Once Upon a Marriage

“All the more reason to control the areas in our lives where we can prevent being hurt.”

“So you think you hurt less alone than you would if you took a chance on loving completely?”

The question was curious, coming from her mother.

“You used to.”

“No, sweetie, I didn’t. Why do you think I took your father back? And kept letting him visit even though I was telling him we weren’t ever going to get back together?”

“Because you loved him.”

“Yes, but also because I loved having his companionship. Because he was my man, and I didn’t want to be alone.”

“So now you have a new man? You suddenly just stop loving Dad?”

Whe

n she said the words out loud, she sounded to herself like a disgruntled kid.

But that wasn’t how she was feeling inside. At all.

“I’ll probably always have warm feelings for your father. He’s the father of my child,” Barbara said. And then shook her head on the pillow. “But I haven’t been in love with him, romantically, for years. He broke my heart, Marie. So many times. Until all that was left was scar tissue.”

“You were still vulnerable to him.”

“Yes. I still believed I needed him.”

Turning to her side, Marie was inches from her mother, face-to-face, which was all that was showing of either woman, with covers up over their shoulders. “So how do you know you aren’t just believing that you need or love Bruce?”

Barbara’s smile grew slowly. And surprised Marie. It was an expression she didn’t recognize on her mother’s face. As if it held answers to life’s mysteries or something.

Kind of like the Mona Lisa smile she and Gabi had made fun of during their freshman year art appreciation class.

Those days were so long ago. And seemed too close for comfort, too. As if she were still a kid hanging out with her best friend, rather than a grown woman with a successful business of her own and a slew of people who depended upon her.

“My past, my time with your father, was difficult. Painful,” Barbara started slowly. “But it also served a purpose. A good purpose.”

Marie wasn’t following. And braced herself for whatever cockamamie thing her mother might come out with next.

“You know, they say that all things happen for a reason. That sometimes the most painful journeys are the way to the greatest joys...”

She didn’t want philosophy. She needed to know her mother was going to be okay.

“I knew the very first time I crossed the line from looking at Bruce as my doctor and started seeing him as a man, that my life had changed,” Barbara said. She didn’t look gooey-eyed. Nor did she sound it.

But she had to be suffering from the malady just the same. This was her mother. Not some twenty-year-old college girl who still believed in love at first sight.

“How long ago was that?” Marie asked. Curious. And trying to figure out what to say next. Did she try to discourage the wedding?

Or keep her worry to herself and give her mother the full support she so obviously wanted?

“Not quite six months.”

“But you said...the whole transference thing. You thought you just had a thing for him, which is common between therapists and their patients. You said that had been going on for a long time.” Or at least that was how Marie remembered it.

Something wasn’t right here. It was up to her to figure this out. To be there for her mother.

“I’d had a crush on him, which I understood to be transference, for years. That’s true.”