And Another Thing

My First Shrink II

The most valuable thing my first therapist did for me was to suggest I could rearrange my life to do the thing I loved, that I didn’t have to stay in a job just because I was good at it or because it seemed safe.  I could completely upend my life.  It was after I had done that—leaving my career as a teacher to move to Durham and become a part-time library assistant, a job which I held for six years—that he did the next most valuable thing.  I was living in Durham, still going back to Winston-Salem to see him every couple of weeks.  It was like touching home base.  I couldn’t give up everything at once.

He had noticed that I felt like a failure.  That was because every piece of writing I’d ever submitted anywhere had been rejected.  He pointed out that I was successful in other ways—I’d graduated with distinction from an excellent university, held down a teaching job for six years and was much loved at the school—but those things didn’t fundamentally matter to me.  They weren’t what I wanted to do.

His theory was that I felt like a failure because I hadn’t proven myself to my father.  I hadn’t, specifically, made varsity football my junior year, except as a bench sitter, and my father died before I became a starter the following year.  My junior year was also miserable academically.  There was something to what he was saying, I had to admit.  I had wanted to triumph in front of my father, and I never did.

I also told him how my relationship with my father shut down when he was ill with leukemia, the whole thing was so painful I could hardly look at him, much less talk to him.  And on the day when he died, I hadn’t made it to the hospital in time.  I hadn’t visited the day before, as I’d been scheduled to (but he was too tired) and I hadn’t gotten there on time the morning of his death.  I’d missed out altogether.

He told me I should write a letter to my father, telling him all the things I would like to have told him before he died.

There it was, another one of those therapy exercises.  I hated to be grouchy, but I didn’t like them.  I wanted to write great literature, not some letter to my father that I would then throw away.  But I was committed to therapy with this man, and couldn’t keep seeing him if I wasn’t there in good faith.  I’d give one morning to writing this letter.

In those days I rode my bike to the university library in the morning to work on my writing, because the tiny house we were renting was too noisy with a three year old around (and all the other kids in the neighborhood.  One of the odd changes when we moved was that my son suddenly had many new friends.  There had been no kids in our Winston-Salem neighborhood).  I would write at the empty tables on the fourth floor—it was summer school, and undergrads weren’t up by 8:30 or so, when I got there—then eat lunch and report to my job at 12:30.  I worked four hours in the afternoon.  My wife worked sixteen hours on the weekend.  Between the two of us we were almost full time.

There were maybe two people on the whole fourth floor that morning.  I settled down at a table facing some high windows and beautiful trees, and took up this writing exercise.  I had no idea what I was going to say.

As I wrote the words Dear Dad, I burst into tears.  I don’t mean tears were rolling down my face.  I started sobbing.

I picked up my stuff and stumbled to an open carrel, where nobody else was around.

To this day I think that what was wrong with my early writing was that I hadn’t connected with it emotionally.  It was well put together, and the sentences were okay—I’d worked on my sentences endlessly, for years—but it came from my head, not my heart.  I couldn’t connect with emotions because I hadn’t connected with the saddest thing in my life.  I hadn’t mourned my father’s death.  He had died when I was sixteen.  I was 27 when I wrote those words.

I kept writing.  It felt wonderful finally to cry.  I had all kinds of things I wanted to say to my father, good things and bad (I didn’t get to the bad things until much later, with my third crack at therapy).  And despite my doubts about Bob’s theory of why I felt like a failure, it did make a great subject for a novel.  Now that I’d opened up the floodgates, I was ready to write that book.  I would call it Football Dreams.

But first I had to write the letter.  I would never have done that if Bob Money hadn’t told me to.