Haywire by Brooke Hayward (android based ebook reader .txt) 📕

Her relationship with Mother fluctuated. Mother and Kenneth had bought another, smaller house in Greenwich, overlooking the Byram River. Occasionally Bridget would drive down for a weekend. These weekends were sometimes comfortable, sometimes strained. By now, Mother had been told that Bridget’s fainting spells were more serious than she had supposed, that they were really seizures. Still, our understanding was confused. As it was explained to us, a convulsive seizure is the physical evidence of an electrical storm within the brain. This abnormal electrical activity is a phenomenon caused by the physical and chemical make-up of the discharging nerve cells in the brain. The overactivity of these cells produces disturbances in consciousness and in muscular coordination. Therefore, the fundamental or primary cause is chemical (or really electrophysicochemical). But the chain of events leading up to the brain’s chemical reaction can be infinitely varied. That variety was what made all the doctors evasive about giving pat answers when asked what Bridget really had. They told us that about 10 percent of the population had a predisposition to seizures but would never know it unless one or more of the contributing causes were also present. Some doctors believed that the causes were hereditary, some believed that they were symptomatic or acquired—by, for instance, some injury to the brain. Bridget remembered a concussion she’d had after a skiing accident; perhaps that had triggered the seizures. In any case, at the top of the list of contributing causes was emotional stress. Most seizures occur, we were told, immediately after some unpleasant or terrifying experience. There might be an increase of seizures during periods of worry or unhappiness. In Bridget’s case, the possibilities were endless.

The shame and the fear she felt about her seizures were as old as history itself. The very word “epilepsy” comes from the Greek word meaning “to be seized.” Martin Luther called it the “demon disease.” The supernatural interpretation of seizures is centuries old. And over the centuries, the casting out of the responsible devils took many forms. In Christ’s time, people spat on epileptics as a precaution against being possessed themselves; from this custom arose the name “morbus insputatus” or “the spitting disease.” In the Middle Ages, openings were sawed in the skulls of those suffering from unbearable headaches or convulsive seizures to let the evil spirits escape. Not until the eighteenth century did leading European physicians abandon a belief in demon possession. In many parts of the earth, men still continue to treat seizures by exorcism. And even now, when the image of the demon as an evil force is no longer valid, the most civilized and educated man still fears being rendered unconscious by something that seems irrational and uncontrollable.

With Bridget, we knew that after a seizure the length of time it took for her to return to normal was commensurate with the length of time she’d been out—which could be a matter of minutes or days. If, say, she passed out for half an hour, it might be six hours before she was herself again. We also knew that before one, she was given a warning that manifested itself by feelings of mental confusion or stupor, nausea and dizziness. During the time she was unconscious, her pulse rate was drastically lowered and her respiration slowed; muscular rigidity set in; her body became cold; all the symptoms of catatonia were present. Catatonia, or catalepsy, is a syndrome most often seen in schizophrenia, so Dr. Brenman asked that Bridget not be subjected to situations which might cause severe emotional agitation. On several occasions, therefore, when plans had been made for Bridget to drive down to Greenwich, Dr. Brenman telephoned Mother and canceled the visit; she suggested that Bridget might be in no state, at that moment, to risk any further emotional disturbance.

These calls from Dr. Brenman left Mother depressed. She correctly interpreted them to mean that Bridget didn’t want to see her. The implication that Bridget’s seizures could be triggered by the vagaries of her relationship with her mother was a terrifying one. Dr. Brenman, positioned between Bridget and the outside world as a kind of intermediary, became, at these times, the object of Mother’s frustrated rage. Dr. Brenman religiously adhered to the sacred principle of the doctor-patient relationship and refused to reveal any of Bridget’s most intimate confidences. While Mother, on the one hand, expressed her endorsement of this principle, she was, on the other, subconsciously threatened by it. It placed her in competition for her daughter’s soul. As much as she truly believed in the process of psychoanalytic therapy, there were moments when she now came to doubt its efficacy. Maybe it was all a futile stab in the dark. Always haunted by the specter of failure—failure as a mother, and therefore as a human being—she began to alternate between periods of high elation and quiet but grave despair.

Her letters to Bridget reflected these swings even more precisely than her spoken expression of them.

Dearest Bridget,

I want you to know that if I appeared cold to you today that it was because I was afraid of crying—and of having to leave the house. I love you as much as I ever have—which, my Brie, is as much as it is possible for me to love anyone—and nothing can ever change this, not even if you go on hating me forever. No one in your whole life will ever love you as unselfishly as your mother. I want, at any cost to my personal happiness, your welfare and happiness. I hope that you will remember this no matter what happens.…

Dearest Bridget,

Perhaps you have noticed that my letters have pretty well stopped? It has finally occurred to me that if you don’t want to see me, or talk on the phone, or even answer my letters, you certainly can’t want to receive them. I am sorry, I hate for there to be no contact between us whatsoever.

I have heard from several sources that you feel you