IN AN OLD MAGAZINE IN THE OCCUPATIONAL THERAPY ROOM I FOUND A color print of Vincent Van Gogh’s Wheat Field with Crows, one of his last paintings before he put a pistol to his chest and pulled the trigger. It is a painting filled with turbulence of brushstroke and thick pigment. In it a road curves through a field, then stops as if at some invisible barrier. A chaos of black wings rises from the wheat. The painting inspired the attempt at black humor that caused me to title my hospital journal How Not to Paint Blackbirds.
I spent a large part of my life in the struggle to become a painter. My effort had raised questions and conflicts, confusing and frustrating me. When I wasn’t painting but filling my days with cooking, sewing, knitting, gardening, reading, and being mother to my two sons, I wondered why I ever put myself through the inevitable emotional pain of trying to be a painter. When I was painting, the process itself felt like life to me, no matter how poor or ineffectual the final product.
There was no confusion or frustration about writing or being a writer. I was a writer. Whatever I didn’t know about myself, I knew this as surely as I knew that day follows night. A dream gave me this realization, though I have no recollection whatsoever of the content of the dream. I dreamed it one late afternoon while taking a nap on the living room couch in Shutesbury. I woke with the certainty that I, Margaret, was a writer. I felt my identity as a writer with the same assurance that I felt my identity as a human being. Though I had no idea how I could know that with such certainty, I had no doubt that the revelation that waked me from my nap was true.
After the nap, I felt disorientated and a little crazy. Since my marriage, my only writing had been academic papers and letters to friends, especially to Pat King. Those things didn’t make me think of myself as a writer, only as a person who sometimes wrote. If I’m a writer, I said to myself, then I want to see what I can write. I went to the desk, got a pen and a legal pad, and sat back down on the couch. Without thinking, I scrawled on the first line of the legal pad: “A lost skate key.” How odd, I thought. “A lost skate key.” Then I remembered the many afternoons of skating back and forth on Grandmother’s paved sidewalk with my cousins and neighbors. All the bruised knees and bending down to tighten the skates with a skate key came rushing back to consciousness. “A pittosporum bush,” I wrote, remembering biting through the dark green leaves on the bush growing at the edge of Grandmother’s yard. I wrote: “June bugs. Roscoe the pig. Grandmother churning butter on the shady side porch.” One after another I wrote images from my childhood: “… the mimosa tree, mint leaves wet with faucet water, my sister’s shoes, handfuls of dirt …” But what did they mean? Was this being a writer? I felt awkward and puzzled. Still I wrote: “Old wallpaper and spider webs. A bicycle. Bamboo and starlings.”
Then I heard John’s car turn into the drive. Quickly I jammed the legal pad under the couch. I would have been embarrassed to have him see what I’d written. In the morning, after he left for work, with shame I destroyed the writing, an action I grew to regret years later when I discovered that what I’d written had been a list of the key images of my first book of poems, The Naked Bear.
Now I was in the state hospital with doctors who—with the exception of the young Filipino doctor—paid no attention to me, and nurses and attendants who were insensitive and sometimes abusive. I sat at a table in the lounge of the new ward, my journal open in front of me. Until now I’d not kept a journal since I was a startled teenager facing my distraught mother lying on my bed, arm thrown over her eyes, body shaking with sobs. “What have I done to deserve such a daughter?” Mother had wailed, clutching my diary in her hand. She’d read that I’d had a beer on the beach with the girls. She was also hysterical about what I might have meant by “being indiscreet” with the boy I’d been dating and whom I adored. I lied to her, saying that I had been “indiscreet” about something I said about his former girlfriend. I had in fact let him touch my breast through my sweater, and—though I felt terribly guilty for having committed such a mortal sin—it mattered so much to me that I felt compelled to acknowledge it in my diary, even if I had to conceal the real event and its excitement in formal and vague language. But watching Mother in her misery, I felt sick with guilt. Guilt for letting the boy touch my breast, guilt for drinking the beer, and—most of all—guilt for upsetting Mother.
But whatever anger I might have felt at Mother’s coming into my room and reading my diary evaporated when the back door slammed. Someone had forgotten: because of the sharp and sudden sound, my sister, Harriet, would be having a convulsion. Mother jumped up and ran down the hall to her. Had Mother said these words to me, or had they just repeated themselves in my head again as they so often did? “You with your mind, you with your talents and gifts and your sister lying up there in that bed unable to raise her head or utter a word. You with your mind …”
Except for a few abstract poems that would have made no sense to Mother, I destroyed all my writing that day. After that I only wrote an occasional poem, making certain that my words were vague enough to keep her from understanding what I was talking about. In time, I pushed writing from my mind altogether until madness broke through the thick walls of repression and gave me back that forgotten and essential part of myself.
I remember little of what I wrote in my hospital journal. I do remember that the writing gave me strength and—by degrees—clarity. My journal gave me reason to wake in the mornings. But later, when I went through periods of feeling shame over my episodes of madness, I took my scissors to the journal and, over time, mutilated it. What remains is a faded green construction-paper cover. On the upper left side is a dirty piece of adhesive tape with my name misspelled on it and some faded identifying numbers. Upside down under this is the partial question “look at this painting?” Under it in smaller letters is: “Think about it for a moment,” followed by “how much do you see,” and the single word “how.” All of the letters have been cut from magazines. In the lower right corner a portrait of Van Gogh stares out in all his red-bearded intensity. The back of the cover is a piece of less faded red construction paper. These words, also cut from a magazine and glued to paper, instruct the reader: “Now look at the painting again.” On the lower right side is a brilliant sun painted by Van Gogh. To me, the message on the cover meant that I’d gone through a near-suicidal struggle and—through writing the journal—had come out on the other side. I had learned how not to paint blackbirds. What follows is the little that remains of that hospital journal after shame and scissors censored it:
August 2, 1971: God. I am so tired of this hospital, this worse than prison place, this institution for dehumanizing human beings fighting to be human. Each day I’ve thought that today could be the day I’d get my walking papers out of this nut house. Each day I’ve held hope in front of me like a carrot held before a horse or donkey or whatever kind of animal it is. But, damn, I’m not a horse or donkey. I’m me, Margaret, and I don’t want any more carrots. My eyes are quite good enough to see all I care of pain. If I could run fast enough would it help my eyes to not see the pain that is already there?
One has to have one hell of a big sense of humor to live in this place. Another patient is looking over my shoulder, telling me I have confused thoughts. Where can I go to be alone and write? Someone is calling me now. I hope she doesn’t find me. She’s the patient who thinks I’m her mother. And I can’t be mother to my own children now. Dear God.
I have just chosen to sit in OT and write. Of course, I couldn’t make that choice until Mr. Buttons decided to unlock the room. Thank you, Mr. Buttons, for unplugging the fan because I needed music and there weren’t electrical outlets for both fan and phonograph to run at the same time. Thank you, Mr. Buttons. Thank you, West Side Story. I need “Maria.” I need to feel pretty. I need to know that somewhere there’s a place for me, too.
But surely not this abominable place, I thought, and looked around me. Sitting at the table next to me, staring blankly at the blank TV across the room, was the young woman who had tried to electrocute herself by poking a fork into a toaster after her parents insisted that she break up with her boyfriend because he was a Jew. At an old upright piano a woman stumbled over notes to a hymn familiar from my Southern Baptist childhood. “Stay away from her,” a nurse had hissed in my ear earlier. “We’re almost certain she’s a lesbian.”
Beneath the barred window next to me stood an old rattan table, someone’s sad, worn castaway. On it sat one of those tall, sharp-speared plants that teachers so often had on their desks when I was a child, those mottled green-leafed plants that seemed to thrive on neglect and dust. One of the patients was kneeling her thin, bent body before the table, scrub rag in hand and a bucket of suds beside her. All morning she knelt before the table and rubbed the rag up and down first one, then another of the table legs, working hard to wash away the dirt and grime accumulated over the years. Around and around the table she moved. Each time she approached a leg as if for the first time, settling in patiently, giving each the same meticulous care she’d given it just minutes before. Even with her thin, stringy hair and state-supplied cotton housedress she had a monumental quality about her. I thought of Lady Macbeth washing and washing her hands.
At the far end of the hall a nurse and two orderlies were dragging a resistant woman across the floor. “Come, cooperate with us, Mary,” the nurse whined, but the woman only stiffened her body, her shoes scraping the floor. “Mary!”
“Mistress Mary, quite contrary,” I thought, surprised at the eruption of that old nursery rhyme in my mind. I was surprised also at my pleasure over the woman’s defiance, and how I enjoyed her stubbornness until the nurse and aides succeeded in getting her into the dreaded room and slamming the door. At that point the woman let out such a desperate scream that I could hardly stand it. But it was over my heart, not my ears, that I wanted to clamp my hands.
I wanted to enjoy the idea of being contrary. I had never been “Mistress Mary Quite Contrary” as a child. Fueled by fear, I’d always been a good girl. In an elementary school play I’d been Little Miss Muffet sitting quietly on her tuffet and eating from a large blue bowl until a cardboard spider came onto the stage with chubby little-boy legs walking beneath the thin spider legs. In mock fear I dropped my spoon and bowl to the floor and ran off stage left.
Now that cardboard spider and the mock fear collided with my memory of being locked in a padded cell just days ago—cold clotted oatmeal shrinking from the sides of its pale blue plastic bowl, congealed blob of rancid butter on top—while a solitary spider made its way up the cracked plaster wall.
“Please, someone come and take me to the bathroom,” I pleaded from the cell. “Please.” But no one came. I sat in a pool of menstrual blood while passersby gawked at me through the small square window in the door. In the new ward, I bent over my journal recording my fear and humiliation.
“What a good girl you are.” Mother’s words came back to me.
Being a good girl meant living a lie.
Sitting at a table, my journal open before me, I picked my pen up with an unfamiliar firmness and, feeling anger rising as if from within the bowels of the earth herself and up through me, grinding my teeth, I wrote, “Mother, you must be glad.” Then—deeply shaken and overwhelmed by intense and confusing emotion—I stopped writing and closed the book.
“This place is driving me crazy!”
The words burst from my mouth in an explosion of frustration when the Pineapple Doctor stopped me in the corridor and asked how I felt.
“To tell you the truth, there are days when I feel like it will drive me crazy, too,” he responded, smiling, and then continued on his way.
What I’d said was true. Something had shifted inside me. I’d awoken that morning with the conviction that any more time in the hospital would hurt me beyond hope of recovery, that it would push me into a pit of madness too dark and deep for me to ever find my way to the light again. I felt frantic to get out.
I went to my room and got pen and paper from the bureau. Then I went to one of the tables in the corridor, sat down, and wrote a letter:
Dear Dr. Turcotte,
I have endured 21 days in this hellhole. I have been strapped spread-eagle to a bed, locked in solitary confinement where I was refused use of the bathroom. I’ve been condescended to, spat at, and forced to clean toilets. I have reached the limits of my endurance. I fear for my sanity if I have to stay here. I can feel myself about to break under the strain of this place. I need to get out NOW. I am truly desperate.
Margaret
I folded the letter, put it into an envelope, sealed it, and wrote Ethel Swift’s name on it. Under her name I wrote, “Please get this to Dr. Turcotte today. Thank you, Margaret.” Then I persuaded a nurse to take it to Ethel.
It was only a couple of hours before Ethel came up to the ward to tell me that I’d be released from the hospital that day. She brought several cardboard boxes with her, and we worked together packing my things into them. First, we packed my clothes from the bureau. Then we packed the other things that I’d accumulated during my three-week incarceration—books, notebooks, postcards and letters, pens and pencils, paint and paintbrushes, and many sheets of heavy handmade French watercolor paper. There was also a small portable typewriter borrowed from Al.
After we finished packing, Ethel asked an orderly to help her carry the boxes and load them into her car. It took them two trips.
When she returned from the last trip, Dr. Turcotte was with her, as well as John, there to sign me out against doctors’ orders. I was only beginning to comprehend that I was really going to leave the hospital. When I saw John, I collapsed against his chest and sobbed aloud while he held me.
Then we pulled apart.
The four of us walked down to the end of the corridor, where we waited while a nurse unlocked the door, then stepped aside to let us leave. Without looking back, I walked down the hall to the elevator. Ethel pushed the button, and we waited in silence. Then we filed through the open door.
When we got out at the main floor Dr. Turcotte shook my hand and said that he and John would be leaving. Ethel would drive me to the motel, where he wanted me to stay for a few days before returning to my apartment. Ethel and I stopped by the admission desk, where I got my wallet, watch, and ring. Then we too left the hospital.
The trees were green and the sky blue. Sunlight spilled its blessing on my face. Once more my life was my own.
I was out of the hospital now and staying in Town House Motor Lodge in Northampton. There were several other patients there. An old, alcoholic priest slipped out at night to dispose of his vodka bottles in a public trash container. There was the wife of a professor from one of the colleges who was tired of playing faculty wife. A young woman who studied astrology had visions of a Renoir-like child visiting her at night with her arms full of flowers.
But before going to the motel, Ethel had taken me to Dr. Turcotte’s office, where he had questioned me.
“Why do you want to go home?” he asked.
“To take care of the boys.”
“And?”
“To pay the bills.”
“And?”
“To water the plants.”
I thought of the huge pots of banana trees and aspidistra leaves and how kind Dee had been to keep them watered all this time.
“And?”
“To do the laundry.”
“And?”
“To paint and write.”
He looked at me with clear blue eyes that so often seemed to see through me and beyond to someplace altogether invisible to me. Chris and John Elder had been staying with my in-laws in Georgia for six weeks and were still there. Carolyn and Jack wanted to keep them and adopt them legally, and told Dr. Turcotte of their intention. I was terrified that I would lose my sons forever. The arrangement made before my hospitalization had been for Chris to live with me while John Elder, at fourteen, would be free to move between the family house where his father lived and my apartment.
Two weeks later I was sitting in a straight chair, smoking a cigarette. My right leg was crossed over my left, and I was shaking my foot in an agitated frenzy while Dr. Turcotte leaned against his desk, dialing the phone. My father-in-law answered. He wanted to know if I was sane enough to take care of the boys.
Dr. Turcotte cleared his throat. “I’ve examined Margaret, and I see no reason that the boys can’t return.”
The two men talked for a few minutes longer, while I sat stunned with relief. My sons were coming home. I began to cry. I’d spent twenty-one agonized days in a nightmarish state institution, strapped to the bed, locked in solitary confinement, and then confined to a locked ward. I’d been condescended to, manipulated, ignored, humiliated. Now, after gradually reclaiming myself in the motel, I was going to be able to go home. And I would not lose my sons.
I reached for a tissue from the box on Dr. Turcotte’s table and blew my nose. Then I covered my face with my hands to muffle my sobs, my whole body shaking.
Dr. Turcotte asked Jim Clark to drive me back to my room at the motel. On the drive over, Jim talked and talked about Carl Jung, about whom I, at the time, knew little. Dr. Turcotte appeared to harbor animosity toward Jung. At one point I shared with him what was to me an important dream. I no longer remember anything about the dream except that the circle was a prominent image in it. I was interpreting the dream in the context of what I’d been reading in Jung’s book Man and His Symbols. Dr. Turcotte waved my interpretation away without consideration. “You had circular images in your dream because you have a round face. It’s as simple as that.”
I accepted his dismissal without protest. By that time I had given him authority over much of my mind and life. I—after all—was the mental patient, the one who’d thought the moored boats in a painting in the lounge were really rocking in the water, had seen them knocking gently against the dock. And such intense colors! Nothing a sane mind could see. Of course I accepted Dr. Turcotte’s dismissal without protest. I was the one who had been locked up and medicated, wasn’t I? Wasn’t I the flawed child grown into the flawed woman?
How do you live when you can’t believe what your own mind tells you?
You find someone else’s mind to believe in.
It wasn’t altogether different from my childhood when, between three and four years of age, I began to block my own perceptions because they weren’t like those of my parents, and I wanted my parents and other adults in my life to accept me. I’d lived in constant fear of abandonment.
Turning into the motel parking lot, Jim was still talking about Carl Jung, and I was listening with fascination. Jim was introducing me to a world that would enrich my life. But that would come later. Now I had been freed from the locked ward and would soon be going home. That was more than enough for now.
By the time Ruth returned from Italy and I got out of the hospital, everything had changed. She had strongly disagreed with the way Dr. Turcotte had encouraged me to put a firm emotional distance between John and myself when John was begging me to come back to him, and threatening again to kill himself if I didn’t.
“Poor John,” Ruth had said to Dr. Turcotte. “He needs her so. This is cruel.”
We were sitting together in Dr. Turcotte’s office. He’d asked her to come talk with him. Dr. Turcotte said that her support of John’s pressuring me to come back to him was undermining his work to effect a safe separation.
He looked at Ruth and retorted: “If you’re nursing a baby and he begins to bite your nipple off with his teeth, you better get your breast out of his mouth in a hurry.”
That was the last time Ruth accompanied me to his office.
Shortly after my release from the hospital, Ruth and I leaned against my car parked in her driveway and smoked cigarettes, while Chris and Tommy chased each other around the yard. She told me that I was much too involved with Dr. Turcotte, and that she thought I was either the sanest or the most insane person she’d ever known and she couldn’t tell which. Then she told me about how once as a volunteer in the state hospital she was engaged in a conversation with someone she assumed to be a staff member. The conversation was interesting, and she had been enjoying it until an orderly came to take the patient to the dining hall for lunch. Ruth was so horrified that she’d not been able to tell a patient from a staff member that she never went back to the hospital.
I assumed she was telling me that she was afraid of me. I called Chris and we went home.
I remember one last phone conversation with her. I told her I had begun to write poetry and read her my latest poem. She said it made her think of Carl Sandburg. She was polite and reserved. She said it was a shame I wasn’t painting. She never called me again, nor did I call her. My son and I had each lost one of our best friends.
Now I was back living in the Shutesbury house with John, from whom I’d tried to get away for years. When I was in the hospital, Dr. Turcotte had brought John with him so I could discharge my anger toward John just as he had done with me when he was in the motel. Even though it was made of anger, the emotional bond between John and me was growing stronger. My pain was so great that I was willing to do almost anything to rid myself of it. If expressing anger at John was what the doctor ordered, expressing anger was what I did.
I stayed in my apartment for a few weeks after I left the hospital before moving back into the house with John. He and I continued to go together to Dr. Turcotte’s office. Usually the doctor saw John for quite a long time before inviting me to join them. Then he would encourage me to express anger toward John. Often I didn’t feel anger, I just felt depressed. But, with the doctor’s encouragement, I would try to find something to express anger toward John about.
Then he would instruct John to say: “Margaret, your anger is beautiful.”
That angered me most of all. I wanted John to speak for himself. He looked like a puppet mouthing the doctor’s words while maintaining an absolutely blank face or sometimes a face twisted with a mixture of pain and rage. But I too was following Dr. Turcotte’s instructions; I too was a puppet.
“What are you feeling now, John?” the doctor always asked. John always replied that he wasn’t feeling “much of anything.”
More and more I felt that Dr. Turcotte was focused on getting John and me back together. A whole family was involved. Of course it would be better for our sons if John and I could get along, if we could remain a family.
But—
The word hung heavy in the air.
My depression made me almost totally dysfunctional. I didn’t know how I would be able to cope with Chris and getting him to and from school. Going to the Laundromat felt like an impossible task. And I was grieving over the loss of Paula, who no longer called me at all. More and more intensely I felt John’s pressure to “come home.” Since he’d been working with Dr. Turcotte, his behavior had improved. More important, he had actually taken all the anger I’d hurled at him. Maybe we could find a way to live together after all. Maybe if we built an addition onto the house, a place I could call my own … Dr. Turcotte had given me hope that even my marriage to John might work, that we together with the children might truly become a healed and whole family.
With the great loss of confidence in my sanity, feeling the stigma of mental illness, and brokenhearted by both the loss of my friends and Chris’s, I went home to John. I went home to months of depression so severe that I was hardly able to get out of bed.
One afternoon Chris came home from school to tell me that Paula’s son Bob had told him he was no longer permitted to play with him because his mother was “mental.” Chris was devastated. He and Bob had played at our house or at Bob’s several days out of every week ever since we’d lived in Shutesbury. I couldn’t bear to see his pain when I was helpless to do anything to comfort him.
All the years of friendship between the boys had dissolved overnight. I struggled between feeling terribly hurt by Paula and feeling guilt for having had the psychotic break. Paula’s first husband, Tom, a racing-car driver, had been killed in a car crash. She’d told me there were times she was barely able to function. I remembered the phone calls when she would talk about looking in the bathroom mirror while watching her image slowly dissolving into smoke. Once she called frantic, saying that the trees outside her window had begun to walk across her backyard. I listened, thinking of Macbeth and “Birnam Wood do come to Dunsinane,” a soldier hidden behind each moving bough. I wondered what threats hid behind the walking trees in Paula’s yard. I asked her to tell me more about the walking trees, and listened until she had talked herself back into a calmer place.
“You really should go back to school and become a therapist, Margaret. You’re so good,” she’d often said to me.
“No,” I’d always replied. “I want to be a writer and a teacher of creative writing. I don’t want to be a therapist.”
But now I was “mental.” Chris and I were untouchables. The years of friendship were over. Paula ignored Chris’s feelings, and her fear about her own instability had hardened her heart against both of us. But understanding this did little to ease the pain.