the golden thread

When Beatrice was four months old, I forgot how to fall asleep. I was exhausted, and growing weary of waking up repeatedly with her at night. But cruelly, just as she started to sleep for longer stretches, my nighttime mind began to fret about starting a new job and leaving her with someone else all day. The fearful, ambivalent, not-ready-to-be-parted part of me kept me awake.

It was misery. I started spending my evenings taking baths and smelling lavender and avoiding screens and drinking soothing cups of tea. Useless, for the most part. All of those outside-the-normal-routine gestures just brought my attention back to the fact that I couldn't sleep, which ramped up my distress about not sleeping, which ensured that I would not sleep. Insomnia is a real bitch that way. 

In the end, I had to start my job and discover through direct experience that we would both be okay before my body remembered how to sleep again. The only helpful thing I took away from those awful weeks was the importance of an evening routine, one that can carry through periods of restful sleep and insomnia. I established a new mini routine then that has endured: reading a very big book, a tiny bit at a time, before I turn out the light.

The idea was to engage with an enormous novel that wouldn't be much of a page-turner. The first was War and Peace. I wanted a book I could open and read for a few minutes every night, just to check in with the characters while I got sleepy. Pierre? Still there? Still a bit muddled? Okay, sounds like things are proceeding as expected. Carry on. Good night.

Now every night I spend my last few waking minutes with the same people for months on end. It's rather soothing. The bigger the book, the better. I only read it before bed (I keep my daytime novels separate). And, almost three years into this practice, I am here to tell you that a person can conquer some hefty books - books I normally wouldn't even pick up - by climbing them five or ten pages at a time. 

After War and Peace came Anna Karenina and Crime and Punishment. Then I left Russia and went to England: Persuasion, Pride and Prejudice, Our Mutual Friend. Now I am two thirds of the way through A Tale of Two Cities. 

(About half of these I'd read before, which I find increases the soporific potential of the text, as plot-related suspense is minimal). 

Who knew I'd take to Dickens? I'd always avoided it because I thought it was schlocky and sentimental and full of stock characters. Maybe it is. But I love it anyway.

I've been thinking about Lucie Manette, weaving her golden thread. In A Tale of Two Cities she is more or less an angel descended from heaven with - naturally - golden hair. She ties her tormented, brilliant father, her almost-as-angelic husband, and other delightful related characters into a peaceful, harmonious family. They all depend on her for their sense of connection, stability, and continuity. 

For her father, Dr. Manette, "she was the golden thread that united him to a Past beyond his misery, and to a Present beyond his misery; and the sound of her voice, the light of her face, the touch of her hand, had a strong beneficial influence with him almost always."

Later, Lucie is depicted as sitting quietly at her work in their shared home, listening to echoes (both domestic and political, from France, where larger forces are about to irrupt into her family life):

Nor, how there were echoes all about her, sweet in her ears, of the many times her father had told her that he found her more devoted to him married (if that could be) than single, and of the many times her husband had said to her that no cares and duties seemed to divide her love for him or her help to him, and asked her "What is the magic secret, my darling, or your being everything to all of us, as if there were only one of us, yet never seeming to be hurried, or to have too much to do?"

I smiled when I read that. Oh Charles! You describe just what the members of my family seem to wish for: the experience of enjoying my full, devoted attention, to indulge the fantasy that only he or she exists in my eyes. So often I feel their anger flare when they become aware of others' claims on me. All of them, as babies, would place the flat of their chubby palm on my cheek and forcefully turn my face back towards them when I spent time turned away, talking to someone else. Today it's as if the children are in competition to hold my gaze the longest. Ignore the rest of them, Mama. You only love me.

Somehow Lucie is able to give each member of her family this illusory certainty. They know she loves them all, yet when when she attends to one of them, that person feels themselves to be the center of her world. 

She's like a dream mother/daughter/wife. You might dismiss her because of that - how can she be real? Where is the darker side of her, where is the her of her, the part that is always stepping aside so that others might shine brighter?

It's a troubling portrait. But I don't want to throw the golden thread out with the bathwater. On Mother's Day Gabriel spontaneously told me that I was the most important person in our family, because I was the center of everyone. You're the salt, he told me. You're the salt of the family. Nothing tastes good without you. 

One needs to feel completely loved, completely seen. Recognized. A child needs someone who can step aside and watch and allow her to be the hero of her story. She needs someone like Lucie, who spins out a golden thread connecting her both to her family and to herself. An adult who has been deeply hurt needs the same. Lucie, by offering her gentle, consistent love, allows her traumatized father in particular to integrate, become whole. In her presence, with her golden thread, he can knit his past, present and future together. After a time of isolation and imprisonment, Lucie's golden thread enables him to rejoin the world as his full self.

So that's kind of like what I do as a therapist. My client has the attention of my whole being. I set my own agenda aside, or at least try to, and I attend with all I've got. I want to create the feeling Charles describes. Right now, only you matter to me. For fifty minutes. Then I need a break, because it's hard work. But Lucie Manette doesn't need any breaks. She gives, gives, gives. She effaces herself and shutters her darker feelings. In that sense, she only expresses part of who she really is. She operates as a half-person - which is a large part of why she is so valued and adored. An angel in the house.

Yet Lucie's work is essential. It is the work of nurture, of love, of supporting another person's growth. Young children believe they are the center of the world, and they should. They need a spinner of golden thread - lots of spinners, really - to support them in that false yet necessary belief. There are times when adults need moments of being the center of the world too. We all need to feel seen, to be valued and recognized. This enables us to love freely.

And now my older children are living out a moment in which I can see their own powers of seeing, holding, and loving other people developing. They are becoming golden thread spinners in their own right. It is amazing, really. I watch them with their friends (both children and special adults); I catch them in moments of kindness, of generosity. Gabriel told me I was the salt. Frances tells me I look beautiful. There are moments when they even recognize me - a separate subjectivity who exists and cares about lots of things, not just what happened at school today. Wow. Just, wow.

Don't get me wrong; those are rare moments. But they offer a glimpse of the people they are becoming. People for whom life tastes good, even when I'm not there. As they grow, it is up to me to make adjustments on my end - no longer the sole golden thread spinner weaving a snug nest, but one who can let out lots of slack and allow my children take it up, connecting themselves farther and farther afield. They can do that, knowing they are ever safely tethered to home.