Chapter Twenty-Five
Twenty-Five
“HOW WAS YOUR WEEK?” EMMA ASKED TWO OF HER favorite clients. Maria and Claire were a married couple who were struggling to juggle their careers, two children and Claire’s ailing mother, who had recently moved in with them. Thankfully, they had managed to get themselves into therapy before things got too bad, which was always a blessing—especially for the therapist.
“It was good,” Claire said as she shared a suspicious look with Maria. Sometimes Emma’s clients seemed to forget that Emma could not only hear them but see them.
“Good in what way?” Emma asked, assuming the look indicated a return of their much-missed sex life.
“Did you get engaged?” Maria blurted out.
“Oh,” Emma replied, startled, before remembering she had a brand-new ring on her finger. “I did. Good eye.”
“I told you it was real,” Claire said to Maria. “You owe me ten bucks and a bubble bath.”
“I’m a little lost…”
“Your engagement video came up on my TikTok,” Maria explained. “A big account I follow reposted it, but I thought maybe it was a prank or something.”
Emma nodded, trying to keep her cool. She knew some of her clients had probably seen the post—especially after people started pulling it from YouTube and sharing it on social media. Within twenty-four hours of releasing the video on her channel it was already her most-viewed piece of content by a long shot and it had only grown from there. Her Instagram DMs were filled with messages from pretty much everyone she had ever met. Most people seemed happy for her. The rest were furious that she was “making a mockery of marriage for attention.” It was one thing for random people to have opinions about her love life. It was another for her clients to know so much about her. But that was the cost of being mildly famous online.
“Why did you think it was a prank?”
“I don’t know,” Maria replied, clearly uncomfortable. “You just don’t seem like the type to do something like that. You’ve always seemed…”
“It’s okay, you can say it.”
“Reasonable? I guess it’s just hard to imagine you marrying someone you barely know at a wedding you planned with someone else. Seems like a no-no for a couples therapist.”
“I think it’s awesome,” Claire chimed in. “You both seemed super happy, and your fiancé is gorgeous.”
Maria, the more jealous of the two, rolled her eyes.
“I even sent it to one of my friends who just got dumped and she said it ‘reignited her faith in humanity.’”
“Taylor said that?” Maria asked skeptically.
“Yep. Our very own Emma is inspiring people to not give up. I love it.”
Emma smiled while keeping her eyes on Maria. She knew that if Maria lost respect for Emma as an individual, she wasn’t going to trust Emma as her therapist.
“I’m sorry to have popped up on your feed like that. I know it can be unsettling to see me outside of my professional setting.”
“It is a little weird,” Maria offered.
“Absolutely. I once saw my college therapist throwing up in a bar. Took a bit of time to repair that relationship.”
Both Maria and Claire laughed, which was a relief. Emma hadn’t lost them completely.
“If you want to ask me any questions to address concerns you might have, I’m happy to answer them,” Emma said with more confidence than she felt.
Self-disclosure was always a tricky thing to navigate with clients. The mental health field had moved away from the idea that therapists should be entirely blank slates who reveal nothing about their personal lives or experiences. The days of silent analysts sitting behind clients on fainting couches were mostly gone. Many clinicians, including Emma, even believed there was a benefit to occasionally sharing parts of themselves with clients. It helped strengthen the therapeutic alliance and shift the power dynamic away from an imbalanced expert/patient to something more equal. The tricky part was knowing how much to share and when.
Emma had misjudged this ratio before and even lost a client after revealing how many times she’d been ghosted while using dating apps. Emma had hoped to make the client feel better about her turbulent dating history, but it just made her think Emma was a loser—and apparently no one wants professional advice from a loser. After that learning experience, Emma had stayed on the conservative side of self-disclosure, but she worried that if she didn’t address the elephant in the room Maria wouldn’t get over it and it would prevent progress.
“I don’t really know if I have any questions necessarily. But it does make you seem kind of unhinged.”
“Maria!” Claire exclaimed as she swatted her wife’s leg.
“No, it’s okay. I want you to be honest with me. What about one else had thought ofit seems unhinged?” Emma got the dreaded word out of her mouth without betraying how much it triggered her. She had spent her entire anxious existence worried that she was one bad day away from blowing her life up and losing control of herself. But, so far, she hadn’t done anything she couldn’t recover from. She hoped Operation: Save My Date wasn’t about to be the exception.
“Like what kind of person doesn’t just cancel their wedding and move on?” Maria asked. “It makes you seem desperate or something.”
“Desperate? Have you seen the guy she’s marrying? Have you seen the huge rock on her finger? If that’s desperate, sign me up,” Claire said with a smirk. “Now can we get back to figuring out what to do with my mother because she is driving me bonkers?”
“That we can do,” Emma said, knowing she was likely never going to see them again. She could tell she was no longer a trusted resource for Maria and would maybe even become a point of contention in their marriage. Emma would send an email with referrals after the session so they wouldn’t feel guilty about switching therapists. It was more important that they got the help they wanted than staying with Emma out of politeness or guilt. Plus, Emma had a huge waitlist of potential clients to pluck from. Apparently, some people wanted a super-public therapist who took big swings in her personal life—at least in Los Angeles.
***
Emma trudged up the stairs of her family home in search of her mom. Matt’s second cousin was having a baby and he had tasked her with buying a present to bring to the baby shower in San Diego that weekend. There wasn’t a registry because the mom-to-be liked to be surprised. This seemed like a terrible idea, but Matt had found it charming—probably because he wasn’t the one who had to find a useful gift that somehow no one else had thought of.
“Mom!” Emma called for the third time. Debbie was an excellent gift-giver, and Emma needed her advice. If she could find her.
Emma was about to fling open her parents’ bedroom door when she heard what sounded like whisper fighting. She took a few steps closer and realized her parents must be inside their walk-in closet. Emma knew that if they had purposely gone into hiding to yell at each other, she should give them privacy. But she was too curious to behave. She slowly opened the bedroom door and tiptoed over to the closet.
“I just need some space,” Debbie hissed. “You’re everywhere all of the time.”
“It’s my house,” Alan hissed back. “Where do you want me to go?”
“Why is that my problem to figure out? I’m not your mother.”
“No. My mother actually wants me around.”
“Come on. Don’t take it so personally.”
“What? That my wife can’t stand being around me? You’re right, why would I care about that?”
“Alan—”
Before Emma could react, the closet door flew open and Alan stormed out. He looked horrified to see her there.
“Sorry,” Emma sputtered, “I was just looking for Mom.”
“She’s by the sweaters,” Alan replied before heading out of the room.
Emma debated making a break for it until she heard Debbie say, “You can come in.” She entered the closet to find her mom sitting on the bench they’d installed to help Alan put his socks on. Her mom looked like she was about to cry. Debbie never cried.
“What happened?” Emma asked as she took a seat.
“He wants me to teach him how to knit.”
This was not the answer Emma was expecting. So she waited for more. She’d learned early on in her training that if something wasn’t making sense, not replying right away often compelled people to fill in more details without her having to ask.
“I don’t want to teach him how to knit,” Debbie explained. “Knitting is my hobby that I do by myself or with my knitting friends. But somehow, I’m the bad guy because I don’t want us to merge into one entity that is never apart for longer than a bowel movement.”
“At least you get to poop in peace,” Emma replied, but Debbie was too upset to laugh.
“I hate hurting his feelings, but I don’t know how to get through to him without being blunt.”
Emma nodded; it was a cycle she had noticed growing up. Alan would do something to annoy Debbie. Debbie would try to get him to stop. He would ignore her complaints until Debbie blew up at him, and then both of them would feel hurt and misunderstood.
“Retirement is a big adjustment. You two will figure out a new way to be with each other.”
“Maybe,” Debbie said, sounding dubious. “Or maybe I’ll just be annoyed for the rest of my life.”
Emma watched as her mother stood up and walked away, likely to finish processing her emotions unobserved. For the first time, Emma felt worried that her parents’ marriage wasn’t as indestructible as she thought. It was an unsettling feeling and she wanted to put it to bed before it spun out of control in her mind. She fished her phone out of her pocket and after a moment’s hesitation made a call.
“Hi,” Matt said. “Everything okay?”
“Sort of. Do you have a minute or are you busy?”
“I’m busy, but I always have a minute for you.”
Emma smiled. She realized it was the first time she was leaning on Matt for emotional support for something outside of their own relationship. This was the type of exchange that could make or break couples, and she hated that she knew that.
“I’m worried about my parents,” Emma explained, giving Matt the play-by-play of her last ten minutes. “What if I’ve been so caught up in my own shit, I haven’t noticed that they’re falling apart?”
“I don’t think you have to worry about that. They’ve been married a long time.”
“That doesn’t mean anything. I had a client in her eighties file for divorce last year.”
Matt laughed even though Emma wasn’t sure what was funny about having to navigate the dating scene again after sixty years. It sounded like a plot of a horror film.
“They’re your parents. Not your patients—”
“Clients. We call them clients. It helps minimize the unequal power dynamic and gives people agency in their own healing.”
“Okay, good to know,” Matt said kindly. “I just don’t want you to stress yourself out. Just because you’ve seen things not work out for your clients doesn’t mean your parents are going to get divorced.”
“You’re right. It just freaked me out. I think I’m still waiting for the next terrible, life-altering thing to happen.”
“Kelly always used to say, ‘The smallest seed of faith is better than the largest fruit of happiness.’”
“What does that mean?”
“Honestly, I’m not totally sure. She’d use it whenever I was worried about the future. I think it’s from the Bible or something.”
It wasn’t, Emma quickly learned through a Google search. It was by Thoreau.
“I’m so sorry but I have to hop on a call. Can we talk later?” Matt said.
“Yes, definitely. Thanks for listening.”
“Of course. Try not to worry about it anymore.”
Emma held back a scoff. Trying not to worry about something only made her worry more.