The phone box was at the end of the street, round the farthest corner. She had known the phone number for a long time, but she was not sure how to start. She was only prepared to say “Good morning”. Michal Hřebeček, M.D., PhD., as was proudly announced by the visiting card and by the […]
The phone box was at the end of the street, round the farthest corner. She had known the phone number for a long time, but she was not sure how to start. She was only prepared to say “Good morning”.
Michal Hřebeček, M.D., PhD., as was proudly announced by the visiting card and by the door label (rather dilapidated, like the rest of his present office, whose never ending and never cleaned mess contrasted with the latest model of laptop, his parents’ gift on the occasion of his second graduation), opened one of his endlessly repetitive routine dialogues on the help line, which he considered absolutely useless but which was there to open the doors to a real profession, preferably with a very theoretical psychological institute, where he would never again hear anything about the problems of teenage girls with their lovers, parents and sexuality. To establish contact, to get the name, to ask a few questions, to let them talk… Yes, of course. Problems with the mother. Another boring hour. He had thought many times about risking his bonus – the threat of losing his mind listening to teenage girls’ problems was very real.
Now, right from the start, to explain for a hundredth time that my parents got divorced…oh yes, that was the real start of the problem. Before that we had been a normal family. Mother always a little stricter than father, but everything working all right… Then I was alone. And did all kinds of things. I was lucky to leave with just the little scar on my shoulder. And mother’s care – morning exercise by the open window, cold showers… and mother’s inquisitive eye, and talks about what I have to do and what I must not do… of course. As if there was only the obligations and no delights… It is not about exercise or no exercise, or the temperature of the shower, it is about having no other opportunity. Mother clearly cannot see that I am not a baby any more; she would still like to feed me with milk. For example she would not let me wear make-up. My schoolmates find it normal to wear lipstick at school, even though it is not allowed, and I do not even have any nail polish at home. Once I borrowed some eye shadows and a lipstick and you would not believe what she did. I thought mother would rub my face with a piece of steel wool. Then she tried to persuade me that it was not good to draw the attention of men so much. She only stopped at midnight. I thought my knees would not bear me any more…
Dr. Hřebeček had just covered a full page with his scribbles, which was a sign for him to start showing concern for the client, although he did not feel it at all. He based his reaction on the routine repetition of the girl’s last sentence: “You mean you were shivering so much? You are not afraid of your mother, are you, Monika?”
No, I am not; I had to kneel on the floor. She loves this. Saying that it did no harm to her, nor to her mother, nor to her mother’s mother… So whenever there is something wrong, a licking and down to your knees. Really medieval, isn’t it!
Dr. Hřebeček sensed adventure. Maybe a case finally? Real child abuse? The first after two long years of picking up the phone and consoling teenagers feeling repressed by not being allowed to squander their pocket money, which invariably highly exceeded the average income in this country… The most important thing is not to scare her now…
How on earth shall I explain him now that mother is not bad, that to be perfect, faultless, the best is just part of the family tradition… Grandmother had wanted the same from mother, and probably succeeded, and mother wants the same from me now, with little success. And so I have to kneel in the corner whenever I do something wrong, or after a licking… What of that…
Dr. Hřebeček remembered old textbooks: psychological terror, physical torture. The textbook said that the victim should now defend the tyrant, to whom he or she felt an emotional bond.
But mother does not really beat me, it is just that you use the word, licking, she just slaps my ass with a wooden spoon. I am lucky that she still treats me as a baby, and so I hardly feel anything. She always says that I won’t be able to sit down for a while, but it has been some time since I stopped believing her.
OK then, psychological terror. It is said to be worse than physical torture, but here Dr. Hřebeček had his doubts. He only admitted that psychological torture was easier to apply with adults than physical violence. A complex opinion later – right now get more details. Even if this were the only case where the help line would do its job in two years, the two years would not have been wasted.
If he asks any more questions my credit will be used up and we will not even get to the point. It is nice of him to talk to me but he is asking stupid questions. I am simply an ordinary child sometimes getting some punishment and sometimes making mother crazy, which I am not surprised about after all, considering what I have been doing.
The most important thing is to keep talking. Dr. Hřebeček is making quick notes, keeping the conversation flowing: So your mother beats you out of rage? Does it happen often?
My God, why on earth is he interested in this? Anyway, it was only once and mother got angry not because of my smoking but because I tried to hide it. It is true that to be slapped with the handle of the flyswatter can be a little painful, for a week I could not button up my blouse, but this does not mean that he should explain to me that it was my mother’s way of showing concern for my health – I know that for myself – like that we have to help each other, which I sometimes do not manage, because I have no time, or sometimes I simply do not feel like it… that is true, and mother gets crazy then, probably rightly so… for example when I fail to polish the shoes, which is my job, or when the mess in my room is too much… or when I forget to rinse the bath or flush the toilet… so. Mother is strict, but just. In fact it is bad of me to behave like that, mother is always very unhappy, believing that I take after my father… father was OK, just a bit of an artist, so he did not mind having a real mess around him… well, in fact mother is a little strange in this too, for example I have to wash the floor twice, or even four times before mother is satisfied, for in our house we do not clean, we disinfect and sterilise. Everything has to be polished, nicely piled up, … you could eat from the floor…
Dr. Hřebeček suddenly realised that he had covered the last page with notes about a normal family with a problem child. The girl said she had had a problematic history, maybe drugs – she did not define it – so mother was now looking after her re-socialisation. Surveillance of correct sanitary habits was part of the therapy after all, at least that was what the textbook said. In this case mother decided to cure her child at home, even managing to keep her at an elite school.
Mother was beaming; she said her great grandmother used to attend the same school! She was delighted that the school was reopened after the Velvet Revolution… so I attend the only school in the world where you’re not allowed to wear trousers – we have to wear school uniforms like in the Middle Ages. All the same, no one is allowed to be different …three hundred stupid maids under one roof, all of them the same. There are six men altogether in the school – the German teacher is too old, the Czech teacher is ugly, the physics teacher is obscene, the chemistry teacher is mad, the gardener is perverse, and the caretaker is sadistic.
Dr. Hřebeček began to smile. He happened to know something about the institute, it was opened with glory and even though people did not believe in its future from the very beginning there were no vacancies. All small-town were mad for their daughters to be protected from the seductions of real life. By chance he had attended the opening ceremony, for his brother was one of “the only six men in the school”. Even though he did not make any comment to that effect, in this case he agreed with Monika. His brother had been a mad chemist from the fourth form when he blew up a family house with one of his experiments.
Why is he so interested in our school? It is true that this is why I have called him, but I have not told him anything yet… An ordinary grammar school, only that there are only girls in it, the school uniforms and things. They say it is a grammar school for the best students, and so they are a little crazy about the uniforms, that’s all. Girls complain that they cannot wear trousers and ordinary underwear. They check that every morning. Well, the whole uniform, but including this. I do not mind, I do not have anything else anyway, only skirts. Mother never wore jeans in her life, she is afraid of trousers and suchlike, even if there is no man in them…
Brother was the black sheep of the Hřebeček family, but guessing from what the girl says, he chose quite an attractive job after all. So long as he doesn’t blow the whole school into the air. OK, enough of brother. Complaints about parents preventing their children from wearing what they would like to are on the agenda every day, together with children simulating fatal diseases to get an excuse from school. Nothing new. Well, but to measure a teenage girl’s temperature with an anal thermometer, that only supported his view.
…that is mad, am I a small baby? But mother says, if you’re really feel sick you need to have your temperature taken, or are you just making it up to get permission to be absent from school? So sometimes I prefer to go to school, even if I really feel bad…But if I am really sick she cures me overnight and I have to go to school the very next morning anyway.
Dr. Hřebeček knew better than the complaining girl that a cured cold took a week and an uncured one took seven days, but pure curiosity made him ask about the method that worked overnight.
She simply wraps me in a piece of wet linen, with a large plastic cloth over it, plus a blanket, then puts me in bed and pours litres of hot tea with lemon into me. She used to be cured like that by her mother, and her mother used to be cured like that by her mother, and it works better than the water of life. Whenever I have a fever, I am cured in this way, whenever I have a stomachache, an enema, and when the pain does not stop, then again, and then everything in the world stops, and you are glad to be all right again.
Dr. Hřebeček, had to quickly turn away from the phone so that the girl would not to hear his gasp of astonishment. God, an enema! That mother lives in the Middle Ages! And the girl probably thinks it’s perfectly normal, so the most important thing is not to alarm her, well an enema is a standard curative method, after all, if you reconcile yourself with the application, which indeed is rather… delicate…, then it is better than all those chemicals…
Well, to hear this I did not have to call anywhere, mother says the same, but at my age, isn’t that a little embarrassing, well, to have an enema or a suppository stuck in your ass. Is it strange, if I feel ashamed in front of mother that I feel more ashamed to talk about it with a stranger on the phone? And anyway, I do not want to talk about this at all, I do not know why we are talking about this at all. This is my life and I know of a lot more lives that are much worse… but also a lot better.
Dr. Hřebeček, had a feeling that he had learned nothing at either school he had attended. Despite the fact that he had diligently attended all his lectures, no one had prepared him for a confrontation with a client who found all of this normal. Until now he believed he had a good command of the case, he had a couple of possible diagnoses of the client’s mother ready, but the client clearly did not want his help in this respect.
For example Lucina. When she was changing at our place this morning, she had a bra that mother would never buy for me. In fact mother is the one to blame for that, if I had a bra like that I would never look with such desire at Lucina and she would never find such a stupid explanation for it, and she would never start up with me in such a way.
Dr. Hřebeček, silently envied his brother his job, for he finally found firm ground under his feet. The girl needs to be reconciled with her own homosexuality.
No, why? Lucie is a smart girl after all!
Well?
Just, she was not the first woman I ended up in bed with. What is so strange about that? Aren’t we living in the 21st century?
Michal Hřebeček had to give up and take into account the fact that two universities were not enough to prepare him for real life. What on earth could have made a girl who finds her mother’s torture and her own homosexuality natural pick up the phone and call the help line? And right when he was on duty too?
The problem is that mother returned unexpectedly. Mother, that model of accuracy and reliability, had to leave her purse behind right then. Well, Lucina managed to hide in the linen closet, but I was found in bed in the middle of the day, which for my mother is akin to chopping a live baby in half in the kitchen. In addition, I had nothing on, which mother understood incorrectly, but not that much, as she thought I was masturbating, so she started shouting at me that I was like my father, who also did not know when to stop, he wanted it all the time, that I was just like him, and so everyone would just abuse me, well, that she did not have to say. In short, she was mad and shouting that she would beat that out of me, even if she was to beat me to death… in short a terrible scene… and Lucina could hear all that, hidden as she was in the closet.
Dr. Hřebeček, was silently apologising to all of his teachers. It is all right, the diagnosis was correct. A hysterical mother, frustrated, probably a latent homosexual sadist, showing pathological affective aggressiveness. He could see the scene quite clearly: mother, in a fit of hysteria, physically attacks her daughter, beating her brutally with the carpet beater, probably the first suitable object she could find, then, remorseful, she runs away, for she cannot deal with the situation emotionally, and the girl runs away from the house, then calling him.
Some people should listen more and talk less. My problem is not the beaten ass, it is neither the first nor the last occasion. If it were not for Lucina in the linen closet, everything would be all right. When she crawled out of the closet, she was real mad, saying it was like the Middle Ages, that I was completely stupid to let her act like that, that if anybody touched her, she would kill them, and would boast of it, that something must be done about it immediately, that she would go to the headmistress; in short she was crazy. But the worst part is that she will now go and tell everybody!
Enough! The girl simply is not normal. Living in an absurd relationship with a hysterical mother, she maintains that her only problem is shame among her schoolmates! Dr. Hřebeček decided to take the situation into his own hands. This cannot be solved on the phone. The girl is ready for long-term therapy. Her hierarchy of values will need to be completely rebuilt, together with her perception of human relationships, broken by her life in a dysfunctional family. Then her relationship with her mother will have to be solved.
I do not need anything like that. My relationship with mother is quite in order. Mother is crazy, but I am with her because I want to be. What I do not want to is to go to that school, where the stupid people there will now only laugh at me. That is why I am calling. How should one go about changing schools?
Typical, thought Dr. Hřebeček to himself. The patient first rejects cooperation, conjuring up other problems. For successful therapy her separation from her mother will probably be necessary. The essential thing is to make the client come to tomorrow’s consultation. The rest he can manage and if the authorities are quick enough, then he will soon get their legal permission for hospitalisation.
OK, if he believes that my coming tomorrow would help somehow then why not? There must be a way of getting to another school and never returning to this one. If the worst comes to the worst then at least I have an excuse for this afternoon and tomorrow. At least he has promised that.
Even though Dr. Hřebeček’s ear was aching from the pressure of the receiver he had to make one more telephone call. He could not complain about cooperation with the authorities, on the contrary, the officer in charge of his clinic was a very understanding and reasonable lady who had always helped him. Today he would need her understanding more than ever, for, in fact, the girl was grown up and the intervention would be just about legal. But on the other hand, if he tells her everything the girl has suffered from her mentally ill mother, she will certainly understand and help him. He dialled the number.
A nasty day. The sun tries to shine, but the cold is horrible. Mother is most likely to come in the evening and I hope to survive with her until tomorrow. The main thing is not to make her angry. Tidy up the shoes, put the coat in the closet, check if everything is all right… DAMN! The door is not locked! WHAT IS MOTHER DOING AT home?
Shut up! I know everything. The doctor called me, luckily. So this is what I get from you for all my care? This for my sacrifice for you? Shut up! So from now on I will be much stricter with you, to give you a reason to complain, when you like it so much. And now where is the wooden spoon?
File Name : LP-001.mp4
File Size : 114.99 MB
Resolution : 352×288
Duration : 00:28:30
Video : MPEG-4 Visual (MPEG-4 Visual), 429 Kbps, 25.000 fps
Audio : AAC (AAC LC), 129 Kbps (CBR), 44.1 KHz, 2 channels, 1 stream
https://way4share.com/c6843f92d16467c7/LP-001.mp4
