Jackie stopped and peeked her little head into one of the offices, setting my paperwork down inside the room. “I’ve got April for you.”
I could smell an earthy, slightly sweet fragrance coming from the room. Maybe it was a flower essence straight from a field in Iceland from one of Mary’s visits. Maybe we would have our session on floor pillows, like the Japanese. Mary was so worldly.
Out from the office walked the flawless blonde. The record inside my head scratched and I felt like I was going to heave. Jackie spoke. “April, this is June,” and then she stopped, turning red as a ripe radish. “Oh my. April and June,” she said looking back and forth at us. “We’ve left out May. Someone find May!” she joked, while emphatically looking around the hallway like a jackass telling a bad joke that people had been subjected to their entire life.
June reached her hand out to shake mine, cutting off Jackie’s performance. “Hi, April, I’m so happy you’re here. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
I limply shook her hand and forced a meager shock-induced smile. Everything was crumbling—there would be no tenderness, no burrowing in an understanding bosom, no pearls of wisdom from around the globe, no safe space for me to speak my truth. Instead, there would be judgment from someone with the time to precisely apply bronzer, who would surely hear one word out of my mouth and give me the verdict of severe and incurable depression, or worse. I felt the blood drain out of my head and drop to the bottom of my feet as I suddenly realized I didn’t want to be looked at under a microscope, namely by this woman. I needed to find a way out. What would Marnie do? Marnie would point out the fact that an error had occurred and that she was very disappointed and what could they do to accommodate her? And Marnie would not worry about having any tact while doing it.
My heart was racing, telling me to do something instead of freezing. “Hi, umm, I was expecting Mary. That’s who I was originally booked with, or so I thought.”
“Was that on the notes?” Jackie asked. “I thought you were on the list for the next available counselor. I’m sorry, let me double check,” she said as she scampered off down the hall. The mole had ruined everything.
It was just June and I standing there in the hallway. She raised her eyebrows and said, “The month jokes never get old, do they?” I let out a sigh of relief that sarcasm had just entered the picture. “I’m sorry you were expecting Mary and we screwed things up. Do you want to reschedule? You won’t hurt my feelings if you prefer to do that.”
Yes, I wanted to reschedule. But Aaron had come home early for me and I had gotten my hopes up for some kind of help today. June stood there, kindly waiting for my answer, with a welcoming-enough smile, but looking like she was a cast member from Real Housewives of Orange County. I cleared my voice, let go of what I thought this would be like and nicely lied. “It’s fine.” Apparently I was believing my own bullshit lie because I felt the blood pumping back up to my face, the nausea subsiding. Marnie would’ve been at the front desk, deep in Jackie’s grill, taking DNA samples, pinpointing exactly where the error occurred, and asking for a discount because of the inconvenience. But I recalibrated myself and followed June into her office.
June’s office was just as organized and curated as she was, which wasn’t as off-putting as I expected because it felt so damn calming to be among order. Of course, there was a color scheme—teal, coral, and grey, with pops of bright yellow in the throw pillows. Mental illness meets beachy. There was an aqua-colored, knitted blanket folded up nicely on the side of the couch. I wondered what kind of scenario would have me—or anyone—cuddled up under a blanket on this couch. Maybe a past-life regression? The couch looked like the material of a grey business suit, not very different than the ones I had shoved my face into earlier that day in the closet, and there was a side bookcase made from what appeared to be weathered ship planks. This must be how people decorated when they weren’t making decisions amid a toddler meltdown at Ikea.
“Have a seat.” June motioned toward the couch, sitting herself down in a cream linen armchair with colorful, upholstered buttons along the back. I looked around, avoiding direct eye contact and analyzing everything within the walls. My feet dangled from the couch, like a little girl’s, and when I noticed it, I quickly sat forward, feet on the floor, and began to sweat. June leaned over and put my paperwork on her desk. “I kind of hate these things. Let’s move beyond the boxes and talk about you. I see that you’d like some guidance about what is normal and how to make things easier. Where would you like to begin?”
I looked at her and took a breath, pausing for a moment. She had not crossed over into the fake eyelash territory. There was hope.
“I guess I’ll start with the fact that this whole motherhood setup is hard for me. I feel like I’m in survival mode most every day because it’s all so constant. I have two kids. Someone’s always hungry, tired, cranky, growing out of shoes, nails need trimming again, slept too much, didn’t sleep enough. And there’s so much screaming and crying. I feel like I’m parenting with a gun to my head, trying to do whatever it takes to appease the shooter.” Then I clarified, “My kids are the shooter.”
She gave me a quick nod. I kept going.
“I am interrupted during every task and pulled in different directions by whoever needs me that minute. It’s like I’m on a short leash and my family are the ones holding it. I don’t feel depressed, or whatever I think depressed is supposed to feel. But I also don’t enjoy being with my beautiful and needy children—namely my toddler—for thirteen hours straight every single day for years on end while my husband has a career and gets to shit alone in a building with only adults. Soooo, I guess I just want to know if what I’m feeling is normal or if I’m a whiny, ungrateful bitch who should just make peace with motherhood and be happy.”
I took a much-needed breath. I knew I had been talking rapidly—one of the red flag checkboxes on the questionnaire. Shit.
June leaned her head back a bit, as if she was trying to get a higher view of me. She appeared to be collecting her thoughts before speaking. Either that or she was about to bolt.
“First, what I hear you saying is that you feel overwhelmed with the day-to-day duties of motherhood, especially with your toddler. It sounds like you are multitasking more than you want to be. I also hear a possible agreement you have about being able to handle it more easily, that there’s something wrong with you if you aren’t able to. That’s the first part of what I’m hearing, correct?”
She had just magically poured my verbal vomit through a sieve.
“Yes, that’s exactly it,” I said. I felt a fire inside me. “The fun, easy moments exist, but they aren’t the bulk of it. How I thought being a mom would feel and how it actually feels are often two different things. Should it be that way?”
“Different stages have different challenges.” She looked down at my form, searching. “Remind me again how old your children are?”
“Violet is two and Elliot is eight.”
June nodded her head like something new clicked. “I don’t know if you remember with your first, but life with a two-year-old is one of the most challenging phases of motherhood. Two and I’m sorry to say, three, are the times when many children are their most difficult. Their needs and desires blur together, everything feels immediate, and they will do whatever it takes to get those things. The role of constant caretaker to a person who can’t be reasoned with is a somewhat impossible spot to be in. As you well know,” she said, softly motioning her open hand toward me. “It doesn’t make you ungrateful to need a break from that role.”
I felt like I’d just taken off a wet coat. My shoulders released. I wished Aaron had been there to hear June’s words. They were different coming out of a professional’s mouth than they would be coming out of a friend’s.
“But people—other moms—come up to me all the time and say things like, ‘I would give anything to have mine that little again,’ and it makes me feel like I should just be loving every minute of it. An
d I want to say to these moms, ‘If you would give anything to have little ones again, then why aren’t you having more kids? If it’s so fucking fun, then why did your husband get a vasectomy?’”
A tiny smile snuck up on June’s face. I felt relief that an f-bomb seemed to be welcomed. I would’ve had to leave otherwise.
“So you are feeling judged for not finding it entirely easy?”
“In a way, yes.”
“Is it judgment from others or from yourself?”
I tilted my head to the side and looked up, as if the answer was stuck in the corner of the room. But I didn’t know. No one had directly told me that I had to love all of motherhood, but on the other hand, no one had told me that it was okay not to, specifically the memes about how many summers we have left with our kids, so we better soak up all the fucking fun while we can.
“Don’t worry if you don’t know yet. We’re just scratching the surface today. What did you think motherhood would be like?”
“I thought it would be amusement parks and camping trips and building couch forts. All smiles. But those things are so much harder with a toddler, to the point where it’s near torture for me to manage just going out to eat as a family. I love my little girl, but right now she adds this wild-card layer to our family and we all—well, mostly me —have to be ready to dodge her toddler bullshit at any moment. If we make plans and she doesn’t nap, we’ll have to cancel because no one wants to wrangle a cranky toddler in a booth for an hour while they try to eat. I didn’t expect it all to feel so fragile. I know I should know this, she’s my second kid. But their age gap is so big that I’ve seriously forgotten everything.”
“I don’t blame you for not wanting to herd a toddler while out to dinner,” June said. “And at least you know your boundaries and will cancel a dinner if it makes the night more tolerable for you and your family.”
That was one way to look at it. I guess my choice to cancel—or not even make plans—always felt like a weakness, but maybe it helped keep my head above water. I was in survival mode with a two-year-old, but I also was surviving, albeit barely.
“I just want my old life back.” The second I said it, I wished I hadn’t. The words escaped my mouth before I could put a more grateful spin on them so I didn’t seem like a monster who didn’t love her kids. I did love my kids. I never questioned that part. But June didn’t flinch.
I looked down at the floor and then back up at her. Something new was making its way to my surface. She waited.
“I guess I signed up for a job that I really knew nothing about. And I assumed that I would love it so much that I could take the twenty-four-hour, seven-days-a-week shift, but maybe I just wasn’t a good candidate for the job.” My voice cracked and my throat ached admitting that. Then the tears came. June subtly slid the tissue box next to me on the couch.
“None of us are necessarily good candidates, April. Nobody can do that job without falling apart, with those kinds of hours and demands. And nobody should.”
I nodded, dabbing my tears before too much mascara damage could be done.
Switching the cross of her legs, June continued, “Maybe you’re realizing that you need to fit in more breaks for yourself. Or perhaps being a stay-at-home mom isn’t for you. It’s not for everyone. If you tease out the self-judgment there, could it be possible that you might thrive having more of a balance, like you mentioned your husband has?”
June made it sound so easy, as if the self-judgment could be neatly boxed up and shipped away. She leaned forward and spoke quietly, almost in a whisper. “Could it be that what you feel like you should be doing and what you are capable of doing might be two different things? And might that be okay?”
That statement pinged somewhere deep in my core. I didn’t want it to be true, but it was. “How do I ever rectify any of this? It’s like I’m in a prison of my own doing—I don’t want to be with them, but I also don’t want to be without them.” I finally saw the lure of the knitted blanket on the couch. I wanted to crawl under it and never come out. This whole matter was too tangled and too contradictory. There were no adequate words, only tears.
June waited patiently while the emotion washed over me, and then steered the ship forward. “I hear you saying that you are the main caretaker, in excess. How does your husband fit into this picture? Does he help you?”
Just when things couldn’t possibly feel worse, now I was adding “guilt for painting my husband as a deadbeat dad” to the mix.
“Oh no, my husband, Aaron, he’s a great dad. He has Nerf gun wars with Elliot and stuffed animal tea parties with Violet. They all watch Star Trek together. The kids adore him. He’s a fun dad.” I found myself struggling to come up with examples of how Aaron helped me.
“In addition to him, do you have a family member, a friend or a babysitter that you can call on to help you out?”
“My mom lives out of state, but sometimes my mother-in-law helps. My next-door neighbor and I trade kids sometimes. But in terms of having an outside babysitter we pay for, I’ve never used one.”
June’s eyebrows raised. I finally realized just how crazy I sounded. Again, it was really different having a trained professional react to your parenting choices than your friend who also has flaws.
“I know, I know. My friend always tells me I need to get a babysitter, that it’s the best thing ever.”
June made a note on the paper. Shit, she’s probably writing “Diagnosis: insanity.”
“Let’s talk about your alone time, April. Does this exist?”
“Does sleeping count?”
“It does not.”
“So then basically never. Probably just doctor’s appointments, Target runs when Aaron can watch the kids after work, Elliot’s teacher conferences, and stuff like that. I recently got a few cavities filled and had about three hours of alone time. And right now I am experiencing ‘alone time’ here with you.”
“Did you just refer to getting cavities filled as ‘alone time’?”
“Yes. Yes, I did. Even though my teeth were being drilled into, there was no whining, no people climbing on me, no requests for food. Alone time. Autonomy. Sort of.”
June laughed with a smidgen of sorrow and then, with a burst of new energy, sat up straight in her chair. “Okay, let’s say money wasn’t an object and a magical Mary Pop-pins appeared who was a trustworthy babysitter that your kids liked. What would you do?”
“Oh wow.” I gladly dove headfirst into this alternate reality. “I would for sure make Mary Poppins feed Violet all of her meals. I would go to Target alone, in the day time. I would buy organic strawberries every time. And those overpriced bath salts in the clear glass jars. I would hire a cook to make all our dinners and they would have to make one meal that worked for everyone’s tastes, like I do every night. Oh, and a housecleaner. A pube-free bathroom floor. And a professional organizer too. The stacks of school papers and toys are closing in on me. I can’t imagine what it would feel like to be de-cluttered and for everything to have its place, like it did when I grew up.”
June had grabbed her pen and was taking notes as I went hog wild.
“And I would go to Nordstrom—not even Nordstrom Rack. I’d go legit Nordstrom and I’d actually try things on in the store, alone, instead of just buying, trying on at home and returning.” And then I remembered. “I could even get back into sewing. Having a Mary Poppins would mean I’d get to focus on one project for hours. Without interruption, right?”
June nodded yes and scribbled something on her paper.
“I could do anything without interruption. I could maybe dance again.”
“Super.” June stopped me. “There is so much here for us to work with. Let’s take a few of these pieces and move toward something actionable today.”
“But how does any of this dream life happen without the endless money and enslavement of a Mary Poppins?” It was like I had woken up from the world’s best dream, that moment right before Justin Timberlake and I finally co
nsummate our love.
“First, we have to think without any restrictions so that we can tap into what it is we specifically want.”
I was beginning to feel hopeful.
June looked at her paper. “Things I heard you say: you want help with harder tasks with Violet, specifically feeding her meals. You’d like more alone time, even if you’re running errands for your family. You’d like help with making dinners that please everyone. You’d like to get some special clothing pieces from somewhere nice. You’d like to have a clean, organized home. And the one that seemed to hold the most oomph with you was that you’d like to get back into sewing.”
It was as if Santa were here reading my Christmas list back to me.
“Yeah, just all that, no big deal,” I shrugged.
“Let’s pick two and focus on those for right now. Start small. I have something that might help you with the organization and de-cluttering piece. Now, which other item would you like to tackle?”
I tried to choose something more practical, but I couldn’t hide from myself or June. “Sewing. But I don’t know how to get the time.”
“Let’s not worry about the ‘how.’ That will come, and it is your job to seek it out,” she said with a wink that wrinkled a long thin scar on her right temple. “Before I see you again, I want you to take one step to find time to sew alone.”
I groaned. “This means I have to get a babysitter, right?”
“That’s entirely up to you. You will know what you need to do. In regards to organization, there is a book I’m going to loan you called The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo.” I’d heard of it, and the title alone was orgasmic. I wasn’t confident about finding time to read anything other than Goodnight Moon, but this felt vital.
“What about a next session together? Next week?” June inquired.
“What do you think I need?” My worry about a diagnosis, which had been dormant all session, suddenly crept back up to the surface. June put her paper and pen down.
Adult Conversation Page 7