Every Wrong Reason(40)

I walked in and collapsed in one of her comfy chairs that sat in front of the desk. She hadn’t invited me, but I was too miserable to care.

“You don’t have a meeting or anything, do you?”

Her expression shifted to careful consideration and I wondered if she was going to bill me for my time. “Not for a few minutes. What’s going on?” This time I heard real concern in her voice. She had gone home to visit her family over the weekend, so we hadn’t spoken since after school on Friday. She didn’t know about all of my Nick drama and I was finding myself reluctant to share it with her.

I didn’t want to burden her with more of my depression, plus I was fairly certain she was as sick of hearing about my woes as I was. But I also couldn’t get myself to speak the truth out loud. I didn’t want to tell her about my Friday night with Nick because I wanted to keep that for me… I wanted to keep it special and untainted by snarky analysis.

I didn’t want her to point out the possible obvious-that Nick didn’t want to go through with the divorce. And I didn’t want her asking questions to find out if maybe I didn’t either.

There was too much past… too much history for us to ever be really happy moving forward. We just needed to cut this cord and move on.

“I saw the divorce lawyer this morning,” I confessed.

I watched her shoulders sag and her mouth turn down in a frown. “Is that where you were?”

“I took the morning. I couldn’t wait any longer.” I picked at the frayed threads on the arm of the chair. “My parents invited Nick over to Sunday dinner yesterday. Things got a little out of control.”

Her eyebrows shot up and her palms slapped the desk. “They did what?”

“Apparently they miss him.”

“They hate him!”

“Apparently they only hate me.”

She waved a dismissive hand. “Trust me, they don’t. My parents hate me. Yours love you. Maybe too much, but they definitely love you.”

I blinked at her, unsure if she was serious or not. Kara kept much of her home life to herself. She shared everything else, though, so I had never wanted to pry. I hadn’t even met her parents before. It wasn’t like college where most of my friends’ parents either came to visit or hosted a group of us for a long weekend. Since I hadn’t met Kara until our professional lives, there had been no reason to meet her family. I had never thought anything of it. She had only met mine a couple times over the years.

I tilted my chin mulishly, “If they loved me, they would not have invited my ex-husband to dinner. That’s not love. That’s torture.”

“He’s not your ex-husband yet,” she said with an obvious amount of patience in her tone. “Maybe they were trying to get you back together? Maybe they don’t hate him as much as you thought they did.”

“They were part of the problem! They made things so difficult for us! We constantly fought about them. I had to drag Nick over there. He would put up such attitude every Sunday that I always felt like the bad guy. And then my mom! God, my mom can be such a brat. She would make me feel like the worst kind of human for marrying him. Now… now they want to play nice? It’s not fair!”

She didn’t say anything for a long time. I got the feeling she didn’t know what to say.

“I’m just frustrated,” I sighed. “It’s not like I can say all of this to my mom. She’ll take it like I’m blaming her for my divorce and I’m not. There were so many more issues besides that one. But they were a problem. A weekly problem. Sometimes more.”

“If Nick hated it so much, and it sounds like you hated it too, then why did you guys keep going over there every single Sunday? That seems excessive.”

I felt like a boulder dropped in my stomach and upset everything inside me, as if I was a puddle and the boulder threw up everything that made me in a fast, draining wave until I was nothing but emptiness and gritty earth. “Because that’s what my parents expected us to do.” But my explanation sounded so weak now.

“But, Kate, why didn’t you guys just go once a month? Or every other week?”

I sat in stunned silence. Why didn’t we? Why hadn’t we set up better boundaries for our extended family? I didn’t want to deal with my mom anymore than Nick did. So why had I tortured us week after week? Why had I let Nick be talked to like that every single Sunday? Why had I purposefully driven a wedge between us over my family?

Because that’s what people do, my mind answered immediately. You spend time with your family because they’re your family.

But my reply didn’t hold the weight it once used to.

I didn’t believe it quite so strongly.

It wasn’t like Nick hadn’t suggested this very thing on more than one occasion, but I had blamed him for being unwilling to try. I had blamed him like it was his fault. I had accused him of causing drama with my parents and being selfish with his time. It was our obligation, I told him. This is what family does.

But wasn’t he my family? Shouldn’t his needs and desires and wants come before my parents? He had never suggested cutting them out of our lives completely. He just wanted to spend less time with them.

It wasn’t until Kara had pointed out the obvious that I finally saw things as they should have been.

Hell, at this moment in time, I didn’t have plans to return for lunch ever again. And although I knew that would change eventually, I didn’t have to force myself to go back every single Sunday. I could create my own boundaries. I could give myself a few Sundays off a month and actually feel rested when it was time to go to school on Monday.