Oh no/here we go
I’m a DBT therapist, a master of dialectics (supposedly). With my clients, I call this ‘nonbinary thinking,’ how multiple things can be true at once, not opposites:
someone can be doing their best, and their best might still suck.
You can love someone and need to tell them no, absolutely not.
When we don’t accept dialectics, we argue with ourselves. We spiral. We get stuck.
One dialectic, an easy, intuitive one, is excitement and fear. Like a roller coaster. My son, after his 8th grade trip to a regional theme park, talked all summer about the different rides, the overlapping emotions; how good it feels when your adrenaline goes up as the cart does, and then you slide down and around, strapped in, your meaty human body moving in ways it absolutely did not evolve to move. I hate roller coasters– feel queasy even listening to him describe them, but the delight and horror of being strapped in as something else takes control– is so relatable, it gives me vertigo.
Don’t
Date a bisexual man, my mother told me;
I remember where we were, in the car, or I’ve constructed a scene around her words; many of my memories involve a specific, mundane location: this intersection, or that parking lot, the sun hot and bright through the windshield. But maybe these scenes are stand-ins, a generalization, generated, like those uncanny images that seem wrong, but you can’t pinpoint exactly why. We were driving to one of the places we would have gone together when I was in 9th grade—Target, the mall, a doctor’s appointment.
You’ll get AIDS if you do.
I think of my son’s noisy overconfidence, his bold, decontextualized assertions from TikTok. His catastrophic body and shiny skin, wavy hair falling in his eyes. How many cautionary tales have I told him when he was a captive audience in the car? Don’t distract the driver or you could cause a crash. Those kids should be wearing helmets. Don’t run in parking lots. Don’t give your personal information out on the Internet.
My mother texts that she put peanuts in her bird feeder. They’re like kids in a ball pit, she says. A couple hours later, she sends a grainy, zoomed in picture of a hawk, attracted to the sounds of the smaller birds. Why can’t I leave well enough alone? She laments. I was willing them to be quiet.
Oh no/here we go
Is the thought I had when I accepted the call ten years ago, offering me a specific child, after months of the anticipation of an abstract child. What have I done and also I can’t wait. This specific child, the boy they described on the phone, getting most of the details wrong. Precluding, at least for a time, all the other children—the baby twins, the girls, the queer teens, any of whom we had expressed openness to.
Oh no/here we go
Was the thought I had last summer when someone messaged me back on the dating app; someone who met all the criteria, someone I had a lot in common with—he, too, was married to a woman; fairly new (but more experienced than me) to ethical non-monogamy. He had a nice smile, and spoke very deliberately. I was so embarrassed to exist that I could barely look at his photos.
We had iced coffees one hot Saturday morning, sitting outside because he was afraid of getting his bike stolen. His nails were painted a royal blue, the polish irregular and thick. I was nervous until I wasn’t. When he left, we hugged, and I liked the feeling of his dense body, the faintly sweaty back of his shirt.
A week after we had coffee, I left the country for three weeks. We emailed pictures back and forth because I hadn’t paid for international data.
What am I doing can have multiple meanings—it can mean ‘I don’t know what I’m doing,’ as in, I’m not sure how to do something (be polyamorous, be a queer man); it can imply that I don’t know why I’m doing something; it can mean what have I gotten myself into.
There was a sense of vertigo, of falling. Not in love, but of something opening up, a possibility: pleasure; rejection. The day of my sister’s wedding, the day before I flew home, three days before our planned rendezvous, he broke things off.
My boy got his driver’s permit this summer, a milestone that I had stress dreams about for weeks. Not even the actual driving, but the trip to the government office. In one dream, the form said clearly that we needed to bring a check, which we had not done.
In the same fashion as when he was little, he narrated the outing, asking quiet, serious questions: this is a nice office. They renovated it? It used to be across the street? How long are we going to wait? Where do we take the pictures? How does the eye test work? Is this where you went when you changed your name?
We brought an overabundance of paperwork documenting his legal identity and my claim to him, but he’d only taken one of the two required tests in the online course, an oversight I’d had a suspicion we’d made. But he was adamant, otherwise.
Nevertheless, he passed the test, had his photograph taken; we were both startled that, when measured with his shoes on, he was close to six feet tall.
The next day, we drove all over town: to my wife’s work and the credit union; the pharmacy. He’s a very good driver, cautious and alert. He continues to narrate: I bet that person is texting and driving (they were); why is that asshole following so close; look, one of their brake lights is out.
Driving a car is a big responsibility. You could die at any moment. It’s easier than driving in a video game but there are big consequences. You can’t just crash and then reset.
I sit, rigid and hypervigilant, in the front seat. When I think he should brake, my right foot smashes to the floorboard, and I grip my seatbelt when he takes a sharp right turn. These are involuntary motions. ear and excitement. My boy! He’s doing it!
He holds up an enormous hand to silence me when I offer directions. I know which way to go, he says. Let me figure it out.
Published Anonymously
About the Author
Eddie is a therapist, dad, and writer living in the southeastern United States.
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