What does Freud know of a mother's heart?

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I called my GP because I was anxious like never before and because I couldn’t focus on anything I was doing.

“Which one is more important?”

“Anxiety?”

“Okay let’s sort that out first and then we’ll deal with your lack of attention. Step by step”.

Step 2 didn’t show up, unfortunately. Step 1 was a little confusing. After a week on antidepressants, my anxiety came back.

I mapped what constituted anxious moments based on shared characteristics: a) fear of forgetting something important—places, items, tasks b) fear of being fired c) fear of lying (but not, very interestingly, of being found lying) d) fear of being rejected.

A therapist was arranged—a genuinely kind person.

Mr I-am-not-Freudian-but and I spent time staring at the dazzling array of my memories of childhood events. In that mix, as it always does, severe haemophilia stood out.

Google-scholar searches on haemophilia and anxiety throw up papers with the word “pre-prophylactic” in them. It refers to the dark ages when people did not inject themselves with clotting injections every other day to live normal-ishly.

The word, “pre-prophylactic”, kicks me in my belly.

It wasn’t until I moved to the UK (thank you NHS), that I entered the golden age of post-prophylactic. In India, clotting injections, when in stock, are unaffordable. My family could buy them only when any more bleeding would be fatal or when the pain was absolutely unbearable. Our threshold for ‘absolutely unbearable’ was measured in the number of nights I spent completely awake.

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That much disease must have done something lasting in my emotional universe. Until 26-ish, I hadn’t seen a single week when I wasn’t bleeding—inside or outside.

Outside bleeds are gory but easy to deal with. Gum bleeds, for instance, saw me wake up to a mouthful of a red-black-fibrous-liquidy clot. It was yuck, but all I had to do was clean my mouth like you’d wash a menstrual cup, or show it to someone so there is a visible emergency to respond to.

Inside ones are enigmatic, and hence agonising. My ankle bleeds were cute tiny bumps. Within them, it felt like fuming acid burning everything in the neighbourhood (my ankle joint bone remains corroded from those episodes).

So, understandably, here was a neat theory of anxiety that reliably explained the purpose of forgetting and of wanting attention.

“Were you scared, Tarun, that maybe if your mom wasn’t around no one would take care of you?”

“Yeah, it was very scary when she wasn’t around”.

There it was; the coveted revelations that therapists and therapy patients yearn for. And, of course, the larger moral was that mothers of children in pain adopt less overprotective strategies to allow healthy attachment.

But what does Freud know of a mother’s heart?

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Now and then, assigning moral blame soothes because it is one way to reclaim agency.

The base ingredient, however, is “moral”. Moral judgements require great care—especially when made towards someone patriarchally assigned with the impossible responsibility of primary caregiving. Inside the very rigidity of that assignment is the potential for consequences that experts then sit back and pontificate upon.

Overprotection is rational when it is empirically hazardous to not over-protect. (A friend once gave me a proper pat on the back and I was sent to the hospital for my first spinal bleed).

Overprotection is rational even more when you’d have to do the work that follows. When governments don’t love you enough (or hate you), we know who takes up the missing care work. When I was wriggling in pain, it was always the mother who stayed up all night holding ice around the swelling—even as she was blamed, by herself and others, for “giving” me the disease.

Overprotection is rational also when the AIDS virus entered and killed your brother after they injected him with fresh blood to stop the bleeding.

Meanwhile, it turned out that my anxiety and lack of focus came from ADHD—undiagnosed and untreated until very recently.

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The ADHD theory gets more consensus in my heart. For the same price, it explains all those anxieties and more.

It often happens that people with untreated haemophilia are traumatized into rest. It becomes natural for them to always choose the safer route. For me, it was the absolute opposite. Despite a fear of movement, I left home, and then the country, to do all sorts of things. It always puzzled me why I didn’t cosy in. In indulgent moments, it was also a source of pride. Now it makes sense why a dopamine-hungry brain wouldn’t mind taking this body along.

The co-occurrence of ADHD and haemophilia was a gorgeous system of binary stars that kept each other from colliding.

The H in my ADHD lived itself out. Like an over-fed river, the H in ADHD found all sorts of beautiful adventures. However, when dams burst, they don’t merely scatter water all over. A lot of it floods existing faultlines—old streams and riverways. The H often lived itself out through, and depended upon, very gendered pathways. The gender that was assigned to my mom constrained her to care work, but the gender assigned to me mandated endless amounts of care work from people around. Without that, the H would have imploded; as it does for millions of undiagnosed ADHD women.

Now I get treatment for both ADHD and haemophilia and it’s been mostly calming. Sometimes, when I imagine going back in time and taking an ADHD pill in the middle of a bleeding episode, it is horror. The last thing I would have wanted when the pain was throbbing and demanding my attention, is to give it attention. Instead, I went on long walks in the buzzing streets of my stimulation-hungry brain.

I bought myself a book or two on ADHD. It’s amazing how experts don’t realize they’re wearing gender-coloured glasses. If the pendulum isn’t on the side of it-is-just-chemicals-in-the-brain, it is on the side of mothers-not-giving-enough-care. Thankfully, again, that doesn’t apply. If anything she overcared.

And even amidst the tsunami of care and protection she expressed and felt, she left so much space for me to leave and figure out the world.

As part of my ADHD assessment, I had to ask my mom to fill out a questionnaire. I told her that the GP suspects I might have a learning disability and that it begins very early in age. She obliged and answered my questions. But, in a very sad tone, she also said:

“Another disorder? This also I gave to you?”