When She Leaves You and You're Sad
A young man in his thirties, the foreman of a construction crew, sits across from me crying. The woman he wanted to marry has left him for another man. Tears are streaming down his well-shaven face, his beautiful blue eyes, red.* A woman leaving him is the ultimate abandonment, but he is learning this tall tidbit about himself for the very first time. We've been talking about his issues for a few months, his history, mainly, the many things he has done that he wishes he had not. We can blame his father for being a poor example, or his mother for assuming he was fine without much help from her. I see this in a lot of men. Mothers assume it isn't necessary to talk to them about private matters, that a nonjudgmental discussion of the real boy and his identity is an invasion of privacy. We look for diagnoses, as if these will help, but all we find is an emptiness, and a loneliness that had never been discussed with either parent. None of the people in his life ever discuss...