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 emoti
onally 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.
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone_A Therapist, HER Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed Page 40