1
Healing Wounds
They say time creeps by when things are going badly…and I couldn’t agree more.
I’d suffered, and the worst part of all is I was the one to blame for it. I’d made a decision that had seemed like the right one, but it was difficult to live with. I’d abandoned the guy I loved.
Maybeabandonedis too strong a word. The guy in question still had his friends on his side: Will, Naya, even his brother Mike. They were with him. I was the one who’d stepped away, who’d gone back to stay with my parents, who’d left everything behind.
A year before that, I’d decided to go away to college and study a major that didn’t interest me, just to get as far as possible from the life I’d lived before. That’s where I met all the people I just mentioned, along with Jack Ross, who was something more complicated than just afriend.
He helped me understand that my relationship with Monty wasn’t love, that I’d need to learn to think for myself, that I had devoted my entire life to pleasing others no matter whether they wanted to make me happy.
I don’t think he realized that the first decision I’d make for myself would be leaving him. Jack needed to chase his dreams, and I wasn’t ready to accompany him. I needed to find out what my own dreams were.
I’d like to take the credit for these insights, which sound like they came straight from a self-help book, but the truth is I’d learned them from the woman who had been my therapist for the last year. My big brother and big sister, Spencer and Shannon, had helped me pay for my sessions with her until I managed to scrape together money of my own.
In a single year, I’d worked as a cashier, a gas station attendant, a warehouse worker, and assistant phys ed teacher under Spencer. Some of these jobs had overlapped, and they’d taken up so much of my time that all I could ever think about was how tired I was. And funny enough, that helped me a lot.
The chance to do as I wanted, make my own money, decide things for myself…it was a huge change. One I hadn’t known how to anticipate. Along with my therapy, it allowed me to see things from a different perspective.
And one of those things was my family.
What Jack had told me once, that they always managed to make me do whatever they wanted, had gotten stuck in my head. For a long time, I ignored the truth, the hundreds of signs that he’d been right. I kept pretending everything was OK…but then one night, it all exploded.
I was sitting at the kitchen table with Sonny and Steve, my parents, and Spencer. The only sound was the game on the little TV by the fridge. My brothers and my father had their eyes glued to the screen, and Mom and I were picking apathetically at our meal.
That was probably what started it—the fact that she and I didn’t like sports and couldn’t distract ourselves—because it gave us no choice but to interact.
“You’re not hungry?” she asked me, watching me push around a brussels sprout with my fork.
I was too tired to deal with her. I’d worked five hours at the gas station and four out on the fields, and I could hardly keep myself upright.
“Not really. I’ll probably wrap this up and save it for tomorrow.”
Mom glared at my basically untouched plate with resentment in her brown eyes, which looked almost exactly like mine. “Fine,” she said after a moment. “I’m not hungry either. Maybe it’s my cooking. Maybe it’s just not good enough.”
“Mom, I didn’t say that,” I responded.
“You don’t have to. You never like anything lately.”
“I’m tired.”
“You always have an excuse.”
She’d been snippy with me ever since I’d returned home, but this was the first time she’d just come out and attacked me, and I struggled to see why. Something was clearly up, but she wouldn’t tell me what. And that meant I would have to be the one to pull it out of her.
“You want to tell me what’s going on with you?” I asked. My tone was calm, but direct.Assertive, as my therapist called it. I had never spoken to my parents that way before, and everyone at the table turned to me with surprise.
My mother, of course, brought her hand to her heart. “What do you mean?”
“Mom,” I told her, “you’ve been acting weird, anyone can see it. What I can’t understand is why you won’t tell me what’s going on.”
She and Dad exchanged glances. They’d been doing that a lot lately. I knew that they had talked about the situation, and it enraged me that they were both sitting there playing dumb.
“Well?” I insisted.
Dad warned me, “Don’t talk to your mother like that.”
