Queen of the Savages

During my divorce, I went to see a therapist.  I hadn’t been to a therapist in years, but I suddenly found myself in need of an objective listener since most people (but, not all) around me at the time were too busy telling me how they felt about the fact that I was getting divorced to let me express how I felt.  The main topic of our sessions revolved around my propensity for what the therapist called “what-if thinking.”  What if I didn’t give someone a hug when they’d asked me to and they crossed the street, got run over by a car, subsequently died, and I had failed to grant their one final request of me? What if? (On the other hand, what if I was just fucking nuts?)

Main topic #2 dealt with my desire to immediately want to share my entire life with someone I met that excited me.  To want them to share my level of enthusiasm with respect to this desire. To want someone to like me as much as I liked them. And my inability to understand when they did not.

Years later, I still get this feeling.  The Southerner and I will meet a new couple and after hanging out a few times I can not grasp why they haven’t asked us to be the god-parents of their unborn children, while the Southerner is busy actually enjoying their company.   For this wholly unhealthy way of thinking, the therapist made me repeat the words “wait, wait, wait” as if they were my own personal mantra.  Except she would make me sound them out like “w–a–i–t, w–a–i–t, w–a–i–t.”   It always struck me as funny that I was being made to pronounce a word that indicated the suspension of something by suspending the word itself.  But, the mantra actually worked and stuck.  I still find myself holding my breath sometimes and slowly forming the words in my internal monologue.  They instantly calm me and cause me to reassess whatever bad decision I was about to make or semi-crazy thing I might have been about to utter in polite company.

Unfortunately, I can’t quite remember what the therapist told me to do about my “what-if” issue and I’ve found myself thinking a lot of what-ifs lately.  What if the Southerner and I are married for 20 years and he suddenly decides to leave me? What if the Southerner and I are married for 20 years, have children, and he suddenly decides to leave me? What if the Southerner and I are married for 20 years, have children, my inner thighs start touching one another, and he suddenly decides to leave me? What if?

The difference between me now and me then is that I am capable of turning the what-ifs around.  What if the Southerner and I are married for 20 years, have children, my inner thighs have started to touch one another, and we’re happy?  We’ve had some hard periods, but mainly good ones, our children don’t hate us, and we’re truly happy. What if?

What if 2012 is the best year of my life so far.

Me: Do you think it’s weird that every time I drive over the Tampa Bay bridge I envision my car careening over the side of it? What I would do if all of sudden my car was sinking to the bottom of the ocean? Do you ever have that thought when you’re driving over the bridge?

Southerner: Umm.  Not really.  You’d be knocked unconscious so it wouldn’t really be up to you at that point.  So there’s no point in worrying about it.

Me: But what if I wasn’t? For Christmas, I want one of those emergency glass kits that cut a hole in the window of the car just in case. Or maybe I should just try to pop the trunk and swim out that way.

Southerner: First of all, if you do, for some reason, find yourself in the middle of the ocean in your car you should take several deep breaths.  You should NOT try to swim out the trunk. That would just make the car fill up with water faster.  You should try to roll the window down and swim out that way.  But, like I said, you’d be unconscious and the likelihood of your car somehow flying over the side of the bridge is about one in a million so you really don’t need to worry about it anymore.

Me: Yeah, and even if I wasn’t unconscious the sharks would probably get to me before I could do anything anyway.

Southerner: Don’t you find it odd that every day you contemplate your car flying over the side of a bridge and being eaten alive by sharks, yet I can’t get you to wear a helmet when we go bike riding?