My patient, a professional middle-aged woman named Rebecca, folded her coat over the back of a chair and arranged herself on the couch. For five minutes, she was silent. Then she said, ‘I’m going to have to talk about sex today.’
This was on a Monday. Rebecca had started coming to see me the year before, shortly after the death of her older sister. She was surprised by the intensity of her feelings of loss and anxiety. These feelings had lessened, but she was now more aware of her own mortality – ‘I’m not living my life as fully as possible,’ she told me, ‘but I’m not sure what I’d like my life to be.’ Her relationship with her husband seemed better but sometimes she worried she’d made the wrong choice.
Rebecca and her husband Tom had spent the previous night in – sushi, some leftover champagne, and a DVD. They took a bath together and spent a long time making love. ‘I had a great orgasm,’ she told me. Ordinarily, this would have guaranteed her a solid night’s sleep. Instead she woke at 4.30 a.m., and, unable to get back to sleep, decided to masturbate. Soon after, she fell asleep and had what she called ‘a sex dream’.
During our session, she tried to reconstruct the dream. ‘It was about a man, maybe an old boyfriend from university, he was pressing against me,’ she said. ‘He held – no, he patted my waist. I don’t remember much, just that he wanted me.’ She woke up feeling bereft.
‘You’d have thought the sex or the masturbation would have been enough – what’s going on with me?’
We talked about the days leading up to her dream. On Saturday night, she’d had a party at a restaurant to celebrate her fiftieth birthday. Her parents had come down from Scotland. Georgia and Anne, her daughters, had helped to arrange the dinner, and had chosen the menu. Her youngest, Oliver, was to make his way to the party from his university in Sussex, but he didn’t show up. Rebecca’s husband had spent a good part of the evening outside the restaurant trying to reach Oliver on his mobile. ‘We left his place at the table all evening,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know whether to be worried or furious.’
Rebecca had finally reached Oliver the following afternoon. He’d told her that something important had come up at the last minute, and that the battery in his phone had been dead, so he hadn’t called. Rebecca assumed that he’d simply decided to spend Saturday night with his friends. ‘To be honest, I think he just couldn’t be bothered,’ she told me.
For Rebecca’s husband, the night at the restaurant seemed to confirm his feelings of estrangement from his son. ‘Tom says he’s just waiting for some disaster – for the police to show up at our door,’ she said. Rebecca remembered Oliver’s daring, his wilfulness as a child. Once, she told me, when he was very small, he slipped out of the house while she was running his bath. She hadn’t given him an ice cream after his tea and so he’d crossed a busy road to the newsagent’s to get one for himself.
Listening to my patient, I began to think that her sexual behaviour was a defence, a reaction to the sadness, anger and anxiety that her son had provoked. I suspected, and she did too, that she was using sex as an antidepressant – a means of momentarily replacing emptiness and fear with the excitement of being desired. She pointed out that sex also helped to blot out disturbing thoughts – like the idea Tom had planted in her head about Oliver’s recklessness one day leading the police to their door.
But this wasn’t quite right – for while her sexual behaviour now looked to both of us like a way of defending herself against certain feelings, it hadn’t felt like that to her at the time. Rather, she had felt the whole night that she was searching for something. Masturbation followed sex, and the dream followed the masturbation, because there was something that she wanted, not something that she wanted to get away from. She’d got out of bed feeling bereft, not depressed. But why?
Suddenly, jostled by a memory, she shifted on the couch.
She began to tell me about a sunny day she’d once spent in the park with Oliver and her mother. Oliver was three at the time. They were all sharing a blanket, watching the older children and their parents fly kites. Rebecca was showing her mother the Mother’s Day card Ollie had made for her at nursery school. On the front of the card Oliver had carefully coloured in a steam train. On the inside of the card, where he’d clearly laboured most, he had drawn two long rows of Xs, for kisses. Ollie leaned against her, hugged her from behind, then wriggled into her lap.
‘Why do you let him use you like a climbing frame?’ Rebecca’s mother had asked her. Rebecca was taken aback – it had never occurred to her that he shouldn’t.
After a pause, she told me, ‘Ollie was always touching me. He couldn’t bear it if I was out of his sight. If I was on the phone or speaking to someone else, he used to do this thing to get my attention, he’d pat my waist and say, “Mummy, Mummy, Mummy” over and over—’
At once, we both heard those words – ‘he’d pat my waist’ – and remembered her dream: ‘he patted my waist … he wanted me’. And we both realised that the dream wasn’t about an old boyfriend. ‘My dream is about Ollie and me, isn’t it?’ she asked.
Neither of us spoke.
‘I miss him being my baby,’ she said.
Rebecca longed for something impossible: a time when she was held, climbed on, kissed, nuzzled, loved by her three-year-old boy. She longed for Oliver’s insistent demands on her attention – Mummy, Mummy, Mummy – to feel his hand touching her waist, and to feel that he needed her again.