Something Good

She was referred by one of my crazier patients so at first I was a bit skeptical.  Well, she wasn't exactly referred, she was brought.  There they were in the waiting room, so what could I do.  I gave her an appointment for the next week.

She is seventy years old, and she looked it, with her slightly unkempt gray hair and leaning on a walker.  She could have been eighty.  A few days before I was to meet with her I had a session with the patient who brought her.  She told me that she was clear that I would never mention either one of them to the other, of which I certainly assured her, but then she told me that she would be coming again with the new woman because the new woman admitted to my patient that she didn't know how to read or write.  My patient did not know if the woman would tell me that, at least not right away.

Given that, I didn't know what to expect, because in our brief meeting she seemed articulate enough.

The session began with this new person and the woman told me she had never been in therapy before but she thought she could use some advice.  Then she told me that she never learned to read. She said she had been traumatized by nuns.  Her parents came from overseas and no one spoke English at home.  When she got to school in first grade the nun was embarrassed that she had a student who not only couldn't read, she could hardly speak English. So the nun placed her in the basement of the church and made her copy the alphabet every day.  She got no further instruction, but has beautiful cursive handwriting.  When she tried to tell her parents what was happening they could not believe that the good Catholic Church would treat anyone that way, and if they did, they much have their reasons.  So nothing was done.

In second grade she sat quietly in the back of the class. She thinks that  he teachers must have thought she was retarded, but no one ever did or said anything. That remained true until high school.  She went to a vocational high school and took up cooking.

At seventeen she met a man four years her senior.  He decided that they should have sex. when her parents realized they were doing that they decided they should get married.  She married him and had four children before she was twenty-two.  She realized that he only used her for sex, and was also having sex with others, so she one day she locked the door and told him if he opened it she would break his head open with a hammer.

He moved to Florida.  Only one of her children ever had real contact with their father., and he took that son for a few thousand dollars.

From then on she took control of her life. She opened a catering business that she ran, very successfully for forty years. She had a staff member write the menus, and she didn't need recipes. She raised her children by herself and they are all on their own and doing pretty well.  The two who still live close by keep in touch with her often.

She retired five years ago and moved in with one of her daughters. Last year, as her grandchildren were entering adolescence she decided that she did not need to be around the noise and chaos, so she moved into what she thought was elderly housing.  The problem is that "elderly housing" in the city where I work is also filled with many interesting and colorful souls, and her hope of hanging out with some nice older women who would talk about their children, cooking and sewing met the harsh reality.

However, before she came to the appointment she had already begun to make some contacts away from the apartment complex, to find some people she may want to spend time with, and to learn how to be polite but distant with those around her. I was able to help her sort out who to see and where to go that could be more enjoyable.   She seemed to be very insightful, and we decided to meet a few more times to make sure things work out. I don't expect that anything more pathological will emerge; she was a very unexpected surprise.

She also told me that now that she is alone in her own place, with no one to push her or evaluate her, she is teaching herself to read.  She expects to have the hang of it by the Fall.  She wants to read that Fifty Shades of Whatever, that her daughters are talking about.