Maybe You Should Talk to Someone

by Lori Gottlieb

  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.

  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 t
wenty 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?”

  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.