Maybe You Should Talk to Someon - Lori Gottlieb Page 0,129
now? She didn’t know how to work the darn thing anyway.
Then one afternoon, Rita ran into Myron and Randie holding hands in the lobby, and, to make herself feel better, she hightailed it to the art-supply store and splurged on materials. Carrying the goods up to her apartment, she tripped over a couple of kids who darted out from nowhere. The bags of brushes, acrylics, and gouaches, the canvases and cartons of clay—all of it came tumbling down, along with Rita, who was caught at the last second by a strong pair of hands.
The hands belonged to the kids’ father, Kyle, whom Rita had seen many times through her peephole but had never met. He was the dad from the “Hello, family” apartment across from hers, and he’d saved his neighbor from a potential broken hip.
After Kyle asked the kids to apologize for not looking where they were going, they all gathered up Rita’s supplies and carried them into her apartment. There, in her living room turned art studio, they saw Rita’s work covering the entire space—portraits and abstracts on easels, ceramics near a potter’s wheel, charcoals in progress hanging from a board on the wall. The kids were in heaven. And Kyle was stunned. You have talent, he said. Real talent. You should sell these.
They went back to their apartment, and shortly after, when Kyle’s wife, Anna, arrived home (“Hello, family!”), the kids begged their mom to go across the hall with them to see “the art lady’s” living room. Rita was stationed, as usual, at the peephole, and the knock came before Rita had a chance to back away. She counted to five, asked, “Who is it?” and greeted them with mock surprise.
Soon Rita was teaching art to Sophia and Alice, ages five and seven, and often joined the “Hello, family” for, well, family dinner. One afternoon, Anna came home and yelled, “Hello, family!” to Sophia and Alice, who were painting in Rita’s living room. The kids called back, “Hello!” and then Alice turned to Rita and asked why she didn’t answer when their mom said hello.
“I’m not family,” Rita said matter-of-factly, to which Alice replied, “Yes, you are. You’re our California grandma!” The girls’ grandparents lived in Charleston and Portland. They visited often, but it was Rita who saw them nearly every day.
Anna, meanwhile, had hung one of Rita’s paintings over the sofa in the family’s living room. Rita also painted two custom pieces for the kids’ room—a dancer for Sophia and a unicorn for Alice. The girls were elated. Anna tried to pay Rita for her work, but Rita refused, insisting they were gifts. Finally, Kyle, a computer programmer, convinced Rita to let him add a feature to her website, an online store. He sent out an email to the parents of Sophia’s and Alice’s classmates, and soon Rita was taking orders for children’s custom portraits. One parent also purchased ceramics for her dining room.
Given all of these developments, I had expected Rita’s mood to improve. She was coming alive, leading a less constricted life. She had people to talk to every day. She was sharing her artistic talent with others who admired it. She wasn’t invisible in the same way she’d been when she first came to see me. But still, her pleasure or joy or whatever she felt (“It’s nice, I suppose,” was the most she would say) lived beneath a dark cloud, a running litany of how if Myron really meant what he’d said in the parking lot at the Y, he would have dated Rita instead of that disgusting Randie in the first place, how no matter how kind they were, the hello-family weren’t really her family, and how she would still die alone.
She seemed to be stuck in what the psychologist Erik Erikson termed despair.
In the mid-1900s, Erikson came up with eight stages of psychosocial development that still guide therapists in their thinking today. Unlike Freud’s stages of psychosexual development, which end at puberty and focus on the id, Erikson’s psychosocial stages focus on personality development in a social context (such as how infants develop a sense of trust in others). Most important, Erikson’s stages continue throughout the entire lifespan, and each interrelated stage involves a crisis that we need to get through to move on to the next. They look like this:
Infant (hope)—trust versus mistrust
Toddler (will)—autonomy versus shame
Preschooler (purpose)—initiative versus guilt
School-age child (competence)—industry versus inferiority
Adolescent (fidelity)—identity versus role confusion
Young adult (love)—intimacy versus isolation
Middle-aged adult (care)—generativity versus stagnation