Jennifer Moses

It’s also situational. For example — and I know this isn’t original — I’m afraid of flying. After all, airplanes are held together by Elmer’s glue and piloted by guys with blow-dried hair. The combination has always disturbed me. Fortunately, I’ve been able to develop a technique for helping the pilot keep the airplane where it should be. It’s very simple, really: The night before my trip, I get a really bad stomach ache, and when I get on the plane the next day, I begin to sweat so profusely that people stare at me. Then I pray. My husband insists that it is not my pre- and during-flight ritual that keeps the plane aloft, but if I say so myself, the proof is in the pudding.

Other activities, such as having to call people I don’t know, push my anxiety meter into the red zone. I also dread bill paying. Worse than paying bills, there’s balancing the checkbook, a feat that I haven’t actually ever been able to accomplish. Even so, just knowing that it’s time to wrestle with my checkbook makes the backs of my knees tingle and my head feel slightly feverish. But the worst is dealing with large, impersonal government agencies, such as the Department of Motor Vehicles. I recently had to go to the DMV to get a new driver’s license. For weeks beforehand, I had nightmares about it. By the time I actually got to the head of the New Driver’s License line, I was a wreck. I was a wreck because I hate lines, and I was worried that I’d have all the wrong documents and end up getting sent home. Plus I’m afraid of government functionaries, who always seem to be angry at me. The clerk took my old driver’s license and looked at me suspiciously. She then asked me to take an eye test. “Please read the top line,” she said. I did so, perfectly too, I might add, only I kind of read it backwards, which is to say from right to left. Then I started jabbering on about how my oldest kid had just started Hebrew school and Hebrew is read from right to left and the clerk let me go on for a moment or two and then said: “Calm down, ma’am, and read the top line.”

My mother tells me that my anxiety is hampering my mothering ability, making my kids and husband nuts, and that it’s time, already, to let the anxiety go. “Don’t they have therapists where you live, Jennifer?” she says. After all, as she points out, the first three rounds of therapy got me pretty damn far. As long as I’d managed to rid myself of self-disgust, insomnia and destructive relationships, why not go the distance and chuck the anxiety, too? Mr. Will, the ageless Cajun Buddhist who, until he took off for Nepal a few weeks ago, was my next-door neighbor, had also been urging me to live life anxiety-free. He wanted me to meditate, and even offered to teach me how to do so. But as I told Mr. Will, I’m far too anxious to meditate, and — this is where I lost him — why the hell would I want to spend several hours of each day meditating when I could be working myself into some kind of frenzy instead?

But as tiresome as it is, my anxiety serves a purpose other than warding off plane crashes. For one thing, it motivates me to get out of bed. It also motivates me to get things done ahead of time, which was why, when I was in college, I never once had to cram for a final exam. (The irony, of course, is that 20 years after graduation I’m still having those really awful exam dreams, where you suddenly realize you haven’t studied all semester.) I also make lists. I make lists of lists — big lists and sub-lists and long-term lists and daily lists. I don’t like it when things are out of whack, so my household runs fairly smoothly, and my kids adhere to a fairly regular routine. I also vacuum a lot.

I guess it shouldn’t have come as much of a surprise when my three children graduated from the diaper stage and emerged as full-fledged anxiety factories of their own. My eldest child is so anxious that at times he tenses up and turns red and paces back and forth like a cartoon character just before steam comes out of his ears. My twins are not laid back by nature either. They literally have started climbing the walls, or, more specifically, the door frame. There they are, clinging to the top of the frame like bats. They want to know why they should come down. It’s safer up in the door frame, they explain, where the raging waters of the Mississippi won’t get them when the inevitable flood finally comes. And by the way, who will take care of us if you and Daddy are both killed at the same time?

Come to think of it, all kids are anxious. Their worlds are governed by mysterious, unknowable and sometimes chaotic forces, and they lack the adult language to imaginatively organize it. Which is why they’re into ritual: magic words, magic signs, the closet door left exactly a half inch open (so the lions inside it will stay inside but not get so pissed off about being locked inside that they come storming out, as my older sister, a corporate lawyer, will explain). Because I am such an anxious person, I think I understand my kids’ anxieties and can at times anticipate their irrational fears better than, say, a more rational, less anxious person, such as my husband. When, for example, the younger of my two sons was troubled by a witch that appeared night after night in his dreams, my husband calmly explained to him that witches aren’t real and that his dreams
couldn’t hurt him anyway. Naturally, this approach didn’t help even a little tiny bit. I took a different approach and taught my son how to chant the Anti-Witch chant. Here’s how it goes: “Go away bad witch/Get AWAY from here/’cause you’re yucky and ucky/you’ll land in the mucky/and we don’t want you ANYMORE!”

It’s not that I enjoy being jazzed up and agitated all the time, but my anxiety is as much a part of me as my memory. It is, in fact, the glue that keeps all the parts of my personality together. Once I was a crazed, miserable, sullen and sulky girl. Every night, I begged God to protect me and my family, and then went on to implore Him not to inflict all kinds of punishments on me. I listed each possible calamity, asking Him, again, to please spare me from them. Please, God, don’t let the house burn down. Please, God, don’t let my father get shot by a madman on the elevator. And on and on I went every night, until I was about 13 — at which point I developed an obsession with Nazis. I saw them everywhere: hiding in the woods that surrounded our house, lurking in the back rows of the movie theater in the new shopping mall, standing in front of me during Algebra class. My high school years were not much better, except that I moved on from Nazis and became afraid of everything.

I’m no longer obsessed with Nazis and I no longer have to ritualistically beg God to spare me from suffering. I actually get on with the business of living quite well. I long ago grew tired of my own cramped misery. And through a series of small miracles, helped along by the kindest Freudian in New York, for whom I later named my first child, I managed to free myself of the worst of my demons. Now at times I can barely recognize myself. Who is this person? And what does she have in common with that miserable mess of a woman who once went by her name? The answer — even more than memory, more than my brown eyes and hair — is that constant, persistent, gnawing sense that something, somewhere, is not quite right. My stomach hurts, my palms sweat — therefore I am. And I look around and see — ah! — that everything’s OK after all.

So now I go around threatening my kid with an operation if he doesn’t pipe down. As threats go, it’s not terribly effective. Threatening to take away his TV time works much better.

My brother-in-law calls us “the foghorn family.”

“SAM FINISHED OFF ALL THE TOASTED OATMEAL? NO FAIR.”

“TOO BAD, YOU IDIOT.”

“YOU’RE THE IDIOT.”

“I AM NOT AN IDIOT, YOU IDIOT.”

“MOM, SAM HIT JONNIE WITH THE CEREAL BOX!” (Sounds of screaming.)

I don’t know for sure why my children are so loud, but I think it has something to do with the fact that at any given time, one of them is shrieking to be heard above the other two. My husband and I, however, are not particularly loud; in fact, at least in the case of my husband, the opposite is true. He practically embodies the notion of the soft-spoken, laid-back, contemplative type — except, of course, when he’s really, really pissed. Then he, too, is capable of shaking the rafters.

Unlike my husband, my kids don’t seem capable of controlling their voices. Instead, they go from zero to 60 decibels faster than you can say, “Who broke the vase?” They’re deafening from the minute they open their sweet little eyes in the morning to the minute they at last, mercifully, close them at night. And it started almost immediately, as in, from the moment that Sam, my firstborn, emerged from the womb, all sticky and tiny and blinking his alien-like eyes. I mean, this was a baby who could scream. Satisfied? He was never satisfied. Content? Why be content when colic is so much more dramatic? By the age of 3, the kid sounded like Humphrey Bogart.

Oh, and did I mention that all my kids, but Sam in particular, tend to be slightly on the anxious side?

Here’s an illustration of how annoying it is to live with high-anxiety, high-decibel-level kids: Let’s say that I’m in the bathroom, with the door locked behind me, and Sam’s on the other side of the door, screaming at me, even though he knows that he is not allowed, under any circumstances, to trail me to the bathroom.

MOM, DID YOU REMEMBER TO SIGN THE PERMISSION FORM? YOU HAVE TO SIGN THE PERMISSION FORM, MOM. IF YOU DON’T SIGN IT, I WON’T BE ABLE TO GO AND I’LL GET AN F MINUS. AND HERE’S A PEN, MOM, HERE. WILL YOU SIGN THE PERMISSION FORM, MOM? I MEAN IT. I REALLY NEED YOU TO SIGN THIS PERMISSION FORM. OK, MOM?

Car trips are nightmares; Thanksgiving dinners painful; “quiet time” an exercise in theater of the absurd. About the only time my kids are, in fact, reasonably quiet (other than when they’re sleeping) is when we go to synagogue. Alas, Yom Kippur comes but once a year. Anyway, it’s no laughing matter, not really, which was why, after our little visit to the ENT, I finally got my act together and started looking around for a speech therapist for Sam, whose vocal nodules were thickening and coarsening by the minute.

Actually, it wasn’t hard to find a good speech therapist because my younger son, Jonathan, was already in speech therapy. He’d started speech therapy the year before because the only person who could understand him was his twin sister, and lately she, too, had been having trouble. The problem was that Jonathan’s speech therapist, Miss Lutavia, couldn’t fit Sam into her already jam-packed schedule.

Besides, she pointed out, the problems Sam had were global, having to do not only with his own strained vocal apparatus, but with the entire family dynamic. So she called a colleague of hers at the Louisiana State University speech and hearing clinic at the department of communication sciences and disorders and, to make a long story short, Sam was evaluated.

Shortly thereafter, my children embarked on group speech therapy. I am not making this up.

Before they could even begin, I had to fill out a four-page questionnaire about Sam’s physical and emotional development including his APGAR score (9.9), his length and weight at birth (20.5 inches and 6 pounds, 4 ounces) and his nursing habits (nonstop). Moreover, I had to answer questions like “Did your child experience ear infections, and, if so, approximately how many? (state year).” As if I could possibly remember. Does he now or did he ever play with matches? (No.) Torture small animals? (Just his brother and sister.) How does he get along with his peers? (Loudly.)

Honestly, sometimes I think there’s a vast conspiracy of health-care-related sub-specialists out there whose sole aim is to discover what my husband and I have done to fuck up our children. Group speech therapy is not the first time we’ve gone down the childhood-imperfection disorders road, no ma’am.

There was the little dance we did with a couple of developmental psychologists the year that Sam was in first grade and his teacher, among other people, noticed that his bottom never actually touched the chair. Sam’s now-ex-pediatrician told me that Sam had a hot-zinger case of attention deficit disorder and would be on Ritalin “for the rest of his life.” (To date, the kid’s never taken anything stronger than children’s Tylenol.)

Then there was the educational testing to which we subjected our daughter, when another bright bulb in the education racket informed us that she apparently processed information in a disjointed way typical of children with learning disorders. So off we shlepped to the neuropsychologist for a battery of tests, only to be told, among other things, that Rose “has difficulty attending to a task unless it is something she is interested in,” and showed no “evidence of hallucinations, delusions or disordered thinking.” Duh.

But group speech therapy at least addresses something real. And OK, so maybe the head honcho at the clinic did sit me down on the first day of group speech therapy and ask me, in a very gentle, non-threatening voice, if I thought that just maybe there might be something in Sam’s history or perhaps in our family’s past that just might account for what she called his “verbal intensity.” You mean in addition to the regular beatings his father gives him? Just kidding. “The cords on his neck stand out whenever he speaks,” she said, “indicating extreme tension and anxiety.” Gee, now you tell me.

The kid’s loud, OK? That’s why we’re in group speech therapy to begin with. Or, in the words of the report: “Therapy should focus on the reduction of high-intensity talking, yelling and screaming. Also, Sam should begin to develop self-monitoring skills with respect to vocal intensity, particularly while interacting with his siblings. Inclusion of his brother and sister in the therapy sessions will facilitate transfer of these self-monitoring skills to the home environment.”

This is how it works: The kids go into a room together with their speech therapist and ascribe numerical values — “1″ for whisper all the way through “5″ for screaming — to each other’s tone of voice. When they come out, they’re covered with stickers.

The real fun begins the rest of the time — the approximately way-too-many hours a week when they’re neither in group speech therapy nor at school, but at home, torturing each other. It is during these hours that I am supposed to track their vocal behaviors daily, rating them by frequency and logging them onto a little graph. Among the behaviors that I am supposed to track:

• Vocalizing under muscular tension

• Talking for an extended period of time
• Using the across-the-room voice
• Laughing hard
• Arguing with siblings
• Calling others from a distance
• Vocalizing toy, animal or other non-linguistic sounds

Oh yeah, and I’m also supposed to graph the underlying quality of each of my children’s three voices.

The problem with this little task, as I told the therapist, is that it might be kind of hard for me to track these and other behaviors when I am simultaneously helping my three kids get their three different homework assignments done, doing the laundry, trying to get dinner on the table, having a little telephone tiff with my husband and battling my own daily ontological meltdown. Not to mention that the whole thing is stupid. What kid doesn’t make farting or pig noises, at least on occasion?

“You really must try,” she said. So I came up with an alternate solution, involving the age-old method of threats combined with bribes. When my kids really turn up the volume, I threaten them with any number of punishments, including missing dessert for up to a week; but when they speak in reasonably quiet voices, they get a star on the star chart that I create weekly and tack on the fridge. If they get a total of five and a half stars a week, I take them to McDonald’s to pick up the high-fat, high-cholesterol, high-hormone kids meal of their choice, and on the way back home, I eat their french fries.

When I told the speech therapist about the alternative graph I had constructed, she didn’t seem impressed. But to date the kids and I have earned enough stars to collect enough little plastic figurines based on characters in movies we haven’t seen to open our own toy store.

Now, that’s what I call a happy ending.

“Yes we are,” I say.

We’re in the dining room of a lovely old house that typifies New Orleans’ Uptown neighborhood with its high ceilings, crown molding and gleaming, wide floorboards and canopy beds. Around me, the St. Mary’s girls coo and laugh, their musical voices hanging in the humid air. But this whole deal, frankly, is weird. Why, indeed, had I agreed to schlep all the way from the comfort of my husband and kids in Baton Rouge to New Orleans for this gathering of assorted former debs and sorority girls, none of whom, as far as I can tell, has ever met a Jew (which is what I am)? Not that you can tell a person’s religious or ethnic bona fides just by looking, but as I stand there grinning stupidly in an effort to blend in, I find myself hurling back to the fourth grade, when my best friend invited me to join her and her family for an afternoon of upper-crust fun at the then-restricted Chevy Chase Club just outside Washington. Her mother had to get some kind of special permission for me to tag along, so that by the time we were actually there, I felt so self-conscious that I got a stomach ache and had to go lie down, and when at last I felt better, I thought that everyone was looking at me, with my dark brown curly hair and dark brown eyes and “Mediterranean” skin, and thinking: “What’s the little kike doing here?”

This time around, to top things off, I’m ravenously hungry, but — as the sole Jew in South Louisiana who keeps kosher — I see there isn’t much here that I can eat. Fortunately, one of the husbands of one of the St. Mary’s girls has already seen to it that I’m well supplied with vodka, so I don’t notice it so much when I get that old, queasy, reject feeling in the pit of my stomach, which is making all kinds of loud noises. Plus I’m no longer a kid. I’m about three seconds shy of the age my mother was when she had her midlife crisis, so what do I care if the people gathered here think I’m Sarah’s Yankee Jewish lesbian lover? A girl, after all, could do far worse.

“Hello,” someone says from behind me. I turn to see another blue-eyed, once-blond former deb. She introduces herself, then says, “Class of ’49.”

The truth is, when Sarah asked me to accompany her to this gathering of New Orleans-based graduates of the St. Mary’s School (an Episcopalian girls school in Raleigh, N.C.), my first thought was: You have got to be kidding me. But what I said was, “Huh?” Sarah went on to explain that St. Mary’s is not only where she was educated for the two years after high school because in the ’60s the University of North Carolina didn’t admit women as freshman, but it was also where her own mother, in whose veins flow generations of blue Virginia blood, had gone. The school was founded in 1842 and for years educated the aristocratic daughters of the really truly Old South, like Jefferson Davis’ daughter. I still wasn’t convinced, however, that I wanted to go to a reunion of St. Mary’s blue-hairs.

But then Sarah pointed out — speaking in the Southern tones so deep that every time I hear her I can’t help but picture white-columned plantation houses serviced by an army of slaves — that the event would provide me with “deep background” for the novel I’m trying to write, the one that’s been ruining my life for the past several decades, but will all be worth it the minute it wins a National Book Award and I get to be interviewed on NPR. I’d told Sarah about my novel, which, like me, is set in Baton Rouge, but, unlike me, revolves around a family of white aristocratic Catholics who live in a big house filled with chintz and French furniture, and a poor black family whose housing accommodations are not nearly so luxe.

“The South is not like the North,” Sarah had said on the drive over.

No kidding, I think now, as I explain, for the third or fourth time in 15 minutes, that I myself am not a St. Mary’s girl — as if you can’t tell by looking at my frizzy brown hair and definitely non-Episcopalian nose — but that I’d come as my friend’s date.