Mel,
She was seven. Northern Michigan summer. Mullet Lake.
Her father announced it was time she learned to swim. Despite her protests, he carried her clinging to his neck 40 yards offshore, pried her hands off, and pointed to a slippery buoy chained to an anchor somewhere far below the surface. "Grab that."
Then he swam back to shore.
She could see him standing there on the beach. Her mother was in a folding chair, nursing a can of Miller High Life, watching the whole thing with unconcerned gaze.
The girl was forty yards out, hugging a buoy in water that was getting colder by the minute. Schools of tiny fish darted around her legs. Gulls wheeled overhead against a darkening sky, calling to no one.
"Daddy, come get me. Please come and get me!"
"Swim, dammit. You can do it. Swim to Daddy."
She couldn't swim. Swimming, to her, meant walking on her hands in the shallows. She was growing cold. But letting go of that buoy was out of the question. There was nothing else. The buoy was it.
Eventually he came out and retrieved her.
The lesson she learned that day had nothing to do with swimming. The lesson was:
Trusting anyone but myself is not only foolish but dangerous.
From then on, it was her on her own.
Her name is Margaret Fleming. She turned 90 on Saturday. She is my therapist.
The woman who was carried out into that lake by a predator father, a mother who watched it happen and did nothing, a suicide attempt that left her in a coma for a week with 50/50 odds – went on to adopt eight children. Founded an adoption agency that placed over a thousand non-white, HIV and special needs kids in homes. She has been in practice for more than forty years. She is still practicing at 90.
She is the person who finally untangled our relationship when a parade of others couldn't.
One therapist had brought Laura right to the edge of buried memories – then went on maternity leave. We shoved everything back in the closet and locked the door.
Margaret didn't flinch. When you've swallowed two bottles of sedatives, then driven into traffic and woken up a week later in a hospital bed... when your own son has been lost to suicide... when another son with schizoaffective disorder has heard voices telling him to strangle you...
You are not going to be rattled by my problems.
She was patient on a geological timescale. She didn't have a treatment plan with a projected end date. She had the patience of someone who knows the healer's job is to be present, not efficient.
She said:
"You have a tape running in your head, Perry."
She was right. I did. She could see it because she had one too. Hers had been on loop playback for 70 years.
What I know about you, dear reader: You're good at business. You're probably good at performing normal. Maybe you're like me and have your own algorithm running – the one that simulates patience, simulates being fine. Most of the time it works well enough that nobody notices.
But there is a tape running in your head too.
Maybe yours says I'm in trouble. Maybe it says I can't trust anyone. Maybe it says If they really knew me, they'd hightail it out of here.
You've been driving with one foot on the gas and one foot on the brake so long you don't even feel the brake anymore. You just wonder why everything takes so much fuel and so many brake pads.
And sometimes, crossing the most basic barrier – stumbling through what "should" be an ordinary conversation – feels like clinging to a buoy 40 yards off shore at age 7 and ordered to swim.
In moments like that you think you need someone to bandage your bleeding neck.
What you really need is someone to accompany you in your ache.
Margaret celebrated her 90th birthday on Saturday.
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