Christmas Home (The Coming Home #6)

34. Clyde

thirty-four

Clyde

T herapy. I’d actually never had a therapy session, and besides what I’d seen on TV, I don’t know what I expected. I guess that was both good and…interesting.

I’d spoken with the therapist who worked for the health center, and Jake’s mom, Anita, seemed the best fit for me. She was an older, heavily tatted lesbian who didn’t put up with shit. I immediately loved her.

We spent week after week peeling back the layers of my life and childhood. The fact that Anita had spent time working with foster kids might’ve helped the most. “You’re still working through your child abuse,” she’d finally said during one of my sessions. “This isn’t something you overcome, dear. It’s often just something you learn to live around. It’s part of you. But with help, you can learn how to keep it from preventing you having a functional life.”

I teased her often about needing to invest in tissues since I used so many during my sessions. At first, I was angry my emotions were so big, but she assured me that was just the way of it. “Tears help you work it out, so let ’em flow,” she’d told me repeatedly.

By early October, I’d graduated from one-on-one sessions to spending my Saturday mornings in Nashville, where I joined a group for battered spouses. It wasn’t what you saw on TV with formal talks about how bad our childhoods were or grumpy participants acting like assholes to one another.

It was liberating. We’d tease and laugh, but just as often, we’d cry and hold one another as we worked through all the shit in our pasts.

Gloria, for instance, showed us her scar from a bullet wound where her husband shot her, barely missing her heart. And Doug’s boyfriend had cut off his pinky as he slept the night he’d announced he was leaving.

Not all of us had physical wounds, but we certainly had plenty of emotional ones.

I know I’m sentimental, but as cooler weather finally broke through the intense heat, a dam broke inside me. I was seeing myself as someone who could function as a human being. Date? No, I didn’t dare think about that, but I could at least see that my brain wasn’t broken.

I’d simply dated men I understood. They felt normal to me. As I served the fall tourist crowds or walked past the bar or motel, I began distinguishing between people who were obviously unsafe.

I hadn’t been able to notice the difference or know what to look for before. It’s almost like the therapy sessions were teaching me to be observant. When a guy would hit on me, something that happened fairly frequently here, which for a small town the size of Crawford City was surprising, I always said no or discouraged them if they weren’t forthcoming, but it helped to consider the men who were interested.

More than a few threw up red flags all over the place, and while sharing with the support group, I talked about how excited I was that I was finally able to see those warning signs.

“Do you think you’ll ever date again?” Doug asked me one day. I would’ve thought he was flirting under other circumstances, but that wasn’t it.

I shrugged. “I don’t know. Part of me thinks I’ll never be able to trust myself with another man, but at the same time, being able to pick up on the red flags might make that a possibility one day.”

Doug looked at where his pinky should be on his hand and sighed. “I don’t think I ever will. No matter what my heart wants. I-I don’t think I will ever trust another man not to hurt me. Next time, it might be my life.”

I thought of Mrs. Cole’s story about the woman who taught her to make cinnamon rolls. “It does seem like a major risk to trust someone after all we’ve been through.”

The group all nodded but remained silent. There wasn’t much to say. None of us were good at picking men, and that’s what led us to staring at one another on a Saturday morning.

The group leader broke before the subject could be pursued further, and I passed out cookies I’d made the night before. “A little sweetness makes tough subjects easier to digest,” Mrs. Cole had told me when I first started going to the group.

She wasn’t wrong, and ever since I started bringing treats with me, others had joined in. It felt good to enjoy fellowship with people I was processing life with. Having a cookie or two just seemed to make that easier.