Maybe You Should Talk to Someon - Lori Gottlieb Page 0,169

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 emotionally 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