After Dad moved to Los Angeles to be with Jennica, I made like a turtle and went into my shell. I spent most of my spare time alone in my room, reading or doing weird obsessive reorganizing of our clothes, our books, our toys. When I was done with the stuff in our room, I’d sneak into Mom’s room and organize her shoes by color, or line up everything in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom according to size. It wasn’t so much about cleaning as it was about wanting everything to be in its proper place.
Phoebe tried to pull me out of myself for the first couple of weeks, but when she realized it wasn’t working, did she abandon me? No. She’d just come over with a book of her own, and the two of us would read in my room for hours without talking. If I needed to take some time out to reorganize all the towels and sheets in our linen closet, she wouldn’t say a word. We traded books we liked, and by the end of those first few months, I’d read the Narnia series, the Alice, I Think trilogy, plus everything Judy Blume and Roald Dahl had ever written.
Mom was worried about me, but she had a lot of other stuff on her plate. She had to look after Rosie; she had to think about going back to work; and she was dealing with her own grief. At first I thought grief was a weird word to use because it wasn’t like my dad had died or anything. But Amanda explained to me one night that grief was the perfect word.
“Your mom has suffered a big loss. You all have.”
I didn’t tell Amanda that I sometimes wished Dad was dead. Killed in a car crash, or struck by lightning. I thought it would be easier to grieve if he was dead and buried, instead of alive and well and living in L.A. with a bimbo who was about to give him a new set of children to love.
Eventually, on Amanda’s advice, my mom sent me to a therapist to help me work through my feelings. The therapist’s name was Dr. Belinda Boniface, which was a pretty fabulous name. She was nice enough, I guess. I only went a handful of times because Dr. Belinda Boniface charged a lot of money for her services, which didn’t make a lot of sense to me since all she did was ask questions and watch me play with dolls.
One day she asked me to draw a picture of our family. This is what I drew.
She noticed that my dad wasn’t in the picture, so she asked me to draw a picture of him. This is what I drew.
Afterward, Dr. Belinda Boniface told my mom that these drawings indicated that I was feeling a lot of anger toward my dad.
Duh, I remembered thinking. I hardly needed expensive therapy for someone to tell me that.