Clever Sincerity and Cognitive Dissonance

"As I have said already, one of the first demands is sincerity. But there are different kinds of sincerity. There is clever sincerity and there is stupid sincerity, just as there is clever insincerity and stupid insincerity. Both stupid sincerity and stupid insincerity are equally mechanical. But if a man wishes to learn to be cleverly sincere, he must be sincere first of all with his teacher and with people who are senior to him in the work. This will be 'clever sincerity.'" 

"You do not understand what it means to be sincere," said G. "You are so used to lying both to yourselves and to others that you can find neither words nor thoughts when you wish to speak the truth. To tell the complete truth about oneself is very difficult. But before telling it one must know it. And you do not even know what the truth about yourselves consists of."                                   -Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous

We were taught in "school" that one must always tell the truth.

What does it mean to tell the truth when the truth is something that you might be punished for? What does it mean to tell the truth when you are asked to go against your conscience? What does it mean to tell the truth when you are a lemming in a pack of lemmings about to jump off a cliff? What does it mean to tell the truth when you have been told what to say? 

We were taught in "school" that we must think for ourselves.

This is what actually happens. There is always a class after a Christmas class or a special presentation that is called an "impressions" class where everyone is supposed to stand up and say what their deepest feelings and impressions of the event were. There was a time when there were a series of public "lectures" given to try to lure people into "school". Groups of people worked for months preparing these lectures and they were always edited by Mr. MC to the point where they all sounded exactly the same, which they all were: an advertisement for school. It was supposed to be a special honor to be asked to be the actual presenter.

One lecture was given by a woman named L and at the next class, we were asked to give our "impressions" of the lecture. Someone always had to be the first to stand up and they gave the lecture a glowing review. Four or five more people spoke and all said that they had thought it was wonderful. Mr. MC then stopped the class and said: "Well, let me tell you what Sharon thought about the lecture. She thought it was awful" and he went on to elaborate extensively. Everyone who spoke about their impressions after that, echoed Mr. MC's and Sharon's condemnation of the lecture and the vilification of the poor presenter. This happened all the time. No one ever wanted to stand up first because you could never be sure what the "party line" was going to be and you always wanted to be on the right side in an argument. So much for the "truth".

Shortly after I moved to Boston, my best friend in school left along with a number of other people. This exodus came about after Sharon's son, D, who was a revered teacher and Sharon's heir apparent, left school. Sharon disowned him and vilified him. We were all shocked by the news. I was not present when he left and I am unsure of all of the details but Mr. MC was sent down to NY to lead our class one night and do "damage control".  Of course, many people stood up and talked about how they knew something was wrong with D and that he had been following the wrong path. He was generally slandered and maliciously maligned. That's how it always went.

The rule is that when anybody leaves school, they are shunned. You are not allowed to speak to or acknowledge anyone who has left the fold. You are also not allowed to acknowledge anyone you know from school if you meet them in public. When my best friend left, she called me to explain what had happened and why she had left. Then we continued to talk on the phone for months afterward which was totally verboten. The people who had left at that time got together and my friend became especially close to Sharon's son, D, and she heard all of his lifes' stories. She heard what it was like for him to grow up in the cult in California. He had been severely abused by his mother and step-father, Alex Horn. My friend told me all of these stories and I listened. She told me as much as she knew about the abusive nature of the group. She told me of Sharon's abortions, her alcoholism, her plastic surgery, her drug abuse and her manipulation of people's lives. She told me that Sharon and Alex had fled San Francisco in the 1970's after they were accused of child abuse. She told me all of these stories and I listened. I knew in my heart it was all true.

I was living in Boston. I knew no one except for the people in the cult. I was estranged from my family and estranged from the friends I had from New York. I had a small child and no job. My husband was deeply involved in the group. I knew these people were crazy but I had no recourse; no where to go and no one to turn to.

Cognitive dissonance is defined as "the mental stress or discomfort experienced by an individual who holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas or values at the same time, or is confronted by new information that conflicts with existing beliefs, ideas or values." (Wikipedia) 

There was a point where I had to explain to my friend that I just couldn't talk to her anymore. I would love her forever but we couldn't keep talking because the inconsistency of knowing the truth and having to live as if I didn't, was driving me mad. Literally. 

I sat in class longing to stand up and tell everyone the truth. I sat in class afraid that I would stand up and tell the truth. I sat in class thinking that if they were such enlightened beings, how come they didn't know that I knew the truth? I sat in class thinking that if they were such enlightened beings, how come they didn't know that I had broken all the rules? I sat in class wondering why they didn't know that I was constantly lying about everything?

I spoke to my husband and told him that I wanted to leave and he said that he would leave if I left. It was another one of those "rules" that if one spouse left school, the other one had to leave as well (or, they could get divorced). I was afraid that if I forced my husband to leave, that it might take a year or ten years but he would eventually blame me for his having to leave school and that would definitely put an end to our marriage. I started trying to think up schemes to leave school without actually having to leave. What if we moved to Mexico? I started waking up at 4 am every morning sick to my stomach and shaking with fear. I got to the point where I knew something had to change or I might literally go mad. This point coincided with my growing unwillingness to lie to my daughter as well. When she was 6, she started to ask me what it was like when she was in my tummy. I knew I couldn't go on. It was no longer clever sincerity, it was blatant lying and it was going to kill me if I didn't stop.

I maintain that Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. That is my point of view, and I adhere to that absolutely and unconditionally. Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or to coerce people along any particular path. If you first understand that, then you will see how impossible it is to organize a belief. A belief is purely an individual matter, and you cannot and must not organize it. If you do, it becomes dead, crystallized; it becomes a creed, a sect, a religion, to be imposed on others. This is what everyone throughout the world is attempting to do. Truth is narrowed down and made a plaything for those who are weak, for those who are only momentarily discontented. Truth cannot be brought down, rather the individual must make the effort to ascend to it. You cannot bring the mountain-top to the valley. If you would attain to the mountain-top you must pass through the valley, climb the steeps, unafraid of the dangerous precipices.                -J. Krishnamurti

Our Daughter Comes Home

I know that all of these posts are backwards so that to start with the beginning of the story, you have to go all the way back to the beginning of the posts. What I have wanted to write about is my daughter. Of all the things that happened to me while I was in the group, the story of my daughter is the one I most want to tell right now.

My new husband and I dreamed of adopting a baby from China or maybe Korea. I have two nieces from Korea – my brother and sister-in-law adopted them as infants (only 6 weeks old) and they are both beautiful, bright, lovely women today.

When Sharon heard that we were interested in adopting, she immediately took charge of the situation. She told us not to adopt from an Asian country but to adopt from Eastern Europe so the baby would have brown hair and brown eyes and we could say that she was our natural child. Pass her off as our natural child? Why and how? Sharon said that my husband’s sons would never accept our daughter if they thought she was adopted. Only if they thought she was their blood sister, would they accept her as part of the family. Our families would not accept her either. I didn’t really believe it but I felt like I had just stepped from a world where nothing was going right for me at all into a fairy tale that I desperately wanted to hold on to so I went along with the story.

Sharon told us that we should not see anyone in our families for at least a year. I said that I would be going to visit my brother and she told me to pretend that I was pregnant while I was there.

I spent the weekend with one hand on my back (oh, my aching back!) and the other hand on my stomach (my dear sweet little baby was inside me of course.) My sister-in-law made me a maternity outfit. It was a performance and I have never been a particularly good actress but they believed it. After the weekend, I spoke to Sharon on the phone and she said that she had never told me to pretend to my brother that I was pregnant. There was no arguing with her. Why would I have put on that particularly difficult charade except under her instruction?  I was totally confused and angry at having been led into a sham of a charade. She then told me to tell them that I had another miscarriage. Another performance…

I remember being at CR one weekend shortly thereafter and I told Sharon that I did not think it was possible to pretend that a child was my natural born child for her whole life. She laughed and told me it had been done many times before and that she would have one of the women who had done it, talk to me. I have no idea how many children whose parents were in “school” were adopted and never told about it. I had a long talk with L that weekend that had two daughters who had been adopted (one of them was the child of another woman I knew in the group and I don’t know where the other one came from). Both of her daughters, now in their 30’s, still have no idea that they were adopted although many of their friends seem to know the truth. We talked for a long time. I was convinced that she could do it but not convinced that I would be able to do it.

I looked around at adoption agencies and about the rules that different countries had for adoption. I had heard horror stories about Romanian orphanages. For Russia, there was no requirement that the parents had to be married for any particular length of time so we picked Russia. That started a year of paperwork, interviews, getting copies of birth certificates and marriage certificates apostilled, fingerprinting, etc. We picked a social worker and walked her through my home in NY even though we knew that we would not live there (I was already on my way to selling my NY home and buying a house in Boston as I had been told to do.) We needed health certificates as well and I went to my doctor and told him what I was planning to do. He begged me not to adopt from Russia. He told me that he had known several families that did adopt from Russia and ended up with severely handicapped children that had torn the families apart and ended in divorce in each case he knew about. I turned my back on his advice and as a matter of fact, I never spoke to him again. This was my happy ending, my dream come true, I was finally going to have my little baby girl and it was going to end happily ever after. I refused to see it any other way. I was also afraid that if I opposed anything that Sharon had suggested (instructed) that she could pull the plug on everything and my happily ever after would disappear down the drain.

I sold my house in New York and bought one in Boston. I don’t think that if I had not been in school I ever would have done that. My rational mind told me that you keep your place for a few years to make sure it all works out and if it doesn’t then you have someplace to go back to. That simply wasn’t going to be a possibility. Not only was I really actually in love with my husband (which is not always true for many of Sharon’s “arranged marriages”) but I felt that I had the added insurance that my husband was also in “school”.  I felt that the situation guaranteed a few things. Since “school” required that everyone make at least $60,000. a year, then we would be fine financially and also that we had would be helped and guided by our teachers so it was bound to work out. Selling my house in NY is one of my biggest regrets of my life considering what has happened to the NY real estate market since then. I bought a house in Boston but my husband also kept the apartment he had been living in. He was totally cash poor due to paying child support so I ended up paying for the apartment as well. He needed to keep the apartment because he took the boys every weekend and he needed someplace to take them. Sharon had told us not to tell the boys or his ex-wife anything about our daughter or me until our daughter was with us. Secrets.

I was alone in Boston. I knew no one and Sharon prohibited me from having any contact with my family or friends. I was not working. Sharon did concede to “giving” me one friend in Boston – a woman who was also an architect and had a daughter who would be roughly my daughter’s age. All through that year, I commuted between Boston and New York. I was not allowed to attend classes in Boston until our daughter came so I was permitted to attend only one class a week in NY. I was leading a double life. I found it hard to make other friends when I couldn’t talk to them honestly and tell them the truth of my life. Smoke and mirrors and secrets. Always secrets…

Finally, we took the long trip to Russia. We had to stay for about one month to comply with the government requirements for adoption. We spent a week in St. Petersburg, some time in Moscow and in Perm, on the edge of Siberia, where our daughter was born.

We returned to the United States with our daughter on May 1, 2000. It was the beginning of another major journey, one that still continues.

Love and Marriage

Time went on as it does. The ticking of my biological clock had stopped and I made a phone call to an adoption agency. I scheduled an appointment to go to an orientation.

During that time, the group was deeply involved in the process of building on a site that had been purchased in Pawling, NY which was to become our new Country Retreat (CR). There was a non-profit corporation formed named the Hudson Valley Artists Foundation. It was a 20-acre property with 2 houses on it – a main house and a caretakers cottage. I was responsible for almost all of the architectural drawings.

Our previous CR had been in Mahopac and there were concerns about our privacy since there was some new construction planned adjacent to the property. Sharon and Alex had had a house right down the road from the house in Mahopac that had burned down in 2002. There were some rumors that they burned it down themselves for the insurance money. There were other rumors that it was an electrical fire and when they realized the house was on fire they called a student, T, who lived nearby and he came over to investigate. Who calls a friend when their house is burning down instead of the fire department? I remember Sharon coming into class after the fire and telling us about it. She told us that her house was totally destroyed (which it was) and that she had lost EVERYTHING and was now homeless and without her possessions. This I later learned was not quite true. She had a co-op on 12th Street, a house in Southampton and a ranch in Montana. She was hardly homeless. She was in some ways a great actress. Her performances were for us though and performances they were. She had a small part in the movie version of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five and had been active in the off-Broadway theater scene in the 1960's but her "career" on the legitimate stage never got farther than that.

One very wealthy student G had purchased the property outright. I think the price was close to $430,000. We were all asked to make a minimum contribution of at least $1,000. A number of us were asked to make much larger contributions as well. I was asked to contribute $100,000. I gave them $50,000 to start and when I was asked for the second installment, I said that I had second thoughts about it and didn’t want to contribute any more. Gratefully, I wasn’t pressured about my decision nor was I punished for it. I had several friends who I knew did not have the money and I paid for their contributions as well as my own. In return, we were told that this property would belong to all of us equally and were would all be able to enjoy it whenever we wished to. It was a lovely place, with an in-ground pool and I did spend many happy weekends there in the summer.

We created a “master plan” for the property which included adding a large dance studio/performance space onto the main house, building a smaller house just for Sharon and the other “teachers” as well as building three additional buildings that were to serve as “studios” for the different artists. The Foundation was set up to offer “retreat spaces” for artists (who had to complete an application process) to come to work and live for various lengths of time in a beautiful country setting. The truth as that the three additional building were for us to live in on our weekends there.

They applied to the town of Pawling for tax free status as the Foundation was a 501(c)3 non-profit corporation. The deal was that in exchange for the elimination of the property taxes, we would present performances and workshops open to the residents of Pawling.  I don’t remember all of the specifics but we literally dressed up the property one weekend for the town to come visit. We turned all the buildings into studios. I remember creating a fiber studio – I brought my spinning wheel along with lots of fiber and fabric. We also created a writing studio, a painting studio, etc. and then we took it all home at the end of the weekend. They never did qualify for tax free status. In addition, there were a couple of instances where the fire company came because the alarm was set off for some reason. They were really paranoid about having uninvited people on the property – mostly because we had a Certificate of Occupancy for I think something like 12 people and on any given weekend, we had probably 30 adults and 25 children on the property. Eventually, they put up a gate that was to be locked at all times in order to eliminate the threat of surprise visits by any town authorities.

That summer, I had given up my architecture job in the city and moved up to Pawling for the duration of the construction to be the resident architect. Of course, I drove to Manhattan twice a week for class getting back to Pawling usually about 3 or 4 am. I was exhausted and frustrated. Being in Pawling greatly reduced my ability to meet people (i.e. men) and get on with my project of trying to at least adopt a child.

One particularly frustrating/despairing weekend, I was sitting and chatting in the kitchen with a number of people. A few of my friends were present as well as one of the teachers, G. I was talking about my dissatisfaction with my life and with school. I was getting no closer to having a man and a child in my life and I said out loud to everyone: “It’s not like the love of my life is going to walk in this door here.”

Well, strangely enough or not, the following weekend, the love of my life did walk in through that door. I don’t know if G told Sharon about my state of mind and the whole thing was engineered but it did happen. We had been told to prepare for a bunch of extra guests. We were given a “shock” and a number of men from the Boston group came for the weekend to help with the construction. They walked in silently one by one on Friday night. Saturday morning, someone told me that the man who ran the school in Boston was looking for me. I am going to call the man who ran the school in Boston Mr. Manchurian Candidate (Mr. MC for short). Mr. MC wanted to talk to me? I had really no relationship with him and couldn’t imagine what he wanted me for. When we finally spoke, he told me that Sharon and he had thought that one of the men in the group and I might be interested in each other. He told me to try and make friends with him, talk to him, sit next to him at meals, etc.

I liked him. We seemed to get along well. We had a lot in common. I thought there might be some possibilities. He asked for my phone number on Sunday before they left. I was on cloud #9. My friend J said that if he was interested, he was would probably call me towards the middle of the week. He called me Monday morning. Wow. We spoke daily after that. He asked if he could come to NY to visit me the following weekend. He came and we had a great time. He came again the following weekend. I was caught up in a whirlwind. I was in love.

The second weekend he came to NY, he said to me, out of the clear blue sky, that he had always wanted to adopt a baby girl!

He had no idea of my struggles with infertility or my despair over not having a child. He had three boys from a previous marriage (also to a woman who had been in school.) and I knew that since we lived in different cities, I was going to be the one who had to move. I was in shock.

To make a short story even shorter, a few weeks later we were married. From the day we met until our marriage, seven weeks had passed. I don’t think that if I had not been in school I would have gotten married so quickly. It was another some of those school “things”. I had wanted a small wedding and a party but Sharon insisted that we “elope” as soon as possible and not tell our families. We were married by a Justice of the Peace in my small back yard on 10^th Street. It was just the two of us and the two dogs…

The Two Dogs and I

I can remember sitting on an orange plastic swivel chair at the table in my mother’s kitchen on East 9^th Street in Manhattan when I was 16, dreaming of the children that I would some day have. I imagined them clinging to my long skirts as I went about the business of the day, There was never a question in my mind that someday I would have children.

As a child, I thought that my parents had no idea what I was all about because they could not remember what they were like when they were my age, I swore that I would remember what it was like to be a child so that my children would not suffer in the same way. I never quite felt like I belonged in my family which I think is a very common feeling for many children. I had decided that I was either adopted or they conceived me as tax deduction and nothing more.

Being a modern woman, I decided that if I was not married by the time I was 35, I would try to have a child on my own. I was 33 when I got married and I thought that all would be well.

If I had known then what I knew now…

At the time my first husband and I started school (late spring or early summer of 1986) we had already decided to take a year off and travel. All my life I had dreamed of going to Europe, purchasing a VW mini-van and traveling overland to India with a group of friends, The political situation in the middle east made that impossible at that time.

My husband was the child of missionaries and had grown up in Hong Kong from the age of 3 to 13. As luck would have it, his father had started a social services agency in Hong Kong which was celebrating its 25^th anniversary and had invited him and his wife back to Hong Kong to join in the festivities. We decided to plan our trip around starting out with my in-laws in Hong Kong in September. It was a rare treat for everyone. My mother and father in-law were planning a trip to mainland China (which we also accompanied them on) as it had been closed to tourism during the time they had lived there. I was thrilled to be going at all, no less with people who spoken fluent Mandarin.  Everyone was happy to be able to see old friends and revisit their earlier days.

I still remember the plane touching down in Hong Kong where the airport is situated in such a way that you almost feel like you are about to plunge into the ocean. After being awake while traveling for almost 24 hours, my father-in-law had contrived to pick us up at the airport in a Mercedes Benz and whisked us off to a banquet in a private room at a restaurant which still today ranks high up on the list of one of the best meals that I have ever had.  But this isn’t about the trip…

A few weeks before we were about to leave, one of us mentioned casually in class that we were going away for a year. We had already sublet our apartment, bought our tickets, and taken a leave of absence from our jobs. Mr. T told us we couldn’t go and we needed to change our plans. He was adamant but the die was cast and we were not changing our plans at that point. I was surprised that this was a problem. The rule was something like: the “work” goes cold in you after 24 hours (or was it 8 hours?) so long absences and vacations were not permitted in school. I was secretly hoping that by the time we got back, my husband would have forgotten about “school” and it would all be over but that wasn’t what happened. Even then, I was not totally convinced about school. I knew I was there more for my husbands sake then because of my own interest.

After we retuned to NY, our friend who had originally introduced us to school called to see if we were ready to go back. I remember meeting with her at the White Horse Tavern and discussing it over a few beers. We went back.

When we returned, I was given a different sustainer than the one that I had had originally. My original sustainer had been a vibrant redhead named J who I had confided in that I thought that school could potentially be the beginning of the end of my marriage. My new sustainer, M, had a Spanish husband (who I thought was gay) and 3 or 4 very young children. Little did I know then that everything I said to them was reported back regularly to the higher echelon.

Shortly after we had returned to the US, I became pregnant. Early in the pregnancy, I started to show signs of miscarriage and I became very depressed. My doctor put me on bed rest but I still went to class.  At the end of class, Mr. T asked to see. He told me that he knew about the potential miscarriage and that he thought he could help me. I was filled with hope and excitement. Of course, he was unable to help me at all. It didn’t occur to me in the moment that my sustainer had breached my trust.

A few days later, I had the miscarriage alone quietly at home.

Time went on but I did not get pregnant again. My husband and I consulted an endocrinologist at Mt. Sinai Hospital and we both went through a whole battery of tests. The conclusion was that one of my fallopian tubes was damaged (probably due to an IUD) but the other one was perfectly normal and they found no reason that I shouldn’t be able to get pregnant. They prescribed Clomid and I started tracking my temperature to find the best moments conception.

My husband started to get more “secret” phone calls than I did. He then started going away for the weekends, coming home late, exhausted and filthy on Sunday nights.  I didn’t have any idea where he went or what he did. I only knew that it had something to do with school and I knew that he drove there and took his construction tools with him. When we had first started at school, we were strictly admonished to NEVER speak about school either between ourselves or with “outsiders”. My husband, being a man who always played by the rules, never said a word to me neither about where he was going nor about what he was doing. I was both jealous and angry. Frequently, he would have a free lance job that needed to be finished and I would complete it for him by myself over the weekend. It was hard to get together with friends because I didn’t know when he would be there to join us or how to explain his absences when he was away. When my temperature said that I was in a fertile period and he was off to unknown places over the weekend, what was I supposed to do? I was becoming somewhat isolated from my husband and friends. For the most part though, I was still pretty happy with my life, my marriage and my job and looked forward to starting our family together.

On our fifth wedding anniversary, we went out to dinner at Raoul’s on Spring Street. It was one of my favorite restaurants and I was all dressed up looking forward to an exciting intimate evening. We sat down at the table and ordered drinks. I was looking forward to celebrating our time together and planning for our future, I leaned over to him and in a breathy voice I said: “Wow, five years, can you believe it!  How are we doing?” He looked calmly back at me and said: “I want a divorce.”

I was totally in shock. There was no way that I had seen that coming and I couldn't believe he was serious. I could understand if he had some issues that he wanted to through and work out but this was an ultimatum. It was a decision wholly made by him with no regard for me, no interest in how I felt or what I wanted. I was out of the equation. The deal was done as far as he was concerned.

We stayed together for another year or two before we finally divorced. I was for the most part hysterically trying for him to change his mind until I realized that if he didn’t want me, there really wasn’t anything I could do about it because begging and pleading were getting me nowhere. We had lunch a year or so after we finally separated and I asked him “Why?” He then gave me a long list of problems he had and concerns about the relationship. I asked him why he had never voiced his concerns or talked about any of it while we were still married so we could have the opportunity to solve the problems. He had no answer.

During the year or so after he announced he wanted a divorce, number of things happened. One was that he stood up in class one night and announced to the entire assembled group in school that he didn’t love me and that he had married me for my money. I was shocked, humiliated, and angry beyond understanding why this had to be a public confession. I believed him and yet somewhere I knew it wasn’t true but I still was unable to see the subtle hand of school behind the whole debacle.

He told me that he had decided he wanted to spend one month apart to think about our marriage and that at the end of the month, we would meet and he would tell me what his decision was.

I didn’t know what to do and in the end I felt like all I could do was to hope and pray. I felt totally helpless and at his mercy. I still saw him in class but we didn’t speak.

A month later we met in a coffee shop. We talked a little. He got up and said that he had to make a phone call and left the restaurant to go to the phone booth on the corner (in the days before cell phones…). I could see him out of the window. He came back and we talked some more and he got up to make another phone call. He came back and told me his decision was final and that he wanted a divorce.

Later, I realized that he was probably calling his sustainer or a partner or maybe even Mr. T for help and support and encouragement. I felt that I didn’t have that kind of support and I felt terribly alone. The one time I was brave enough to speak up in class about how miserable and unhappy I was, Mr. T said to me: “You are born alone and you die alone.” Basic translation: Shut up and just get over it. I didn’t speak about it again. 

I sat in class week after week watching my ex-husband and never speaking. He stood up and talked about his new girlfriend and then how she had gotten pregnant and then how he wanted to marry her. They gave him their blessing and pretty soon he brought her to school and I had to watch the two of them sitting there week after week. At that point, I felt that since I had been in school all those years for my (now) ex-husband, I needed to try and be there for myself and I redoubled my efforts in working on myself.

Time passed and I still wanted a child. I stood up in class one evening and told Sharon that I wanted a child. I had heard other women ask the same question and she frequently suggested they go to Europe for a few weeks, have an affair and get pregnant by someone they would never see again. Me? She told me that I would make a terrible mother because I was not a loving woman. She said that I was self centered and had no ability to take care of anything. She suggested that I get a plant and try not to kill it. I replied that I had many plants and they were doing quite well. She then told me to get a dog. She said I had to get a young puppy who was untrained, not an older dog, so I could have the experience of training him.

I was stunned. What happens when someone in an “authority” position, your “teacher”, tells you something like that? I am not a loving woman. I believed her, I didn’t believe her, I was torn, bleeding and wracked with pain, doubt, indecision and most of all I was frozen. I couldn’t do anything. Weeks went by and people kept asking me if I had gotten a dog yet. Night after night: “Did you get a dog yet? Did you get a dog yet?” Frozen like a deer in the headlights. I couldn’t move. I realize, years later, that this has often been my response to severe psychic turmoil: everything stops and I am unable to move in any direction at all, frozen in fear.

Time went by and I rented a car and drove to a kennel on Long Island and I got a dog. Then people started asking me what his name was. For weeks, he had no name and finally I settled on "Puck" from A Midsummer Night's Dream. Puck, the mischievous one. He was driving me crazy as only a small puppy in a small NY apartment can. The hems of my dresses were filled with holes where he would jump up and grab hold of me. More time went by and I stood up again a year later to ask again about a child and Sharon told me to get another dog. I got another dog. Sophie was a rescue dog.

After awhile, I just didn’t say anything, I just went back to my reproductive endocrinologist and did a number of rounds of donor insemination. I didn’t get pregnant. More tests. More drugs. More consultations. I went to several acupuncturists. I joined an organization for single women wanting to get pregnant. I talked to my cousin, who lives in Denver, an OBGYN with a specialization in infertility. Finally, I decided to do several rounds of in-vitro fertilization. I flew back and forth for several months, giving myself injections, sending blood samples back and forth, and monitoring my hormone levels.

I finally got pregnant. Sharon sent me to her personal gynecologist but there was something wrong with the fetus and I had to have a D and C. A friend from school who was a nurse accompanied me to the procedure and then spent the night. I was heartbroken. Then next class, Sharon asked me to stand up and she told me that I didn’t talk enough in class and either I spoke every class for the next month or I would not be allowed to go come back to school.

I panicked. The threat of being asked to leave school was the worst imaginable punishment. How do I explain that? It doesn’t make any rational sense and yet I believed what they said: that without school, my life would turn to shit. If I had any chance in the world to have a happy complete fulfilling life, it was only with the help of school. Without school I was doomed to a life of misery – I would end up a homeless bag lady wandering the streets of New York and eating out of garbage cans. School was my only hope to make my dreams come true and enable me to live the life I wanted.

It was because of Sharon’s ultimatum that I stayed in New York and did not attempt another in vitro fertilization. I thought that if I missed class by being away it would count as a class where I hadn’t spoken and it would all be over. I spoke every class for the next month. The truth was that in the end, I don’t think that anyone cared. I never got the sense that there was anyone appointed to counting the number of times I spoke in class. It  was never remarked on when the month was up and I lapsed into silence again.

Who knew why Sharon came out with the pronouncements she did? That was the frightening part really because it was all so plain unpredictable – what she said and why she said it and also whether or not she remembered what she had said. You never really knew if she was serious or joking or just plain drunk so it was impossible to predict the consequences. It was impossible to know how to react to her.

I remember one time, early on, Mr. T told me that I wore black too often and that if I wore black again to class, he would ask me to leave, The following class I wore a bright red silk shirt with a brightly printed skirt. A made me stand up and asked me why I had worn black again after he had told me no to. I said that I didn’t believe I was wearing black but he commented that there was a little bit of black in my skirt. Oh….

Sharon trained all her teachers in her own image and it was dangerous to say anything that wasn’t the “party line” (and sometimes it was hard to know what the party line actually was because it could change really fast.) School was it’s own little totalitarian regime where you didn’t know who was who so you couldn’t say anything to anyone for fear of being turned in to the authorities. You didn’t always know who your friends were. There were some people who were never my friends but they would be nice to me upon occasion and I was always suspicious. I had “friends” who asked me to be their bridesmaid who I didn’t really know and had no idea why they had asked me. Only a very few were real friends who I could trust. Some were friends who I couldn’t trust because I knew they would tattle on me and some were just plain enemies no matter what they said.

Once another woman confided in me that she also wanted to have a child. She was thinking about adopting but didn’t want to ask Sharon because she was afraid that Sharon would tell her to get a dog.

Pucky and Sophie