Yes, said the patient. I do think someone will say that to me. Has said that to me. I mean Mother.
Your adoptive mother.
Yes. Capital-M mother. She didn’t want me then, and she doesn’t want me now.
That is not true. Why are you punishing yourself again? Your mother was conflicted, put in a situation not of her own choosing. And now she is afraid of your father and unable to handle her own feelings.
I’ve spent my whole life looking out for Mother’s feelings! It all amounts to rejection for me.
This last was said in her cold, angry voice. After which she sat back, mute. One could imagine her arms crossed over her chest, the glum expression on her face. The seconds ticked away as traffic noise filled the space in the therapeutic conversation.
Finally the therapist said: And so you believe your Michal Gershon must do the same.
Of course.
But why? Why would she?
She gave me away. Isn’t that enough evidence?
Perhaps she wonders what became of her child.
She could have looked for me, if that’s what she wanted. Like I said a couple of weeks ago, mothers come in all varieties. Maybe she’s a shit.
So then, said the therapist, it will be she who is lacking. Not you.
Ah, said the patient. Yes. I suppose so.
Her voice drifted off, so that the “I suppose so” was a near whisper.
I sat pained as I listened to her indecision and fear, the awful sense she carried inside her, ontologically, of being unwanted. I saw how adoption, far from liberating a person, could inscribe a sense of defect inside one’s heart, as deep and indelible as any work of the genes. She had “inherited” her feeling of being unworthy; she had come to consciousness with the knowledge of having been given away. I could not imagine any path for her but toward the truth. Nothing could possibly cure such feelings of unworthiness except understanding why: Why had her mother given her away?
What should I do? she asked her therapist.
Do you really want me to give you the answer? replied the doctor.
The patient sighed. Of course not. No one can do that for me. But … I’ve barely digested the bad meal fed me by one set of parents. Why subject myself to another mother? Maybe I can just put all this information aside. And wait.
You are not required to do anything at all, said Dr. Schussler.
Yes, said the patient. I’m just going to put all this on the shelf. And see how I feel after a while.
A perfectly realistic decision, the doctor said.
65.
How could she! The therapist had pulled her client relentlessly toward the birth mother, and now—after all the hard work I had done to find her, laying my overcoat across the therapist’s mud swamp, so to speak—now the doctor thought to say: Well, never mind.
It was the therapist’s guilt and fear. What relief Dr. Schussler must feel to put it all aside, go back to “Mother” and “Father,” the two parental figures who predate the whole dark, messy, terrifying connection to the exterminated Jews of Europe.
The month of June ended; July went by; the August hiatus loomed. Throughout, the patient never again mentioned her birth mother.
As the sessions wore on, my feelings about her denial began to evolve. Initially I was merely angry at Dr. Schussler and felt somewhat forgiving toward the patient; such reticence seemed natural, protective, given the scar upon her soul. Soon, however, by the time we had come to the fourth session, and the patient still had not said a word about her mother, my emotions began to take on a more sinister cast, which, given my history, should have been a warning to me.
The patient began to bore me. What dullness she revealed as, week by week, she ventured nothing more daring than a discussion of work issues (things far too technical for the therapist to remark upon), thoughts about finding a new apartment (without taking any action whatsoever thereupon), rants about lesbian-feminist politics (she was against separatism, a position unchanged since the second session I had overheard), current events about which she could do nothing but moan (the FBI shootout at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, the congressional report on CIA abuses in spying upon Americans).
Such timidity! Such a lack of curiosity! With all the new avenues opened up to her by the knowledge of her origins, she had withdrawn into the safety of the quotidian. It was one thing for her never to have set off on