Goodbye, Sweet Girl by Kelly Sundberg

Author:Kelly Sundberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-04-11T04:00:00+00:00

10

Take Me to the River

WHEN THE SCHOOL year began, we moved back to Boise. An older friend of mine who had worked with me in the forest service was renting us a house for an amount that we could afford. It was a clean little house on a tidy street in an orderly neighborhood with a large fenced yard and a garden. It was the kind of house where a family could be happy.

IN AUGUST, JUST before we moved back to Boise, Caleb and I left Reed with my parents for a couple of days and drove to Boise to make arrangements for the move. We stayed in a hotel and went to see my therapist. We talked about Caleb’s betrayal, about my feelings of resentment, and about how to move forward. We did not talk about Caleb’s anger. We talked about what I could do differently. The answer was clear: I had to be more forgiving, more tolerant, and more accepting of Caleb’s flaws. I was too hard, he said.

I felt this hardness inside me; I knew it to be true.

THE THERAPIST ASKED Caleb why he hadn’t told me the truth. “Because she would have punished me,” he said. The word punish continued to recur from him, and I was baffled. What did he mean by punish?

Finally the therapist said to Caleb, “Did your mother punish you when she was angry?”

“Yes,” he said. “If I skipped church on a Sunday evening, she would have still been giving me the silent treatment on Tuesday.”

The therapist then asked, “Do you think that Kelly punishes you?”

He thought for a long time and then said, “No, I guess not.”

It was true. I rarely held grudges. My own mother had been short-tempered, but she was not a grudge holder. She never held things against me for very long, and my father was almost oddly calm. Punishing was not behavior that I had seen modeled at home, but although I didn’t have the extremes of my mother’s temper, I did have a temper.

I had spent my twenties in therapy, trying to learn how to forgive. I wanted to forgive my mother for how hard she was on me, and I wanted to forgive myself for how hard I was on her in return. I hadn’t wanted to have children because I was afraid that I would duplicate the dynamic I’d had with my mother in my own family, but it never occurred to me that I would marry an angry person rather than becoming one. Therapy taught me how to accept accountability for my insecurities and my failings, but maybe I grew too willing to accept accountability. I was more inclined to blame myself when I was angry than I was to blame Caleb.

After that therapy session, we went back to our hotel, and I held Caleb tenderly, said that I was sorry. I felt a kinship with the broken boy inside him who had craved his mother’s approval, and I wanted to love that boy the way he had never been loved.

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