Free How to Be a Grown-up by Emma McLaughlin Page B

struggled to think clearly. “But your book is called No More Blame .”
    “Oh. You haven’t read it.” She sat back. “Couples therapy is traditionally a gateway drug to divorce. Why? Because people pay hundreds of dollars to have these polite useless conversations. Then they go home where I can’t help them and tear each other apart. So in my process we dive into the blame.” She arced her pressed palms. “We become blame warriors. So, Blake, continue.”
    “It’s gotten to the point where nothing I do is good enough. Seriously, nothing.”
    What? “That’s not true, Blake.”
    “It is.”
    “Can you be specific?” she prompted him.
    “You don’t let me flow with the kids. Every morning, you’re just go, go, go.”
    I was dumbfounded. “When we’re trying to get out the door and you stand there like you’ve never seen them before, when they don’t have shoes on, which is a pretty obvious place to start, I get angry.”
    “I was never on time for school. I skipped out on whole years. You’re so focused on what’s not happening. The important thing is that they’re not just being hustled from one place to the next. That they love to learn. That they read.”
    “Well, that’s what they’re learning right now. In school.”
    “Let him finish,” Dr. Brompton interrupted me.
    He pressed his palms together. “You always have to control what I say, me, the whole process.”
    “Blake, I don’t want to control you, or the process! It’s just that”—at $250 an hour —“I think we should focus on the plan.”
    “Fuck the plan. You’re not hearing me. I’m not happy, Rory.”
    “Of course you’re not happy; your agent fired you.”
    “No.” He twisted to face me, his eyes grabbing mine. “I’m not happy with you. With us. How we are, how we’ve been. I’m not happy.”
    I was hearing him. Hearing him so hard I felt like I was being flung from a car accident. “Um . . . so, I’m sensing you’re not coming home after this.”
    He shook his head.
    “Okay.” It’s just a tantrum, just a tantrum, just a tantrum . “Well, while we continue working this out . . .” I was biting my tongue, which was clamping on my throat, which was squeezing my larynx, which was compressing my stomach, which was gripping my intestines, which were hanging onto my colon. “. . . we have kids who need to see their dad. Every day.”
    “I—”
    “Every day.” I could speak for them. Speaking for them was all I could do. “You will pick them up from the extended day program. You will bring them home. We will tell them you’re in a show. And leaving early every morning before they get up. Okay?”
    Stewing silence.
    “Blake, okay ?”
    “Okay!”
    Dr. Brompton leaned forward. “This was very productive. Shall I put you down for next week?”

    “I’m so sorry,” Jessica said for the tenth time as she sat on my kitchen counter eating out of a bag of Skinny Pop that night. “Dr. Brompton came so highly recommended.”
    “It’s not your fault,” I said as I stirred the leftover meatloaf into the leftover crushed tomatoes for what was hopefully going to morph into bolognese sauce.
    “But do you blame me?”
    “I do.” I laughed. Then, in a burst of magical culinary thinking, I switched spatulas as if that might do the trick. “The thing is I know what’s running him. He’s mad at himself, mad at his agent, mad at the world, but the only person in the room is me, so he’s decided I’m the problem.”
    “You’re suddenly a stranger,” Jessica added.
    “Exactly. Only that knowledge does me a fat fuck of good because I’m not the one who has to get it. He does.”
    Without moving, she opened the door to the fridge and grabbed a Fresca. “So he just trashed you for an hour?” She popped it open.
    “Please. Forty-five minutes. I shudder to think what a whole hour would cost.”
    “I am coming back as a high-class therapist,” she said, flexing her feet, and we both saw the