VIRGO: Have you been tapping into your proper share of smart love, interesting beauty, and creative mojo? Are you enjoying the succulent rewards you deserve for all the good deeds and hard work you've done in the past eight months? If not, I am very upset. In fact, I would be livid and mournful if I found out that you have not been soaking up a steady flow of useful bliss, sweet revelations, and fun surprises. Therefore, to ensure my happiness and well-being, I COMMAND you to experience these goodies in abundance. [I do love a good command.]

(8 months. That'd be June.)

…pre-guilt: the expectation that she was going to say or do something that would make me feel properly guilty. The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes

We went the principal’s office.  That’s what he calls going to the shrink.  A ‘boner killer’.  I laugh at both these names for counseling.  I laugh at many things he says. He has different kinds of laughs.  I suppose we all do.  I was thinking about that part of the time, about our different amused sounds.  I have a snort when I’m surprised by something that hits me as funny, and I also have what he calls a patronizing sound, a kind of “o really?!” laugh.  I think about that when the shrink starts in about my capacity to forgive (not so much) and then he says something like my mom can be difficult and I make the sound and I hear myself make it and it sounds like “difficult?!-that is a euphemism like relocation center is to prison camp” kind of laugh.  He has a laugh that sounds like “I know you want me to laugh right now”, which sounds like ha ha ha unlike his real laugh, which crinkles his eyes shut. 

Thing A: nostalgia for childhood.  I don’t know what that feels like. He does. Most of the people I have loved, many friends, they do have it too.  Then there was a coming of age for them, during which their adult selves came on and their people didn’t like them or didn’t like them being adults at all or both, and that was hard because it felt like being exiled, and struggling with that exiled feeling and making peace with it was a thing.  People like that still ache sometimes, it seems, for what it felt like to be a completely happy kid eating a certain kind of food at a certain place, etc.  I have none of that whatsoever.  I don’t know what that kind of nostalgia for a preconscious self feels like or looks like in the mind. 

Thing B: nostalgia for the future, and the value that will be in the ever shortening time between now and dead. My exiles came in adulthood, from such things as tribes to which I thought I belonged because I picked them, but lo that didn’t mean they’d pick me back. Friends, in-laws, professional pockets of people. This latest rejection by my husband’s clan was nothing new, and so that’s not what hurt(s) about it.  My nostalgia is mostly forward facing. It’s for a life I wish for, in which I eat foods in places and built good memories I will be happy to have made, and sometimes I cry for those which haven’t happened yet, and I grow very angry lest my in-laws threaten that future space of nostalgia by crippling my husband’s ability to face forward with me.  My best friend. 

What I learn in counseling: What I’m actually pissed off about.  And then I’m not so much anymore, like locating a wound and putting proper pressure on it. Experience and natural arrogance shield me from most of what would hurt about Aaron’s people rejecting who I am and that I am.  And what that doesn’t cover, an overweening sense of justice does (you can’t watch a woman half kill herself mentally physically and financially to have your son’s child and then drink beers with the mistress whom he clearly laments and then retain any personal value in my eyes, even if that woman had not been me).  So, upon reflection, I’m not hurt on my own accord really.  I’m hurt on our accord, and on his accord. And thus, by proxy I think I might be feeling Thing A.  …   If so, it’s a wonder he’s not pissed off at them, I think  ….. Then I wonder, wait, maybe he is, but I’ve been feeling/doing it for him (?) 

The boys and Aaron all got Bestbuy cards from my mom for Christmas, and he’s bought out theirs so that he’s got 3 now to spend, and he likes that.  It’s the same as having $150 but better, because to him a giftcard feels like to spend on something he wants rather than needs.  Again, a kind of charming way that he retains what must have been great about being a kid. So I ask him what he’s going to get.  He blushes and says “maybe a camera”, and we both laugh our real laughs.  Adults can like toys too, he’s taught me, and to play. 

You teach me how to play, baby, and I’ll teach you some do-not-disrespect-me implacability and we’ll both be making significant and necessary contributions to one another’s adulthoods.