When I visit him in his hospital bed, I am not afraid. My mother tells me that although his eyes are closed and his mouth is open, he can hear anything I want to say. I tell him that I love him, and that I thank him for being such a blessing in my life and my mother’s. The corners of his mouth curve upward and I interpret this as a smile. He hears me. He loves me. He can understand. I am reminded of when I visited him by his bedside to tell him about getting into Princeton and that I would have to pay close to nothing. His dementia was already advancing by then, but he had smiled and said, in a clear tone, “I’m not surprised.” It was like he remembered everything. He had always believed in my intellect and beauty, and always encouraged me. I felt as if I had a stepfather again. He was still present. I reconceived of his mind as one that goes in and out. When it returns, it sends a message that has me believing in magic—or God’s grace—and the beauty of life all over again.
Later on, after I have left, my mother whispers to him that it is okay to leave, and he does. When I get the news, I’m not sure if I still want to go back to Princeton to see the opening night of my play. I think it is inappropriate to leave, even cruel, but my mother urges me to go. I have been working on it throughout my sophomore year, and fighting with other more popular, white-dominated arts groups to get the performance space that the production deserves. I listen to her and return to campus. The show sells out. People agree to pay half price to sit on the steps to watch. My collaborators and I could only have dreamed of this several months ago. Although my mother cannot make it and my stepfather has already passed, my father, Mathurin, shows up front and center. Growing up, I desired nothing more than to make him proud, and now his eyes are glimmering as my art comes alive in front of his face. His presence reinforces to me how loved I am. I am happy.
To my surprise, it was my mother who suggested, a few months before my stepfather passed, that I go to therapy. She had been researching for days leading up to one of my breaks from college, and made my first appointment. She told me that I would be fine, and that she would sit alongside me if I authorized it.
My first thought was: If she thinks it’s okay, then it must be okay. My mother is one of the most religious people I know, and I still look to her for counsel. She told me that I needed to get well, not to be like some other parishioners in our church who suffered from psychological and physical distress yet refused to seek help.
At first I sat and fidgeted on a comfy sofa while obsessively looking at the clock. But soon, I felt like weights were being taken off my heart. I finally had someone to talk to about my feeling of weakness without the fear of being embarrassed. I realized that it was okay to admit out loud that I’m weak, I’m tired, I’m hurt, and some days, I am not happy. As a black woman studying at an Ivy League university, I felt like I had to put on a facade of perfection all the time, or else I was not meant to be at such a prestigious institution—a space that was never originally meant for people like me. Whenever I went home, my family members reminded me how much of a blessing it was. I wasn’t supposed to be unhappy, and if I was, I should just suck it up.
I saw the therapist a few times before and after my stepfather’s death. She recognized that I needed to restructure my thought process, and none of her methods deviated from or challenged what I knew to be true within the tenets of my religion. The guilt of being disobedient to God gradually faded. There is a time to pray and there is a time to act. My soul did not have to be at odds with either, and I wish that others like myself would recognize this when they cry for help. I felt peace in my head and in my bones.
After my stepfather passed, my mother herself hovered on the verge of depression. She would not leave her bed, and all the curtains in the house were closed. Taking care of him had taken a huge toll on her, as it would on anyone. She was exhausted from watching his every move, and infuriated that his colleagues had never called or come around to check up on him. She gained over a hundred pounds from stress. But she never viewed him as a burden. He was her husband. She never complained. She didn’t so much as wince or groan when she had to get up to take him to the bathroom, or bathe him. This is the most extreme example of love that I will probably ever witness in my life.
I pushed her to go to a support group at a hospital that was just ten minutes away in a neighboring town. She went and returned home a more revitalized woman, and she kept going to the sessions. She lost those hundred pounds, and then some more. And eventually, I did not pace; I did not check, double-check, triple-check, quadruple-check, sextuple-check, septuple-check, octuple-check anything; I did not wake up in a panic in the middle of the night, or fear that a bell was going to fall from the sky and pulverize me. I still experience infrequent waves of apprehension around silverware, not because I want to harm myself but rather because my reflection in the metal utensils reminds me that I am still here. I am living.
At times I do feel quivers of compulsion. I keep thinking that I’ll forget an alarm, but I never do. I think something will catch on fire, but it never does. I am learning to trust myself more and in turn work less, which is still more than enough. I do not know if OCD will become a constant in my life, if what I went through was just a one-time experience or the first glimpse of a condition that I will have to battle in synchronicity with the ebbs and flows of my life.
I did not realize at first that psychological healing was in fact what I needed more than anything after my surgery. My mother had reluctantly brought me back to Harlem, but I still could not wipe myself after using the bathroom, only pat. I could not wash my vagina as usual, but rather let the soapsuds slide down my body. I could not laugh as raucously as I used to; laughing required me to hold my stomach up and space out my giggles so that I would not feel pain from the stitches. I had to sit with pillows underneath me. And then the dreams started. I had feverish dreams in which I would be walking down the street when a man would push me up against a wire fence before loosening his belt buckle. I would tell him that I was physically unable to be penetrated, but he would force himself in anyway. My stitches would rip and I would go into shock. When he’d finished, my rapist would kick me there for good measure before disappearing into the night. Every dream I had was about sexual assault, although the focus was less on me being penetrated without my consent and more on my stitches being torn out. I felt less like a woman and more like a rag doll that could come undone at any moment.
My journal pages filled with my frantic thoughts. I feared that if anyone read it, they would assume that I was having a mental breakdown. When I walked to the train station I had to remind myself to act as I had done prior to my procedure, because every force inside of me wanted me to pull down my pants and yell at everyone to look at what a doctor had done to me. I didn’t care about being catcalled, about a man getting hard, about a mother shielding her child’s eyes. I needed to experience some emotion, some sensation, other than pain. I tried masturbating, but after forty-five minutes I was still hardly wet. Before, I could come in less than fifteen.
The man who I was dating at the time wanted to see me. When we got back to his place, after a glass and a half of wine, I was taking my top off. We quickly moved from the living room to his bedroom, but I just wanted to be next to another body when I could barely hold on to my own. As he pressed up against me, I hissed and told him to be gentle. I was still in recovery, after all.
And that’s when he asked, “Can I see it?”
“See what?”
His eyes dropped below my waist, and so I showed him. He could have stared at me for three minutes or an hour. I was so focused on how this was one of the most intimate experiences of my life. I didn’t need to be penetrated. I had never been. All I needed was to be reminded that I was still a woman.