Earlier, Wendell had pointed out that I’d kept my distance from Boyfriend—ignoring clues that would have made his revelation less shocking—because if I’d inquired about them, Boyfriend might have said something I didn’t want to hear. I told myself it meant nothing that he seemed irritated by kids in public places, that he’d happily run errands for us rather than attend my son’s basketball games, that he said it was more important to his ex-wife than to him to have children when they were having fertility problems, and that his brother and sister-in-law stayed in a hotel when they came to visit because Boyfriend didn’t want the commotion of their three kids in his house. And yet, neither he nor I had ever discussed our feelings about children directly. I figured: He’s a dad, he likes kids.
Wendell and I talked about my pretending away certain parts of Boyfriend’s history and comments and body language to quiet the alarm that might have gone off if I’d paid them heed. And now Wendell wonders if I’ve been keeping my distance from him as well, obsessing over my notes and sitting far away from him in order to protect myself here too.
I glance at the L-shaped sofa configuration. “Don’t most people sit here?” I ask from my seat under the window. I’m certain that nobody shares a sofa with him, so that rules out position D. And as for position B, catty-corner to him, who would sit that close to the therapist? Again, nobody.
“Some do,” Wendell says.
“Really? Where?”
“Anywhere along here.” Wendell gestures from where I’m sitting all the way to position B.
Suddenly the distance between us seems vast, but I still can’t believe that people sit that close to Wendell.
“So somebody walks into your office for the very first time, scans the room, and then plops down right there, even though you’re going to be sitting just inches away?”
“They do,” Wendell says simply. I think about the tissue box that Wendell had tossed to me and how he kept it on the table next to position B because, it occurs to me now, most people must sit there.
“Oh,” I say. “Should I move?”
Wendell shrugs. “It’s up to you.”
I get up and sit down perpendicular to Wendell. I have to adjust my legs to the side so that they don’t touch his. I notice a bit of gray at the roots of his dark hair. The wedding ring on his finger. I remember asking Caroline to refer me—or my “friend”—to a married male therapist, but now that I’m here, I realize it doesn’t really matter. He hasn’t sided with me or declared Boyfriend a sociopath.
I adjust the pillows and try to get comfortable. This feels strange. I look down at my notes, but I have no interest in reading them right now. I feel exposed, and I have the urge to run.
“I can’t sit here,” I say.
Wendell asks why, and I tell him I don’t know.
“Not knowing is a good place to start,” he says, and this feels like a revelation. I spend so much time trying to figure things out, chasing the answer, but it’s okay to not know.
We’re both quiet for a while, then I get up and move farther away, about midway between positions A and B. I can breathe again.
I think of a Flannery O’Connor quote: “The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.” What am I protecting myself from? What do I not want Wendell to see?
All along, I’d been telling Wendell that I didn’t wish ill upon Boyfriend—like having his next girlfriend blindside him—I just wanted our relationship back. I said with a straight face that I didn’t want revenge, that I didn’t hate Boyfriend, that I wasn’t angry, just confused.
Wendell listened but said he wasn’t buying it. Obviously, I did want revenge, I did hate Boyfriend, I was furious.
“Your feelings don’t have to mesh with what you think they should be,” he explained. “They’ll be there regardless, so you might as well welcome them because they hold important clues.”
How many times had I said something similar to my own patients? But here I feel as if I’m hearing this for the first time. Don’t judge your feelings; notice them. Use them as your map. Don’t be afraid of the truth.
My friends, my family—like me, they’ve had trouble considering the possibility that Boyfriend is a decent guy who was confused and conflicted. Instead, he was either selfish or a liar. They’ve also never considered that, even though Boyfriend told himself that he couldn’t live with a kid, maybe he also couldn’t live with me. Maybe, in ways he didn’t realize, I reminded him too much of his parents or ex-wife or the woman he once mentioned who had hurt him deeply in graduate school. “I made a decision never to go through anything like that again,” he had said early in our relationship. I’d asked him to explain more, but he didn’t want to talk about it, and I, colluding with his avoidance, didn’t push it.
Wendell, though, has been asking me to look at the ways we avoided each other by hiding behind romance and banter and plans for our future. And now I’m in pain and creating my own suffering—and my therapist is literally trying to kick some sense into me.
He switches his crossed legs from right over left to left over right, something therapists do when their legs start to fall asleep. His striped socks match his striped cardigan today, as if they came as a set. He points with his chin to the papers in my hand. “I don’t think you’re going to get the answers you’re looking for from these notes.”
You’re grieving something bigger pops into my head, like a song lyric I can’t shake. “But if I don’t talk about the breakup, I won’t have anything to say,” I insist.
Wendell tilts his head. “You’ll have the important things to say.”
I hear him and I don’t. Whenever Wendell implies that this is bigger than Boyfriend, I push back, so I suspect that he must be onto something. The things we protest against the most are often the very things we need to look at.
“Maybe,” I say. But I feel antsy. “Right now I feel like I need to finish telling you what Boyfriend said. Can I just tell you one last thing?”
He takes in a breath and then stops, hesitating, like he was about to say something but decided against it. “Sure,” Wendell says. He’s pushed me enough and knows it. He’s taken away my drug—talking about Boyfriend—for a minute too long, and I need another fix.
I start rifling through the pages, but now I can’t remember where I was. I’m scanning the notes to see which damning quote I should share next, but there are so many asterisks and so many notes, and I can feel Wendell’s eyes on me. I wonder what I would be thinking if somebody like me were sitting in my therapy room right now. Actually, I know. I’d be thinking of the laminated sign that my office mate posted inside the files at work: There is a continuing decision to be made as to whether to evade pain, or to tolerate it and therefore modify it.
I put down the notes.
“Okay,” I say to Wendell. “What did you want to say?”
Wendell explains that my pain feels like it’s in the present, but it’s actually in both the past and the future. Therapists talk a lot about how the past informs the present—how our histories affect the ways we think, feel, and behave and how at some point in our lives, we have to let go of the fantasy of creating a better past. If we don’t accept the notion that there’s no redo, much as we try to get our parents or siblings or partners to fix what happened years ago, our pasts will keep us stuck. Changing our relationship to the past is a staple of therapy. But we talk far less about how our relationship to the future informs the present too. Our notion of the future can be just as powerful a roadblock to change as our notion of the past.