A teddy bear changed my life one Christmas long ago. In his absence I turned to God, and then psychotherapy and the rest is history.
This is how it happened. I loved a little fluffy one-eyed teddy bear for most of my childhood. He appeared under the Christmas tree when I was still in the pram. My mother said he came with Santa and stayed, because he liked me. And certainly, he was an intimate companion for many years.
He knew everything about me and was attuned to my various moods and emotions. If I was in good humour because the teacher praised my handwriting, then teddy too was delighted when I got home. But if I had been slapped for spelling Cat with a K, my sorrow was matched exactly by teddy’s empathy.
One winter he disappeared. I searched under the stairs, and in the coal shed, but he was not to be found. I was almost 13 and too embarrassed to ask any adult in the household where he might be. I faced Christmas in stoic silence, knowing loss for the first time, and certain that teddy was gone for good. And I was right; my companion was never found.
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Although the truth did come out sometime later. In October my mother had seen a notice in the church porch; the St Vincent de Paul society were appealing for toys. The plan was to distribute them among the poorer families of the parish and since I had begun secondary school that September my mother chose to discreetly whip the teddy from between my sheets where he usually slept all day while I was at school.
I know this because the Anglo-Celt did a lovely report in the Christmas issue that year, recording the enormous number of toys that were donated and how the generosity of the public would bring such joy to so many children at Christmas.
Splashed across the front page was a photograph of all the toys collected – and by chance, my teddy sat on top of all the other dolls and fire engines and Lego sets that were piled high before a Christmas tree.
I was devastated. Already a broken man with an entire lifetime of unresolved grief before me, now compounded by the fact that my mother denied everything. Under my interrogation she remained as blank as a brick wall. And she even observed that many teddies look the same and it might be hard to distinguish one from another.
It was in that moment that I stopped trusting her forever. It was betrayal. I faced the grim reality of adolescence with no intimate companion. Is it any wonder I turned to Jesus, God, and TS Eliot in my later years of solitude?
Every week on the Dublin train I would rehearse what I might tell the therapist
Of course, by the time I reached middle age I had long forgotten this tiny calamity at Christmas, and if it ever surfaced in my memory I would have considered it a trivial event.
But years later I found myself on the Carrick-on-Shannon to Dublin train for a meeting a therapist. I had been through the trauma of ill-health and depression and was coming out the other end. So I reached out to a therapist whom I began to meet once a week in Dublin. A person who listened with care and empathy as I trawled through the detritus of my unconscious youth trying to find some clues for what had caused my depression, if not my physical illness.
The therapist was a still presence in her chair as she gazed at me. I invariably squirmed in a chair opposite hers for an hour each week. And there was always a box of tissues beside my chair which was useful when I stumbled on to some upsetting memory from long ago and burst into tears.
Such moments of emotional breakdown in the therapist’s chair will be familiar to many people as beneficial;a kind of rinsing of the soul that happens suddenly and unexpectedly and leaves one relieved and serene in the aftermath. Tissues in a therapist’s room are a symbol of tenderness; an assurance that you have permission to pat your eyeballs when the tears are over, because you are loved.
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I cried so much in therapy that the retina in my left eye detached. Or at least that was my theory when I reported it to the ophthalmologist in an emergency room, after my vision suddenly went to black one morning in the bed.
The ophthalmologist, it goes without saying, took a dim view of my theory regarding the excess of tears as a cause of the detached retina.
But one thing is certain; the tissues in the therapist’s room were a trigger even when tears were not the inevitable outcome of the session. “If the tissues were there then someone ought to cry,” I reasoned. “And it ought to be me.” And being from Cavan I knew the value of €60 per session.
The tissues were there to provide a balm for emotional collapse, but if I left the room without having dropped a single tear I sometimes felt that I wasn’t getting value for money.
All those days of cruelty are held tightly in the heart for years
So every week on the Dublin train I would rehearse what I might tell the therapist. I would trawl in the dark waters of unconscious memory in the hope of turning up some gem that I could share. The weekly appointment was a ritual that obliged me to find an appropriate narrative.
I’d scratch my head and pick out some jewel from my collection box of wounds, some blood-red emotional ruby that would provide immense satisfaction when I presented it to the listener.
And so life went on. On Tuesdays I was a Buddhist and on Sundays I was a Christian, but on Wednesdays I believed in therapy. To paraphrase the song, “Mine eyes had seen the glories of the theories of Freud.”
It doesn’t surprise me that I always went for my annual sessions in the run up to Christmas. Because it’s at Christmas that therapists are most needed and are most useful. Even in January they remain extremely busy, dealing with the fallout from various disasters.
Christmas can be such an emotional nightmare, yet we tend to repeat the same crash one year after the next.
The dinner is the most glaring precipice that we fall over, yet we march towards it relentlessly. We face the table, salute the turkey, and try to deny that we’re utterly bored. We endure the twinkling lights and card games and empty whiskey bottles cluttering the mantelpiece.
We endure the loneliness of supermarket aisles filled with unbearably jolly carols and other people buying things we can’t afford. We stress about wasting so much money on disposable paper napkins that nobody uses, and on presents for particular people we resent.
And we regurgitate the same old arguments with family members, endure the same ritual of merrymaking like actors in a bad play. The gift-wrapped socks, the cheap sherry and Prosecco. We accept it all perhaps to inoculate ourselves from the impending melt down. The argument about paper hats or which Christmas game we should play or the emptiness of life without AA batteries.
And it’s not just family feuds that make Christmas a living nightmare. Sometimes it is just that people are sad and starved of Vitamin D and don’t know it.
One way or another the casualty wards and emergency rooms get busy and the phones buzz in the call centres as the cries for help rise from people worried about suicide, or domestic violence or just loneliness.
Anything can trigger a row, even paper hats.
“Why won’t you wear it?”
“Because I don’t want to wear it.”
“After your mother made such an effort cooking the dinner and I paid good money for that f**king bike. By God you’ll wear it and you’ll enjoy it.”
All those days of cruelty are held tightly in the heart for years.
Happily, I recovered from depression, and the only advice I have on the matter is this; if you don’t enjoy Christmas, at least enjoy the therapy. It can be enlightening, and liberating, and sometimes even funny.
Therapy is nothing to be afraid of. You can release the tears and acknowledge the abiding love of teddy bears and grieve over those long-forgotten wounds.
