Cured by Anne McTiernan

Author:Anne McTiernan [McTiernan, Anne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

I drove home slowly, confused at his continued questioning about my childhood. I didn’t see how that related to my current problems. I tried to distance myself from the young Anne. She didn’t exist anymore. As I drove, however, I thought about the parallels between her and my current self. Young Anne felt like she was in constant danger of being sent away by her mother and aunt. Adult Anne felt like she was in constant danger of her husband leaving her. Young Anne had to take care of her mother’s moods and feelings. Adult Anne was responsible for her daughters’ well-being and for keeping her husband happy. Young Anne did well scholastically but couldn’t make or keep friends very well. Adult Anne struggled to keep up in her medical studies and felt like the odd person out in her class. Maybe the psychiatrist was right to look into my past.

I recalled that when I was about eight years old, my mother told me about my early childhood. She and my father split up when she was pregnant with me, and he gave up his parental rights. After I was born, she had the option of taking welfare or working. She chose to work, she said, because she didn’t want to be a “welfare mother.” She considered women on welfare to be cheap and low-class. When I was two months old, she returned to her secretarial job. She put me with a sitter during the day, but she said I woke her at night.

“You were disrupting my sleep,” my mother said. I felt badly for her.

“So, I had to send you away,” she continued. “I had no choice. You know, I thought about putting you up for adoption, but I decided to keep you. You were a beautiful baby—blonde and blue-eyed—you would have been adopted easily.”

I guessed I was supposed to thank her for this. But inside, I wished she had decided differently. I knew an adopted girl; her parents doted on her.

Sometime later, she admitted that she’d kept me because she realized it would be her only chance at motherhood. As a Catholic, she was forbidden to remarry. She’d never again be able to have a child, unless she did the unthinkable and return to my father.

“I wanted to make sure I had someone to take care of me when I got old,” she said.

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