She, Myself & I by Whitney Gaskell Page A

family.”
    “But you’ve said you don’t want to get married, or even date again,” Sophie said carefully. We’d suddenly swapped roles: I was emoting, she was analyzing.
    “I don’t know what I want,” I said miserably.
    Chapter Twelve

    “What do you think you should do?” Elise asked.
    “Don’t do that. Don’t get all shrinky on me,” I groaned.
    God, I hated therapy. It always seemed so self-indulgent to me, wasted money and wasted time. I’d first seen Elise several years ago, when Scott and I had been married for about six months and I’d been struggling with a low-grade depression that I couldn’t seem to shake. One year and a grossly large amount of money later, we’d discussed everything from the competitive nature of my relationship with Sophie to the many issues stemming from my parents’ acrimonious divorce to the distance I sometimes felt from my new husband, and I was no closer to uncovering what had been bothering me. So I stopped going.
    But now that I was wading through this postdivorce swamp, I for once decided to take my mother’s advice and called Elise for an appointment. I figured that now more than ever I probably needed a neutral opinion on how to proceed. Should I call Zack? I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about him, but the idea of getting further involved with him terrified me. What if he, too, was gay, and I was somehow doomed to a life of dating and marrying closeted men? And was it really so crazy to consider having a baby on my own? Or were my baby pangs the result of loneliness and grief?
    “Okay, here’s my non-shrinky answer for you: you’re really screwed up,” Elise said, peering at me through her thick, tortoiseshell-framed glasses.
    “What? You’re not supposed to say that,” I protested. “You’re supposed to be supportive and kind.”
    “Whenever I try to be supportive and kind, you accuse me of being shrinky,” Elise pointed out. Accurately.
    “True, but I don’t think you should go around telling your clients that they’re screwed up. At least give me some hope.”
    Elise looked at me thoughtfully. But then, Elise did everything thoughtfully. She probably peed thoughtfully and went through thoughtful labor with her children. She even looked like a therapist, with her tasteful brown pageboy haircut and her gently rounded face.
    “I didn’t say you’re irredeemably screwed up. If you wanted to, you could overcome it,” she offered.
    “With another year of therapy spent discussing why my mother always felt she had to befriend my friends?” I asked, and crossed my arms.
    “No, that’s not what I was going to say. But I’m not going to tell you if you’re just going to sit there and be sarcastic,” she said.
    “You can’t do that! I’m paying you for this!”
    “Paige, you are not the craziest client I’ve ever had, but I think you might be the most stubborn. Which is not necessarily better,” Elise sighed.
    I bit my lip. I was a little intrigued. “Okay, I won’t be sarcastic. Tell me how I can unscrew myself, ha-ha.”
    Elise shook her head, obviously not appreciating my shrink humor. “Okay, here it is: stop being so fucking closed off.”
    Fucking? I’d never heard Elise swear before. It was like hearing your parents curse for the first time—it was both titillating and disillusioning, and not at all what you expect to come out of the mouth of someone wearing a long flowered skirt and matching pink sweater set.
    “Fucking?” I repeated.
    “Yes. Fucking. I’m not denying that you’ve had a tough time, and I can understand how having to cope with the loss of your pregnancy, the loss of your marriage, and finding out that your partner was not the man you thought he was would be overwhelming. And it does take time to get over those kinds of traumatic events, absolutely. But you’re not trying to heal. You’re just closing yourself off and making stupid declarations about how you’re never going to risk getting involved