She reaches into her purse for more tissues, can’t find any, and dabs her eyes with the one she’s just blown her nose into. I always wonder why she doesn’t take a clean tissue from the box a few inches from her.
“Anyway,” she says, “every day around five p.m., the mother comes home from work. And every day the same thing happens.”
Rita chokes up here, stops. More nose-blowing and eye dabbing. Take the damn tissues! I want to scream. This pained woman, whom nobody talks to or touches, won’t even let herself have a clean tissue. Rita squeezes what’s left of the snot ball in her hand, wipes her eyes, and takes a breath.
“Every day,” she continues, “the mother unlocks the front door, opens it up, and calls out, ‘Hello, family!’ That’s how she greets them: ‘Hello, family!’”
Her voice falters and she takes a minute to compose herself. The children, Rita explains, come running, squealing with joy, and her husband gives her a big, excited kiss. Rita tells me that she watches all this through the peephole that she secretly had enlarged for spying purposes. (“Don’t judge,” she says.)
“And do you know what I do?” she asks. “I know it’s horribly ungenerous, but I seethe with anger.” She’s sobbing now. “There’s never been a ‘Hello, family!’ for me.”
I try to imagine the kind of family Rita might fashion for herself at this point in her life—perhaps with a partner or a rapprochement with her adult children. But I wonder about other possibilities too—what she might do with her passion for art or how she might form some new friendships. I think about the abandonment she experienced as a child and the trauma her own children experienced. How all of them must feel so ripped off and full of resentment that none of them can see what’s actually there and what kind of lives they might still be able to create. And how for a while, I haven’t been able to see it for Rita either.
I walk over to the tissue box, hand it to Rita, then sit down next to her on the couch.
“Thank you,” she says. “Where did those come from?”
“They’ve been there all along,” I say. But instead of taking a fresh tissue, she continues to wipe her face with the snot ball.
In the car on the way home, I call Jen. I know she’s probably also in the car driving home.
When she picks up, I say, “Please tell me that I won’t still be dating in retirement.”
She laughs. “I don’t know. I might be dating in retirement. People used to hang it up once their spouses died. Now they date.” I hear the blare of horns before she continues. “And there are so many divorced people out there too.”
“Are you trying to tell me you’re having marital problems?”
“Yes.”
“He’s farting again?”
“Yes.”
It’s their ongoing joke. Jen has warned her husband that she’s moving into the next room at night if he keeps eating dairy, but he loves dairy and she loves him, so she never moves.
I pull into the driveway and tell Jen I have to go. I park the car and unlock the front door to our house, where my son is being cared for by his babysitter, Cesar. Technically, Cesar works for us, but really, he’s like an older brother to my son and a second son to me. We’re close with his parents and sibling and his multitude of cousins, and I’ve watched him grow up through the years into the college student he is now, taking care of my son as he grows too.
I open the door and yell, “Hello, family!”
Zach shouts from his room, “Hey, Mom!” Cesar takes off an earbud and calls out from the kitchen, where he’s preparing dinner, “Hey!”
Nobody runs up excitedly to greet me, nobody squeals with delight, but I don’t feel deprived the way Rita does—just the opposite. I go to my bedroom to change into sweatpants, and when I come back out, we all start talking at once, sharing our days, teasing one another, vying for airtime, putting plates on the table and pouring the drinks. The boys bicker over setting the table and race to get the bigger portions. Hello, family.
I once told Wendell that I’m a terrible decision maker, that often what I think I want doesn’t turn out the way I’d imagined. But there were two notable exceptions, and both proved to be the best decisions of my life. In each case, I was nearly forty.
One was my decision to have a baby.
The other was my decision to become a therapist.
25
The UPS Guy
The year Zach was born, I began acting inappropriately with my UPS delivery guy.
I don’t mean that I tried to seduce him (it’s hard to be seductive with milk stains on your T-shirt). I mean that whenever he delivered a package—which was often, given the need for baby supplies—I would try to detain him with conversation simply because I craved adult company. I’d strain to make small talk about the weather, a news headline, even the weight of a package (“Wow, who knew diapers were so heavy! Do you have kids?”) while the UPS driver fake-smiled and nodded as he not-so-subtly backed away from me to the safety of his truck.
At the time I was working from home as a writer, which meant that all day, I sat alone in my pajamas at a computer when I wasn’t feeding, changing, bouncing, or otherwise engaging with an adorable but demanding ten-pound human with a talent for screaming like a banshee. Basically, I interacted with what I called, in my darkest moments, “a gastrointestinal tract with lungs.” Before having a baby, I’d relished the freedom of a non-office job. But now I longed to get dressed every day and be in the company of verbal grownups.
It was during this perfect storm of isolation and plummeting estrogen that I started to wonder if I’d made a mistake by leaving medical school. Journalism suited me well—I got to cover hundreds of topics for dozens of publications, and they all revolved around a common thread that fascinated me: the human psyche. I didn’t want to stop writing, but now, while reeking of spit-up in the middle of the night, I reconsidered the possibility of a dual career. If I became a psychiatrist, I reasoned, I could interact with people in a meaningful way, helping them to be happier, but I could also have the flexibility to write and spend time with my family.
I sat on the idea for a few weeks, until one spring morning I called up my former dean at Stanford and floated my plan by her. A renowned researcher, she was also the med-school version of a camp mom—warm, wise, intuitive. I had run her mother-daughter book group when I was in medical school and knew her well. I was sure that after I explained my thought process, she would be supportive of my plan.
Instead she said: “Why would you do that?”
And then: “Besides, psychiatrists don’t make people happy!”
I remembered the old medical-school quip: “Psychiatrists don’t make people happy—prescriptions do!” Suddenly sobered, I knew what she meant. It wasn’t that she didn’t respect psychiatrists; it was that psychiatry today tends to be more about the nuances of medication and neurotransmitters than the subtleties of people’s life stories—all of which she knew I knew.
Anyway, she asked, did I really want to do three years of residency with a toddler? Did I want to spend time with my son before he started kindergarten? Did I remember talking with her as a medical student about my desire to have more substantial relationships with patients than the contemporary medical model afforded?