Actually, it’s about time I gave Hannah a call. She doesn’t know about my pregnancy. She doesn’t know about my panic attacks, either. After four years with her, I still find it difficult to ask for help. I come from a family that believes depression is a weakness, not an illness. I didn’t see a therapist as a child, when one might have done me some real good. My grandfather, a surgeon, believes psychiatrists are sicker than their patients. My father, a Vietnam vet, saw several VA therapists before he died, but none was able to alleviate the symptoms of his post-traumatic stress disorder. My mother also discouraged therapy, saying shrinks had never done her older sister any good, and that one had even seduced her. When suicidal impulses finally convinced me to seek treatment-at the age of twenty-four-neither the MDs nor the psychologists were able to control my mood swings, ease my nightmares, or slow my drinking and occasional reckless sexual behavior. For me-until Hannah Goldman and her laissez-faire style-therapy was pretty much a washout. And yetthough my present situation would qualify as a crisis in Hannah’s book, I can’t quite bring myself to call her.
As the night landscape changes from wet bottomland to hilly forests of oak and pine, I sense the great river out to my left, rolling southward as it has for millennia, oblivious to human travail. The Mississippi River links the town of my birth to the city of my adulthood, a great winding artery connecting the two spiritual poles of my existence, infancy and independence. Yet how independent am I? Natchez, the upstream city-older than New Orleans by two years, 1716 versus 1718-is the source of all that I am, whether I like it or not. And tonight, the prodigal daughter is returning home at eighty-five miles an hour.