Waiting for Jim: memories long forgotten
Recently I was sitting in my dentist's chair waiting for a short procedure when her assistant came to tell me that the doctor would be a little late. "How late?" I asked, mostly only curious and not with much energy on the question. I had given myself a two hour space between this appointment and a session with a client.
I really like my dentist who happens to have the same name as one of my dearest friends from my New York days, and I really like her quick intelligence. I love watching her work with such skill and kind assurance while I stare at her with gaping mouth and eyes fixed on her serious face. I once told her that she would have made an excellent psychotherapist, which is not a compliment that comes frequently from this VB.
I really like my dentist who happens to have the same name as one of my dearest friends from my New York days, and I really like her quick intelligence. I love watching her work with such skill and kind assurance while I stare at her with gaping mouth and eyes fixed on her serious face. I once told her that she would have made an excellent psychotherapist, which is not a compliment that comes frequently from this VB.
Fifteen minutes later the assistant came back into the room, apologizing that the doctor would be delayed a while longer, and after I made a less casual and more energetic query, it became clear that my dentist had had to step away from the clinic for a few minutes, but she would return in no more than 10 minutes. The thing is, even though I was in no hurry, I began to feel an urgency about the situation, an urgency which made no rational sense at all. At about the 30 minute mark, quite beyond the supposed 10 minutes when she was to return, I took off the little paper napkin from around my neck, stood up, and with anger rising, was already at the door when the assistant came rushing in doing her best to smooth this byrd's ruffled feathers. At this point, she left to notify my dentist that I was leaving, and Dr. Marion came in immediately with appropriate and sincere apologies. There was still time to do the minor procedure, but I insisted that there was not enough time for me to get to my session- a complete lie - and we rescheduled for the following day.
At that point I went merrily off to the grocery store, feeling a kind of relief as if I had escaped from prison. I still had plenty of time to meet my client at 12 noon. This feeling of freedom made absolutely no sense to me.
Pondering my childish behavior, I found myself remembering a moment in New York in the 1980's when I was meeting a dear friend for dinner. At that time he was the editor of magazine, and to say that he was a busy man is quite an understatement. Approximately thirty minutes late, he jumped out of a taxi, apologizing profusely, and I started to scream right there in front of Grand Central Station. I had not the slightest ability to feel how awful this must have made him feel.
What happened to cause such a sense of urgency after I had already waited with seeming patience and equanimity for close to the time my friend arrived? I first discovered the answer to that question in a psychotherapy session with a psychoanalyst in Los Angeles, perhaps twenty years ago. As I was describing to Dr Lassiter another similar incident where I went berserk after waiting for someone for thirty or forty minutes, she quietly asked, "What occurs to you when you think about waiting for someone? " I don't know," was my response. "The only thing that occurs to me was that I was born first before my twin brother Jim. But that was fifty minutes before he was born, not thirty." As I said those words, and saw the look on her face, I realized/felt how this little boy who had shared a space with his brother for nine months had to wait for him "outside" in a strange, new, alien world for fifty minutes. This is not to mention that his mother was totally involved in giving birth to his brother. My mother's recollection is that I lay there quietly waiting, but I suspect she does not quite remember that this little baby grew increasingly agitated around the thirty minute mark.
After having lived seven-seven years on this planet, this story still astonishes me. It strikes me with wonder, discouragement and hope. Wonder at the absolute power of psychic reality, something that we cannot see or touch. Nor can we know it by thinking about it. Jung says that there is no archemedian point by which the psyche can step outside itself in order to see itself. And yet he insists the psyche is nethertheless real. In fact it is existence itself.
Wonder also, as a psychotherapist who has seen how each of us has been formed by our earliest experience, and how those experiences and the ones to follow in the next few years shape much of our future lives.
Discouragement: I actually gained this insight about waiting for my brother well over twenty years ago, but what use was that insight as I sat in the dentist's chair, with a growing sense of urgency and anger steadily rising? I suspect that most of us feel discouragement such as this when we discover that the insight we experienced, one we felt so sure would change our lives, vanished within a day or so. Insights are like sand castles that last for a moment and then disappear as the tide rolls in.
Hope? Perhaps some sand castles miraculously survive the our human tendency to forget. I have felt that "feathered thing" called hope even in the darkest moments of my life. and how sobering and humbling it is to realize that even though the little baby waited for fifty minutes, his brother did actually come. How many of us spend our lives waiting for some unknown brother or sister, father or mother who never came?
