Shattered Appearances ✓

e i g h t: A Walk in The Park

Like my last two sessions I stared at the clock, and unlike last time, I stayed clear of the encyclopedias. I really didn't want her to look inside my mind any further. She didn't stare at me per say, but would occasionally glance at me before she wrote something on her tablet.

"Care to share what you're writing?" I said after she jotted something down for the fifth time.

"What? Oh, I'm not writing anything, I'm playing Angry Birds. It can get a little boring when it's quiet."

"My dad is paying you to play games on your iPad? Really?"

"Well, unless you want to talk. That would be a better use of your father's money. I'm okay either way though. I'm on level 13 already."

I didn't know if she was telling the truth or was just using this as a way to get me to say something about myself, but it worked.

"Fine, what do you want to know?"

"Anything. But if you want, let's start with the relationship you have with your father."

"I don't know, my dad is just there. He really was never in the picture until now. He only visited me three times a year max but he completely stopped visiting two years ago. I didn't mind though. I had my mother."

"So you would say that you didn't have a close relationship with him then? You didn't want a relationship with him?"

I thought about the answer for a while. It wasn't that I didn't want a good relationship with my dad. It was all I wanted when I was younger. I would always be so excited to spend the summer with my dad every year. He just didn't try. He really didn't want me.

I repeated what I thought to Rose and she nodded.

"Why do you think he rarely visited?" She asked, and I shrugged in response.

"How could I possibly know? I always thought it was because he lived eight hours away. Coming to Maryland too often would be difficult. Then I started thinking it could've been my mother. With her refusal to talk about what happened between them, I always thought it was a nasty breakup. You know that 50% of marriages end in divorce now. It's sad, really."

"Do you think that your dad might have been directing his feelings toward your mother onto you?"

"I don't know, okay? Like I said before, I'm not my father. He did what he had to do. It turned out for the best. We're too different to get along. I would never do what he did."

She thought about what she was going to say for a minute before she finally responded, "What do you think he did?"

"He left my mom with a new born baby. I was only three months old at the time. My dad left my mother in an known country, unknown state, all alone with a baby. I'll never forgive him for that."

"Never forgive him for what he did to your mom or what he did to you?"

I did answer that question and instead looked at the clock again. There were only ten minutes until the end of the session. I only had to make it to that long. She didn't pressure me to say anything else and just continued doing whatever she was doing on her tablet. When the session was over, I stood up and said goodbye.

"One last piece of advice. I suggest you talk to your father. There might be another side of the story that you don't know about."

I already know everything. I don't need him to feed me more lies.

Unlike the last two times, I convinced my father that I could drive myself to my sessions, he was reductant but let me go. He would find out if I went or not based on what Dr.Schacter said so it didn't matter anyway.