.

I spoke to my analyst from the couch and rarely looked directly at her.  Whenever I arrived at her consulting room, I kept my eyes to the ground as she ushered me in, to avoid her gaze, but I took note of her shoes.  They were brightly coloured to match her clothes. 

My analyst’s couch was like a bed, a single bed with a teal blue cover.  Lying there flat on my back with my eyes closed, I remembered the title of a book I’d read about an old woman’s last years confined to bed in a nursing home, This Bed My Centre.  My analyst’s couch became my centre.  Unlike the priest in the confessional whose interest felt prurient, my analyst’s interest was genuine.  I spoke; she listened.  She spoke and I listened and we learned from one another.

The last time I saw her, she took my hand when we came to say goodbye.  Before then we had only exchanged words.  Her own hands were large and tanned.  On her right fourth finger she wore a silver ring.  It held an oval stone, a lapis lazuli that matched the blue of the sea that rolled unceasingly near her house. 

When I walked away that final time, I took with me a sprig of geranium from her front fence.  I planted it down the side of my house.  It took root in that effortless way geraniums do.  Within a year it flowered.  Within another it was gone.  The builders ripped it out to make room for their equipment during renovations. 

After it was gone, nothing happened.  The sky did not fall down.  The earth did not crack.  There was nothing left for me to take up now.  No noble causes, no ideal ways of being, no firm system of beliefs.  No way of escape. 

‘I feel sorry for people like you,’ my mother says.  ‘It’s all me, me, me.  You just do as you please.’

I’ve learned to say nothing.  I sit and wait till the storm has passed.

‘When you want to live without any discipline at all, you’re not growing but heading for disaster.’  My mother is older now, grey haired and shrunken.  The book she is reading falls off her lap.  She struggles to get to her feet and reaches for her walking stick.

My baby is asleep in her carry basket.  She’s bundled up ready to leave. 

‘And what about her?’ my mother says, pointing down at the baby’s head.  ‘How will you teach her to lead a good life?’  She jabs her walking stick at the floor as she staggers behind me to the front door.

I click the carry basket into its position on the back seat of the car and kiss my mother goodbye. 

‘Without some form of religion, there can be no moral sense,’ my mother says.

I wind down the window.  ‘Don’t worry, Mum.  I’m sure we’ll all be okay in the end.’

‘How can you, without God?’

I release the hand brake, indicate and pull out into the street.  In the side rear view mirror I can see my mother, soon a dot on the horizon.  She’s still waving, still hoping I suppose, if she prays hard enough, her daughter can be saved.

‘Religion, sex and Psychoanalysis’, Psychotherapy in Australia, Vol. 14, No. 3, May 2008