Ahhh, that luxurious half hour of peace following therapy.

You walk out of the office 100 pounds lighter than when you went in. You can hardly feel your baggage. Instead, you’re carrying an overwhelming sense that everything will be okay because, after all, you’re in therapy and that’s what therapy does: it makes things okay.

Not every exit from the office can be brimming with peace and joy and little blue birds swooping with happy songs in and out of trees. If you’re in the chair because of a drama or trauma, you can leave feeling more like the parts of road kill still stuck to the tires. But as of last Wednesday, my third time back in the chair after a two year break, I definitely heard the blue birds, and felt mighty fine.

And also self-congratulatory for going while I’m not in a crisis. I have some fine tuning to do, not heavy lifting. I give myself extra kudos for that

A dark and exquisitely sordid past

I competed in that heavy lifting test of endurance three years ago, almost to the month. I had started going (again, to my fifth therapist) because my emotionally unavailable boyfriend was pulling away from me, and it was so clearly my fault. I knew he was a hurting puppy/lost soul/dark-and-broody type who didn’t like to talk emotion or about much else for that matter, but that’s what I was there for. To fix him. To save him.

When I saw that I couldn’t, and also that every one of his “friends” was a woman who happened to be in love with him, I turned into Psychogirl — a needy, clingy, demanding, jealous bundle of joy. I loved him desperately but hated who I was turning into, and it felt eerily like the last time I was so intensely in love. I knew I had to get back in the chair and sort things out.

Sadly, by “sorting,” I meant to somehow “fix myself” to be more patient, kind, and loving with that insufferable fuckwit. Dumping him was not an option: I had to turn myself into something more lovable, so he would marry me, dammit. (This situation has always reminded me of the joke about the crappy restaurant that serves crappy food, and the portions are too small!)

It turned out that I didn’t have to dump him; he beat me to it. That day is forever scorched into my soul as the beginning of the end. It didn’t kill me when he dropped the bomb, and that I could keep breathing through so much pain baffled me. I had no idea people could endure such a nightmare. It may have been a shitty relationship, but it was my shitty relationship, and without it I had no idea what to do. I was 30 years old and my ovaries were drying up into little tumbleweeds. Now what was I supposed to do?

O, the anxiety. The despair. Seconds, in mourning time, feel more like hours. Nothing could console me — not my music, my happy little apartment, my friends. It was a seriously dark time spiked with panic attacks. I bumped up my therapy appointments to twice a week.

They saved me, and put an end to the woman who was doomed to love broken men forever.

Psychogirl, Begone!

The only unfortunate outcome of that time is that I have found my answer to the question “What is the thing you are the most proud of?” but I can’t use it in a job interview. Who wants to hear that, though miracle of rigorous psychotherapy, Valium, and Women Who Love Too Much, I have liberated myself from loving emotionally unavailable losers? Certainly not a panel of folks looking to hire a professional woman of poise and substance. So I still have to make stuff up for that one.

But the effects are profound and lasting. Therapy helped me do what I thought was the impossible: find a healthy man attractive, and marry him. Who’d have thunk it?

Certainly not me or any of my friends who, I swear, lost bets and handed each other $50 bills as I walked passed them down the aisle. My favorite wedding gift was from a friend who wrote in the card, “My apologies to The Mister for an utterly Madeline-centric gift.

It was a tiny statue of a pig with wings.

Today, nary an ovary for which to be worried

Flash forward three years, and here I am. Thirty-three, in love with the a man I could not have made up if I had tried. I am medication-free, and joyfully unafraid of my hardening ovaries.

So why my sudden desire to hop back in the chair?

In response, I ask you: have you read my last post? No sooner than I was convinced he’d never leave me by choice did I figure he’d be taken from me some other way. For example, by getting struck by lightening or eaten by bears. These things always happen as soon as the persecuted heroine lets her guard down. And when you grow up watching movies instead of interacting with your family, you tend to believe that Hollywood presents a fairly accurate reality. (Or so said my therapist two Wednesdays ago. I told you she was brilliant!)

So here I am. Happily hitched to someone who rolls his eyes when I ask him to text me the second his plane touches ground, because such a bizarre way of viewing the world never occurred to him. Someone who has never met anyone else whose father defines “eating vegetarian” as the periods of time between food stamps running out and the next social security check, when he is forced to eat the canned vegetables donated by neighbors.

I find The Mister a refreshing anomaly in my otherwise checkered past with men. In the words of Jack Nicholson in that sappy date movie with Helen Hunt, “He makes me want to be a better Man.” Or woman. You know what I mean. It’s quite a trip, this emotional-stability binge I’ve been on since my last time in the chair. And it’s addictive. So, now that the dust has settled after the wedding, it seems like a good time to make a few more small repairs.

Tomorrow, a future free from falling frogs

When I called my therapist to make an appointment, hearing her voice brought a flood of warmth. She noticed my name had changed and I declared, “I got married!” with the pride of a first grader holding up her homework and telling her mother, “I got a gold star!”

Then, given that she knew far too much about my choice of men in the past, I felt a need to convince her that I’d actually chosen wisely. I told her that my family loved him, and his family loved my family, and I loved his dog, and mostly we spent our time sitting around with our families and his dog proclaiming our love for one another.

It lead her to the most obvious question she needed to ask which was, “So why are you calling me?”

I was in my office and lowered my voice to a whisper.

“Pssst? Can you hear me?”

“I can sort of hear you,” she said.

“Well, I’m always afraid he’s going to die.”

She was quiet for a couple seconds. “What did you say?”

Oh for crap’s sake. What if my coworkers heard me?

In a normal voice I said, “I said, I always think, heh heh heh, um…” Then, in a whisper, “he’s going to die.“

“Ohhhhh!” she said. Was she laughing? “There’s a name for that!”

“There is? What is it?” I practically did cartwheels.

“Generalized Anxiety Disorder!”

“No way!” This is the closest I’ve ever felt to winning the lottery. I’d heard of Generalized Anxiety Disorder. I had no idea what it was, but if there was a name for it, then it meant that I wasn’t completely flippin’ loony toons for thinking The Mister was gonna get called home any second. He was going to live!

We made an appointment and, for the rest of the week, I was reasonably unafraid of asteroids crashing onto his side of the bed. It was luscious.

Our first three appointments have been fabulous, though I forgot that for therapy to work, you have to talk about unpleasant things. I had forgotten to pencil that into my day planner. But I’m encouraged by the fact that naming this charming little quirk of mine has sent it scurrying out of the light. I haven’t pictured his impending doom in over 21 days. Well, okaymaybeIhave. But it wasn’t for very long, and I shook myself out of it before I started obsessing.

And that’s something.

I’ll take it.

And I’ll keep you posted.