Rebels in White Gloves (38 page)

Like Kathy Smith Ruckman, Alison chose on principle to be a full-time mom to her three children, April, Elizabeth, and Steven. “I believe in being there all the time for my kids and not parking them for the sake of my career. To watch a baby come out of you creates a powerful blood love. Nobody can do a better job with your kids than you, who love them.” Unlike Kathy, however, Alison assimilated nearly every one of the sixties tenets as to how to birth and rear a child. All three of her babies were delivered by midwives, the first one at home. Doctors, Alison felt, “way overmedicalized” birthing. She didn’t like drugs and had read that you should move around to speed up labor “instead of being stuck
with your feet up in stirrups.” She’d heard about bonding and didn’t want to be separated from her baby. She breast-fed “on demand,” though her mother had not nursed her at all. (“She thought it was yucky; she was very proper and private about her body. And wealthy women generally bottle-fed so as not to be tied to their baby, to remain free socially.”) She always used cloth diapers. “My skin breaks out with synthetics; I realize this is the princess and the pea, but what’s the benefit of having Baggies on your bottom?” And she let all of her kids come sleep in her bed. “I based a lot of what I did on feminist research, like Virginia Axline’s theories about validating your children by really listening to them. I tried not to treat my son differently from my daughters; I gave them similar toys and required they all clean their room and learn to cook and sew.”

Mindful of her own misery under strict surveillance at Miss Porter’s, and eager for her daughters to have the freedom to develop their strength and autonomy, Alison sent them to Montessori and Waldorf schools. “I shared the Steiner principle of trusting a child’s inner direction rather than viewing them as objects to be molded. The Waldorf school was artsy and hippie and free—the kids had no homework or tests or much science; they raised goats and made pottery and tie-dye.” Her mother-in-law was scandalized: She regularly reminded Alison that when Bruce was a boy, she’d made him sleep on the front porch and every morning saw he had a cold shower and two hours of piano before school. But Alison stood by her choice to be “looser” with her kids. “I don’t believe in running arbitrary power trips. I talk things through with my kids. I like to give them more choice than I had. I believe that the way you help your kids not become victims is to let them know that you love them but also to trust them and give them room to make their own decisions. April knows that she can come to me and we’ll deal with birth control. I’ve told her that sex is powerful, that making love can be a cosmic experience, but that treating it as a sport or doing it because you’ve gotten drunk can leave you feeling rotten, or be dangerous. I’ve encouraged her to learn to protect herself; I have a black belt in Tae Kwan Do.”

Alison had just given birth to their third child, Steven, in 1988, when they learned that Bruce’s mother had Alzheimer’s and was in rapid decline. Bruce’s father was much too frail to take care of her, so Bruce and Alison decided to move his parents in. As she had been after every pregnancy,
Alison was in extremely poor health, weak and exhausted and unable to sleep. She felt no match for her mother-in-law. A “cranky, dominating” southern matriarch, Mrs. Swain had from the beginning disapproved of her son’s choice of a liberal Yankee bride, and had never forgiven Alison for marrying her only child. Even as her illness progressed and she grew more deluded, Mrs. Swain remained ferociously strong. “She was running things, but she was out of her gourd,” said Alison. “Her hours were completely kaflooey. And every so often she’d freak out; she’d suddenly become a child needing to get home and would just head out the door and wander into other people’s houses. We finally had to move out to the country, where there were no houses in sight.”

The family moved to Lawrence, Kansas, settling in a beautiful old schoolhouse in the middle of cornfields, where their closest neighbors were hawks and coyotes and an occasional bald eagle wheeling in the washed-out skies. For the next seven years, Alison spent her days feeding and bathing and chasing not only her three children but now also her frightened, miserable mother-in-law and her increasingly fragile father-in-law. She could have bought herself freedom from the ceaseless toil—she’d recently inherited enough money to hire as many servants as she herself had been surrounded by as a child. Instead, she gave all that money away, sending anonymous checks to people she’d read about in the paper who were wiped out in a fire or hit by devastating illness. The one fragment of her legacy she kept was the family silver, cherishing the link it afforded to her female ancestors; she kept it in a shoe box stuffed in a kitchen drawer.

Alison had looked forward to the freedom she would gain as her kids got older; now, instead, her responsibilities grew heavier by the day. She persevered in her caretaker role, reminding herself of her great love for Bruce, swallowing each day a bit more resentment, scolding herself for her selfishness, sinking ever deeper into depression. If she ever protested, it was in her most childlike voice and hummingbird manner, apologizing and revoking her complaint almost before she’d finished making it: “I felt frustrated and trapped as my caregiving duties went on and on and on, but I felt guilty feeling that way. I have a hard time dumping anyone. Even with boyfriends, I used to get them to break up with me. I never wanted to regret that I hadn’t been there for my kids or that I had pressed my husband to put his parents in a nursing home.”

Her childhood of privilege had persuaded Alison as thoroughly as any in her class that how one lives one’s personal life is a political decision: She had fallen in love with Bruce because he seemed to be a man who lived what he believed, and she wanted to join him in that effort. She spoke proudly of his heroism as a young man, protesting the war in Vietnam by dropping out of mandatory ROTC and facing court-martial: “I knew people who ate balls of aluminum foil to have weird X rays, or who acted crazy or homosexual. I admired Bruce for having the courage to fight it head-on. He would have gone to Leavenworth if he’d lost.” She is equally admiring of him as a husband, father, and son. “I’ve never felt exploited by him. He has done many things I don’t think most men would.” After Steven’s birth, Alison was so weak that her doctors made her quit breast-feeding and take Halcion to sleep, which plunged her into “huge clouds” of depression. Bruce cared for Steven all night while working all day, and continued his habit of doing much of the housecleaning. When he decided, at the same time, to move his parents in, Alison worried but couldn’t help but honor his devotion. “You see what kind of a person someone is by the way they treat people when they’re most helpless and the power is most unequal. My sweetie stood by us all faithfully, and I wanted to repay him with the same devotion.”

Alison’s affection for her father-in-law, a doctor, was nearly as great. “He’s amazing and deserved every bit of tender care I could give. He was an orphan who ran away to vaudeville and worked his way through medical school during the Depression and became the only doctor in his Georgia town who would treat black people. I was so startled when I saw the separate waiting room he had to keep. He was such a generous man; even in 1981 he charged five dollars for an office visit and seven dollars for a house call.” Over time, she even softened toward her mother-in-law. “After all her hostility, in her last years she said over and over how glad she was that I was part of their family. Hearing that, I forgave a lot of the bother. You can do a lot if you think people appreciate it. I also saw how my kids benefited from having them there. Dr. and Mrs. Swain were the devoted grandparents. My parents were always busy and far away.”

For years Alison did not paint. Though she set up a worktable in the middle of the living room, she was always far more interruptible than Bruce in his study, which was a separate room with a door he could close. She suffered the paradoxical unhappiness of the housebound
woman—loneliness and no solitude, all the while comforting herself with the thought that though she hadn’t “done great deeds,” she had “raised good people, which is a contribution.” She repeated to herself the Buddhist aphorism “Before enlightenment: carry water, chop wood. After enlightenment: carry water, chop wood.”

After fifteen years of complete dedication to the care of other people, Alison began to wonder “if I knew who I was anymore,” and finally turned on Bruce in anger. “Gosh, I got mad. My own needs and interests had gone completely by the wayside. I felt that I had no life. Sometimes I was unbearably bored. Taking care of people doesn’t use your whole brain, but I had no time for anything else. At moments I wondered if I even knew what I wanted anymore, I was so oriented to other people’s needs. I would not wish this on my children. I’ve told them to put me in a home.”

It was a “blessing in disguise,” she says, when in 1992 Bruce’s mother broke her hip; at last Dr. Swain agreed that she could get the care she required only in a nursing home. He remained with the family, but Bruce hired a visiting nurse to help out two hours a day, which gave Alison her long-wished-for chance to go back to school for a master’s in social work. “I loved being with adults and talking about social justice, and got all A’s.” The same year, she wrote to Hillary Clinton asking if she could come to the White House to make a painting of the Rose Garden for her old employer Mrs. Mellon, who had designed the garden for President and Mrs. Kennedy.

Alison’s respite from full-time caretaking proved to be short-lived. April had blossomed into a strong, self-possessed teenager: “She doesn’t have that problem of ‘Oh no, someone needs help so I must rush in,’ ” says her mother. “April has her goals and is not easily diverted.” Elizabeth, however, had not fared so well; for years she had been battling poor health, enduring recurring bouts of mononucleosis and pneumonia and terrible insomnia. While April had absorbed Alison’s vision for her daughters—“to have adventures and careers and do something for the world before they marry and become moms, not just blindly follow what I did”—Elizabeth (named for death-and-dying guru Elisabeth Kübler-Ross) seemed to have been shaped less by what her mother said than by what her mother was. Pale, waifish, and tiny-voiced, Elizabeth has, like her mother, suffered chronic debilitating illness and fatigue.
Again and again in elementary school and junior high, doctors prescribed antibiotics; when she repeatedly failed to respond, they suggested Alison take her to a psychologist. By ninth grade Elizabeth was so weak she had to finish the school year at home.

Alison, meanwhile, had contracted Lyme disease and Epstein-Barr virus and also had to quit going to school. “I thought, There goes the social work; there goes anything to do with my own abilities. I felt all doors closing. I was on the brink of lymphoma or leukemia, which we fortunately caught before chemo and radiation were necessary. My immune system was shot. I’d needed to make caring for us a priority; instead, I’d been caring for Bruce’s parents and quietly going down the tubes. I finally had to decide, Was I going to flame out taking care of other people?”

Since 1994, Alison has turned all her energies to getting herself and Elizabeth well. She has read widely and decided, despite her doctors’ skepticism, that Elizabeth was suffering chronic fatigue syndrome. Perhaps she inherited an immune-system weakness from her maternal grandmother, who died of lymphoma and lupus, or from her mother, who had polio as a child. Alison is now fluent in the language of T cells and lymphocytes and retroviruses and musculoskeletal degeneration. And she has made progress; first with an immunologist in Tucson, who treated Elizabeth with acupuncture and herbs, then with a move to Hawaii, where Elizabeth dramatically improved. Alison and Hillary Clinton have even traded notes on alternative healing. The First Lady did finally arrange for Alison to paint the Rose Garden (a project she later set aside to cope with her daughter’s health crisis) and startled her one evening when Alison was in the garden sketching by suddenly appearing, wearing a baseball cap, big sunglasses, leggings, and headphones. The two classmates chatted for an hour in the waning light. Alison told her that Bill’s astrological chart had aspects that make him see all sides of things, which is why it’s hard for him to make up his mind. Hillary told her about Chelsea’s bout with mononucleosis, and suggested homeopathy and acupuncture.

Chronic fatigue syndrome remains a controversial diagnosis. Most common among white women, it is widely dismissed by doctors as a psychosomatic “yuppie flu”; those who take it seriously are mocked for “performing million-dollar workups on neurotic women,” according to
Hillary Johnson, author of a history of the medical establishment’s response to the illness. Though it is now on the Centers for Disease Control’s list of infectious diseases, and the National Institutes of Health funds research on it, and though the work of scientists like Martha McClintock, ’69, has increasingly documented the effects of the mind and social relations on the body’s health, many doctors still share the view argued by Elaine Showalter in her book
Hystories:
that CFS is a somatization of emotional privation; that for people who otherwise feel they have no right to ask for attention and care, a physical illness becomes “a culturally permissible language of distress,” which entitles them to the “privileges of the sick role.” (The men most susceptible to such illnesses, Showalter notes, are low-ranking soldiers. The wars that are meant to deliver manly activity instead trap them in feminine passivity, at the mercy of other people’s command; “battle fatigue,” or “shell shock,” is the erosion caused by months or years of stress in a situation they can’t escape.) Unlike the inward, self-gnawing symptoms of depression, Showalter argues, such “hysterical” illnesses have historically manifested outward symptoms that demand attention; as they grow “epidemic,” they create a community with a shared story.

The community of CFS sufferers and health activists has provided Alison a new vocabulary to describe her life. And though she resented her doctors’ dismissal of her chronic fatigue as a matter for psychotherapy, she herself sees her physical malaise as an illness of the spirit, a perception reinforced by her New Age beliefs. She describes her constellation of illnesses as most common in people who “put other people’s needs first and run around whipped” all the time. “It would kill me to think I’d looked out for myself and others had suffered. But I wonder whether, if I’d been able to say to my husband, ‘No, we can’t take care of your parents in our house’ or insisted we bring in a visiting nurse sooner, it might have been easier to protect Elizabeth’s health, and my own.”