Page 41 of That Birthday in Barbados
“Don’t waste any energy worrying about that. I’ve paid the price for over indulgence more times than I’d care to admit.”
“I’ve never done this. Ever.”
“Then you were overdue. Everyone needs to lose control once in a while.”
“Why?” she asks, leaning back to look at me with an incredulous stare.
“Because what control freaks fear most is losing control.”
“How do you know I’m a control freak?”
“Aren’t you?”
She’d like to deny it. The evidence is there on her face, the struggle between making an argument to the contrary and the realization that she’s already given me plenty of evidence to support my assertion.
She shrugs. “Not that it does any good being one. Trying to control life is like trying to hold water in your hands. There’s only so much that will fit in your palm. The rest is just going to leak out.”
“Come on. Let’s walk. Don’t want to cramp up.”
“More discomfort at this point really won’tmake a difference.”
I put a loose arm around her shoulders and nudge her forward. “Yeah. It will.”We walk a couple of hundred yards before I say, “So you’relooking at a reformed control freak.”
“You?” she asks, the doubt clear in her voice.
“I look way too laid back, right?”
“Well . . . yeah. Control freaks don’t usually walk away from things like Wall Street.”
“No. They don’t. I was a perfectionist. Had to make straight A’s in school. Graduate at the top of my class. Be among the top hires.”
“That’s great, isn’t it? Impressive anyway.”
“Yeah, if you actually appreciate yourself for those accomplishments. I couldn’t do that because I was always looking for the thing I hadn’t yet done and defining myself by that.”
She’s quiet, and I have to wonder if she’s recognizing herself in what I’ve just said. “A counselor once told me the need to control is really about perfectionism and the inability to accept uncertainty. Do you agree with that?”
I glance out at the ocean to our right, stare at it for a few moments before I say, “I grew up in foster care, not knowing whether I would be in a different home from one week to another. And I guess my trying to create a life as perfect as I could make it was all about denying uncertainty.”
“Oh. Anders. I didn’t mean to pry-”
“It’s okay,” I say. “My mom was a teenager when she had me. Motherhood proved too hard at that point. She left me alone overnight when I was three and the state took me away from her.”
She looks horrified. “I’m sorry.”
I shrug. “That was part of my life. I can’tdeny it. I guess I’ve finally gotten to a place of accepting that all of that has made me who I am today. A man who accepts that there’s little in this world that’s for certain. At some point, I decided to take each day as it comes and try not to mold it in my image.”
She stops, folds her arms across her chest and stares out at the ocean far below. “Do you ever see your mother?”
“She died when I was seven. I never knew who my dad was.”
She looks at me, holds my gaze for several long moments. “That’s an awful lot of uncertainty.”
“It was. I tried to outrun it by trying to prove that the bad stuff can’t touch you if you’re perfect enough.”
“I know what you had to do to get a job with that firm on Wall Street. After all that, you just found the courage to walk away?”
“There’s a little more to it,” I say.
