Maybe You Should Talk to Someon - Lori Gottlieb Page 0,74

used to hang it up once their spouses died. Now they date.” I hear the blare of horns before she continues. “And there are so many divorced people out there too.”

“Are you trying to tell me you’re having marital problems?”

“Yes.”

“He’s farting again?”

“Yes.”

It’s their ongoing joke. Jen has warned her husband that she’s moving into the next room at night if he keeps eating dairy, but he loves dairy and she loves him, so she never moves.

I pull into the driveway and tell Jen I have to go. I park the car and unlock the front door to our house, where my son is being cared for by his babysitter, Cesar. Technically, Cesar works for us, but really, he’s like an older brother to my son and a second son to me. We’re close with his parents and sibling and his multitude of cousins, and I’ve watched him grow up through the years into the college student he is now, taking care of my son as he grows too.

I open the door and yell, “Hello, family!”

Zach shouts from his room, “Hey, Mom!” Cesar takes off an earbud and calls out from the kitchen, where he’s preparing dinner, “Hey!”

Nobody runs up excitedly to greet me, nobody squeals with delight, but I don’t feel deprived the way Rita does—just the opposite. I go to my bedroom to change into sweatpants, and when I come back out, we all start talking at once, sharing our days, teasing one another, vying for airtime, putting plates on the table and pouring the drinks. The boys bicker over setting the table and race to get the bigger portions. Hello, family.

I once told Wendell that I’m a terrible decision maker, that often what I think I want doesn’t turn out the way I’d imagined. But there were two notable exceptions, and both proved to be the best decisions of my life. In each case, I was nearly forty.

One was my decision to have a baby.

The other was my decision to become a therapist.

25

The UPS Guy

The year Zach was born, I began acting inappropriately with my UPS delivery guy.

I don’t mean that I tried to seduce him (it’s hard to be seductive with milk stains on your T-shirt). I mean that whenever he delivered a package—which was often, given the need for baby supplies—I would try to detain him with conversation simply because I craved adult company. I’d strain to make small talk about the weather, a news headline, even the weight of a package (“Wow, who knew diapers were so heavy! Do you have kids?”) while the UPS driver fake-smiled and nodded as he not-so-subtly backed away from me to the safety of his truck.

At the time I was working from home as a writer, which meant that all day, I sat alone in my pajamas at a computer when I wasn’t feeding, changing, bouncing, or otherwise engaging with an adorable but demanding ten-pound human with a talent for screaming like a banshee. Basically, I interacted with what I called, in my darkest moments, “a gastrointestinal tract with lungs.” Before having a baby, I’d relished the freedom of a non-office job. But now I longed to get dressed every day and be in the company of verbal grownups.

It was during this perfect storm of isolation and plummeting estrogen that I started to wonder if I’d made a mistake by leaving medical school. Journalism suited me well—I got to cover hundreds of topics for dozens of publications, and they all revolved around a common thread that fascinated me: the human psyche. I didn’t want to stop writing, but now, while reeking of spit-up in the middle of the night, I reconsidered the possibility of a dual career. If I became a psychiatrist, I reasoned, I could interact with people in a meaningful way, helping them to be happier, but I could also have the flexibility to write and spend time with my family.

I sat on the idea for a few weeks, until one spring morning I called up my former dean at Stanford and floated my plan by her. A renowned researcher, she was also the med-school version of a camp mom—warm, wise, intuitive. I had run her mother-daughter book group when I was in medical school and knew her well. I was sure that after I explained my thought process, she would be supportive of my plan.

Instead she said: “Why would you do that?”

And then: “Besides, psychiatrists don’t make people happy!”

I remembered the old medical-school quip: “Psychiatrists don’t