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I wonder what Dr. Jacob is thinking by this point as I ramble on. She probably assumes my depression is all related to my marriage problems. That I made a huge mistake, married my high-school sweetheart, and wound up in the ER or something so many times that eventually I left him in the middle of the night and fled here. It’s the type of story she must listen to week in and week out at a shelter like this.
I feel like I should defend Chris whenever she asks about him, but if I do that, she’s just going to lump me into the same category as those mousey girls in group, the ones who go on and on about how he’s so much kinder to me when he’s not stressed out at work, and I just need to find a way to keep from irritating him. Says the girl with three broken ribs, a black eye, and a dislocated jaw.
I know I’m being pretty closed off with Dr. Jacob, and I don’t mean to. I’m only talking to her so I won’t get kicked out of Sacred Meadows. I think we both know that. I’m just here doing my time like she is. Telling this stranger my sob story, getting my meal ticket for another seven days, and finally leaving her office no worse off and certainly no better.
I’m still not sure how much I’m going to tell her. It’s all about choices. I have so few of those left to me these days. Even in the dining room, we don’t get to pick what we eat. It’s not like a school cafeteria where you can choose what kind of sandwich you want or which sides you’ll have with it. Here, it’s soup. And if it’s not soup, it’s casserole. You don’t select your own sides because they’re all cooked together in one blob. The only thing you get to choose is whether you want one scoop or two.
Maybe you’ll tell me I shouldn’t complain, but you’re the one who can drive anywhere you want in your own car and select your dinner menu every single night. Eat out, cook in, you probably have no idea how lucky you are. You’ve heard about prison inmates, I’m sure, how they get institutionalized so by the time they’re released — especially the ones who go in as teens and come out middle-aged — they have absolutely no idea how to function in the real world.
How to think or make choices for themselves.
I’ve made my choices. That’s what landed me here. And I’ll fess up to each and every one. I’m not so jaded and bitter I’ll go blaming everything on someone else. That’s not my style. Mostly because I still love Chris, at least in a way. Sure, when I say that, Dr. Jacob might roll those big doe eyes at me. Throw a label on my forehead and lump me together with all those other women she talks to at the shelter, the ones who we all know are destined to return to their abusers the second they step out of here.
That’s not me. But like I said before, the more I try to defend my husband, the guiltier I’m going to appear, so I’ll just have to let my story speak for itself. Right now, she wants to know about our early days. How we ended up married. I can’t believe how young we were. How unprepared to forge a life together.
Well, she’ll see.
And then she can make up her own mind about Chris and me.