Issue 4, October 2009
+Editor's Note {
} next story+ Suck and Rub
Julie Christman
When I was 12, my mother called me to her side: “Julie, come here, I want to show you something.” She held out the Philadelphia Inquirer, open to the editorial section. I glanced at a black and white portrait of a doughy, thick, pasty-faced woman with short, cropped hair and large glasses. The headline read, 40-year-old Thumb Sucker. “You don’t want to end up like her, do you?”
My mother claims I sucked my thumb in utero. As a toddler, I was Linus, sky-blue fitted sheet always in tow. Thumb-in-mouth was my predominant position for the first ten years of my life – most of my time was spent grinding fabric below my nostrils and above my lip, up and down the bridge of my nose, lips smacking softly against the shriveled wet thumb planted against the roof of my mouth. In department stores, my mother would find me inside clothing racks and behind curtain displays sucking my thumb and rubbing the various fabrics between my fingers. Strangers would ask me, “What flavor is it?” when they caught me. My stock answer, from age 4 to age 10, was, “Vanilla.”
Somehow my parents convinced me to give my Linus blankie to Santa when I was 5. I found substitutes for the blankie: my cotton underwear printed with pink poodles and blue kittens (clean or dirty, I didn’t discriminate) and eventually, my sister’s gray-blue ringer t-shirt with navy cuffs and collar, named the “kitty shirt” for the decal of a fuzzy gray tabby kitten sitting among daisies that faded slowly over many years of misuse. When I reminded my sister two years ago of the shirt’s role in my habit, she demanded I return the kitty shirt. “It’s mine. I want it back,” she insisted, teasing. It would take 25 years and three dogs before that t-shirt was no longer at the top of my “List of Possessions I Would Rescue From a Burning Building.” It was gray-blue, which allowed me to get away with infrequent washings. I draped the kitty shirt over my shoulder like a dishtowel, or wound it around my neck like a silk scarf. Sometimes I pulled it over my head and slithered my arms through the sleeves even after it lost its cuffs and collar. Not able to part with it for even a minute, it grew humid, dark with grime and the smells of daily life. I loved it more than anything else in the world.
Shortly after she showed me the article about the 40-year-old thumb sucker, my mother and I agreed on a date for me to hand over the kitty shirt and be done with my habit. We counted the remaining weeks together.
On the big day she called to me from downstairs to hand it over.
“Now, Julie.”
“Coming.” I pressed it against my face one last time. The kitty shirt deserved a hearty goodbye, a true thumb-sucking send off. I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply. The pungent scent of my world washed over and through me. My head floated upwards, my body slid into silky warmth.
“Julie Lynne, don’t make me come up there.”
“Alright, Ma.” I had to have another go. After pushing all the air out of my gut, I braced myself for another hit. As I inhaled the second time, I felt something catch in my head. A glitch. My will shattered. My need for this shirt—for this habit—reeled me back. I wasn’t done; I would never be done. This was my cross to bear for eternity. I would, I knew, be 40, 50, 60, gleefully sucking and rubbing away.
I gave the shirt up, as agreed, but wasted no time finding a substitute. After searching through my drawers, testing each t-shirt between my thumb and forefinger, I settled on a mint green one that said “Let’s Go Jamaica” across the front in black letters. Its swish between my fingers felt synthetic, the shirt obviously a polyester cotton blend, but it would do. It smelled stale, like the drawer.
My mother, convinced she had helped to break my 12-year habit, paid less attention to the whereabouts of my thumb. Our pact forced me to become more discrete. I honed my reflexes. The instant I heard any noise—a rustle, the creek of the floorboard, a hand on the doorknob, a whisper—my hand dropped into my lap and I assumed my poker face. Neither three years of braces nor three broken arms curbed my habit. When the orthopedist recast my right arm after four weeks at a 90-degree angle in a 96-degree angle “because it wasn’t quite healed,” my left thumb acted as a pinch hitter for the remaining four weeks.
Four years later while snooping in my mother’s room, I found it—I found the kitty shirt. She had neatly folded it and stashed it beneath an old comforter stuffed between her bureau and the wall. Despite the gray dust that had accumulated over its four years in exile, I buried my face in the kitty shirt’s folds, my fingers rubbing greedily. The birds sang in the sunlight, celebrating our grand reunion. I was dumbfounded that she never threw it out. A decade later, helping her prepare for a cross-country move, I would come to understand that my mother never threw anything out. We both have attachment issues.
The Jamaica shirt was immediately dethroned. How had I ever settled for less than the superior rub of the paper-thin kitty shirt? I flaunted its re-emergence, pursued my habit with renewed vigor. I even began telling my friends my deepest secret to justify the presence of the kitty shirt in my lap or over my shoulder during sleepovers and while watching movies in the den. In the shadows, I slipped my thumb to the roof of my mouth, rubbed the shirt, sneaking it to my face for a quick hit. I was a 16-year-old thumb sucker and it was marvelous.
When my high school boyfriend went away to college later that summer, I committed the ultimate act of self-sacrifice in the name of teenage love: I gave him the kitty shirt as a going-away present. For a year I lived on scraps, strands of knotted fabric a half-inch wide. While cleaning through his freshman accumulations, he came across my selfless gift, and with a shrug handed it back to me. He told me it smelled like rotten cheese. With the kitty shirt balled in my fist, I released a deep and painful sigh. “‘Til death do us part,” I vowed. “Amen.”
Two years later, at 18, I worried about what my college roommate would think! How was I going to hide my habit and make it to class? My first roommate had secrets of her own, including a two-hour make-up regime causing her to wake up at mind-numbing hours. My second roommate had a “bankie,” a yellow baby blanket with a triangular tear. She couldn’t fall asleep without it. Our living arrangement seemed fixed by fate.
My habit made me a bit more antisocial than the average college student. I learned to sneak the kitty shirt into the bathroom for a fix, eyes closed, quick and silent. A piece of the kitty shirt, a sleeve, became a regular accessory until my roommate, the one with the “bankie,” threw the piece out thinking it was trash when she borrowed my Levis and found the scrap of kitty shirt in the pocket intertwined with a used tissue. She, of all people, knew the significance of the kitty shirt. It was the lowest point of our relationship. We did move past it, eventually.
***
The demise of the kitty shirt was a slow, drawn-out disintegration. At 21, when I moved into my first apartment, I adopted a 10-month-old black Labrador Retriever. We shared a studio and some days I came home to a torn shoe, shredded carpet, or ripped sheets. For months, before leaving everyday, I stuffed the kitty shirt under my pillow to protect it. Then one day I opened the door and saw it strewn across the floor in small, wet pieces. My voice quivered as I turned to my dog and asked: “What. Did. You. Do?” Her ears dropped back and she slowly rolled onto her back, raising the white flag of her exposed belly. Wiping the tears off my face, I did the only thing I could do—I tied it back together. I started carrying it with me everywhere in a little Paul Frank pouch decorated with the grinning head of Julius the Monkey.
That is, until a clever Washington DC thief stole my purse, my backpack, and my friend’s jacket out of the trunk of my car. He stole everything I had in the car except half of a roast beef sandwich in a blue plastic bag. Earlier in the evening I had debated slipping the kitty shirt pouch in my pocket but decided I didn’t want to risk losing it. I often wonder what the thief thought when he unzipped that monkey pouch only to find a moist, smelly mess of gray-blue fabric instead of credit cards, cash, and change. I wonder if he rubbed it?
After that, again, I was back to scraps. I had two pocket pieces of the kitty shirt that traveled with me daily, becoming my ticket to instant escape. At 26, I lost all thumb-sucking discipline. I started sucking my thumb everywhere: in bathrooms, in my office when I was alone, in the library, in my car. I stopped going out in lieu of spending quality time with my thumb. I became an avid hand washer, never knowing when the uncontrollable urge to suck and rub would strike. One afternoon, while reading the spines of abnormal psychology journals at University of Baltimore, I realized that my thumb was in my mouth. I had no idea how it had gotten there.
My first therapist, Dorothy, asked me repeatedly if my thumb got all wrinkly when I sucked it. She would hold her thumb up to her lips and make little nibbling noises. My insurance changed before we could make any real progress.
My second therapist, Sam—a short, loud man who cursed a lot and whined about wanting to be tall and sexy—asked me to suck my thumb in front of him. I obliged only once, and quickly. He suggested I make jewelry out of my pocket pieces by having them set in amber. A novel idea, but didn’t he understand it was about touching the fabric, not looking at it?
A short time later, while dog sitting, my friend’s dogs ate those last two pieces of the kitty shirt (they waited until I was in the shower and my dog turned a blind eye). I dropped to my hands and knees, wrapped in a bath towel, and groped the carpet around the table where I left the pocket pieces before my shower. I checked and checked again. The dogs stared at me with cocked heads. I felt hopeless and ridiculous.
While mourning the pocket pieces’ passing, I confessed to my therapist that the thumb alone did not interest me. The rubbing was the glue that held the habit together so to speak. On an off-week, I found a new shirt with potential—my father’s charcoal-gray t-shirt—in the same box as my Cabbage Patch Kids, charm necklace, and love letters from elementary school. My therapist suggested I wear my new “woobie” (as we called it out of respect for the kitty shirt) to bed instead of carrying it around my apartment. He wanted me to realize I could sleep nights without it clutched in my fist, I could relax without it, and I could control it. He suggested I devote time in my day just for thumb sucking. Finally, after he ran out of cognitive behavioral tricks, he told me to get a stopwatch and graph paper and time how long I suck my thumb every day.
I tracked the number of episodes and the cumulative minutes for three months. I made beautiful line graphs with sharp peaks and low valleys. Each time I put my thumb in my mouth I clicked the yellow plastic stopwatch hanging around my neck. It amazed me to see that I sucked my thumb for a total of 240 minutes per day; one single episode was 150 minutes long. Sundays were marathons. The frequency fluctuated with my activity level. TV and a good book meant more thumb sucking. I discovered that my thumb automatically found its way to my mouth when I was trying on new outfits, in front of my closet and in dressing rooms, or when I felt a moment of panic or fear. I noticed I could not fall asleep with my thumb in my mouth. When I craved my thumb, my front teeth throbbed and I clenched my jaws in my thumb’s absence. I understood that my habit was a facet of me, a facet I happened to like, and that there were bigger issues for me to discuss with my therapist like seasonal depression and chronic self-deprecation.
After the third month of charting my habit, I decided I didn’t care to break it. It didn’t make me “a danger to myself or others,” plus it was cheaper and healthier than smoking. I asked my therapist what was so wrong about a ticket to instant relaxation that was accessible, affordable and legal? He couldn’t come up with an answer. With a shrug, a smile, and a “what the hell,” we both let it go, happily ever after.
* * *
I did try to stop sucking my thumb. Deep down, I harbored the romantic notion that explaining my habit to the world would rob me of it, exploiting it to the point that all comfort and appeal would be bastardized and therefore lost to me.
That didn’t happen.
Instead, after a particularly intense day with my favorite appendage—hours in front of the computer, on the couch, in the bathroom—the back of my front teeth throbbed from the pressure of my thumb. I pushed against them with my free hand, testing for looseness. I clenched my jaw and pushed my tongue through the gap between my top and bottom teeth. When I heard a distinct and prominent lisp in my voice during a telephone conversation, it became clear to me that the time had come.
It was a Saturday afternoon when I put the woobie down in my closet. Later, I returned for a visit, but refused to touch it. My teeth, my overbite, my inability to pronounce sibilant sounds required me to stop. This time I would do it; I was 29, the age of transition. So determined, I drove to Pier 1 Imports on Sunday to procure a new resting place for my woobie: a wooden box, with inlaid cut glass. I brought it home and carefully folded my old friend—refraining from one last rub or deep inhalation—and placed it inside. I laid the pocket piece on top, closed the lid. After a click of the padlock and toss of the key, I started crocheting.
It was like detox. I went through physical withdrawal symptoms for an entire week. My teeth continued to throb. My skin crawled. My chest gasped in shallow, panicked breaths. My shoulders pinned to my ears, I walked around feeling ready to scream. I cried on my stationary bike as I peddled through my grief. I didn’t recognize myself without this habit. At work they told me I looked pale. I told them I was having trouble breathing, I felt nauseous. I rocked on my couch at night looking at the box, trying to figure out how to break the lock. I needed the thumb with the woobie; I needed the rub. I begged my dentist for a night guard to ease the clenching.
Anhedonia swept over me. Part of me was truly dead. How could I explain to anyone that an enormous part of me was missing, gone? I had killed it. My boyfriend asked me why I kept the box. I explained that knowing the real thing was a padlock away kept me from settling for substitutes.
That is, until recently, when he made the mistake of leaving one of the substitute woobies in my laundry hamper: a navy blue t-shirt with Adam Clayton Powell No. 43 on the front in faded, white letters. It smelled like him. I tried to stay away. I even placed it in a manila envelope to try and save myself, but after six months of struggle, I caved.
* * *
For my thirtieth birthday, my friend asked me for all of my old t-shirts, so she could make me something—she wasn’t giving away what. She wanted my t-shirts because they were soft; she knew how my shirts had a tendency to become threadbare. I gladly gathered all of my potential woobies, except the Adam Clayton Powell shirt—I was being smart this time, I didn’t want to have another meltdown. I even gave her the box, told her to do with it whatever she wanted.
Months later she gave me back a t-shirt quilt, with the pocket of my old, boxed woobie sewn on the square that fell under my hand if the quilt were tucked under my armpit. I remember her asking, when I told her my boyfriend and I rearranged our bedroom, if I still slept on the same side of the bed. At the time I thought it was such a thoughtful question, an indication of just how well she knew me, and a bit psychic of her as it had been up for debate.
The mere idea of an entire queen-sized quilt of potential woobies made me swoon. And now I had one to lounge on and rub all over. The pocket made me weepy; joyous pocket, I was afraid I would rub it right off the quilt. My friend said when she opened the box she could not believe how worn the shirt had become—it was see-through. It was too thin to use the whole thing. She salvaged what she could.
I continue to have faith that at some point in my life I will be able to stop sucking my thumb.
Maybe when I’m 40.
Julie Christman
When I was 12, my mother called me to her side: “Julie, come here, I want to show you something.” She held out the Philadelphia Inquirer, open to the editorial section. I glanced at a black and white portrait of a doughy, thick, pasty-faced woman with short, cropped hair and large glasses. The headline read, 40-year-old Thumb Sucker. “You don’t want to end up like her, do you?”
My mother claims I sucked my thumb in utero. As a toddler, I was Linus, sky-blue fitted sheet always in tow. Thumb-in-mouth was my predominant position for the first ten years of my life – most of my time was spent grinding fabric below my nostrils and above my lip, up and down the bridge of my nose, lips smacking softly against the shriveled wet thumb planted against the roof of my mouth. In department stores, my mother would find me inside clothing racks and behind curtain displays sucking my thumb and rubbing the various fabrics between my fingers. Strangers would ask me, “What flavor is it?” when they caught me. My stock answer, from age 4 to age 10, was, “Vanilla.”
Somehow my parents convinced me to give my Linus blankie to Santa when I was 5. I found substitutes for the blankie: my cotton underwear printed with pink poodles and blue kittens (clean or dirty, I didn’t discriminate) and eventually, my sister’s gray-blue ringer t-shirt with navy cuffs and collar, named the “kitty shirt” for the decal of a fuzzy gray tabby kitten sitting among daisies that faded slowly over many years of misuse. When I reminded my sister two years ago of the shirt’s role in my habit, she demanded I return the kitty shirt. “It’s mine. I want it back,” she insisted, teasing. It would take 25 years and three dogs before that t-shirt was no longer at the top of my “List of Possessions I Would Rescue From a Burning Building.” It was gray-blue, which allowed me to get away with infrequent washings. I draped the kitty shirt over my shoulder like a dishtowel, or wound it around my neck like a silk scarf. Sometimes I pulled it over my head and slithered my arms through the sleeves even after it lost its cuffs and collar. Not able to part with it for even a minute, it grew humid, dark with grime and the smells of daily life. I loved it more than anything else in the world.
Shortly after she showed me the article about the 40-year-old thumb sucker, my mother and I agreed on a date for me to hand over the kitty shirt and be done with my habit. We counted the remaining weeks together.
On the big day she called to me from downstairs to hand it over.
“Now, Julie.”
“Coming.” I pressed it against my face one last time. The kitty shirt deserved a hearty goodbye, a true thumb-sucking send off. I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply. The pungent scent of my world washed over and through me. My head floated upwards, my body slid into silky warmth.
“Julie Lynne, don’t make me come up there.”
“Alright, Ma.” I had to have another go. After pushing all the air out of my gut, I braced myself for another hit. As I inhaled the second time, I felt something catch in my head. A glitch. My will shattered. My need for this shirt—for this habit—reeled me back. I wasn’t done; I would never be done. This was my cross to bear for eternity. I would, I knew, be 40, 50, 60, gleefully sucking and rubbing away.
I gave the shirt up, as agreed, but wasted no time finding a substitute. After searching through my drawers, testing each t-shirt between my thumb and forefinger, I settled on a mint green one that said “Let’s Go Jamaica” across the front in black letters. Its swish between my fingers felt synthetic, the shirt obviously a polyester cotton blend, but it would do. It smelled stale, like the drawer.
My mother, convinced she had helped to break my 12-year habit, paid less attention to the whereabouts of my thumb. Our pact forced me to become more discrete. I honed my reflexes. The instant I heard any noise—a rustle, the creek of the floorboard, a hand on the doorknob, a whisper—my hand dropped into my lap and I assumed my poker face. Neither three years of braces nor three broken arms curbed my habit. When the orthopedist recast my right arm after four weeks at a 90-degree angle in a 96-degree angle “because it wasn’t quite healed,” my left thumb acted as a pinch hitter for the remaining four weeks.
Four years later while snooping in my mother’s room, I found it—I found the kitty shirt. She had neatly folded it and stashed it beneath an old comforter stuffed between her bureau and the wall. Despite the gray dust that had accumulated over its four years in exile, I buried my face in the kitty shirt’s folds, my fingers rubbing greedily. The birds sang in the sunlight, celebrating our grand reunion. I was dumbfounded that she never threw it out. A decade later, helping her prepare for a cross-country move, I would come to understand that my mother never threw anything out. We both have attachment issues.
The Jamaica shirt was immediately dethroned. How had I ever settled for less than the superior rub of the paper-thin kitty shirt? I flaunted its re-emergence, pursued my habit with renewed vigor. I even began telling my friends my deepest secret to justify the presence of the kitty shirt in my lap or over my shoulder during sleepovers and while watching movies in the den. In the shadows, I slipped my thumb to the roof of my mouth, rubbed the shirt, sneaking it to my face for a quick hit. I was a 16-year-old thumb sucker and it was marvelous.
When my high school boyfriend went away to college later that summer, I committed the ultimate act of self-sacrifice in the name of teenage love: I gave him the kitty shirt as a going-away present. For a year I lived on scraps, strands of knotted fabric a half-inch wide. While cleaning through his freshman accumulations, he came across my selfless gift, and with a shrug handed it back to me. He told me it smelled like rotten cheese. With the kitty shirt balled in my fist, I released a deep and painful sigh. “‘Til death do us part,” I vowed. “Amen.”
Two years later, at 18, I worried about what my college roommate would think! How was I going to hide my habit and make it to class? My first roommate had secrets of her own, including a two-hour make-up regime causing her to wake up at mind-numbing hours. My second roommate had a “bankie,” a yellow baby blanket with a triangular tear. She couldn’t fall asleep without it. Our living arrangement seemed fixed by fate.
My habit made me a bit more antisocial than the average college student. I learned to sneak the kitty shirt into the bathroom for a fix, eyes closed, quick and silent. A piece of the kitty shirt, a sleeve, became a regular accessory until my roommate, the one with the “bankie,” threw the piece out thinking it was trash when she borrowed my Levis and found the scrap of kitty shirt in the pocket intertwined with a used tissue. She, of all people, knew the significance of the kitty shirt. It was the lowest point of our relationship. We did move past it, eventually.
***
The demise of the kitty shirt was a slow, drawn-out disintegration. At 21, when I moved into my first apartment, I adopted a 10-month-old black Labrador Retriever. We shared a studio and some days I came home to a torn shoe, shredded carpet, or ripped sheets. For months, before leaving everyday, I stuffed the kitty shirt under my pillow to protect it. Then one day I opened the door and saw it strewn across the floor in small, wet pieces. My voice quivered as I turned to my dog and asked: “What. Did. You. Do?” Her ears dropped back and she slowly rolled onto her back, raising the white flag of her exposed belly. Wiping the tears off my face, I did the only thing I could do—I tied it back together. I started carrying it with me everywhere in a little Paul Frank pouch decorated with the grinning head of Julius the Monkey.
That is, until a clever Washington DC thief stole my purse, my backpack, and my friend’s jacket out of the trunk of my car. He stole everything I had in the car except half of a roast beef sandwich in a blue plastic bag. Earlier in the evening I had debated slipping the kitty shirt pouch in my pocket but decided I didn’t want to risk losing it. I often wonder what the thief thought when he unzipped that monkey pouch only to find a moist, smelly mess of gray-blue fabric instead of credit cards, cash, and change. I wonder if he rubbed it?
After that, again, I was back to scraps. I had two pocket pieces of the kitty shirt that traveled with me daily, becoming my ticket to instant escape. At 26, I lost all thumb-sucking discipline. I started sucking my thumb everywhere: in bathrooms, in my office when I was alone, in the library, in my car. I stopped going out in lieu of spending quality time with my thumb. I became an avid hand washer, never knowing when the uncontrollable urge to suck and rub would strike. One afternoon, while reading the spines of abnormal psychology journals at University of Baltimore, I realized that my thumb was in my mouth. I had no idea how it had gotten there.
My first therapist, Dorothy, asked me repeatedly if my thumb got all wrinkly when I sucked it. She would hold her thumb up to her lips and make little nibbling noises. My insurance changed before we could make any real progress.
My second therapist, Sam—a short, loud man who cursed a lot and whined about wanting to be tall and sexy—asked me to suck my thumb in front of him. I obliged only once, and quickly. He suggested I make jewelry out of my pocket pieces by having them set in amber. A novel idea, but didn’t he understand it was about touching the fabric, not looking at it?
A short time later, while dog sitting, my friend’s dogs ate those last two pieces of the kitty shirt (they waited until I was in the shower and my dog turned a blind eye). I dropped to my hands and knees, wrapped in a bath towel, and groped the carpet around the table where I left the pocket pieces before my shower. I checked and checked again. The dogs stared at me with cocked heads. I felt hopeless and ridiculous.
While mourning the pocket pieces’ passing, I confessed to my therapist that the thumb alone did not interest me. The rubbing was the glue that held the habit together so to speak. On an off-week, I found a new shirt with potential—my father’s charcoal-gray t-shirt—in the same box as my Cabbage Patch Kids, charm necklace, and love letters from elementary school. My therapist suggested I wear my new “woobie” (as we called it out of respect for the kitty shirt) to bed instead of carrying it around my apartment. He wanted me to realize I could sleep nights without it clutched in my fist, I could relax without it, and I could control it. He suggested I devote time in my day just for thumb sucking. Finally, after he ran out of cognitive behavioral tricks, he told me to get a stopwatch and graph paper and time how long I suck my thumb every day.
I tracked the number of episodes and the cumulative minutes for three months. I made beautiful line graphs with sharp peaks and low valleys. Each time I put my thumb in my mouth I clicked the yellow plastic stopwatch hanging around my neck. It amazed me to see that I sucked my thumb for a total of 240 minutes per day; one single episode was 150 minutes long. Sundays were marathons. The frequency fluctuated with my activity level. TV and a good book meant more thumb sucking. I discovered that my thumb automatically found its way to my mouth when I was trying on new outfits, in front of my closet and in dressing rooms, or when I felt a moment of panic or fear. I noticed I could not fall asleep with my thumb in my mouth. When I craved my thumb, my front teeth throbbed and I clenched my jaws in my thumb’s absence. I understood that my habit was a facet of me, a facet I happened to like, and that there were bigger issues for me to discuss with my therapist like seasonal depression and chronic self-deprecation.
After the third month of charting my habit, I decided I didn’t care to break it. It didn’t make me “a danger to myself or others,” plus it was cheaper and healthier than smoking. I asked my therapist what was so wrong about a ticket to instant relaxation that was accessible, affordable and legal? He couldn’t come up with an answer. With a shrug, a smile, and a “what the hell,” we both let it go, happily ever after.
* * *
I did try to stop sucking my thumb. Deep down, I harbored the romantic notion that explaining my habit to the world would rob me of it, exploiting it to the point that all comfort and appeal would be bastardized and therefore lost to me.
That didn’t happen.
Instead, after a particularly intense day with my favorite appendage—hours in front of the computer, on the couch, in the bathroom—the back of my front teeth throbbed from the pressure of my thumb. I pushed against them with my free hand, testing for looseness. I clenched my jaw and pushed my tongue through the gap between my top and bottom teeth. When I heard a distinct and prominent lisp in my voice during a telephone conversation, it became clear to me that the time had come.
It was a Saturday afternoon when I put the woobie down in my closet. Later, I returned for a visit, but refused to touch it. My teeth, my overbite, my inability to pronounce sibilant sounds required me to stop. This time I would do it; I was 29, the age of transition. So determined, I drove to Pier 1 Imports on Sunday to procure a new resting place for my woobie: a wooden box, with inlaid cut glass. I brought it home and carefully folded my old friend—refraining from one last rub or deep inhalation—and placed it inside. I laid the pocket piece on top, closed the lid. After a click of the padlock and toss of the key, I started crocheting.
It was like detox. I went through physical withdrawal symptoms for an entire week. My teeth continued to throb. My skin crawled. My chest gasped in shallow, panicked breaths. My shoulders pinned to my ears, I walked around feeling ready to scream. I cried on my stationary bike as I peddled through my grief. I didn’t recognize myself without this habit. At work they told me I looked pale. I told them I was having trouble breathing, I felt nauseous. I rocked on my couch at night looking at the box, trying to figure out how to break the lock. I needed the thumb with the woobie; I needed the rub. I begged my dentist for a night guard to ease the clenching.
Anhedonia swept over me. Part of me was truly dead. How could I explain to anyone that an enormous part of me was missing, gone? I had killed it. My boyfriend asked me why I kept the box. I explained that knowing the real thing was a padlock away kept me from settling for substitutes.
That is, until recently, when he made the mistake of leaving one of the substitute woobies in my laundry hamper: a navy blue t-shirt with Adam Clayton Powell No. 43 on the front in faded, white letters. It smelled like him. I tried to stay away. I even placed it in a manila envelope to try and save myself, but after six months of struggle, I caved.
* * *
For my thirtieth birthday, my friend asked me for all of my old t-shirts, so she could make me something—she wasn’t giving away what. She wanted my t-shirts because they were soft; she knew how my shirts had a tendency to become threadbare. I gladly gathered all of my potential woobies, except the Adam Clayton Powell shirt—I was being smart this time, I didn’t want to have another meltdown. I even gave her the box, told her to do with it whatever she wanted.
Months later she gave me back a t-shirt quilt, with the pocket of my old, boxed woobie sewn on the square that fell under my hand if the quilt were tucked under my armpit. I remember her asking, when I told her my boyfriend and I rearranged our bedroom, if I still slept on the same side of the bed. At the time I thought it was such a thoughtful question, an indication of just how well she knew me, and a bit psychic of her as it had been up for debate.
The mere idea of an entire queen-sized quilt of potential woobies made me swoon. And now I had one to lounge on and rub all over. The pocket made me weepy; joyous pocket, I was afraid I would rub it right off the quilt. My friend said when she opened the box she could not believe how worn the shirt had become—it was see-through. It was too thin to use the whole thing. She salvaged what she could.
I continue to have faith that at some point in my life I will be able to stop sucking my thumb.
Maybe when I’m 40.
Copyright © 2007-2009 Storyscape Journal ISSN 1941-3157