Give It a Stupid Name

What a fourteen-year-old worked out about a body that is being discussed by other people.

I sat in a surgical waiting room for two hours and forty minutes and read the same page of a magazine eleven or twelve times.

My daughter was fourteen. Somewhere on the other side of a door I was not allowed through, a surgeon was removing a thing from inside her body that a year's worth of doctors had told us was not there.

She had given it a name three weeks earlier.

Gerald. She named it Gerald, because you cannot be frightened of a Gerald. A Gerald is not a diagnosis. A Gerald is a man who parks badly. A Gerald is a roommate who has stopped paying his share and is going to be asked to leave.

I want to tell you what that year had been, because the name does not make sense without it.

First it was imaginary. Then, when she kept insisting, it was dramatic. Then it was probably just her period. Then it was probably just her anxiety, which is the one they save for girls, and which arrives with a particular tone of voice that I could pick out of a lineup today.

She could put her finger on the spot. That is the detail I keep coming back to. Not a vague ache, not somewhere in there. A spot, the size of a coin, in the same place every time, for a year, while adults with framed certificates explained to her what she was actually feeling.

So she named it, and the naming changed the house.

I did not understand that at the time. I thought it was a coping mechanism, which is a phrase I now dislike, because it suggests something small and slightly beneath us. It was not small. It was a change of grammar.

Before the name, the sentence in our kitchen was: they think it might be nothing.

After the name, the sentence was: Gerald has to go.

Hear the difference. The first one is a thing happening to a fourteen-year-old girl, and it is being decided by other people, in rooms she has to be driven to. The second one is an eviction. It has a date. It has somebody in charge, and the somebody in charge is her.

Not everybody appreciated it.

Somebody in the extended family heard her use the name and said, gently, that it was not funny. She was right that it was not funny. She had misunderstood the assignment. Funny was never the point. Ownership was.

That is the whole thing, and it took me years and a waiting room to catch up to a teenager on it.

Here is what I think now.

A body that is being discussed by other people stops belonging to you. That is not a feeling, it is closer to a procedure. Your symptoms become items, your account becomes a claim, and after enough appointments you begin to describe your own body in the third person, carefully, in the register of a woman trying not to be dismissed.

I have watched my daughter do it since she was thirteen. I have also, more recently, caught myself doing it.

Because this is the part of it I did not expect, and it is the reason I am writing this down rather than keeping it as a family story.

The second half of a woman's life comes with its own version of that room, and nobody is sitting in the chair advocating for you.

Everything is now probably hormones. Everything is now probably stress. Everything is probably just where you are in life, said kindly, with a hand already reaching for the door. You get older and the same tone of voice that was used on my fourteen-year-old is used on you, and this time there is no mother in the waiting room memorizing the exact wording so it can be quoted back later.

The instinct in that room is to become more serious. More precise. More medical. I have done it. You arrive with dates and a printed list and a folder, and you speak in an even voice, and you are careful not to cry, because crying gets you the anxiety sentence.

And it does help, some. It is also exhausting, and it hands the whole thing over to their language.

What my daughter did was refuse the language entirely.

She kept the medical terms for the medical people, and inside her own house she called it Gerald, and by doing that she moved the thing out of the category of what is happening to me and into the category of what I am dealing with. Those are two different rooms. You can act in the second one.

I am not going to tell you that naming a thing shrinks it. It does not. Gerald was exactly the size he was, and he came out in a surgery that took two hours and forty minutes, and the pictures afterward showed him precisely where she had been pointing for a year.

What it changes is where you are standing in relation to it.

FOR YOU

There is a well-established idea underneath this. Putting an experience into words is associated with a shift in how it is processed, and psychologists sometimes describe the related move of stepping back from an experience and referring to it from a small distance rather than from inside it. Naming something, giving it a label that is yours rather than theirs, is a homemade version of the same move.

Worth being careful about two things. This is about your relationship to the thing, not about the thing itself, and no amount of naming replaces care from somebody who actually looks at you. And the research on how women's symptom reports are received in clinical settings is genuinely mixed and still developing, so treat any confident summary of it, including mine, with some suspicion.

So if you are in that part of it now, with a body doing something on a schedule nobody consulted you about, and a folder, and an appointment in March.

Give it a stupid name.

Not to be brave, and not to make light of it, and certainly not for anybody else's benefit. Do it because the clinical name belongs to them and this one will belong to you, and because a woman who has been handing over her own body in installments since she was thirteen is entitled to keep one thing.

It will not be funny. It was never meant to be.

The surgeon came out at eleven minutes past ten and used the correct term for what he had removed.

I nodded and thanked him and asked all the right questions, and the entire time, somewhere behind my face, I was thinking: that is not his name.

We still mark the anniversary. Not the surgery. The eviction.