More silence.
I feel as though I’m viewing this scene from above, watching a confused version of myself move at incredible speed through the famous stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. If my laughter was denial and my when-the-hell-were-you-going-to-tell-me was anger, I’m moving on to bargaining. How, I want to know, can we make this work? Can I take on more of the childcare? Add an extra date night?
Boyfriend shakes his head. His teenagers don’t wake up at seven a.m. to play Legos, he says. He’s looking forward to finally having his freedom, and he wants to relax on weekend mornings. Never mind that my son plays independently with his Legos in the mornings. The problem, apparently, is that my son occasionally says this: “Look at my Lego! Look what I made!”
“The thing is,” Boyfriend explains, “I don’t want to have to look at the Legos. I just want to read the paper.”
I consider the possibility that an alien has invaded Boyfriend’s body or that he has a burgeoning brain tumor of which this personality shift is the first symptom. I wonder what Boyfriend would think of me if I broke up with him because his teenage daughters wanted me to look at their new leggings from Forever 21 when I was trying to relax and read a book. I don’t want to look at the leggings. I just want to read my book. What kind of person gets away with simply not wanting to look?
“I thought you wanted to marry me,” I say, pathetically.
“I do want to marry you,” he says. “I just don’t want to live with a kid.”
I think about this for a second, like a puzzle I’m trying to solve. It sounds like the riddle of the Sphinx.
“But I come with a kid,” I say, my voice getting louder. I’m furious that he’s bringing this up now, that he’s bringing this up at all. “You can’t order me up à la carte, like a burger without the fries, like a . . . a—” I think about patients who present ideal scenarios and insist that they can only be happy with that exact situation. If he didn’t drop out of business school to become a writer, he’d be my dream guy (so I’ll break up with him and keep dating hedge-fund managers who bore me). If the job wasn’t across the bridge, it would be the perfect opportunity (so I’ll stay in my dead-end job and keep telling you how much I envy my friends’ careers). If she didn’t have a kid, I’d marry her.
Certainly we all have our deal-breakers. But when patients repeatedly engage in this kind of analysis, sometimes I’ll say, “If the queen had balls, she’d be the king.” If you go through life picking and choosing, if you don’t recognize that “the perfect is the enemy of the good,” you may deprive yourself of joy. At first patients are taken aback by my bluntness, but ultimately it saves them months of treatment.
“The truth is, I didn’t want to date somebody with a kid,” Boyfriend is saying. “But then I fell in love with you, and I didn’t know what to do.”
“You didn’t fall in love with me before our first date, when I told you I had a six-year-old,” I say. “You knew what to do then, didn’t you?”
More suffocating silence.
As you’ve probably guessed, this conversation goes nowhere. I try to understand if it’s about something else—how could it not be about something else? After all, his wanting his freedom is the ultimate “It’s not you, it’s me” (always code for It’s not me, it’s you). Is Boyfriend unhappy with something in the relationship that he’s afraid to tell me about? I ask him calmly, my voice softer now, because I’m mindful of the fact that Very Angry People aren’t Very Approachable. But Boyfriend insists that it’s only about his wanting to live without kids, not without me.
I’m in a state of shock mixed with bewilderment. I don’t understand how this has never come up. How do you sleep soundly next to a person and plan a life with her when you’re secretly grappling with whether to leave? (The answer is simple—a common defense mechanism called compartmentalization. But right now I’m too busy using another defense mechanism, denial, to see it.)
Boyfriend, by the way, is an attorney, and he lays it all out as he would in front of a jury. He really does want to marry me. He really does love me. He just wants much more time with me. He wants to be able to leave spontaneously together for the weekend or come home from work and go out to eat without worrying about a third person. He wants the privacy of a couple, not the communal feel of a family. When he learned I had a young child, he told himself it wasn’t ideal, but he said nothing to me because he thought he could adjust. Two years later, though, as we’re about to merge our homes, just as his freedom is in sight, he’s realized how important this is. He knew things had to end, but he also didn’t want them to—and even when he thought about telling me, he didn’t know how to bring it up because of how far in we were already and how angry I’d likely be. He hesitated to tell me, he says, because he didn’t want to be a jerk.
The defense rests and is also very sorry.
“You’re sorry?” I spit out. “Well, guess what. By trying NOT to be a jerk, you’ve made yourself into the world’s BIGGEST jerk!”
He goes quiet again, and it hits me: His eerie silence earlier was his way of bringing this up. And although we go round and round on this until the sun peeks through the shutters, we both know in a bone-deep way that there’s nothing else to say.
I have a kid. He wants freedom. Kids and freedom are mutually exclusive.
If the queen had balls, she’d be the king.
Voilà—I had my presenting problem.
3
The Space of a Step
Telling somebody you’re a psychotherapist often leads to a surprised pause, followed by awkward questions like these: “Oh, a therapist! Should I tell you about my childhood?” Or “Can you help me with this problem with my mother-in-law?” Or “Are you going to psychoanalyze me?” (The answers, by the way, are “Please, don’t”; “Possibly”; and “Why would I do that here? If I were a gynecologist, would you ask if I was about to give you a pelvic exam?”)
But I understand where these responses come from. It boils down to fear—of being exposed, of being found out. Will you spot the insecurities that I’m so skillful at hiding? Will you see my vulnerabilities, my lies, my shame?
Will you see the human in my being?
It strikes me that the people I’m talking to at a barbecue or dinner party don’t seem to wonder whether they might see me and the qualities I, too, try to hide in polite company. Once they hear that I’m a therapist, I morph into somebody who might peer into their psyches if they aren’t careful to deflect the conversation with therapist jokes or walk away to refill a drink as soon as possible.
Sometimes, though, people will ask more questions, like “What kind of people do you see in your practice?” I tell them I see people just like any of us, which is to say, just like whoever is asking. Once I told a curious couple at a Fourth of July gathering that I see a good number of couples in my practice, and they proceeded to get into an argument right in front of me. He wanted to know why she seemed so interested in what a couples therapist does—after all, they weren’t having problems (uncomfortable chuckle). She wanted to know why he had no interest in the emotional lives of couples—after all, maybe they could use some help (glare). But was I thinking about them as a therapy case? Not at all. This time, I was the one who left the conversation to “get a refill.”