Chapter 8 - Load-Bearing
Now the part that isn't finished, and probably never fully will be.
My daughter did not do a brave thing. I want to be careful here, because a lot of people have said "what a brave girl" to me since all this came out, and every time, something goes tight and cold in my chest.
She did a load-bearing thing. She held up a wall for two straight years that was never hers to hold in the first place.
She was fourteen when she found that profile, and she made a fully adult calculation using nine-year-old information, and she got it wrong — and the reason she got it wrong is that when she was nine years old, a van burned on her uncle's driveway forty minutes after her mother did exactly the right thing.
I taught her that lesson. Not on purpose. Not ever on purpose. But I'm the one who was there when it happened, and I'm the one she was watching.
We started seeing someone in April. Dr. Odalie Marsh, Tuesdays, together first and then separately.
The thing that came out around the sixth session, which I genuinely did not see coming at all, was that Sorrel hadn't only been protecting me from Barnaby.
She'd also been protecting me from finding out.
She told Dr. Marsh, right in front of me, that after 2019 I had "gone funny" for about a year — her exact word — and that she remembers me not getting off the couch for long stretches, and that she decided, somewhere in there, that her mother couldn't survive going through that again, and definitely couldn't survive it while also running an entire household.
She had been managing my mental health at fourteen years old. That's what had actually been happening underneath everything else.
I have had to sit with that for a long time.
May you like
Tibby found out in June. We told her together, with Dr. Marsh in the room, in the smallest, truest version we could manage for a ten-year-old, and she cried, and then went and got her big book about dog breeds and made Sorrel sit and look through it with her for a full hour — which is apparently just what she does when things get too big to hold.
She's been okay so far, in the particular way ten-year-olds are okay right up until they're seventeen and it all comes out sideways.
