The Mind is Made of Glass

The mental crisis I have been in, leaving my family, is, in actuality, the leaving of a cult. In part, the cult of white supremacy, a culture of privilege, wealth and power, of authoritarianism, of male domination and the holdover of primogenitor. I watch the documentary called The Vow, about a modern day cult, focusing on the story of a few of its members in the process of defecting, and I see the parallels with my own situation. Particularly striking, at a visceral level, is witnessing the mental crisis provoked when cult members receive information diametrically opposed to their indoctrination, falling into the void of not knowing, what’s true, what’s real. 

This is a throwback for me to the false self and the true self. I thought I had that one - just be honest, be authentic, be courageous, be steadfast - but that early time, first stages of leaving home and family threatened to overwhelm my psyche. Look at the time I brought Vic to America to meet my parents and they rejected him. I was deeply in love with him, but at the same time could not imagine what it would feel like to be ostracized and estranged from my family if I chose him over them. More of a visceral response, I know now, it was fear of annihilation. And why should I be made to choose? That, on top of finding out my mother allowed a doctor to mess with my private parts when I was ten years old. When I arrived back in the States I made an appointment to see a gynecologist, a young male doctor I had never seen before. I wasn’t sure if I had a vaginal or bladder infection or both. There, on his table, naked from the waist down and vulnerable, the doctor began to examine me. “I’ve never seen anything like this before,” he states with an edge of excitement in his voice. Then with no bedside manner, and no permission given, the doctor retrieves his young assistant from the next room to show him the anatomical anomaly he has discovered. Objectified by these two men with prying eyes, I must have withdrawn into myself in that moment, for it wasn’t until I got home and saw my mother, that I asked her what exactly had been done to me during that operation when I was ten years old. I was stunned to find out my mother didn’t know. Was it the times, or willful neglect? not to ask for the details when a doctor takes a knife to your daughter’s body, to her holy parts. A blind deference to authority, or the charm of a narcissist. After all, my mother went to a private girls school with the doctor’s sister and they traveled in the same social circles. Is there any point mentioning here that my mother’s school doctor was Dr. Spock! No, I don’t suppose so. But worth mentioning that my mother did not have a mind of her own, but deferred completely to male authority. This is a dangerous path to follow, even if one deludes oneself with the best of intentions, decisions and actions taken are not one’s own, but marked by persuasion of an authority outside one’s self, outside of conscience, outside of relationship and Eros. Reckless in it’s detachment from reality.

The rejection of Vic. After all, he had been married before and wasn’t yet divorced. And he had a young child by that marriage. This interloper must have seemed like quite a threat, and not for the reasons I have already mentioned. But because he had been supporting me in the unraveling of the conditioning of my family and the elite and extreme culture I grew up in. Vic had not initiated this transformation, yet contact with his being had opened Pandora’s box. A flood of feelings and sensations came from some place deep inside me that I sensed but had no language for. During the first months I lived with Vic there would be times when I would withdraw into a vacant interior space. Vic said to me, “I’ll just sit here with you. I’m not going anywhere.” A visceral force would gather my unspent tears, forming them into dark clouds. Slowly those tears would be released from their firmament, a trickle of rain tracing paths across my face, then, the downpour. Slowly shafts of daylight penetrated the dark earth, my body convulsing with dry heaves as if to expel from its fields the chemical toxins they had been fertilized with. I prayed for rain, then prayed for more rain. To wash this body holy, to purify and consecrate the Feminine. To align with that virgin state Esther Harding wrote about, in which a women is one-in-herself. 

The rejection of Vic, and the discovery of the tampering with my body, this inner discord was too much for me, and for a time I dissociated, days on end of rapid heartbeat and migraine headaches, splitting off and drifting towards the blankness of a conflict free world - art school, a bit part in a movie - I was biding my time waiting for an appointment to see the doctor who had operated on me. After an overnight stay in the hospital for more invasive testing, and re-traumatization, I saw the doctor in his office with my mother. He was a smooth operator. But what did I know then about deceit and manipulation. He drew a picture of my private parts, showing me what he had done when he operated on my urethra. I must still have the picture somewhere in my files tucked into the medical records. There was one main question on my mind, would any of this interfere with my sex life? He said no. But there would continue to be issues and questions connected with the bladder operation, the frequent bladder infections, the concerns about having a vaginal birth.

The cult of Dr Schmidt, the cult of the medical field. How did I get out? I sent for my medical records from the Presbyterian Hospital in NYC when I was in my late thirties. I read them but couldn’t quite comprehend. I asked my bodywork teacher, Susan, to read them. Still confused, I watched as she became very angry. This is how it is for one who is dissociated. It’s as easy as turning off a light switch, given the right stimulus. I was numb, had no emotional response, could not comprehend the facts. Watch Susan, I said to myself. Anger, that’s the emotion I’m supposed to feel. That’s the emotion that belongs with my story. That was both a realization of the disconnect and a nudge towards the reconstruction of my psyche, with the appropriate emotion, the appropriate understanding of what had happened, the truth of what had happened. Gloria Steinem says, “The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.” I had trouble with anger. It was a foreign emotion, rejected, dead and buried. I saw in the notes of the medical records that my mother had had enuresis until the age of six. I called her to ask her about this childhood bedwetting. She paused for a moment, a palpable silence, then said, “I remember standing outside the door with the wet sheets wrapped around my neck.”

I was so stunned by this confession and this shaming, it didn’t occur to me to ask her to explain, to ask her how that felt or how it might have affected her as an adult. My mother grew up in an era in which psychological analysis and insight were uncommon. I came to believe that my mother’s insistence that my bedwetting was a physical problem to be acknowledged and proved by doctors was her way of saving me, but also redeeming herself from her shame.

As it happened, I had a good friend whose father was a urologist and had been a colleague of the doctor who had operated on me as a child. I asked if he would look at my hospital records. I watched as his face turned red. He had few words, but they cut through the fog like the parting of the Red Sea, an exodus from the false narrative of male authority. A true God was watching over me, was leading me out of danger towards freedom. I was finding my Moses holding his staff out over the water as a strong wind divided the sea, letting me escape. My friend’s father had few words. “The operation was bogus.” And “Don’t blame your mother.” Shortly after, I did speak with my mother as we walked down the road near my house. I said, “I didn’t have to have that operation.” She didn’t ask any questions, but defended her decision saying, “Yes you did.” I saw how intractable she was, so I withdrew least I dilute this new contact with the truth.

My mother was lost, the way so many are in the culture of authoritarianism and patriarchy. Complicit. Her job was to enculturate me, to train me to submit to male authority. The wife who turns a blind eye towards the abuse of her own children, while Saturn feasts and devours. Dinner in the family dining room was always a tense affair. My father did most of the talking. I tried to stay under the radar, ducking from my father’s cyclical bouts of rage. On one of these occasions my mother had provoked my father. Not to say it was her fault, but she sometimes needled him. Perhaps to let some steam out of the pressure cooker. Perhaps safer for her with the whole family present. One evening when the pressure cooker blew, my father picked up his glass and hurled it towards my mother. It is only now as I write this that I think, “Thank God it didn’t hit her.” I’m startled that this never crossed my mind before. What if the glass had hit her face, un-crowning her, shattering her nobility, leaving splinters of glass in her skin, scaring her well born features and perfectly coiffed hair. But the glass flew passed my mother and went right through the bay window. Shards of sound from the breaking glass struck my ears and entered my body, though I could not feel it at the time. Like a stop frame, the dinner scene, people seated in front of half eaten food, flash frozen. No one moved an inch. No one asked if my mother was ok. No one reproached my father for his dangerous fit of temper. No one leapt from their chair to clean up the broken glass. We were afraid to move.  

There have been so many times when my mother, my father, exerted pressure on me through threats and intimidation, through the tyranny of the rational mind or should I say irrational as it was likely emotionally based. Threatened me through seen and unseen, spoken and unspoken. “You are either in or out of the orbit.” The displays of rage, the breaking of glass, as if to say, “This could be you. I could break you, your body, and if I have to, even your mind, to protect my ego, to protect my image.” I have struggled and fought for my sanity, that mind of glass, so fragile it can crack, break and shatter, or it can see more clearly in its transparency. Truth, clear and fine as Waterford Crystal. Sand, soda ash and limestone, melted at very high temperatures to form a new material, glass. An alchemy that forms and transforms me in the fire into crystalline glass. A merciful annealing, the process of heating a glass object to release the strain introduced in the forming process. Then cracking off, the breaking off of the rod that has been used as a handle during the forming process. A new constancy without an object, without attachment. I am waking, as if from a dream, a nightmare, to an expanse of sapphire, a Sea of Glass, this vault of earth and floor of heaven. 

~Marina