VII

Beauty in the Breakdown

I Feel Haunted by My Affair

Hi, Polly,

I’d like to first say that I find your advice more than just good but revelatory and sort of almost mystical. Which is why I’m writing to you, half-drunk on a Saturday morning, about one of the things that has been most leaving me reaching for prescriptions lately.

I’m a very long-married person in her early forties. By very long, I mean we started dating when we were eighteen, were married a whole seven years later.

We have had all the problems that people who marry young have, by which I mean sexual foundering and infidelity. While we both have red in our ledger, I have been the guiltier party. But we’ve always had a rapport and love and understanding that managed to overcome it, with the help of a little therapy.

But.

Five years ago, I had dinner with a guy. A semi-famous guy, whom I had long deeply admired. I had no notion that I was sexually attracted to him, but at the end of that (husband-approved) dinner things went haywire. It was a onetime thing, and we kept up occasional, friendly, every-once-in-a-while-sexy contact over the next years. Until a few weeks ago, when he texted me because he was in town from L.A.—now graduated from semi- to super-famous—and we met again.

And it was something I can’t even describe. I don’t really think it’s about the fame thing, though I could be deluding myself on that score. It was a few hours in a hotel room, but I felt seen and listened to in this way that I feel like I’ve never been.

The sex rocked. But that’s not the big takeaway. It was feeling…appreciated. Which is not to say that my husband doesn’t appreciate me. It’s more, just, how much can you possibly appreciate someone when you’ve been together for twenty-three fucking years? And having someone really thoughtful and funny and smart see me anew was just mind-boggling. I have been a party to other infidelities, but mostly I found these men essentially convenient penises. This is the first person with whom I’ve felt a rapport that went past the sexual. And that scares me.

So I guess my question is this: I know this was a one-(two-)time deal and that I need to just let it be a thing that was and feel bad about it and move on, but I’m finding it impossible to do. I think about this guy all the time—like, most seconds of the day. It’s distracting me from being a good partner to my husband, from being a person who can work and create, from everything. Do you have any tips for letting go? I love who I have, and I am pretty much content with the compromises I have made. Why should one lovely afternoon with a lovely guy I will probably never see again and who has no lasting interest in me fuck everything up? (Except because I’m an asshole who deserves it.)

Wish I Wasn’t Such a Terrible Person

Dear WIWSATP,

I get a little self-righteous when it comes to infidelity. In any committed, exclusive relationship, even a troubled one, having sex with someone else might feel casual and even unrelated to your spouse, but to your spouse it’s like this act of violence has been committed against his or her psyche. I know you feel guilty, but I want to start there because I think people let themselves off the hook a lot on this front without taking full measure of the emotional impact of their actions. An event like this can really fuck with a person’s sense of well-being as well as his or her perspective on the past and the future. Cheating is never a small thing, even if you and your husband have both done it before.

That said, I think it’s also obvious that being with the same person since you were eighteen carries with it a particular set of challenges. I don’t think I know a single couple who’ve been together since their early twenties who haven’t struggled with some form of cheating or some talk of open marriages. And many of the couples I know who met when they were very young have trouble not reverting to that age when issues arise. They can go through years of couples therapy, they can be mature outside of the relationship, but when it comes to confronting each other, they suddenly turn into teenagers. (Hell, even close friendships can turn that way. A friend of mine from junior high school and I practically had to go through couples therapy ourselves.)

So I would never sit in judgment of anyone who’s managed to keep a marriage together since he or she was a teenager. I was a lunatic as a teenager, I was an angry drunk in my twenties, I had boundary issues through my thirties, and I’m still no cup of tea on bad days. If I had married all the dudes I wanted to marry over the course of those years, I’d be three or four times divorced by now, with plenty of cheating along the way.

Big preamble to the central point, but stay with me: This event is a wake-up call for you. You’re starting to feel unappreciated, lost, unimportant, invisible. This is the natural—or maybe not-so-natural—outcome of spending over two decades with a person you met at a very young age, and it’s also the outcome of living in a culture where women are widely considered over-the-hill/damaged goods/rotten fruit at age thirty-five. Obviously, you feel good, and you probably look good, too. But no matter how great your life is, there’s reckoning to be done as you approach forty.

The challenge for you right now is to pay attention to the wake-up call itself—I need something else from my life!—rather than getting distracted by the memory of hot sex and the seductive cloud of illusion that floats around the edges of extreme fame. One of the really dangerous things about famous people is that they ooze a sense of importance. If you are being seen by someone the world sees, somehow you matter. If you are being adored and ravaged by this SEEN person, suddenly you are no longer invisible. You are the sexy heroine lingering between the sheets in the suspense thriller. You are full color, larger-than-life, brilliant and special and vivid and amazing.

This, of course, is also how it feels to have great sex. This is the sensation of being ravished: You matter. You are fully awake and alive. Your ego is fed and your senses are fed at the same time. When you put yourself into that mind-set, when you try that on for size, it’s not all that hard to see why people are obsessed with sex, why people cheat, why some people will do almost anything for that fix, even if it tears their lives apart.

So you have the double whammy of fame and hot sex seducing you into feeling like you had this brief taste of superpowered, all-encompassing everythingness. But just as actual famous people don’t maintain this level of ecstasy over being famous for long, real relationships don’t match the ecstasy of an affair. Your experience was seductive and magical, but that doesn’t mean it’s something that could exist outside of the confines of a hotel room or your imagination.

And who is this famous guy, really? Is he a wonderful person who just happens to be single and just happens to think you’re attractive and just happens not to mind that you’ve been married forever? Is he a perfectly satisfied guy who fucks around a lot because, well, he can? Or is having sex with women who admire him what he does to make it through the day?

Even though it doesn’t sound like you’d leave your husband for him, even if that were even an option, maybe it makes sense to imagine what that would be like. What would it be like to have sex with him over and over again and travel the world being the girlfriend of a super-famous dude? Would it be magical? Would you feel SEEN and IMPORTANT forever? Would you get to be the sexy heroine lingering between the sheets in the suspense thriller, full color, larger-than-life, brilliant and special and vivid and amazing, forever and ever? Would it be good enough to feel that way for a year? Two years? And then, maybe, you’d be replaced with an upgrade. Would it all be worth it?

Who knows? Maybe it would be incredible. For our purposes, though, I want to propose that it wouldn’t be so electric for even one more night. You say you felt seen. I think you’d wake up the next day and see how good he is at making everyone, from you to some kid on the street, feel seen. I don’t think you’d feel more appreciated and more full-color than you do with your husband over the long haul. I think you would feel LESS so. You say yourself that the problem isn’t that your husband doesn’t appreciate you. You have no major complaints about him.

So this is really about you. You’re in your early forties, and you want your life to be bigger. WHO DOESN’T?! We all want our lives to be gigantic. Maybe that’s a flaw of our screwy, self-centered culture. Maybe we all thought we would be superhero princesses, painting murals and flying to Monaco and firing giant weapons and riding on the backs of orcas into the sunset. Maybe we thought we’d stay young and special and fabulous forever and it would only get better and better.

It’s not hard to meet someone who’s successful and attractive and have the faintest sense that if that person is attracted to you, too, that means you are somehow MEANT TO LIVE AMONG THE GOLDEN PEOPLE. I get that. I interviewed celebrities when I was younger, and sometimes my mind was prone to these slightly toxic, self-involved flights of fancy. But you know what? Life is just life, for all of us. There is no golden life. We all have to face ourselves, every day. No amount of fame or money in the world can cushion you from the mundane trials of everyday existence. Those who believe otherwise are young and naive, and they fundamentally misunderstand this world. When someone says, “What does she care? She’s rich!” I really question that person’s onboard navigation system. Hang out with a few rich people and a few famous people, and you’ll see. They are not immune.

And getting that full-colored, full-body rush over being alive and being seen and being SOMEBODY? You can have that. This guy gave you a taste of something that you already own, something that’s been asleep inside you for a long time. You don’t need to kick your husband to the curb to have that feeling back. Do you see that? The most important thing is to honor the part of your soul that woke up when you strayed.

When you have been “good” for years—stayed loyal to your husband for a long time, been a helpful partner, fulfilled the demands of your career, showed up for your friends—it’s totally natural for something deep inside you to crave wildness and darkness and things that you haven’t been able to even acknowledge for ages. Your soul might want to let in some of the seemingly BAD emotions: anger and resentment and selfishness. I’m not talking about kicking kittens, either. I’m talking about acknowledging a desire to be alone, to be seen as a separate person, to go to a party without a mate by your side, to make art, to write angry things, to learn a new language, to complain, to dye your hair a new color, to wear tall boots, to play guitar, to tell people to go away, to be a little bigger and pushier than you were before.

All of this may sound like the stuff of adolescence. But sometimes in our lives we have to dare to try on the other side of things, just to see what fits. Sometimes, when there’s a crisis, it means the life we’re leading is starting to chafe.

Don’t go throwing out everything at once or decide that you’ve been brought back to life by this super-famous magic man. People latch onto narratives like that so easily. I promise: It’s a mirage. Unless you’re truly trapped in a terrible, irredeemable marriage (this doesn’t sound like you), it’s smart to be suspicious of the sensation that an affair will deliver you from stagnation. Many a truly terrible marriage has been wrought from the ashes of a pretty good, redeemable one.

You’ve learned something here: You’ve learned that you need more from your life. You made a mistake, but along the way you’ve been given an invitation to answer the lonely bleatings of your neglected soul. You are stepping into a new era now. Separate this famous guy from your vision, and think about what it means to feel intimate with other people, to feel connected to them, to feel appreciated by them. You need closer friendships that are more intimate and meaningful to you. You need a closer relationship with yourself. You need to feel sexier and wilder and more alive in your everyday life. You need to explore and discover new things. You need to see that this is the start of a great new chapter of your life, and it can be anything under the sun. Do you feel that? You are already full color, larger-than-life, brilliant and special and vivid and amazing. You have to feel your way, through small changes and big changes, through little risks and big ones, through speaking your mind and listening more, to a new reality and a new life. You are not an asshole. You don’t want to fuck everything up. You just want to be seen. You want to treat yourself to a new way of living, one that honors you, one that’s honest and real and doesn’t involve sneaking around or hiding in plain sight. You aren’t a terrible person, so make the choice not to act like one ever again. Treat yourself with the respect and love that you deserve.

Polly

The Good Wife

Dear Polly,

I am a thirty-eight-year-old emergency dispatcher. I have known my wife for ten years, and we have been married for the last six years. We have a wonderful three-year-old son together.

During the course of our marriage, my wife would subtly make hints about how I was not home enough, that I did not help out around the house enough, and, after our son was born, that I was not taking as active a role as she would have liked in parenting. You see, I have always been the type of person who is not a homebody, and my wife is the exact opposite. I would go out with my friends very often; she was always invited but would simply say no. When our son was born, she pointed this out, and I scaled back my time with my friends substantially, or so I thought. I used to go out every weekend. I scaled it back to three times a month.

This past Christmas, we were spending the holiday with family, and while out to dinner she began to ask me if I wanted more kids. I told her that I did, and we began to work out when we could start to try to get pregnant again. Three weeks after Christmas, she tells me that she wants to get separated because I am not home and I’m not helping out around the house enough. She says that she has grown unhappy in our marriage.

I realize that this unhappiness is all my fault, and I am scared that I ruined the best thing that ever happened to me.

I asked her if I made the changes that she is asking for, would she stay, and she told me that she does not know. That maybe it would work but she does not know.

I do not want this marriage to end, because I love her more now than I did when we were first married. I guess what I am asking is if the marriage is worth saving. I also don’t understand why three weeks after talking to me about having another child she would tell me this.

Hope you can help.

Afraid That I Ruined the Best Thing

Dear ATIRTBT,

Your wife’s hints weren’t subtle, trust me. The fact that you’ve shrugged and said, “Well, you’re a homebody and I’m not,” to someone who’s at home watching a toddler and grappling with a sink full of dirty dishes and a pile of dirty laundry suggests that you have an astounding ability to ignore the facts on the ground while blithely continuing along whatever path you choose. I’m guessing that you wrote off your wife’s repeated “hints” (see also her deepest desires and wishes, delivered through tears, with a great deal of urgency in her voice), chalked them up as nagging, then exited to sip beers with your bros while she held it down at home.

You weren’t listening. You lacked empathy. You shrugged her off. Finally, you agreed (reluctantly, I’m guessing) to cut back your weekend excursions from four a month to three a month. You saw this as a big sacrifice. You made that clear to her.

If you took an active role with your kid, if you cleaned up after yourself, if you felt terrible when your wife told you she felt buried under the weight of her domestic chores and needed a break, if you offered to watch your son at night, if you started to clean up much more often, if you encouraged your wife to take a break and go see her friends and go away for a weekend? Then she wouldn’t be wondering if you’re a human being with a functioning brain and heart. But you didn’t do any of those things. You took her desperation and sadness and frustration and shrugged it off as just another wife bitching about her husband. (All wives do that. Amirite, bro? Fist bump.)

I know I’m being harsh, but if you’re going to save your marriage, you need to wake the fuck up and see how completely weak and lame and passive you’re being, and have probably been for years. When one person is handling the overwhelming majority of the domestic load for three years while his/her wife/husband/partner hits the town every weekend and refuses to stay home and watch the fort (or clean the fort!), guess what? The one who’s left at home gets angrier and angrier until there’s not much love left.

Is your marriage worth saving? If you love her more than ever and you feel like you might’ve ruined the best thing that ever happened to you, why are you even asking me that? Did you really think I’d say, “Nah, man, forget that whiny bitch! Who needs her?” Do you seriously not understand why she’d be asking you if you want another kid? She’s wondering if you even love her enough to want another kid, since the main thing you seem to enjoy is hanging with your buddies on weekends. She’s wondering how in the world she’d manage at home with two kids and no help. She’s wondering what you have left together. She’s wondering why, if she’s doing ALL of the work anyway, she doesn’t just bail while she’s young so she can find another guy who actually enjoys spending time with her. Maybe she could find a guy who knows how to load a dishwasher and vacuum and get up in the middle of the night to deal with a three-year-old’s bad dreams. Maybe she could have another baby with a guy who acts like he’s in love with her and listens to her and takes her feelings into account instead of writing them off as “subtle hints.”

What’s sad is that so many men end up where you are now without knowing how they got there. They assume that once you marry a woman, she’s going to stick by your side, cook your meals, raise your kids, and deal with pretty much every single thing on the home front all week, only to sit around at home on the weekends alone while you go off and have your fun. Women don’t have to live that way. They have other options. Your wife shouldn’t have to threaten you with divorce for you to know that.

Maybe she really was being subtle. Maybe she didn’t put her foot down and say, “Come on, guy. It’s the WEEKEND. Ever think about, I don’t know, FINDING US A SITTER AND MAKING A DINNER RESERVATION? Ever think about STAYING HOME WHILE I GO OUT? Ever think AT ALL?” I feel bad for dudes who can’t listen and can’t take their ladies seriously unless they’re screaming and crying. Because this is where it ends: with a wife who can’t feel anything anymore. You ignore a person’s emotions for years and years, and guess what? They have no emotions left for you.

I know you don’t like hearing it. I’m sure there are things you do to help that I’m not considering—how you watch your kid on weekends for a little while, or play a bit of ball in the yard, or occasionally fold a load of laundry while you’re watching SportsCenter. I’m sure you’re not a bad guy. But if you want to save your marriage, listen to me: You need to drop everything and woo your wife. Tell her you’re sorry. Tell her you’re willing to do your share of the cleaning. Tell her you’re willing to watch the kid every other weekend while she goes out. Tell her you’ll hire a sitter every Saturday night instead of going out with your buddies so you two can go out instead. Tell her you’ll go to couples therapy with her. Tell her you’ll redesign your entire marriage from the ground up.

This isn’t a moment to wonder what’s worth saving. Your wife is great. Your life is great. The only thing that’s bad about this picture is you. ARE YOU WORTH SAVING? Ask yourself that instead. Then figure out how to save yourself. Figure out how to be a better person, a better listener, a better friend, a better husband, a better partner. Figure out how to show up and do your share. Figure out how to shower your wife with the love and affection that she deserves.

The best thing that ever happened to you is about to go sour permanently. This isn’t a time for wishy-washiness and second-guessing. This is a time to take action. This is a time for great big flowery gestures and gifts and long, heartfelt letters. Don’t expect her to come around instantly, either. Be patient. Don’t get mad if she doesn’t immediately start kissing your ass just for being nice for a few days or weeks or months. You’ve been lazy and blind for a long, long time, Afraid. It’s probably going to take a long, long time to win her back. But this is a crucial moment in your life. This is the part where you grow up, at long last. This is the part where you learn just how good it can feel to put someone else first.

Polly

Full Disclosure

Dear Polly,

I’ve got a real doozy. It involves my past coming back to haunt me and possibly admitting a big failure to my boyfriend (I’ve never told anyone, because I’m so ashamed).

Here’s the story: About four years ago, I was seduced by a married man who was my superior at work in my small town. It was a textbook affair: He was well respected in my field, offered to mentor me (but at a sexual price), made four times my salary (was more “valuable” than I), told me his marriage was doomed and that he’d leave his wife. Yes, I fell for it. I resisted his advances for a full year but was afraid to report him to HR because I was desperate to learn more in a very competitive career. I even have digital evidence (text messages, chats) of the whole situation, but I never submitted them, because I was young, stupid. He took my lack of complaint as consent and was relentless in his advances, and over time I started to believe his lies.

It took a while to get physical, but as soon as it did, I woke up and realized he would never leave his wife. I felt incredibly guilty, so I quit my job, demanded no contact, didn’t date for two years, and eventually forgave myself.

The problem: My current, equal-partnership, nontoxic, wonderful boyfriend (of two years) may accept a job at the same firm where my former “mentor” works. It’s a great opportunity, but he could get hired elsewhere because he is talented. My boyfriend knows that my mentor works there and that my mentor sexually harassed me for months. What he doesn’t know is that I eventually did cave in to my mentor’s advances. However, I was too ashamed to tell my boyfriend the whole truth, and neither of us really shares specifics on our sexual history because neither of us are very interested in details of our romantic pasts.

The question: Should I tell my boyfriend everything? Our industry is small, and the “mentor” may eventually figure out our connection. If my boyfriend works with him, is it more kind for him to know the truth? Or perhaps decide that he shouldn’t go work there, even though it’s a great company? Or, the worst-case scenario for me, decide that he and I are no longer a good fit as a couple?

If I should tell my boyfriend, do I tell him now? Or should I wait until he makes a decision? If he decides to go elsewhere, is it okay that I keep this buried in my past?

I’ve privately atoned for this sin, and I hate that it’s a part of my past. I’ve gotten older, stronger, wiser, kinder. This time, I want to do the right thing. But this situation is a painful, humbling reminder that I did the wrong thing once and that fear/embarrassment is clouding my judgment. What’s the best way to handle this?

Sincerely,

Regrets Die Hard

Dear RDH,

You should definitely tell your boyfriend right now—immediately, today. This is not the shameful revelation that you think it is. You’re just too close to it to see that. Plus, you’ve never told anyone, so you haven’t put things in perspective effectively. You were a young, naive woman worried about your future, and you were in an imbalanced power dynamic with a charismatic creep who told you lies and relentlessly seduced you for a full year. I mean, Jesus, the effort some fuckers will go to, just to pry open one pair of lady pants! Why doesn’t someone that busy and important have fulfilling hobbies so he doesn’t have to waste all his time wheedling and cajoling near teenagers into serving up the goods?

Obviously, I don’t encourage affairs with married men or bosses or married bosses (bleccch), but it’s not exactly shocking that you might’ve found yourself slowly but surely succumbing to the fantasy of a life on easy street via a soon-to-be-divorced boss man. He was relentless, and he planted a seed in your head that you two were destined to be a pair. He was manipulative. He complained about his wife. He acted like maybe you two were soul mates. He acted like the attraction between you was white-hot. He treated you like the one ray of sunshine in his life. A TALE AS OLD AS TIME.

But look, you held out for a full year. And you didn’t date for two years after that. Even though you weren’t the one who made marriage vows and broke them just to feed your hungry dipshit ego, I’ll bet you’re the one who’s feeling the most shame over it now. It’s amazing how that works, isn’t it? He invests an entire year trying to lure you into the sack and betray his family, but somehow you’re worse because you’re the sucker, the slut, the one who got tricked. Why do we live in a world where manipulative bullies are treated like crafty heroes and naive youngsters with big dreams are made to feel pathetic?

Stop carrying the shame of this around with you. It’s not yours to carry. It belongs to the weasel who preyed on your ambition and your naïveté. And as you look back on the two years you spent ashamed of yourself and unable to go near any other guy, release that sad young woman from this shame, too. Let her be someone else, someone who’s forgiven, someone who was slowly learning some hard truths about the world. She was fooled (understandably!), but she won’t get fooled again.

Take that attitude into your conversation with your boyfriend. Be honest with him, but keep in mind that even though you feel shame, you really shouldn’t.

No matter how you do it, though, you must tell your boyfriend about this, and soon. It’s very important for him to understand who this guy is before he starts working for/with him. You do NOT want him finding out after he accepts the job—or, god forbid, a year into it—that you slept with his co-worker. He may never forgive you for not telling him the truth earlier. He may be so uncomfortable and so freaked out and so furious at you that he breaks up with you, just for failing to tell him the truth for so long.

And really, it’s easy enough to say to him now, “Look, I didn’t think it would come to this and I didn’t think there was ever any reason for you to know the full story, because I thought it would only bother you and make you feel jealous. But I need to tell you now. You should know before you make your choice.”

Be clear with him about how ashamed you’ve felt over this, and be clear that you don’t want to feel ashamed about it anymore. But be vulnerable about what you’ve gone through, too, so he understands what a huge, difficult situation this was for you. Let him know that you really need him to understand and support you because it’s a big deal in your personal and professional life and you’ve been keeping it hidden from everyone for so long that it’s really not healthy.

Give him some room to be freaked out. Be patient. Don’t get mad at him for feeling whatever he feels about it. Then give him an opening to play the supportive boyfriend, too. I think he will. If he’s a good guy, he will. Let him know that you’ve been losing sleep over this.

But definitely don’t just cross your fingers and hope that he picks a different job. No way. Just tell him. Trust me, I’ve known plenty of people who didn’t tell their partners important things—like introducing former lovers as “old friends” in passing without thinking about it—and then the truth comes out and one really minor, stupid lie turns into what feels like a major violation of trust and a big wound that needs to be mended. When you conceal the truth, you make your past affair feel, to your boyfriend, like it still holds sexual intrigue for you. You give the impression, with a small lie, that you still DESERVE to feel shame over this.

But you don’t. So don’t fall into that trap. Tell him everything, and while you’re at it, talk with him about the importance of honesty in a relationship. Without honesty, there really isn’t a relationship at all. Don’t live that way. Don’t try to seem better than you are. Show him who you are, mistakes and all. That’s how you’ll build a solid foundation of trust between you two, so you can move forward and make a whole lifetime of mistakes together. (Ha!)

Tell him the truth. Then put down this load and don’t pick it up again. You’ve carried it around for long enough.

Polly

Mourning Glory

Hi, Polly,

Last year my father, who was fifty-six, died suddenly of a heart aneurysm. He took me out for my twenty-fourth birthday dinner, and then two days later he was dead.

I feel like the past months have been a mess of every emotion possible. I’m a great big ball of pain, and it seems as though grief is the one thing no one will talk about with me. My dad was the parent who showed up for me, who supported me as a writer. We shared so many similarities: a tendency to overthink and undersleep, a need for long intellectual conversations, a deep and sometimes painful sensitivity, and a love of words.

My mother has said she can’t understand why I’m so sad and depressed over my dad’s death. It’s a message I’ve gotten before, as though I’m overreacting in my grief. That I need to toughen up and get over it. I’m in therapy, but I worry about how I will ever deal with this. Can you give me any advice?

Signed,

The Daughter Left Behind

Hi, TDLB,

Your mother can’t tolerate seeing you unhappy. That’s all. She’s unsettled by it and worries that you’ll never snap out of it. As a mother, I can relate to that very well, and I’m sympathetic to her. She only wants you to be happy.

But—BUT!—there’s a certain kind of childhood to be had in the company of someone who only wants you to be happy. Think about what that means, the flatness, the scentless sterility of that: I. Only. Want. You. To. Be. Happy.

Here’s what I DON’T want you to be:

Devastated

Confused

Remorseful

Harried

Unnerved

Haunted

Inspired

Embarrassed

Tempted

Nervous

Seduced

Melancholy

Nostalgic

Grateful

Your mother doesn’t want you to struggle or overthink things. She doesn’t want you to be sensitive or complicated. She doesn’t want you to honor exactly who you are. She wants you to GET OVER IT so she can feel at peace again. She’s probably a little bit controlling. Just a guess. She’s probably a little bit anxious.

And again, I understand that, and I have empathy for it, as a sometimes-anxious woman with kids. But you have to find a way to set all of her expectations and desires for you aside. You can love her and still do that. You have to find a way to get a little space for yourself, to get a little distance, so you can look back over that distance and say, “This person, my mother, is conflicted and sad in ways that she won’t admit. She wants us to lie together. She will react negatively to anything that I do that doesn’t feel absolutely safe and controlled and happy and that’s not a direct reflection of what she wants for me.”

Your mother doesn’t want you to be an artist, a writer, an intellect. But that’s what you are, right? That’s what you want and what you believe in. You want the truth; you want to feel what you feel. You want to feel completely, painfully alive, and you know, instinctively, that this includes diving straight into your grief and not coming up to the surface until you feel like you’re ready.

My father also died when he was fifty-six years old, completely out of the blue, from his first heart attack. He was in great shape and extremely youthful. He ran or swam every day. He was a professor of economics, prone to bizarre digressions about human nature and spirituality and also prone to aggressive, off-color jokes. He was ruled by his emotions. I don’t want to imply that he and I had the same sort of relationship that you had with your father; my dad could be very difficult, and I was treated more like a sidekick than an equal. But he loved me and he showed it, and when he died, I felt like the center of my life would never return. He and I were both very needy, very raw, and the rest of my family was much more controlled, more skeptical, more reserved, far less prone to starting a fight or leaping into the fray or showing their asses. When he died, I mourned for about four months straight, and then something shifted. I turned something off. I didn’t want to play my role as joker. I was the last remaining emotional wild card in my family, and I felt ashamed of that suddenly, and for the first time I withdrew. I was twenty-five years old, and after several years of drifting and drinking too much I got a boyfriend, got a great job, got in shape, and shut all the emotional neediness and messiness out for a while.

Maybe I made a decision to BE HAPPY. I wrote cartoons, and that was part of it, too; I stopped drawing attention to myself as much and drew attention to my work instead. I pushed that clown onto the page and became much more flat and controlled in real life. I dated a childlike artist, somebody who needed my help. I was strong. But I wasn’t happy, not exactly.

Then I went into therapy, and I realized that two years later I hadn’t grieved my father’s death nearly enough. Two years of grieving, even if you’re not trying to turn it off most of the time, is nothing when it comes to a parent or a spouse or anyone you’ve lived with for a big part of your life. When it’s someone like your dad, who formed your identity? Of course you feel lost without him. You want him back. That’s a gigantic loss. And it feels like you’re losing part of your childhood, too, when someone important from your childhood disappears. It doesn’t help that your mother doesn’t understand or doesn’t accept what a huge sea change you’re still grappling with.

So, you need to get some distance from your mother. Forgive her, talk about her in therapy, try to lean on her, but accept that she may never get it, or she’ll be too invested in your “getting over” this to get it. (Was she married to your dad when he died? It doesn’t sound like it, but if she was, WHOA.) She isn’t the right person to tell about the full force of your emotions. You know, mothers often can’t fill this role, sadly. Many of us are just too invested in our kids’ survival, and anything we perceive as threatening to that gets the heave-ho, even at the cost of their truest, fullest happiness.

No one else will talk about grief with you? See, this is the bullshit thing about suffering a big loss when you’re so young. I went through this, too. Very few of my friends—and I had lots of friends—were capable of even discussing my dad’s death with me. It made them uncomfortable. That’s how young we were. They were sure they’d say the wrong thing. We were all so self-conscious and inflexible and confused by the immense gulf between different people’s experiences. Some people stay that way, too. They try to downplay death or act like the death of a second cousin and the death of a parent should be tackled with the same blasé toughness. It happens; you get over it. And if you talk about someone else’s death, about how it affected or affects you? That’s self-involved and pathetic.

Not only is this attitude bizarre, insensitive, and pathologically self-protective, but it shuts out the possibility that maybe, just maybe, you don’t know that much about death yet because you’ve never had a close friend or family member die. When you lose someone very close to you, someone who makes up this essential part of your history and your future, your worldview shifts dramatically. You have a palpable feeling that everything and anything good can disappear at any time. I missed my dad a lot. I also felt like everyone I knew was going to start dying. I also hated that my dad wasn’t able to go on living. I wanted him to be alive; I wanted him to feel rain on his face, to eat a great meal, to read something funny, for HIS sake.

After my dad’s death, I felt more anguished and I felt more alive than I’d ever felt in my life. I felt more grateful than ever. I only wanted honest people in my life, people who could talk about heaviness and melancholy and really savor it instead of feeling uncomfortable. I don’t think I stuck to that. I think I couldn’t handle staying in that space for very long, because it made me feel too raw. So I retreated.

Don’t retreat. You need to find people who will talk about this. Figure out who they are. You’re in therapy now. If your therapist isn’t helping you deal with this very well, then get a new therapist. Or find a grief counselor, too. Or find a therapy group for people mourning a big loss. Look hard at your friends, and figure out which ones you can lean on a little more. Someone out there can handle it, I’m sure of that. You just have to figure out who it is.

And you need to write things down. Every day. It’ll help you to understand what shape your pain takes so it doesn’t take you by surprise, so you can talk yourself out of feeling paralyzed by it.

You also need to exercise every day. Mourning and exercise go very well together. You’re already in a lot of pain—what’s a little more? Fatigue can feel pretty redemptive when you’re sad.

Because mourning is about being alive. That’s something you have to remind yourself of, and maybe you should even take a shot at trying to explain this to your mother. Leaning into your sadness is not refusing to be happy. Leaning into your sadness, every day, inviting it into your life, getting up and putting on some running shoes and running and walking and running for an hour or two, and crying while you run or walk—that’s reaffirming that you want to keep living. That’s celebrating how much your father meant to you and how he will never disappear from your life, ever. That’s knowing that you will survive this and you’ll carry it with you and it’ll be a big piece of who you are.

Because you don’t ONLY want to be happy. You are not a two-dimensional cartoon cutout who keeps all pain at bay, at the expense of your very soul. You are not someone who will tell other people to take their own complex, difficult, colorful experiences, experiences that you don’t know anything about, and push them down, store them away, bury them, because it makes you uncomfortable. You are going to feel this crushing loss for as long as you need to feel it, you’re going to feel the full force of it, so that you can also feel

Devastated

Confused

Remorseful

Harried

Unnerved

Haunted

Inspired

Embarrassed

Tempted

Nervous

Seduced

Melancholy

Nostalgic

Grateful

You are going to feel grateful. This is the paradox of mourning. Incredible sadness carries with it an ability to touch the purest strain of joy, to experience an almost ecstatic release, to see an almost blinding, undiluted beauty in everything. Your dad will always be a part of your life. I hated it when people said that kind of thing before my dad died; I thought it was a sad lie told by needy liars. But it’s true.

Two days after my dad died, I called his insurance agent to cancel his car insurance. The guy had a thick southern accent. He didn’t get all stiff and weird on the phone, like most people did. He said, “My god. He was just in here the other day. He looked so healthy and young.” It was a very honest response. Then he said, “My dad died when I was twenty-five years old. That was twenty-five years ago. I still remember him perfectly, like I just saw him yesterday. I still have dreams about him.” At the time, I thought that sounded incredibly heartbreaking and depressing.

But here it is, almost twenty years later, and I get it. I remember my dad perfectly—his big laugh, his voice singing “Danny Boy” with showy bravado, his teasing tones, his little Muhammad Ali dance. If I turn my back on how important he is, I block my path to joy. I block my ability to bring joy to other people. He is a vital part of my life. And even the sadness I feel about losing him is vital. It makes every color brighter; it makes every single moment of happiness—or longing, or satisfaction, or grace, or melancholy—more real, more palpable, more complete.

Don’t wonder how you will deal with this. You ARE dealing with it. Don’t wonder how you will get over it. You will NEVER get over it. I know that seems heartbreaking and depressing and wrong. Trust me that it’s also gratifying and miraculous and astonishing and endlessly inspiring and important and helpful. Letting this pain in and growing from it will give you strength and resilience that you can pass on to other people in ways you can’t possibly understand now. It’s NOT all about you, not remotely. You are not stuck. You are not wallowing. This is a beautiful, terrible time in your life that you’ll always remember. Don’t turn away from it. Don’t shut it down. Don’t get over it.

Polly

The Bean Eaters

Hi, Polly,

Something I say a lot in therapy is “I don’t know how to think about this” (my therapist, frustratingly, doesn’t seem to like to tell me how to think about things—just nods and nods—but your column is good for that), and here is something I don’t know how to think about:

I have a very close friend whose whole family is from a once-great and bustling American city which now has a really shitty economy and no good job prospects for the old-timers. The city declared bankruptcy in the last year. His parents, entrepreneurs, both lost their jobs and businesses (through a combination of the financial crisis, the city collapsing, sheer bad luck, and risky decision-making) and eventually lost their house as they fell behind on mortgage payments. They used to be doing well, were comfortable, and now they have bad health and live off family, quite depressed, with a mountain of debt. They do these small jobs, but nothing in this city really pays well enough to get them back on track and in their own place. I also think they are defeated and exhausted, and the people around them sense this defeat and want very little to do with it, like it might be catching.

They are in their late fifties, have an ill parent who keeps them in the city (although I don’t know where they would go even so), and my friend says it’s so hard to watch this slow-motion disaster. My friend is doing okay, but not okay enough to be of much financial help, but he tries. He says it’s just difficult to know that you can get older and—contrary to much popular wisdom—things can get much harder. That life is a struggle, getting older is difficult and heartbreaking, your body gives out, and complete uncertainty and failure is what we have to look forward to. What’s the point?? It’s so hard to have the energy and motivation to remake your life past a certain point. And is it even possible?

I agree that sometimes I don’t know the point when I see situations like this. It looks hopeless. I struggle with depression, and it depresses me more. And also I don’t know the right things to say in response to all this loss, to make it less awful, make sense of it, frame it in a way that isn’t totally devastating. My friend’s parents have each other (they’re both very sweet people) and two great kids. But it doesn’t feel like enough right now. Is there a right thing to say?? What is the point??

How Do I Make Sense of This

Dear HDIMSOT,

On the first day of class in tenth grade, my English teacher asked me to read a poem out loud in class. I was about to start when she spotted my last name in her book and said, “Hmmm. I bet you think you’re clever, because of your sister.” (My older sister was the valedictorian.) “Well,” she continued, “what you don’t know is that your brother is the smartest one in your family.” (My older brother looked like Shaggy from Scooby-Doo!, got middling grades, and put all of his energy into playing D&D on the weekends.) “Anyway, go ahead and read.”

Right. So now let’s see if the dumbest little fuck in the family can manage to say a few words out loud without screwing up. The poem was “The Bean Eaters,” by Gwendolyn Brooks.

In it, Brooks tells the story of an old, poor couple who eat their dinner of beans off chipped plates.

When I was finished reading, my teacher asked what I thought the poem was about. I looked down at the page again, panicking. This old couple had lived past their expiration date, Brooks seems to say. Even so, they kept getting dressed and straightening up and tinkering about their little rented room. That sounded pretty empty. Their lives were basically over, as far as I could tell, but they were still going through the motions. All they had left were their memories. They remember “with twinklings and twinges,” Brooks writes, as they eat their beans in a room packed with “beads and receipts and dolls and cloths” and also “tobacco crumbs, vases and fringes.”

Those words reminded me of my grandmother, who was having trouble with her memory and was a serious pack rat. We had just moved her out of her house in Chicago that summer so she could come to live with us. She had closets full of yogurt lids and empty glass jars and old newspapers, all saved for some imaginary art project that would never happen. Clearing out that house was one of the most depressing things I’d ever done: All of her plans were up in smoke, her life was basically over, and she didn’t even know what year it was.

So, I cleared my throat. “Well…the poem is about having no money and having no control over your life,” I said. “These poor people are surrounded by their own filth—chipped plates, tobacco crumbs—and they’re basically just waiting to die.”

“NOOOOOOO!” my teacher screeched, standing up and slamming her gnarled fist down on her desk. “NO, NO, NO, NO, NO!” she bellowed, pounding her fist onto the desk over and over with each “NO.” Then she got up and stood right in front of me and pointed a scary finger in my face and fixed me with two ferocious eyes.

“That is WRONG. You got it ALL WRONG. They are poor, but they are happy! You think they have to be miserable just because they’re POOR?! THEY HAVE THEIR MEMORIES! TWINKLINGS AND TWINGES! What do you think those are? TWINKLINGS! AND! TWINGES! YOU DON’T EVEN KNOW, DO YOU?!” She returned to her desk and sat down. “Oh, you kids are so spoiled. You’re so, so, so spoiled! It makes me sick, it really does. You don’t have any sense of anything.”

So, that went really well.

But let’s get to the point, which isn’t actually that this fine nation of ours is filled with crumbling, once-great American cities packed with crumbling, once-great public schools that employ once-great teachers (who eventually become world-weary sadists with boundary issues, amirite?). The real point is that when you’re young and you’re a little depressed and you’re not sure what will make your life feel rich and fulfilling and worthwhile, it’s pretty impossible to understand how it feels to have lived a full life already.

That’s not me calling all of the youngest ones the dumbest ones, either. That’s me saying that YOU are the one we need to worry about in this picture, not your friend’s parents. Because where you are right now is extremely fucking hard. It’s tough to start down the path to adult life with even the slightest whiff of depression on board. And, honestly, it’s hard for even the happiest, cheeriest person alive to navigate their twenties without becoming depressed.

When you’re a little depressed, you see the world through a smoggy, gray haze. You look at older people who’ve lost everything and you think, “Is THAT where we all end up?” There are so many unknowns in your life right now. So, when you look at older people who are also facing unknowns, it just buries you. Is there no relief from feeling lost? Even if you do figure things out and get a house and a job and a life, it could all be taken away from you in a heartbeat! So, what’s the fucking point?

Listen to me: You don’t know how bad it is for them, but you also don’t know how good it is for them. I know they’re only in their late fifties—which really isn’t old, by the way. I guarantee they’ve navigated a few hardships already. They’ve experienced disappointments. Yes, I’m sure they’re depressed and overwhelmed right now. But they’re nice people, and they have each other. They have “an ill parent who keeps them in the city.” To you, that sounds like one more shitty thing in their lives, and I understand that. But sometimes having a big responsibility can actually help you make it through the hard times.

Let’s go back to those twinklings and twinges from the poem. When I was young, I breezed right past that line, but there’s joy in those words that I couldn’t detect. And even once my teacher shouted at me, I still thought, “Oh, yeah? What’s so good about having your memories? What’s so good about being surrounded by beads and dolls, vases and fringes? That sounds horribly claustrophobic and depressing!”

Part of the satisfaction of getting older, though, comes from feeling connected—deeply connected—to other people and to yourself. Your friends’ parents are still showing up for this ill parent, and they’re showing up for each other. Maybe they’re arguing every night in some relative’s guest room or even on the fold-out couch in some living room. I don’t know. But they’re together, living through this as a couple, even as some of their closest friends back away from them.

You’re sensitive, which is a nice quality. You’re alarmed by how their friends could abandon them. Pay attention to that part, because it’s one of the most devastating things you learn as you get older: Some of the most loyal-seeming friends in the world will end up bailing on you when things get tough. Sometimes it means they didn’t love you in the first place and you just didn’t know it before. But other times it’s just pathological: I Hate Feeling Uncomfortable, So I Avoid Heaviness At All Costs.

Now you’ll never be like that. Now that you’ve seen that up close, you know you’ll never be a person who doesn’t show up for a close friend. Maybe this couple was reckless with their money, and maybe they weren’t. It doesn’t matter. Never use an “I told you so” attitude to let yourself off the hook from showing up for someone you love. And don’t use the “I don’t know what to say” excuse, either, or the “I’m afraid I’ll say something wrong” excuse. You probably will say something wrong. That’s okay. JUST SHOW UP. Show up and say, “God, this sucks. I’m so sorry.” Just keep saying that, and keep showing up.

Your friend is showing up. He’s concerned, and he’s trying to help. Don’t underestimate how big that is, having a son who wants to help you. A parent in that situation might think, “We should be helping him! We’ve squandered his inheritance!” Fuck inheritances. It’s beautiful that their son wants to help, and his parents can feel that, even though they’re in pain. Your friend just needs to keep showing that he loves them and that he’s grateful for all that they’ve already done for him. He needs to give them the gift of his words. Two sweet people will treasure that more than he can possibly imagine.

And yet, it’s also true what your friend says: You get older, and, contrary to popular wisdom, things do get much harder. Popular wisdom is usually complete horseshit in fact. Mostly it’s designed to keep us from freaking out about how bleak everything actually is. We’re spoon-fed this diet of enforced cheer in the form of pop songs and chirpy sitcoms and TV commercials to keep us on a straight and narrow path of docile consumption and compliance, while the world goes straight to hell. And the sad fact is that we ALL get older and older, and we don’t have the money we imagined we’d have, and we’re never quite as fabulous as we imagined we’d be. And then on top of it all, the debts start piling up, and our hair starts turning gray, and our balance of days on earth gets shorter. And one day we look in the mirror, and we say to ourselves, “Fuck, am I ugly! And I feel terrible. And it’s only going to get worse from here!”

Yep. Growing old is a motherfucker. Three years ago, a friend of mine died, and I felt sick about it, and I was losing sleep over money issues, and my writing felt stuck. And when I looked in the mirror (rarely!), I saw an angry old lady with dark circles under her eyes, but when I tried to put on makeup to fix the problem, I just looked like an angry old hooker instead. (I mean sex worker. See how old?)

Life is a struggle. But that Summer of Feeling Old, I flew home to my mom’s house, and instead of feeling annoyed by my mom, I stayed quiet. I noticed how organized she was and saw how she took walks or went to her exercise class every single day. I noticed the new watercolor of her dog that she’d painted and framed. And then she made this great salad with stilton and pine nuts and some cold beet soup for dinner one night, and she poured us glasses of wine, and she told us about the birds she’d been seeing at the bird feeder outside her big window, and then she played the kids some birdcalls from the special audio bird book she has. “Let’s find the eastern towhee,” she said. “That’s the one that sings, ‘Drink your TEE-HEE-HEE-HEE-EA!’ ”

I’d always assumed my mom was a little unhappy and maybe a little lonely. She’s old, she lives alone, why wouldn’t she be, right? That night I realized I was wrong, that my mom was happy. She’d struggled mightily to save enough for retirement on a secretary’s salary, and she pulled through some hard stuff. And now she was savoring her life, full stop.

Life is a struggle, but you know what? Most of us just keep rolling along one way or another, difficult or not. Sometimes, just like Gwendolyn Brooks wrote, you just have to keep getting dressed and straightening up, without questioning it.

I’ll bet your friend’s parents haven’t given up yet. Uncertainty and failure might look like the end of the road to you. But uncertainty is a part of life. Facing uncertainty and failure doesn’t always make people weaker and weaker until they give up. Sometimes it wakes them up, and it’s like they can see the beauty around them for the first time. Sometimes losing everything makes you realize how little you actually need. Sometimes losing everything sends you out into the world to breathe in the air, to pick some flowery weeds, to take in a new day.

Because this life is full of promise, always. It’s full of beads and dolls and chipped plates; it’s full of twinklings and twinges. It is possible to admit that life is a struggle and also embrace the fact that small things—like sons who call you and beloved dogs in framed pictures and birds that tell you to drink your fucking tea—matter. They matter a lot.

Stop trying to make sense of things. You can’t think your way through this. Open your heart and drink in this glorious day. You are young, and you will find little things that will make you grateful to be alive. Believe in what you love now, with all of your heart, and you will love more and more until everything around you is love. Love yourself now, exactly as sad and scared and flawed as you are, and you will grow up and live a rich life and show up for other people, and you’ll know exactly how big that is.

Let’s celebrate this moment together. There are twinklings and twinges, right here, in this moment. It is enough. Let’s find the eastern towhee.

Polly