Page 14 of The Therapist
‘I know you won’t because we don’t hurt people’s feelings, do we? That’s not nice.’
Iggy nods his head vigorously. ‘We don’t say nasty things that we wouldn’t want people to say to us,’ he says, echoing what I have told him many times.
I turn around and start the car.
‘Can we still have pizza?’ he asks in a small voice, and I feel like someone has punched me. Neither Oliver nor I yell at Iggy. It’s never really been necessary. He must be confused by my over-the-top response.
‘Yes, we can,’ I tell him and I start driving.
I know that I will need to discuss what just happened with SueEllen. It was not a normal reaction, obviously.
The older I get, the more distant school seems until something like this happens or until a client like Sandy, cloaked in beauty, walks into my office and suddenly I am the overweight teenager with a single friend who was bullied as badly as I was, actually worse than I was, much worse. I try to push away thoughts of Janine, my one school friend, short with red hair and freckles and terrible skin but a very kind heart. I feel like she could be sitting right next to me in the car.
I don’t want to think about her, about how she called me one night and needed to speak to me but I wasn’t in the mood and told my mother to tell her I was busy. If we were teenagers now, she would just message me and I would be able to respond with an emoji or a single sentence. If we were teenagers now, she would be able to find a Reddit forum and discuss her problems. But this was before smartphones and I didn’t feel like a conversation. I have regretted that decision for twenty years now.
I still have a long way to go to put my teen years behind me.
I think about Sandy telling me that she could talk to me all day. I certainly couldn’t imagine that, and I would never think of approaching a woman like her for friendship. But now that I am tasked with helping her and guiding her, I worry that my own issues may be preventing me from doing the best job.
‘Rubbish,’ I say aloud.
‘What, Mum?’ asks Iggy.
‘Nothing, sweetheart, nothing.’
A terrible thought occurs to me as I make my way to our local pizza place. Maybe it’s not Sandy who can’t be trusted. Maybe it’s me. What if I can’t trust myself and the way I’m dealing with her because of my own personal history?
I need to find a way to bring my best self to my sessions with Sandy, regardless of what I think or know about her.
With that thought in my head, I park and get my son out of the car, grabbing him in a quick tight hug before we go and order pizza.
‘I love you, baby,’ I tell him.
He wriggles in my arms. ‘Yes, Mum, I know, I’m hungry, put me down.’
A happy little boy bounces into the pizza store. I need to borrow some of that and make sure I’m bringing my best self to work when I next see Sandy. I do want to help the woman, after all.
Of course you do,I reassure myself,of course you do.
SIX
Sandy
Today is the next step of the plan and it’s all going so well. Ben telling me that he could no longer treat me was a bit of a spanner in the works but I’ve adjusted.
It took more effort than I would have thought to get ‘the husband’ to agree. But I managed it in the end.
I waited until the children were in bed and definitely asleep. He likes to do the bedtime routine, to play the ‘good dad’. He reads a story to Lila first, lies next to her on her bed with the princess pink duvet cover and reads about fairies and creatures who live in a magical tree. I enjoyed creating my daughter’s bedroom. I made her the kind of space that I wished for growing up, when I had a room with a bed and a chair, a desk and a bookcase filled with books that I never had any interest in reading. Sometimes, when the children are at school, I go into that bedroom and lie down on the bed and imagine a different childhood for myself, one with glamorous wealthy parents whose only desire was for me to shine brightly and look beautiful. I know it’s fashionable to blame your childhood for the person you are but I think that I am who I was always goingto be. My mother, Maureen, with her sensible short hair and a chunky body, was never quite able to believe I had come from her.
‘People used to stop me in the streets,’ she has told me, ‘just to say what a beautiful baby I had.’ They never said that about my older sister and that’s because she looks exactly like my mother. And she has grown into the same kind of woman, lumpy and practical. She’s a librarian in a small country town, and when I see her, I can’t help looking at the rough skin on her hands or getting irritated by the fact that she doesn’t wear any make-up. She has two children with her husband, who’s a farmer, and I don’t think I’ve exchanged more than a perfunctory greeting with her for years.
I think my mother would have preferred it if my beauty had diminished as I got older, rather than blossomed.
I know she felt that if she could keep me on the straight and narrow, direct my interests towards working hard and doing good, then I would become a worthy human being despite my looks. Beauty seemed to be inherently problematic to my parents, as though it was an indication of something lacking in the person, something that took away from who they could be rather than something that added to a life.
My father had his own brand of keeping me on track to becoming a good person. But there was no way either of them could change the path I was on. Only I could do that with a stupid infatuation. They were delighted when I got married and then had two children because they thought I had finally settled into an acceptable life. ‘You’ll never love anything the way you love your children,’ my mother told me when I was pregnant with Felix and I wanted to believe her but I knew it wasn’t the truth. Children require sacrifice, demand you give them everything you have and everything you are, and I was never cut out for that.
But I’ll make sure things are put right now.
