Transparent Frames
by JEAN HANNAH EDELSTEIN
Field hockey was something that occurred to me as a good idea in the final months before I fell ill, with what felt like madness. With what several doctors agreed was severe clinical depression. The field hockey season began just a few days before being alive became a Sisyphean task, before my first thought in the morning was that I should kill myself and my last thought at night was that I had failed.
When my mother would pick me up from a game and drive me to my psychiatric appointments, still wearing my uniform, depression and hockey seemed separate. But now the connection seems clear to me, that I was immersing myself in something that was so unlikely, in an attempt to swerve and escape the blackness.
As well as a rebellion against my self, field hockey was a rebellion against my family. We were cerebral, not sporting. Our athletic narratives were hued with failure, and that's how we liked it.
On summer trips back to her hometown on the west coast of Scotland, my mother would drive us — me and my older brother and younger sister — past the field where she was made to play field hockey in her own teenage years.
We had to march two miles there and two miles back in the course of a school day, my mother would say, Just for gym class. It was at the end of the day and one of my friends lived right by the field but they still made her walk all the way home.
That this marching and playing happened in the rain was moot. Everything in Scotland happened in the rain.
My father was on his high school tennis team in one of Chicago’s tony North Shore suburbs. He was the second-worst seed, something he cited with the special pride of someone who wasn’t the worst player, but who would not have wanted to have been any better. The tennis accomplishment of which my father was most proud (the only tennis accomplishment that my father ever mentioned) was the time that he convinced all his teammates to hold their rackets left-handed in the yearbook photo. He took us to the local public library to show us. There he was, with the other boys, all smiling with their smoothed, side-parted hair and white shorts. The joke was somewhat lost on me because I had never held a tennis racket.
Twenty-five years after he graduated, when my father was inducted into his high school’s hall of fame, he was introduced at the awards ceremony by the tennis coach, the only person still working at the school who knew him.
He was not good at tennis, the coach said, So it is a good thing he is good at physics.
Everyone laughed.
‘Organized sports’, as he and maybe no one else called them, were things that my father had strong opinions about; unpopular opinions. My father’s view was that organized sports weren’t good for kids. Coaches were bullies. Adolescent sporting rivalries were unhealthy. Fathers put too much pressure on their children to succeed. Mothers shouldn’t be spending their lives shuttling their offspring from field to field in minivans. My father believed that kids should play disorganized sports, good old-fashioned pick-up games in parks and vacant lots. My father believed this as if good old-fashioned pick-up games existed, as if vacant lots were still a thing.
My father’s prejudices were confirmed when my brother, at seven or eight, played in the community soccer league. My brother was on a team of kids whose fathers were not that interested in organized sports. My brother’s team played against teams of kids whose fathers were very interested in organized sports. These very interested fathers were the coaches; they wore whistles and ran up and down the field, shouting. Some of them wore cleats. These fathers didn’t stand on the sidelines drinking coffee out of styrofoam cups and doing fond chuckles when their children kicked the ball in the wrong direction. During the course of the season, my brother’s team scored zero goals, a fact that my father cited for years to come every time someone suggested that perhaps my brother or I or our younger sister should participate in something athletic.
Zero goals, said my father, This is the problem with organized sports.
My brother’s interest in soccer waned. He moved on to math competitions, which he had a chance of winning. My father approved of organized maths.
And thus my announcement that I was going to play field hockey was received by my parents with the kind of sympathy and swallowed mirth with which they had responded to my request, two years earlier, to attend a Christian summer camp with my best friends. My friends had given me the brochure, a shiny trifold with photos of kids hiking and swimming and praising. I’d hidden it under my mattress, like pornography, for a couple of days, before I mustered the courage to show it to my mother, persuaded myself that she could be persuaded.
You can’t go to church camp, she said, immediately. It’s for Christians.
I’ll ignore the religious parts, I said. I was desperate to go canoeing and make things with macrame; to return to seventh grade in possession of a camp boyfriend who I’d never see again but always talk about.
You can’t go to church camp, said my mother. We’re going to Scotland for the summer, to see your grandmother.
That is so unfair, I said. It’s just going to rain.
My desire to play field hockey was rooted in a similar motivation. I wanted to be normal. To be well-rounded. I wanted to have the kind of American youth I’d learned about in movies: a jacket with a letter sewn on the sleeve; swishy blonde hair; at least a fair shake at being Homecoming Queen. Field hockey was a gateway: a preppy, cute uniform (a red plaid miniskirt; white knee socks for home games, red for away); the fact that it was only played by girls.
While much like Christian summer camp, field hockey was not really for the likes of me, it was hard for my parents to prevent it. The freshman team was a no-cut affair, so I didn’t need to have any athletic ability. All I needed was a will and a way. The way was simply to spend the last week of summer before high school began doing shuttle runs and drilling dribbles. Plus spending just as many hours trying to style my frizzy hair into a smooth ponytail that would bob back and forth like a pendulum while I ran after the ball, so that from the back I could be mistaken for someone named Brittany.
I was willing.
OK, said my father, Field hockey. Fine. I’ll take you to the sporting goods store for your mouthguard and cleats. But you need to wear eye protection, too.
Eye protection? I said.
You could lose an eye with one of those sticks in your face, my father said.
No one wears eye protection when they play field hockey, I said. It’s not on the equipment list.
They’re making a mistake, said my father. They’ll be sorry when they go blind. Anyway, it’s no problem. I’ll just get you some safety glasses from the lab.
The lab was where my father worked: a large multinational corporation’s global center for research and development, headquartered in the suburb where we lived. Lots of my classmate’s fathers worked in the lab. Probably some of the fathers of the girls on my field hockey team. But no one else’s father made her play field hockey in laboratory safety glasses.
The laboratory safety glasses my father gave me were massive things with thick, transparent plastic frames. They were not the laboratory safety glasses of a Brittany. They were the laboratory safety glasses of the daughter of a Scottish immigrant and and Ashkenazi Jew, of someone who’d never gotten a tan by the pool at a country club, drunk a wine cooler, loved a soccer player named Bryce. They were laboratory safety glasses that didn’t say In a couple of years I will be an unbeatable candidate for Homecoming Queen. My laboratory safety glasses said I am the kind of person who once tried to impress the boy I had a crush on by showily turning the pages of my unabridged edition of Anna Karenina.
They’ll fall off when I run, I said.
Ah, said my father. I’ll fix that.
He pulled a beige rubber band out of a junk drawer and cut the loop with a pair of scissors. He knotted the ends of the rubber band to the arms of the laboratory safety glasses, so that the rubber would wrap around my head, leaving a dent in my straight-ironed hair.
Hockey season started in earnest on the first day of high school. Depression arrived in the second week, when I woke with my alarm and found that the sense of self-loathing that had been slowly rising was now suffocating me. It wasn’t just that I didn’t want to go to math class. It was that I never wanted to wake up.
At first the diagnosis was ‘school refusal’. At first I just cried. Then I screamed until I could not breathe. My parents, exasperated, turned on the light and pulled the blankets off. I lay face down and tried to cry out enough tears to drown in. I screamed that I hated them, which was also a way of saying that I hated myself, and I screamed that I wanted to die, which was also a way of saying that I hated my parents.
Eventually, my parents would get tired. We’d all get tired. One of them would stay at home with me and then the next morning, maybe, after an hour or so, I’d gather the strength to go in to school. My father would drive me there, on his way to the lab. I’d be crying as we left the house and still crying when we pulled up to the school. Some mornings he’d stop in the parking lot of the grocery store next door to the school; I’d cry and he’d try to comfort me and he’d have a look on his face that I’d never seen before. My father looked helpless.
Some mornings when my shoulders stopped heaving and I caught my breath, I’d make it in to catch half of my second-period English class.
Some mornings my father had to drive me home again.
My parents started taking me to see some experts. The experts asked questions, looked for reasonss. The experts picked through all of my fourteen years of experience, searching for some probable cause. There wasn’t one. Just an all-encompassing sense of horror at being alive.
Are you having a difficult time in school? the experts said, How are your grades?
No, I said, I wasn’t. I am now, because I don’t really go to school. I can’t.
Do you have many friends? the experts said.
Yes, I said.
Do you get along with your parents? the experts said.
Yes, I said. For all that I said that I hated them, the truth was that I loved my parents. The truth was that making me wear laboratory safety glasses while I played field hockey was maybe the worst thing that my parents had ever done to me.
The experts were stumped. They gave way to new, escalating experts.
My guidance counselor ceded to the school psychologist. The school psychologist suggested we consult my pediatrician. The pediatrician sent me to an adolescent psychologist. The adolescent psychologist suggested I should see a psychiatrist.
I lay with the family dog on the kitchen floor while my mother was on hold with the insurance company, with various doctors, her jaw set and determined. I watched her dial and take notes and through the fog I knew that it was a sign of how much she loved me. But when one of the psychiatrists at last agreed to see me, when my mother heaved that sigh of relief and called my father to come home at once, I refused to walk to the car. And when between them my parents strong-armed me into it I hurled my shoes out the window, and when my parents hurled my shoes back in and drove me to the psychiatrist’s office, I lay across the back seat of the car and I cried, and I cried.
The psychiatrist was a kind middle-aged man with a voice like a children’s television host. Not an obvious kind of person to understand a fourteen-year-old girl, but he listened to me tell him the things that I had told the other experts and he told me that he was going to prescribe anti-depressants. And then I cried some more. Still with self-hatred, but also with something like relief: relief that this wasn’t just how I was. Relief to be told, to just begin to believe, that hating myself was not just the way that I was supposed to be, but an illness.
If you have never suffered from clinical depression you might be surprised that I stayed on the field hockey team. On the days when I did make it to school, which were about half of the days, I attended the practices, I got on the bus to be driven to the games, I played my ten minutes before the coach put me back on the bench because I was terrible at field hockey. But if you have been depressed, then you might not be surprised that I stayed on the field hockey team: my brain felt like hell but my public face remained, for the most part, intact. Quitting the team would mean admitting what was wrong with me: I had a mental illness. I was mentally ill. I was crazy. The thought of anyone knowing this made me want to die in a different way from how I generally wanted to die.
My fear of humiliation may have been a sign that a small bit of me did still want to live.
Expending all of my aggression on myself meant that in hockey, I was a natural at defense. I played fullback, so that I could stand by the goal and defer to my more strident teammates, their swinging hooked wooden sticks and their substantial, immovable calves.
That’s my ball! my teammates would shout, and I’d shrug step out of their way, dainty and compliant, because the truth was that I didn’t really want to hit the ball at all. What I really did want was a crippling sports injury: one that would require some kind of lavish bandaging, or even a cast. Crutches, a wheelchair, an inpatient hospital stay. I wanted to sit on the sidelines at our games with my visible injury, a vision of martyrdom, and I wanted people to feel sorry for me.
Look at Jean, they would say. Isn’t she brave? Taking one for the team, and now sitting on the bench, a vision of martyrdom! We feel sorry for her.
I wanted this because when you are fourteen years old and you have severe clinical depression, no one outside of your family tells you that you that you are brave. No one tells you that they are sorry that you’re not well. No one congratulates you for staying alive every day that you do it. No one tells you that they hope you will feel better soon. None of these things happen because no one knows that you are very ill, because you don’t tell anyone, because you don’t want anyone to know that you are crazy.
On the day when the girl who played left forward took a stick to the face, breaking her nose, I gathered around her with the other girls as she wept. We screamed sympathetic screams while the coach applied first aid and flagged down a parent to drive her to the emergency room. I watched the hot red blood gush out of my teammate’s face and stain her white jersey. I wished it was mine.
She should have been wearing safety glasses, my father said, when I told him what happened. She’s lucky she didn’t lose an eye.
My father only came to watch one of my field hockey games; he and my mother had both missed many days of work to look after me. They would not leave me home alone when I was at my worst, for a reason that neither of them ever stated, but which we all knew.
But he left the laboratory early one afternoon and drove to the field to watch me in the final game of the season. It was one of those sunny, crisp days made for apple-cheeked girls named Brittany, and as I laced up my cleats and put on my shinguards I felt for a moment as if I liked myself. I ran after the ball and I hit it a couple of times, good noisy thwacks, and my father cheered, took photos, did fond chuckles.
Afterwards, my father hugged me, and it was like we hadn’t spent three mornings the previous week screaming at each other; like he and my mother hadn’t had to beg me the night before to take my medication; like they weren’t trying every day to save my life. It was like I was a normal American teenage girl, playing field hockey in a kicky little miniskirt, the light of a late-October afternoon glinting golden in the lenses of her laboratory safety glasses.
We got into the car for the drive home.
So, said my father, that’s field hockey.
Yes, I said.
It’s kind of like golf while running, he said.
It is, I said. It’s kind of ridiculous.
It’s great that you tried it! my father said.
Thanks, Dad, I said.
I took antidepressants for 14 years. I never played field hockey again.
Jean Hannah Edelstein is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Berlin. You can find her website here.
Paintings by Morris Louis.
"Laughlines" - The Everywheres (mp3)
"Little Stone" - The Everywheres (mp3)
