🎧 Chapter Six | The Love You Want
What you need to know:
A new marriage is in trouble. Taking up a knitting hobby to buoy her nerves, Jennifer attends a couples workshop with Rick, only there turns out to be a big problem…
Chapter Six
The Love You Want
Holding hands like two lost children, Rick and I stand in the doorway of an empty hotel conference room. It is five-thirty on a Friday afternoon. Before us, an oversized whiteboard on an easel that reads: WELCOME and GET READY TO GET THE LOVE YOU WANT.
“Bad writing and all caps,” I murmur, peering into the room.
Before us, five round tables draped in maroon table cloths and topped with books, folders, name tags. Against a far wall, a buffet table of sweaty pitchers of ice water, coffee carafes, an assortment of teas, cream/sweetener options, a tray of sugar cookies topped with multi-colored sprinkles.
“Where is everyone?” I ask.
Rick nudges me playfully. “We’re pretty early,” Rick says. “Not everyone is as eager as you.”
He’s right. This weekend workshop was an impulse purchase (like the yarn). One of Fran’s recommendations suggested we give it a try. I thought, why not?
“Hey there! Hi there. Howdy,” a voice bellows. We turn to see a woman stride our direction. Dark reddish hair bobbed neatly at her chin, a sharp nose, bright greenish-brown eyes. Brilliant red lipstick.
“I’m Maxine,” she says, shakes with a hard grip. “You’re our first arrivals.”
Rubbing life back into my hand, I study this Maxine in tight jeans, a cowboy-style shirt with snap buttons and cowboy boots. No doubt, the all-caps writer, I think.
Also coming our way is a balding man in a pale gray suit with a white button-up shirt open at the collar.
“And this,” Maxine says, waving impatiently for him to move faster, “is Todd. My work husband.”
The man, winded, smooths a hand over his shiny pate. “She means we work together. Not that we’re married.”
They laugh a series of loud guffaws as if this is a great joke they’ve told many times.
“Come in. Come in,” Maxine says. “Grab a place to sit.”
Rick and I take our places at one of the back tables, our chairs nudged close enough our arms touch. Slowly, other couples file into the room, receive the same hearty welcome from Maxine, to include the bone crunching handshake.
Up front, Todd—who seems to be the audio and visual expert—taps the keys of a laptop, turns on soft melodic music, adjusts the volume high, then low, then turns it off. Tests a mic. Lowers and raises a screen.
Rick flips through the spiral bound note book, many pages thick. I arrange my two bags on the back of the chair. One, an oversized purse with all manner of supplies, including mechanical pencils, a brand new journal, gum, band-aides, hand lotion, mints, lip balm, phone, checkbook, and wallet. The second, my knitting project. In a week I have managed to add a foot to the shawl with only one dropped stitch.
Leaving the knitting for now, I arrange two mechanical pencils and my journal on the table.
This will be great, I think, congratulating myself on the efficiency of a couples therapy weekend. We’ll figure all our problems this weekend, pick up a few coping skills, and get back on track. Easy.
Rick and I share the table with couple from Beaverton, Nick and Carrie, who have flourished their names in broad strokes on stick-on name tags.
Nick is a shark-ish man with slicked back black hair who wears a gray sport coat and black slacks. Carrie is a tiny, shaky looking woman in a flowered full skirted dress. Nick sells cars, he tells us. BMW’s mostly. Carrie is a stay-at-home mom.
“Okay, okay,” Maxine says, closing the conference room doors with a hard clatter. She strides over to Todd who slaps a microphone into her hand like a baton.
“You’ve all had a chance to get those name tags on,” Maxine says. Her loud voice cracks through the speakers.
Everyone winces.
Maxine scowls at Todd but he’s already on it, making adjustments.
“Better?” she asks the room.
Nods of approval.
Starting again, Maxine belts out her opening spiel. She’s a full on public speaker working the room, walking in broad arcs, making eye contact with each of us for the requisite three to five seconds. I know this because I have also been trained in public speaking, years earlier when I worked as a weather girl, then an anchor, and finally an investigative reporter for several newsrooms from Montana to Oregon. All that was long before I became a mom, a creative writer, then a writing teacher.
“Everyone in this room has moved from the glow of first love,” Maxine is saying, “that ecstatic state of bliss where you see your own and your partners most divine nature—ever so briefly. Yes?”
I take up a pencil and open to the front page of my notebook. “First love,” I write. “That glow.” But then put down a question mark, dart a quick side-long look over at Rick.
Holding the booklet in his lap, he sits very still, eyes set on Maxine.
I study the tablet, the question mark. I don’t remember “that glow.” Rather, I remember a sense of overwhelm: (He’s technically still married. I shouldn’t get involved with him). Moments of surprise: (He picked me? Of all the women out there?). Then something like confused obligation: (I need to jump at the opportunity to be with him, otherwise someone else might snap him up).
“But now you are in the reality of your relationship,” Maxine continues, “and many of you have been there for a long time wondering ‘is this it? Is the bliss gone? Am I stuck in a tedious, often exhausting relationship where nothing new can happen?’”
Around us, the other couples exchange knowing glances.
I write down “tedious” and “exhausting” add more question marks, then lower my pencil to the table. A sense of restlessness within. Reaching around, I tug the Listen to Your Mother bag on my lap and lift out the project, separate the needles from their protective cover.
“This weekend is a first step in meeting your partner anew and reviving the love you once shared, and taking that love to the next level,” Maxine says. “Which is why you are all staying here as part of the retreat. You get to enjoy one-on-one time with each other. No kids. No distractions.”
Across the table, Nick growls low at Carrie who flushes, then darts her eyes to me, the knitting, then me again.
I smile at her, blandly. Knit two. Purl two. Knit two more.
Being alone for a weekend isn’t our issue. Rick and I are alone every weekend (unless I keep the kids while Steve travels for his job). We don’t need romance renewal. We need tools, advice, guidance.
On the phone, Maxine assured me this retreat would give all that and more but again I wonder if I did jump without thinking things through…Like this relationship, I add to myself, then shake off that thought. No. I didn’t rush in with Rick. I was careful. I took my time.
I knit faster still. At the end of the row, I turn the project around, head the opposite way
Maxine now digresses into introductory stuff about her years as a couples counselor. How she’s “seen it all.” Todd, too. She says this retreat is a beginning. After, we can continue our work with her, or with Todd.
My hands go still. I study the pair of them, decide Todd will be the one I approach, if needed.
We learn to “hold each other” non-sexually which means a simple embrace that demonstrates care and disinterested comfort.
We share our hopes and dreams for ourselves, and a couple.
We join “breakout groups” and discuss our insights.
Finally, we practice “talking” to each other with a script in the workbook.
Each couple is asked to demonstrate they understand this script via a performance in the front of room.
Near the end, it’s Rick and my turn.
Our task is to bring up an issue that might be uncomfortable to discuss.
Like the others before us, we sit knee to knee in stiff backed chairs at the front of the room. The rest of the couples sit in chairs they’ve brought forward and arranged in a half circle. A silent audience. Maxine sits near us on a bar stool, her legs crossed at the knee, a pad in her lap. Todd is in the back of the room tapping on his computer.
I don’t like being in front this way, don’t like the scrutiny, have the sense that in any moment I’ll be picked off by someone. Called out. Humiliated. Calm. Calm, I tell myself. It’s only fair. We’ve watched the others. It’s our turn. I hold my shaking hands together on the open booklet in my lap.
“I hadn’t expected you’d be so consumed with your kids,” Rick says, voice coming at me fast and sharp. Angry. “I resent it. It’s great you love them so much but what about me?”
I stare at him. A prickling feeling just under my skin. The attack has come, not from the others, but from my own husband.
Rick wears a light blue button-up shirt, khaki slacks, and woven slip-on sandals. Sitting back in his chair, he smiles as if this is the most normal thing to have said.
I open my mouth only to close it again, look down at the tight nubby carpet. In all the years we’ve been together he’s never, not ever, said such a thing. In fact, the opposite:
“You’re a great mom.”
“I’m so impressed by how focused you are on the kids.”
“Kate hardly noticed the boys.”
“I wish my mother had loved me like you love your children.”
He said those things. Didn’t he?
“Great sharing,” Maxine says, dragging me back to the present
I look at her, briefly, then stare at Rick. “I didn’t know you felt that way,” I say.
“Stop!” Maxine says, hand raised.
I almost tell her to shut up because this is nuts. The reversal of a long held position. The undoing of years of assurance. I look past her at the waiting people in the gallery. This collective collapses something in me. I feel small. Irrelevant. Terrified.
Maxine pointedly clears her throat.
I look up at her again.
She waggles a finger at the booklet on my lap.
I lower my gaze to the script.
“Let me see if I’ve got this,” I finally manage to say, voice tremulous. “You said that you didn’t expect me to spend a lot of time with my kids and you resent the attention I invest in them?”
Rick tracks his finger along the script, head bowed, nodding as if in agreement with my summation.
“I hear you said you want to know about you?” I continue. “Did I get that right?”
“Yes,” he says. “You got it all.” He finally looks up, as mild mannered as ever. Seemingly clueless that he’s just tipped my world upside down. Again.
A beat of silence. The world holding its breath.
Then: “Perfect. Well done,” Maxine says. “Didn’t they do great?”
The room erupts in applause.
I look at them, at Maxine, then over at Rick who claps, too, as if he’s part of this whole charade. I cannot clap. Will not. I can only replay, again and again, how he resents my love for my children.
Maxine holds her hands up, the room going quiet. She rolls her hands toward me. “Okay, Jennifer, now it’s time to validate what Rick has shared,” she says.
I hear her, I even understand, but I can only sit there, very still, and wonder what else Rick has lied about.
Next:
Chapter 7: A Wild Dog and Birdsong
It’s the weekly pass-off of the children with Jennifer’s former husband. Once he drives away with the kids, Jennifer heads to her office only to be taken aside by Rick who reveals “something bad has happened” to one of her kids…
