Chapter 51 Dear Myron

Rita is carrying an artist's portfolio, a large black case with nylon handles that's at least three feet long. She's begun teaching art at the local university, the one from which she would have graduated had she not dropped out to get married, and today she brought in her own work to share with her students.

Her portfolio holds sketches for the prints that she's selling on her website, a series based on her own life. The images are visually comical and even cartoonish, but their themes—regret, humiliation, time, eighty-year-old sex—reveal their darkness and depth. She's shown me these before, but now when Rita reaches into her portfolio, she takes out something else: a yellow legal pad.

She hasn't spoken to Myron since the kiss more than two months ago—has avoided him, in fact, going to a different class at the Y, ignoring his knocks on her door (she uses the peephole for screening purposes now, not for spying on the hello-family), going into stealth mode when moving about the building. She's been taking time to craft a letter, obsessing over every line. She tells me she has no idea if her words make sense anymore, and after reading it again this morning, she's not convinced she should send it at all.

"Can I read it to you before I make an absolute fool of myself?" she asks.

"Of course," I say, and she places the yellow pad on her lap.

I can see her handwriting from where I'm sitting—not the specific letters, but the shapes. An artist's handwriting, I think. Gorgeous cursive, the loops perfectly formed but with an added flair. It takes her a minute to start. She breathes in, sighs, almost begins, breathes in, and sighs again. Finally, she speaks.

"‘Dear Myron,'" she reads off the page, then looks up at me. "Is that too formal—or too intimate, perhaps? Do you think I should start with ‘Hi'? Or just the more neutral ‘Myron'?"

"I think if you worry too much about the details, you might miss the big picture," I say, and Rita makes a face. She knows that I'm talking about more than her salutation.

"All right, then," she says, looking back at the lined pad. Still, she grabs a pen, crosses out the word dear, then takes a breath and begins again.

"‘Myron,'" she reads. "‘I'm sorry for my inexcusable behavior in the parking lot. It was completely uncalled for, and I owe you an apology. I certainly owe you an explanation, and you deserve one. So I'm going to give you that here, and then I'm sure you'll be done with me.'"

I must have made a sound—an involuntary mmm—because Rita looks up and asks, "What? Too much?"

"I was thinking about the prison sentence," I say. "I was just noticing that you're assuming Myron abides by your same punishment system." Rita thinks about that, crosses something out, then continues reading.

"‘Honestly, Myron,'" she continues from the legal pad, "‘at first I didn't know why I slapped you. I thought it was because I was angry that you'd been dating that woman, who was, quite frankly, so beneath you. But more important, I couldn't understand why we had been acting like a couple for months—why you would allow me to misperceive the situation in this way only to dispose of me. I know that you've since offered your reasons. You were afraid to start something romantic with me because if it turned out badly, you would lose our friendship. You were afraid that if it didn't work out, we would feel awkward living in the same building—as if it weren't tremendously awkward seeing you with that woman, whose cackle I could hear two floors up, even with my television on.'"

Rita looks up at me, raises her eyebrows in a question, and I shake my head. She strikes something out.

"‘But now, Myron,'" Rita goes on, "‘you say you want to take that risk. You say that I am worth that risk. And when you said that in the parking lot, I had to run because, believe it or not, I felt sorry for you. I felt sorry for you because you have no idea what kind of risk you'd be taking by getting involved with me. It wouldn't be fair to let you take that risk without telling you who I really am.'"

A tear rolls down Rita's face, then another, and she reaches for a side pocket in her artist's portfolio, where she's stuffed a bunch of tissues. As always, a box of tissues sits within arm's reach, and it still makes me crazy that she won't just take the tissues. She cries for a few moments, stuffs the used tissues into the pocket of the portfolio, then looks back at the pad.

"‘You think you know my past,'" she reads. "‘My marriages, the names and ages of my children, and the cities they live in, and that I don't see them much. Well, much wasn't accurate. I should have said that I don't see them at all. Why? Because they hate me.'"

Rita chokes up, then composes herself and goes on.

"‘What you don't know, Myron—what even my second and third husbands didn't fully know—is that their father, my first husband, Richard, drank. And when he drank, he hurt our children, my children—sometimes with words, sometimes with his hands. He would hurt them in ways I can't get myself to write here. Back then I would scream at him to stop, pleading, and he would yell back at me, and if he was very drunk, he'd hurt me too, and I didn't want the children to see that, so I would stop. You know what I did instead? I would go in the other room. Did you read that, Myron? My husband would be hurting my children and I would go in the other room! And I would think, about my husband, You are ruining them forever, hurting them beyond repair, and I would know that I was ruining them too, and I would cry and do nothing.'"

Rita is crying so hard now she can no longer speak. She's crying into her hands, and when she calms down, she unzips the portfolio's pocket, pulls out the soiled tissues, wipes her face, licks her finger, and turns the page on the pad.

"‘Why didn't I report it to the police, you may wonder. Why didn't I leave and take the children with me? At the time, I told myself that there would be no way to survive, to take care of the children and get a decent job with no college degree. Every day, I would look at the want ads in the newspaper and think, I could be a waitress or a secretary or a bookkeeper, but could I make the hours and the pay work? Who would pick up the kids from school? Make them dinner? I never called to find out, because the truth is—and you have to hear this, Myron—the truth is that I didn't want to find out. That's right: I didn't want to.'"

Rita looks at me as if to say, See? See what a monster I am? This part is new to me too. She holds up a finger—a signal for me to wait for her to collect herself—then reads on.

"‘I had felt so alone as a child—and this is no excuse, just an explanation—that the idea of being alone with four kids and working eight hours each day at a dead-end job, well, I just couldn't bear it. I'd seen what happened to other divorcées, the ways they were ostracized, like lepers, and I thought, No, thank you. I imagined I would have no adults to talk to, and that, perhaps even worse, I'd lose my one salvation. I'd have neither the time nor the resources to paint, and I worried that under these circumstances, taken together, I would be tempted to kill myself. I justified my staying by reasoning that if the children had a depressed mother, that would be better than a dead mother. But here's another truth, Myron: I didn't want to lose Richard.'"

A dark sound emerges from Rita, and then tears. She wipes her eyes with the dirty tissues.

"‘Richard—I hated him, yes, but I also loved him or, rather, the version of him when he wasn't drinking. He was brilliant and witty, and as strange as this sounds, I knew I would miss his companionship. Besides, I would worry about the kids spending time alone with Richard, given his drinking and his temper, so I would have fought to keep them with me all the time, and with him being at work every day, often going to late dinners, he would have agreed. And the thought of him getting off easy like that made me horribly resentful.'"

Rita licks her finger to turn the page again, but the paper sticks and it takes several attempts before she extricates the single sheet from the rest.

"‘Once, when I was very courageous, I told him I was leaving. I meant it, Myron, it wasn't an empty threat. I resolved that I was done. So I told him, and Richard just looked at me, stunned at first, I think. But then a smile formed on his face, the most evil smile I had ever seen, and he said, slowly, deliberately, in a voice that I can only describe as a growl, "If you leave, you will have nothing. The kids will have nothing. So, be my guest, Rita. Leave!" And then he started laughing, and there was venom in his laugh, and I knew right then it was a silly idea. I knew I would stay. But in order to stay, to live with the situation, I told myself all kinds of lies. I told myself it would stop. That Richard would stop drinking. And sometimes he would, at least for a while. But then I'd find his hiding places, bottles peeking out from behind his law books on the shelf in the den or rolled up in blankets on the top of the kids' closets, and we'd be back in hell.

"‘I imagine what you're thinking right now—that I'm making excuses. That I'm playing the victim. It's all true. But I've also thought a lot about how a person can be one thing and another thing, both at the same time. I've thought about how much I loved my children despite what I let happen to them, and how Richard, believe it or not, loved them too. I've thought about how he could hurt them and hurt me and also love us and laugh with us and help the kids with their schoolwork and coach their Little League games and give them thoughtful advice when they had disagreements with their friends. I've thought about how Richard would say he would change, and how much he wanted to change, and how he still wouldn't change, at least not for long, and how despite all of this, none of what he said was ever a lie.

"‘When I finally left, Richard cried. I'd never seen him cry before. He begged me to stay. But I saw my children, now teenagers or about to be, getting into drugs and harming themselves, wanting to die like me. My son almost overdosed, and a switch flipped, and I said, Enough. Nothing—not poverty, not giving up my art, not the fear of being alone for the rest of my life—nothing could stop me from taking the kids and leaving. The morning of the evening I told Richard I was leaving, I withdrew money from our bank account, applied for a job, and rented a two-bedroom apartment, one room for me and my daughter, the other for the boys, and we left.

"‘But it was too late. The kids were a mess. They hated me, and, strangely, they wanted to be back with Richard. Once we left, Richard was on his best behavior, and he provided for them financially. He would show up at my daughter's college and take her and her friends out for fancy meals. And the kids soon remembered him differently—especially the youngest, who missed playing ball with him. The youngest would beg to stay with him. And I would feel guilty for leaving. I would doubt myself. Had it been the right decision?'"

Rita stops. "Hold on," she says to me, "I lost my place." She turns some pages, then picks up again.

"‘Anyway, Myron,'" she reads, "‘eventually my children cut me out of their lives entirely. By the time of my second divorce, they said they had no respect for me. They kept in touch with Richard periodically, and he would send them money, but when he died, his new wife somehow got all the money, and the children were angry. Just livid! And suddenly they remembered more clearly what he had done to them, but they weren't enraged just at him—they were still enraged at me for letting it happen. They blocked me out, and the only time I heard from them was when they were in trouble. My daughter was in an abusive relationship and needed money to leave, but she wouldn't give me any details. Just send the money, she said, so I did. I sent her money to rent an apartment and buy food. And, of course, she didn't leave, and far as I know, she's still with that man. Then my son needed money for rehab but wouldn't let me visit.'"

Rita glances at the clock. "I'm getting to the end," she says. I nod.

"‘I lied to you about something else, Myron. I said that I couldn't be your bridge partner because I wouldn't be very good, but I used to be an excellent bridge player. I declined your offer because I imagined it would put me in a situation where I'd have to tell you what I'm telling you now—that we'd travel to a tournament in a city where one of my children lives and you would ask why we weren't visiting them, and I would make something up, say they were out of town, or ill, or what have you, but that wouldn't work every time. You would get suspicious, and sooner or later, I knew, you would put the pieces together and realize that something had gone dreadfully wrong. You would say to yourself, Aha! This woman I'm dating is not at all as she seems! '"

Rita's voice quivers and then breaks as she tries to get this last part out.

"‘So that's me, Myron,'" she reads, so quietly I can barely hear her. "‘That's the person you kissed in the parking lot at the Y.'"

As Rita looks down at the letter, I'm floored by how clearly she's spelled out the contradictions of her history. When she first came to me, she mentioned that I made her think of her daughter, whom she missed terribly. She said that her daughter had at one point talked about wanting to become a psychologist and had volunteered to work in a treatment center but then got sidetracked by her volatile relationship.

What I didn't tell Rita was that she, in some ways, reminded me of my mother. Not that my mother's adult life looked anything like Rita's—my parents have had a long, stable, and loving marriage, and my father is the kindest possible husband. It's that both Rita and my mother came from difficult and lonely childhoods. In my mother's case, her father died when she was just nine years old, and though her mother did her best to raise her and her sister, who was eight years older, my mother suffered. And her suffering affected the way she interacted with her own children.

So, like Rita's children, I went through a period where I shut my mom out. And while that had long passed, as I sit with Rita and hear her story, I have the urge to cry—not for my pain, but for my mother's. As much as I've thought about my relationship with my mother over the years, I've never considered her experience in exactly the way I am now. I have the fantasy that all adults should be given the opportunity to hear parents—not their own—rip themselves open, become completely vulnerable, and give their versions of events, because in seeing this, you can't help but come to a newfound understanding of your own parents' lives, whatever the situation.

While Rita read her letter, I wasn't just listening to her words; I was also observing her body, seeing how at times, it would crumple in on itself, how sometimes her hands would tremble and her lips would become pinched and her leg would shake and her voice would quaver, how she'd shift her weight when she paused. I'm watching her body now too, and sad as she seems, her body appears, if not at peace, the most relaxed I've seen it. She leans back on the couch, recovering from the exertion of the reading.

And then something astounding happens.

She reaches over to the tissue box on my side table and pulls one out. A clean, fresh tissue! She opens it up, blows her nose, then takes another from the box and blows her nose again. It's all I can do not to break into applause.

"So," she asks, "do you think I should send this?"

I picture Myron reading Rita's letter. I wonder how he'll respond as a father and grandfather, as somebody who was married to Myrna, likely a very different kind of mother to their now happily grown children. Will he accept who Rita is, all of her? Or will this information be too much, something he can't get past?

"Rita," I say, "that's a decision only you can make. But I'm curious—is this a letter for Myron or for your children?"

Rita pauses for a second, looks at the ceiling. Then she looks back at me, nods, but says nothing, because we each know the answer is Both.

Chapter 52 Mothers

"So," I'm telling Wendell, "we get back from a late dinner with friends and I ask Zach to take his shower, but he wants to play, and I tell him we can't because it's a school night. And then he has this complete overreaction and whines, ‘You're so mean! You're the meanest!'—which isn't like him at all—but also this anger just boils up inside me.

"So I say something petty like, ‘Oh, really? Well, maybe next time I shouldn't take you and your friends out to dinner, if I'm so mean.' Like I'm five years old! And he says, ‘Fine!' and slams his door—he's never slammed his door before—and gets in the shower and I go to my computer planning to answer emails but instead I'm having a conversation in my head about whether I really am mean. How could I have responded that way? I'm the adult, after all.

"And then all of a sudden I remember a frustrating phone conversation I'd had with my mother that morning and it clicks. I'm not angry with Zach. I'm angry with my mom. It was classic displacement."

Wendell smiles as if to say, Displacement's a bitch, isn't it? We all use defense mechanisms to deal with anxiety, frustration, or unacceptable impulses, but what's fascinating about them is that we aren't aware of them in the moment. A familiar example is denial—a smoker might cling to the belief that his shortness of breath is due to the hot weather and not his cigarettes. Another person might use rationalization (justifying something shameful)—saying after he's rejected for a job that he never really wanted the job in the first place. In reaction formation, unacceptable feelings or impulses are expressed as their opposite, as when a person who dislikes her neighbor goes out of her way to befriend her or when an evangelical Christian man who's attracted to men makes homophobic slurs.

Some defense mechanisms are considered primitive and others mature. In the latter group is sublimation, when a person turns a potentially harmful impulse into something less harmful (a man with aggressive impulses takes up boxing) or even constructive (a person with the urge to cut people becomes a surgeon who saves lives).

Displacement (shifting a feeling toward one person onto a safer alternative) is considered a neurotic defense, neither primitive nor mature. A person who was yelled at by her boss but could get fired if she yelled back might come home and yell at her dog. Or a woman who felt angry at her mother after a phone conversation might displace that anger onto her son.

I tell Wendell that when I went to apologize to Zach after his shower, I discovered that he, too, was displacing his anger onto me—some kids at recess had kicked Zach and his friends off the basketball courts. When the yard teacher said that everyone could play, the boys wouldn't pass the ball to Zach or his friends, and apparently some "mean" things were said. Zach was furious with those boys, but it was safer to be furious at his mom who wanted him to take a shower.

"The irony of the story," I continue, "is that we both launched our anger at the wrong target."

From time to time, Wendell and I have discussed the ways parental relationships evolve in midlife as people shift from blaming their parents to taking full responsibility for their lives. It's what Wendell calls "the changing of the guard." Whereas in their younger years, people often come to therapy to understand why their parents won't act in ways they wish, later on, people come to figure out how to manage what is. And so my question about my mother has gone from "Why can't she change?" to "Why can't I?" How is it, I ask Wendell, that even in my forties, I can be affected so deeply by a phone call from my mother?

I'm not asking for an actual answer. Wendell doesn't need to tell me that people regress; that you might astonish yourself with how far you've come, only to slip back into your old roles.

"It's like the eggs," I say, and he nods in recognition. I once told Wendell that Mike, my colleague, had said a while back that when we feel fragile, we're like raw eggs—we crack open and splatter if dropped. But when we develop more resilience, we're like hard-boiled eggs—we might get dinged up if dropped, but we won't crack completely and spill all over the place. Over the years, I've gone from being a raw egg to a hard-boiled egg with my mother, but sometimes the raw egg in me emerges.

I tell Wendell that later that night my mom apologized and we worked it out. Before that, though, I'd gotten caught up in our old routine—her wanting me to do something the way she wanted it done, me wanting to do it the way I wanted. And perhaps Zach perceives me the same way, trying to control him by getting him to do things the way I want too—all in the name of love, of wanting the best for our children. As much as I claim to be dramatically different from my mother, there are times when I'm eerily similar.

Now, talking about my phone conversation, I don't bother telling Wendell what my mom said or what I said because I know that's not the point. He won't position me as victim and my mom as aggressor. Years ago I might have deconstructed our pas de deux, trying to garner sympathy for my predicament: Can't you see? Isn't she difficult? But now I find his more clear-eyed approach comforting.

Today I tell Wendell that I've begun saving my mom's phone messages to my computer, the warm and sweet ones that I'll want to hear, that my son may want so that he can hear his grandmother's voice when he's my age—or, later, when we're both gone. I tell him that I'm also noticing that the nagging I do as a parent isn't for Zach as much as it is for me; it's a distraction from my awareness that he'll be leaving me one day, from my sadness, despite my wanting him to do the healthy work of what's called "separation and individuation."

I try to imagine Zach as a teenager. I remember my mom dealing with me as a teenager and finding me as alien as I might one day find Zach. It seems not that long ago that he was in preschool, and my parents were healthy, and I was healthy, and the neighborhood kids all ran outside to play every evening after dinner, and the only thought I had about the future at all was the sense of Things will be easier, I'll have more flexibility, more sleep. I never thought about what would be lost.

Who knew that a phone call with my mother could bring all this to the surface—that underneath the old mother-daughter frustration was not a wish for her to go away but a longing for her to stay forever?

I think of something else Wendell once said: "The nature of life is change and the nature of people is to resist change." It was a paraphrase of something he'd read that had resonated with him both personally and as a therapist, he told me, because it was a theme that informed nearly every person's struggles. The day before he said this, I had been told by my eye doctor that I had developed presbyopia, which happens to most people in their forties. As people age, they become farsighted; they have to hold whatever they're reading or looking at farther away in order to see it clearly. But maybe an emotional presbyopia happens around this age too, where people pull back to see the bigger picture: how scared they are to lose what they have, even if they still complain about it.

"And my mother!" Julie exclaims in my office later that day, recalling her own morning conversation with her mom. "This is so hard on her. She said her job as a parent was to make sure that her children were safe when she left the planet, but now she's making sure I'm leaving the planet safely."

Julie tells me that when she was in college, she got in a fight with her mom about Julie's boyfriend. Her mother thought that Julie had lost her natural buoyancy and that the boyfriend's behaviors—canceling plans at the last minute, pressuring Julie to edit his papers, demanding that Julie spend the holidays with him instead of with her own family—were the reason. Julie's mom suggested that she check out the campus counseling center to talk this over with a neutral party, and Julie exploded.

"There's nothing wrong with our relationship!" Julie shouted. "If I go to a counselor, it will be to talk about you, not him!" She didn't go to a counselor, though now she wishes she had. A few months later, the boyfriend dumped her. And her mom loved her enough not to say I told you so. Instead, when Julie called crying, her mom sat on the phone and simply listened.

"Now," Julie says, "my mom will have to go to a therapist to talk about me."

Recently, one of my lab tests came back positive for a marker for Sjögren's syndrome, an autoimmune disease most common in women over forty, but even so, my doctors aren't sure I have this because I don't have its chief symptoms. "It could be an unusual presentation," one doctor explained, then went on to say that I may have Sjögren's and something else or just something else that hasn't—still—been determined. Sjögren's, it turns out, is difficult to diagnose, and nobody knows what causes it—it could be genetic, environmental, triggered by a virus or bacteria, or some combination of those factors.

"We don't have all the answers," this doctor said, and while the prospect of still not knowing scared me, another doctor's comment frightened me even more: "Whatever it is will present itself eventually." That week, I'd told Wendell again that my greatest fear is leaving Zach without a mother, and Wendell said that I had two choices: I could give Zach a mother who's constantly worried about leaving him motherless, or I could give him a mother whose uncertain health makes her more acutely aware of the preciousness of their time together.

"Which scares you less?" he'd asked rhetorically.

His question made me think of Julie and how initially I'd hesitated when she asked if I would see her through her death. It wasn't just my inexperience that gave me pause, I realized later—it was that Julie would force me to face my own mortality, something I wasn't ready to do. Even after agreeing to her request, I'd been keeping myself safe in that relationship by never comparing my mortality to hers. After all, nobody has put a time limit on my lifespan in the same way. But Julie had learned to live with who she was and what she had—which was, in essence, what I'd helped her to do and what we all need to do. There's so much about our lives that remains unknown. I would have to cope with not knowing what my future held, manage my worry, and focus on living now. This couldn't be just a piece of advice I'd given Julie. It was time for me to take my own medicine.

"The more you welcome your vulnerability," Wendell had said, "the less afraid you'll feel."

This isn't how we tend to view life when we're younger. Our younger selves think in terms of a beginning, middle, and some kind of resolution. But somewhere along the way—perhaps in that middle—we realize that everyone lives with things that may not get worked out. That the middle has to be the resolution, and how we make meaning of it becomes our task. Although time feels like it's slipping away and I just can't hold on to it, something else is true too: My illness has sharpened my focus. It's why I couldn't write the wrong book. It's why I'm dating again. It's why I'm soaking in my mother and looking at her with a generosity I have for so long been unable to access. And it's why Wendell is helping me examine the mothering I'll leave Zach with someday. Now I keep in mind that none of us can love and be loved without the possibility of loss but that there's a difference between knowledge and terror.

As Julie imagines her mother in therapy, I wonder what Zach might say to a therapist about me when he's grown.

And then I think: I hope he finds his Wendell.

Chapter 53 The Hug

I'm curled up on the couch—my living-room couch, that is—with Allison, my college friend who's in town from the Midwest. We're surfing channels after dinner and land on John's show. She has no idea that John is my patient. I keep going, wanting to watch something light and breezy.

"Wait," Allison says, "go back!" Turns out she loves John's show.

I click back with the remote. I haven't seen the show in a while, so I try to catch up. Some of the people have changed; their relationships are new. I'm half watching, half dozing, content to be relaxing with my longtime friend.

"She's so great, isn't she?" Allison says.

"Who?" I ask sleepily.

"The therapist character."

I open my eyes. The main character is in what appears to be a therapist's office. The therapist is a petite brunette in glasses—but in typical Hollywood fashion, she's stunning in an intellectual way. Maybe that's the kind of woman John would take as a mistress, I think. The main character is getting up to leave. He appears troubled. She walks him to the door.

"You look like you need a hug," the main character says to the therapist.

The therapist seems surprised for a split second, then shifts into neutral. "Are you saying you'd like a hug?" she asks.

"No," he says. There's a beat, and then suddenly he leans down and hugs her. It's not sexual, but it's intense. The camera moves in on the character's face: his eyes are closed, but a tear escapes. He rests his head on her shoulder and seems at peace. Then the camera pans around to the therapist's face, and her eyes are open wide, bulging, as if she wants to bolt. It's like those scenes in romantic comedies after two people have finally slept together and one person has a look of utter bliss while the other looks completely freaked out.

"I think we both feel better now," the character says, letting go of the embrace and turning to leave. He walks away, and the scene ends on the therapist's expression: What the hell just happened?

It's a funny moment and Allison laughs, but I'm as confused as the therapist in the show. Is John acknowledging his affection for me? Is he making fun of himself, of the way he projects his needs onto others? Television shows are written months in advance. Was he aware back then of how obnoxious he can be? Is he now?

"So many shows have therapists lately," Allison says. She starts talking about her favorite TV therapists: Jennifer Melfi from The Sopranos, Tobias Fünke from Arrested Development, Niles Crane from Frasier, even the goofy Marvin Monroe on The Simpsons.

"Did you ever watch In Treatment?" I ask. "The Gabriel Byrne character?"

"Oh, yeah—loved him," she says. "But this one's more realistic."

"You think so?" I say, wondering now whether this character is modeled after me or after the "nice, but an idiot" therapist John saw before me. Shows are staffed by a dozen or so writers who are assigned their own episodes, so it's also possible that this character was created by another writer altogether.

I keep the show on through the credits, though I know exactly what they'll say. This episode was written by John.

"I watched your show last week," I tell John at our next session.

John shakes his head, mixes his salad with his chopsticks, takes a bite, chews.

"Fucking network," he says, swallowing. "They made me do it."

I nod.

"They said everyone likes therapists."

I shrug. Oh, well.

"They're like sheep," John continues. "One show has a therapist, every show has to have one."

"It's your show," I observe. "Couldn't you say no?"

John thinks about this. "Yeah," he says. "But I didn't want to be an asshole."

I smile. He didn't want to be an asshole.

"And now," John goes on, "because of the ratings, I'll never get rid of her."

"You're stuck with her," I say. "Because of the ratings."

"Fucking network," he repeats. John takes another bite, curses the chopsticks. "It'll be okay, though," he says. "She's kind of growing on me. We have some good ideas for next season." He wipes his mouth with his napkin, first the left corner of his lips, then the right. I watch him.

"What?" he says.

I raise my eyebrows.

"Oh, no, no, no," he says, protesting. "I know what you're thinking. You're thinking that there's some ‘connection'"—he puts air quotes around the word connection—"between the therapist and you. It's fiction, okay?"

"All of it?" I say.

"Of course! It's a story, a show. God, if I took any dialogue from here, it would kill the ratings. So, no, obviously it's not you."

"I'm thinking about the emotions more than the dialogue," I say. "Maybe there's some truth in them."

"It's a show," he repeats.

I give John a look.

"I mean it. That character has no more to do with you than the main character has to do with me. Other than his good looks, of course." He laughs at his joke. At least, I think it's a joke.

We sit in silence as John glances around the room—at the pictures on the wall, at the floor, at his hands. I remember his "One Mississippi, two Mississippi," back before he could tolerate the wait. After a couple of minutes, he speaks up.

"I want to show you something," he says, then adds sarcastically, "Can I get a permission slip to use my phone?"

I nod. He grabs his phone, scrolls through it, then hands it over to me. "That's my family." On the screen is a photo of a pretty blonde and two girls who appear to be cracking up as they do bunny ears on their mom—Margo, Gracie, and Ruby. (Turns out Margo wasn't the patient before me at Wendell's.) Next to Ruby is Rosie, the ugly dog that John loves dearly, with a pink bow on her patchy-furred head. After hearing so much about them, here they are, a mesmerizing tableau. I can't stop staring at them.

"Sometimes I forget how lucky I am," he says quietly.

"You have a lovely family," I say. I tell him how moved I am that he shared this picture with me. I start to hand the phone back, but John stops me.

"Wait," he says. "Those are my girls. But here's my boy."

I feel a pinch in my gut. He's about to show me Gabe. As the mom of a boy myself, I don't know if I can look without crying.

John scrolls through some photos, and there he is: Gabe. He's so adorable I feel like my heart might split in half. He has John's thick, wavy hair and Margo's bright blue eyes. He's sitting in John's lap at a Dodgers game, and he's got a ball in his hand, mustard on his cheek, and a look on his face like he's just won the World Series. John tells me that they'd just caught a ball up in the stands and Gabe was ecstatic.

"I'm the luckiest person in the whole wide world!" Gabe had said that day. John tells me that Gabe said it again when he got home and showed the ball to Margo and Gracie and then again when he was snuggling with John at bedtime. "The luckiest person in the whole world, the entire galaxy and beyond!"

"He was the luckiest that day," I say, and I can feel my eyes get wet.

"Oh, for Christ's sake, don't cry on me," John says, looking away. "Just what I need, a therapist who cries."

"Why not cry in response to sadness?" I say pointedly. John takes his phone back and types something in.

"As long as you're letting me use my phone," he says, "there's something else I want to show you." Now that I've seen his wife, his daughters, his dog, and his dead son, I wonder what else he wants to share.

"Here," he says, extending his arm in my direction. I take the phone and recognize the New York Times website. There's a review of the new season of John's show.

"Check out the last paragraph," he says.

I scroll to the end, where the reviewer waxes poetic about the direction the show has taken. The main character, the reviewer writes, has begun to share glimpses of his underlying humanity without losing his edge, and this makes him all the more interesting, his moments of compassion a delightful twist. If viewers used to be riveted by his perverse lack of regard for others, the reviewer contends, now we can't stop watching him struggle to reconcile this with what's buried beneath. The review concludes with a question: What might we discover if he continues to reveal himself?

I look up from the phone and smile at John. "I agree," I say. "Especially with the question posed at the end."

"It's a nice review, huh?" he says.

"It is—and more."

"No, no, no—don't start making this like he's talking about me again. It's the character."

"Okay," I say.

"Good," he says. "Just so we're straight on that."

I catch John's eye. "Why did you want me to see this?"

He looks at me like I'm an idiot. "Because it's a great review! It's the fucking New York Times!"

"But why that specific paragraph?"

"Because it means we'll go into syndication. If this season is doing so well, the network can't not give us another pickup."

I think about how hard it is for John to be vulnerable. How ashamed and needy it makes him feel. How scary connection seems.

"Well," I say, "I look forward to seeing where ‘the character'"—I make air quotations like John did—"goes in the next season. I think the future holds a lot of possibility."

John's body responds for him; he blushes. Caught, he blushes even more. "Thanks," he says. I smile and meet his eyes, and he manages to meet mine and hold my gaze for a good twenty seconds before glancing toward his feet. Looking down, he whispers, "Thanks for . . . you know"—he searches for the right word—"everything."

My eyes tear up again. "You're so welcome," I say.

"Well," John says, clearing his throat and folding his pedicured feet onto the couch. "Now that the preliminaries are over, what the fuck should we talk about today?"

Chapter 54 Don't Blow It

There are two main categories of people who are so depressed that they contemplate suicide. One type thinks, I had a nice life, and if I can just emerge from this terrible crisis—the death of a loved one; extended unemployment—I'll have something to look forward to. But what if I can't? The other type thinks, My life is barren, and there's nothing to look forward to.

Rita fell into the second category.

Of course, the story a patient comes into therapy with may not be the story she leaves with. What was included in the telling at first might now be written out, and what was left out might become a central plot point. Some major characters might become minor ones, and some minor characters might go on to receive star billing. The patient's own role might change too—from bit player to protagonist, from victim to hero.

A few days after her seventieth birthday, Rita comes in for her regular session. Instead of marking the occasion with her suicide, she's brought me a present.

"It's my birthday gift to you," she says.

Rita's gift is beautifully wrapped, and she asks me to open it in front of her. The box is heavy, and I try to figure out what it is. Bottles of my favorite tea that she had seen and commented on in my office? A large book? A set of the darkly comic mugs that she's begun selling on her website? (I'm hoping for these.)

I dig through the tissue paper and feel something ceramic (the mugs!), but as I lift the object out, I look at Rita and smile. It's a tissue-box cover painted with the words RITA SAYS—DON'T BLOW IT. The design is at once bold and unassuming, like Rita herself. I turn the box over and notice her logo with her business's name: It Ain't Over Till It's Over, Inc.

I begin to thank her but she interrupts me.

"It was inspired by our conversations about my not taking the tissues," Rita says, as if I might not get the reference. "I used to think, What is with this therapist, harping on which tissues I use? I never understood it until one of the girls"—she means one of the hello-family girls—"saw me take a tissue from my purse and said, ‘Ewwww! Our mom says you should never use dirty tissues!' And I thought, So does my therapist. Everybody needs a fresh box of tissues. And why not add a classy cover?" She says the word classy with a wink in her voice.

Rita's being here today doesn't signal the end of her therapy, nor do I measure the therapy's success by the fact that she's alive. After all, what if Rita had chosen not to kill herself on her seventieth birthday but was still severely depressed? What we're celebrating today isn't her continued physical presence so much as her still-in-progress emotional revival—the risks she's taken to begin to move from a position of ossification to one of openness, from self-flagellation to something closer to self-acceptance.

Though we have a lot to celebrate today, Rita's therapy will continue because old habits die hard. Because pain abates but doesn't vanish. Because broken relationships (with herself, with her children) require sensitive and intentional rapprochement, and new ones need support and self-awareness to flourish. If Rita is going to be with Myron, she'll have to better acquaint herself with her projections, her fears, her envy, her pain and past crimes, so that this next marriage, her fourth, becomes her last and first great love story.

Myron, it turns out, didn't respond to Rita's letter for a full week. She had handwritten her missive and stuffed it through a slit on the side of the communal bank of metal boxes into his, and at first Rita agonized about what might have happened. Her eyesight wasn't as good as it used to be, and her arthritis made it difficult to push the letter through the slightly rusted opening. Had she accidentally slipped it into the adjacent box, the one that belonged to the hello-family? How mortifying that would be! She obsessed about this possibility all week, tormenting herself in a spiral I call catastrophizing, until a text arrived from Myron.

In my office, Rita had read me the text: "‘Rita, thank you for sharing yourself with me. I want to talk with you, but there's a lot to absorb, and I need a bit more time. Back in touch soon, M.'

"A lot to absorb!" Rita exclaimed. "I know what he's absorbing—what a monster I am and how grateful he is to have spared himself! Now that he knows the truth, he's absorbing how he can retract everything he said when he mauled me in the parking lot!"

I noted how assaulted she felt by Myron's perceived abandonment, how quickly a romantic kiss had turned into a mauling.

"That's one explanation," I said. "But another is that you've hidden yourself from him so deliberately and for so long that he needs some time to take in this new part of the picture. He kissed you in the parking lot, poured his heart out to you, and you've avoided him ever since. And now he gets this letter. That is a lot to absorb."

Rita shook her head. "You see," she went on as if she hadn't heard a word I said, "this is exactly why it's better to keep my distance."

I told Rita what I tell everyone who's afraid of getting hurt in relationships—which is to say, everyone with a heartbeat. I explained to her that even in the best possible relationship, you're going to get hurt sometimes, and no matter how much you love somebody, you will at times hurt that person, not because you want to, but because you're human. You will inevitably hurt your partner, your parents, your children, your closest friend—and they will hurt you—because if you sign up for intimacy, getting hurt is part of the deal.

But, I went on, what was so great about a loving intimacy was that there was room for repair. Therapists call this process rupture and repair, and if you had parents who acknowledged their mistakes and took responsibility for them and taught you as a child to acknowledge your mistakes and learn from them too, then ruptures won't feel so cataclysmic in your adult relationships. If, however, your childhood ruptures didn't come with loving repairs, it will take some practice for you to tolerate the ruptures, to stop believing that every rupture signals the end, and to trust that even if a relationship doesn't work out, you will survive that rupture too. You will heal and self-repair and sign up for another relationship full of its own ruptures and repairs. It's not ideal, opening yourself up like this, putting your shield down, but if you want the rewards of an intimate relationship, there's no way around it.

Still, Rita called me every day to let me know that Myron hadn't responded. "Radio silence," she'd say into my voicemail, then add sarcastically, "He must still be absorbing."

I urged her to stay connected to all the good in her life despite her anxiety around Myron, to not withdraw into hopelessness because something was painful, not to be like the person on a diet who messes up once and says, "Forget it! I'll never lose weight," and then binges for the rest of the week, making herself feel ten times worse. I told her to report to me on my voicemail what she was doing each day, and, dutifully, Rita would tell me that she had dinner with the hello-family, created the syllabus for her college class, took "the grandkids"—her honorary granddaughters—to the museum for an art lesson, filled orders from her website. But without fail, she'd end with a caustic crack about Myron.

Secretly, of course, I too was hoping that Myron would rise to the occasion and that he'd do so sooner rather than later. Rita had gone out on a limb by revealing herself to him, and I didn't want the experience to confirm her deeply held belief that she was unlovable. As the days wore on, Rita got more antsy to hear from Myron—but so did I.

At our next session, I was relieved to hear that Rita and Myron had talked. And, indeed, he'd been taken aback by all that Rita had shared—and by the fact that she'd concealed so much. Who was this woman to whom he was drawn so strongly? Was this kind and caring person the same one who'd fled in fear while her husband hurt their children? Could this woman who doted on the hello-family kids be the same one who neglected her own? Was this funny, artistic, and whip-smart woman the same one who'd wiled away her days in a haze of depression? And if so, what did this mean? What effect might it have not just on Myron, but on his children and grandchildren? After all, he reasoned, whomever he dated would be woven into the fabric of his close-knit family.

During that week of "absorbing," Myron confessed to Rita, he spoke to Myrna, his deceased wife, whose counsel he had always relied on. He still talked to her, and now, she was telling him not to be so judgmental—to be cautious but not closed-minded. After all, had she not been fortunate enough to have loving parents and a wonderful husband, who knows what she would have done under the circumstances? He also called his brother back east, and he said, "Have you told her about Dad?" By which he meant, Have you told her about Dad's deep depression after Mom died? Have you told her that you were afraid of the same thing happening to you after Myrna died?

Finally, he'd phoned his best buddy from childhood, who listened intently to Myron's story and then said, "My friend, all you do is talk about this woman. At our age, who doesn't come with enough baggage to bring down an airplane? You think you've got nothing? You've got a dead wife you talk to every day and an aunt in the loony bin that nobody mentions. You're a good catch, but c'mon. Who do you think you are, Prince Charming?"

But most important, Myron spoke to himself. His voice inside said, Take a risk. Maybe our pasts don't define us but inform us. Maybe all she's been through is exactly what makes her so interesting—and so caring now.

"Nobody's ever called me caring before," Rita said in my office, tearing up as she related the conversation with Myron. "I was always called selfish and demanding."

"But you're not like that with Myron," I said.

Rita thought about that. "No," she said slowly. "I'm not."

Sitting with Rita, I was reminded that the heart is just as fragile at seventy as it is at seventeen. The vulnerability, the longing, the passion—they're all there in full force. Falling in love never gets old. No matter how jaded you are, how much suffering love has caused you, a new love can't help but make you feel hopeful and alive, like that very first time. Maybe this time it's more grounded—you have more experience, you're wiser, you know you have less time—but your heart still leaps when you hear your lover's voice or see that number pop up on your phone. Late-in-life love has the benefit of being especially forgiving, generous, sensitive—and urgent.

Rita told me that after her talk with Myron, they went to bed, and she enjoyed what she called "an eight-hour orgasm," just what her skin hunger craved. "We slept in each other's arms," Rita said, "and that felt just as good as the several orgasms that came before it." Over the past couple of months, Rita and Myron have become life partners and bridge partners; they won their first travel tournament. She still gets pedicures, not just for the foot massages but because somebody other than her actually sees her toes now.

That's not to say that Rita doesn't struggle; she does, sometimes mightily. While the changes in her life have added much-needed color to her days, she still experiences what she calls "pinches": sadness over her children as she watches Myron with his; anxiety that comes with the novelty of being in a trusting relationship after her unstable history.

More than once, Rita has been on the verge of reading something negative into something Myron has said, of sabotaging her relationship so that she could punish herself for her happiness or retreat to the familiar safety of loneliness. But each time, she has worked hard to reflect before acting; she channels our conversations and tells herself, like on her tissue-box cover, "Don't blow it, girl." I've told her about the many relationships I've seen implode simply because one person was terrified of being abandoned and so did everything in his or her power to push the other person away. She is starting to see that what makes self-sabotage so tricky is that it attempts to solve one problem (alleviate abandonment anxiety) by creating another (making her partner want to leave).

Seeing Rita in this phase of her life reminds me of something I once heard, though I can't recall from where: "Every laugh and good time that comes my way feels ten times better than before I knew such sadness."

For the first time in forty years, Rita tells me after I open her gift, she had a birthday party. Not that she expected one. She assumed she'd celebrate quietly with Myron, but when they walked into the restaurant, she found a group of people waiting for her—surprise!

"You can't do that to a seventy-year-old," Rita says today, relishing the memory. "I almost went into cardiac arrest."

Standing in the crowd, clapping and laughing, were the hello-family—Anna, Kyle, Sophia, and Alice (the girls made paintings as gifts); Myron's son and daughter and their children (who are gradually becoming another set of honorary grandchildren); and a few students from the college class she's teaching (one student told her, "If you want to have an interesting conversation, talk to an old person"). Also there were fellow members of her apartment board (after finally agreeing to join, Rita spearheaded a replacement of the rusted mailboxes) and some bridge-group friends that she and Myron had made recently. Nearly twenty people had come to celebrate a woman who a year earlier hadn't had a friend in the world.

But the biggest surprise had come that morning, when Rita got an email from her daughter. After writing to Myron, she had sent a well-thought-out letter to each of her kids, to which she'd received the usual nonresponses. But that day, there was an email from Robin, which Rita reads to me in session.

Mom: Well, you're right, I don't forgive you, and I'm glad you aren't asking me to. Honestly, I almost deleted your email without reading it because I thought it would be the usual bullshit. And then, I don't know why—maybe because we hadn't been in touch in so long—I thought I should at least open it and make sure that you weren't writing to say you were dying. But I wasn't expecting anything like this at all. I kept thinking, Is this my mom?

Anyway, I took your letter to my therapist—yes, I'm in therapy now; and no, I haven't dumped Roger yet—and I told her, "I don't want to turn out like this." I don't want to be stuck in an abusive relationship and making excuses not to leave, thinking it's too late or that I can't start over or God knows what I tell myself when Roger tries to rope me back in. I told my therapist that if you're finally able to be in a healthy relationship, I can do this too, and I don't want to wait until I'm seventy. Did you notice the email address I'm sending this from? It's my secret job-hunting email.

Rita cries for a while, then continues reading.

You know what's funny, Mom? After I read her your letter, my therapist asked if I had any positive memories of my childhood, and I couldn't think of anything. But then I started having dreams. I had a dream about going to a ballet and when I woke up, I realized that I was the ballerina in the dream, and you were the teacher, and I remembered that time when I was maybe eight or nine and you took me to a ballet class I was dying to go to, and they said I didn't have enough experience, and I cried, and you hugged me and said, "Come on, I'll teach you," and we went into an empty studio and pretended to do ballet for what seemed like hours. I remember laughing and dancing and wishing each moment would last forever. And there were more dreams after that, dreams that brought back positive memories from childhood, memories I didn't even know I had.

I guess I'm saying that I'm not ready to talk or try to have any kind of relationship right now, or maybe ever, but I wanted you to know that I remembered you at your best, which wasn't nearly enough, but it was something. For what it's worth, all of us were shocked by your letter. We all talked about it and agreed that even if we never have a relationship with you, we need to get our lives together because, like I said, if you can, so can we. My therapist said that maybe I don't want to get my life together because then you would win. I didn't know what she meant, but I think now I do. Or I'm starting to.

Anyway, happy birthday.

From,

Robin

P.S. Nice website.

Rita looks up from the email. She's not sure what to make of it. She wishes her sons had also replied, because she worries deeply about all of her kids. About Robin, who still hasn't left Roger. The boys—one still struggling with addiction issues, one divorced for the second time from a "nasty, critical woman who tricked him into marriage with a fake pregnancy," and the little one, who left college because of a learning disability, and has jumped from job to job ever since. Rita says she's tried to help, but they won't talk to her, and besides, what could she do for them now anyway? She's given financial help when asked, but that's all the contact they want.

"I worry about them," she says. "I worry all the time."

"Maybe," I say, "instead of worrying about them, you can love them. All you can do is find a way to love them that's about what they need from you and not what you need from them right now."

I think about what it must have been like for her kids to receive her letter. Rita had wanted to tell them about her relationship with the hello-family kids, to show them that she's changed, to let them see her loving maternal side that she'd like to offer them too. But I suggested that she leave that out for now. I imagined that they'd feel resentful, like the patient who told me about his father who left the family and married a younger woman and had kids with her. His father had been cranky and emotionally absent, but the kids in family number two got the Dad of the Year—he coached their soccer teams, attended their piano recitals, volunteered in their schools, took them on vacations, knew the names of their friends. My patient felt like an outsider, an unwanted visitor in family number two, and he was, like many people with similar stories, deeply hurt at seeing his dad become the father he wanted—but to different children.

"It's an opening," I say of the letter.

Eventually, two of the boys reach out to Rita and meet Myron. For the first time in the boys' lives, they start to form a relationship with a reliable, loving father figure. The youngest, though, remains hobbled by his anger. All of her children are distant and furious, but that's okay—at least this time, Rita is able to hear them without shielding herself with defensiveness or tears. Robin moved into a studio apartment and got an administrative job at a mental-health clinic. Rita had encouraged her to move west to be close to her and Myron, to provide some community as she rebuilds her life after Roger, but Robin doesn't want to leave her therapist (or, Rita suspects, Roger)—not yet.

It's not an ideal family, or even a functional one, but it's family. Rita revels in it but also reckons with the pain of all that she cannot fix.

And though Rita's days are finally full, she does have time to add a few more products to her website. One is a welcome sign that can be hung in people's entryways. It consists of two large words surrounded by various stick figures who all look unhinged in their own ways. The sign reads HELLO, FAMILY!

The second is a print she created for Myron's daughter, a teacher, who saw this message on a Post-it above Rita's desk and asked if she'd make an artistic version for her classroom to teach kids resilience. It reads FAILURE IS PART OF BEING HUMAN.

"I must have read that somewhere," she told me, "but I couldn't find an attribution." In fact, it was something I had said to her in session once, but I don't mind that she doesn't remember. Irvin Yalom, the psychiatrist, wrote that it was "far better that [a patient make progress but] forget what we talked about than the opposite possibility (a more popular choice for patients)—to remember precisely what was talked about but to remain unchanged."

Rita's third addition is a small print featuring two abstract gray-haired people, their bodies entwined and in motion, surrounded by cartoon-like exclamations: Ouch . . . my back! Slow down . . . my heart! In elegant calligraphy above the bodies, she wrote, OLD PEOPLE STILL FUCK.

It's her best-selling piece to date.