CC BY-SA 4.0
The Ancient Decision
"You're a guest, man, but you sat in." The leader turned in his chair. He gestured to the circle of people around him. "Everyone else shared a childhood story. If you sit in, you have to share, too. That's the rule."
"That is the rule," his wife agreed. He hadn't paid much attention when she had warned him the day before.
He sat up. He hadn't participated beyond being present. Out of politeness, he had listened to each story and to the ensuing discussion. No other, deeper thoughts about the therapy session had occurred to him. He had spent his time trying to learn everyone's name. He knew his wife loved the group.
He was pretty sure he would be seeing more of the members. He had already gone to dinner with a married couple that his wife knew from the therapy sessions.
"Okay," he said. He nodded to the members around him while he tried to remember what they had each said. He needed to gauge the severity of their tales of childhood. Everyone had childhood trauma. Growing up was that way. Parents set rules. They enforced boundaries. Inept parents set them inconsistently and enforced them arbitrarily, which created greater traumas and confusions for the children. But even good parents caused tears. And every generation had its failings. It was up to the next generation to improve.
"Pull your chair into the circle, please," said the group leader.
"Fine. Okay, this is a thing my father did." He pulled his chair closer, settled into it, and glanced at his wife. She nodded for him to go ahead. He related a brief story, although still a longer one than he would have liked, about a type of punishment his father had exacted.
After most of the stories, members of the group chimed in with supportive statements. Sometimes they didn't say anything insightful. Still, he was aware that their words were meant to at least acknowledge the shared experience. After his story, people fell silent. They looked at one another. They looked at his wife. She nodded to them. What her nodding meant, he couldn't guess.
"Uh, how often did this happen?" asked the group leader.
"Every week or thereabouts." He had lived without that particular punishment for as long as a month, sometimes, in the summer. But he had endured flurries of it, day after day, at other times of the year. "Until I grew up and left home."
Finally, the group leader ventured an opinion, cautiously. One or two others thanked him for sharing. The session timer rang. At the tone, everyone shuffled to their feet. They looked relieved. One of the men nodded to his wife. Again, he couldn't see the meaning of it. And afterward, everyone avoided him. They kept their distance from his wife, too, although he had arrived at the end of these sessions before and he had seen her trade hugs with the other women.
His wife took him by the arm, as she usually did. She led him to the waiting room and took her sweater off the coat rack. For a moment, she gazed up at him and opened her mouth to speak. Then she glanced around and took a deep breath.
Outside, in the cool evening air, she finally found her voice.
"Why aren’t you hobbled by trauma, like the others?" she asked. "Or angry like me? I knew what your father did to you. And that he did more. The others didn’t know. Just me. And to me you seem so healthy."
"Am I?"
"You act it. You say it, sometimes." She swayed for a moment, as if leaving the emotional trauma aside for a moment and remembering to flirt. She smiled. "I've always liked it."
"We are supposed to transcend our parents." It was a principal he had read in a book as a child. The concept had stayed with him. "My father never had a father, so he seems terrible when I talk about him. He wanted to be a good parent, sort of, but he couldn't get there. He did bad things. After I left home, I decided it shouldn’t bother me."
"Just like that?" she narrowed her eyes.
"I had to work at it for years. You know that." She had quizzed him thoroughly after they married, as if she had forgotten to do it before, which was the case. The change in status from girlfriend to wife had awoken new concerns. "It's not like I could transcend everything that happened to my family all at once."
"You did it, though."
"I worked for years to improve. Although, yeah, the change started with the decision. You have to decide you're going to get better."
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