Love Did That #3
“He’d rather have left than be carried,” Dr. Matthews said.
“Yes.”
“Tell me about your father before. Before your mother died.”
That was easier. That I could talk about all day.
“He was the best man I ever knew. He was a king in our house. Present, every day. Protected us, provided, loved my mother out loud where we could see it. He was an artist, he built a record label from nothing, and he taught us everything. How to move, how to be men, carry ourselves, how to work. My brothers and I especially are the men we are because of what he put in us before it all fell apart. I’ve spent my whole life trying to be that. The man he was.”
“From everything you’ve told me, you are that man. You stepped into his shoes at nineteen and you carried everything he carried and more. You are your father’s son in his strength.”
“That’s the point.”
“Mm.” He let a moment go by. “Can I explain something, and you can do what you want with it.”
“Okay.”
“You’re your father in his strength. You see that, and you’re proud of it, and you’ve built your whole identity on it. You stayed. You are the opposite of the man who walked out.”
I nodded.
“But there’s a second way you’re also like him, and it’s the one you can’t see, because seeing it would cost you the first one. You also left.”
“I didn’t leave.”
“Your body didn’t. Your father left the family.
You left yourself. You keep every person you love at the exact distance where you can protect them, and they can never reach into you.
Your father’s absence was a door he walked out of.
Yours is a door you’ve been standing behind.
You think staying makes you his opposite.
I’m telling you it’s the same wound. He refused to be carried and he left.
You refuse to be carried and you stayed. Same refusal. Different exit.”
I didn’t say anything to that.
“You agreed your father needed help and wouldn’t take it,” he said. “That the not-taking-it is what cost your family its father. That’s a version of the thing you’re doing to yourself.”
“It worked,” I said, and even I could hear it come out thin. “For eighteen years it worked.”
“Did it.” He didn’t raise his voice. “Julian, that kind of carrying is a bow bent all the way back. You can hold a bow there a long time. But it doesn’t hold forever.
Eventually the tension gets to be too much and you have to let go…
or it breaks. And from what you’ve told me, it looks like it’s already started to. ”
“What do you mean?”
“You finally let one person all the way in. The first time in your adult life, and the second she got close enough to ask you to set the weight down, you couldn’t do it, and now you’re sitting in my office having lost her. That’s not the bow holding. That’s the bow breaking.”
My throat closed, and I looked at the bookshelf so I wouldn’t have to look at him.
“The thing that saved your family when you were younger,” he spoke gently now, “was a young man deciding to be steady when no one else could be. That was the right call. It kept four children alive. I’m not going to take that from you.”
He waited until I looked at him. “But they’re grown, Julian.
Your company’s built. Your home is stable.
The thing that saved you isn’t saving anybody anymore.
It’s a cage you forgot you were allowed to walk out of.
What kept you alive back then is the thing costing you your life now.
Your body doesn’t know the emergency is over. ”
“How do I tell it that?”
“You let yourself grieve the mother you never really grieved. Your father too. And you let somebody carry you while you do it. You’ve carried everyone in your life. Every single one. When is somebody going to get to carry you?”
“That’s not —” My voice failed and I had to start again. “That’s not how I’m built.”
“It’s how everybody’s built. You’re just the only one who never got a turn.”
I drove home and thought about Alyssa the whole way.
Her methods still rubbed me the wrong way, but my anger was gone from it.
What was left was simple enough. In my whole life, people had needed me, leaned on me, brought me the broken thing to fix.
Only one had looked at me and decided I was the one who needed coverage and risked my whole regard for her to do it. Alyssa.
She tried to take care of me, knowing I’d fight her, knowing it might cost us. That isn’t a thing you do to a person. It’s a thing you do for them.
I had stayed away not because I no longer wanted her, but because I had to get right in my own head before I had any business standing in front of her again. And I was getting there. Not finished, Dr. Matthews had said it plain, but right enough to show up and let her see it.
She’d be at Sunday dinner. I wasn’t going to plan a speech. I had five sentences and they were the truest I owned. I went to therapy. You were right. I miss you. I’m sorry. I love you.
I slept the whole night through for the first time in three weeks, woke almost feeling relaxed.