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Therese

I am two weeks into my time at Come . It’s more of a retreat than a rehab center, and I want to tell whoever is in charge that they could make a boatload of money with a slight change in their marketing strategy:

Now: You are broken. Let us fix you.

New: The world is broken. Let us love you.

Everything is very structured and predictable, a salve to any anxious nervous system. There are two “betterment activities” each day.

On Mondays, we have restorative yoga, which is basically just lying on the floor in various stretches, as well as one-on-one therapy.

My therapist, Crystal, is fine, I guess.

She wears a quartz crystal around her neck, and I cannot tell if this is ironic or not.

She is at least ten years younger than me and wears combat boots with pink laces.

One side of her head is shaved. The hair on the other side is dyed pink and combed into a wave every day.

I am skeptical of her ability to heal me in any real way, but she is kind, and I must comply with these sessions to get out of this place.

We haven’t really delved into any of the heavy stuff yet—I’m sure that’s coming.

She has been focused on how I’m settling in and has started to ask me about my stresses as a mother and wife. Layers of the onion, as they say.

On Tuesdays, we have a “Mastering Mothering” class, which is mostly about how to manage our emotions so that we can then help our children emotionally regulate themselves.

Everything in this place is about emotional regulation.

Deep breathing is the key to calming the vagus nerve, which runs through the body and touches every organ system and is, apparently, the key to everything.

They should really call it the Vagus Nerve Institute.

We also have group therapy on Tuesdays, during which we talk about how we miss our children, but also love having some respite.

At least one person breaks down in tears every time.

It’s often this woman, Sheila, who was sent here by her husband after she refused to get out of bed for thirteen days straight.

She continues to insist that she is not depressed, just very tired.

It’s during group therapy that I learn the various reasons people are here.

Alexis and Jennifer became full-blown alcoholics in their first years of motherhood.

Once, while grocery shopping in the middle of the day, Alexis was so drunk that she left her two-year-old daughter in the cart and proceeded to drive home, only realizing once she’d gotten home and unpacked the groceries that her daughter was missing.

Jennifer drank a bottle of wine while sharing a bath with her four-year-old and, when she went to get out, slipped and hit her head on the tub’s faucet.

She lay bleeding and unconscious on the tile floor, her daughter likely screaming in terror, until her husband found her.

There is significant worry about the trauma experienced by the children in both of these incidents.

Catherine’s mother died of cancer, and she simply lost the ability to do anything but put her three children in front of the TV for seven hours a day.

Raquel told her husband she was ill so she could stay in the basement bedroom for a few days.

She so enjoyed the reprieve from her parenting duties that she fabricated fibromyalgia, which led her husband to hire a nanny.

Then her husband caught her in the basement doing an online aerobics class, seemingly pain-free, and that was that.

Serena left her family—including four children under the age of eight—to be with a man in Argentina who she’d met on a dating app for married people.

After he scammed her out of all the money in the checking account she shared with her husband, she came back home.

Her husband took out a second mortgage on their house to send her to Come .

Nobody has had my exact situation. They’ve had bits and pieces of my situation—marriage issues, death and grief, affairs—but not the whole shebang. Crystal and I have only begun to scratch the surface of the whole shebang. It’s a surface I’d much rather ignore until the nuclear death of the sun.

On Wednesdays, we have restorative yoga in the mornings and “Live Out Loud” scream sessions in the afternoons. During these sessions, we all gather in the courtyard and scream. It’s surprisingly therapeutic.

On Thursdays, there’s more one-on-one therapy and a yoga flow class in the evening. At the very least, I am getting quite flexible.

On Fridays, there’s more group therapy and then a “Laugh It Off” session where we all gather in the courtyard and laugh hysterically. This would be much better if we were all high, but drugs are frowned upon here.

On Saturdays, we do a nature hike, which is really just a walk through the hills across the street from the property, and a half-hour guided meditation (during which I fall asleep, despite getting nine hours of blissful sleep at night).

“Your body is recovering from long-term deprivation on multiple levels.” That’s what Crystal said, which felt so validating that I wanted to cry.

On Sundays, we have a free-dance class with this woman named Marcella who always shows up in three-inch black heels and a red flamenco dress.

She encourages us to move our bodies in whatever ways feel good, and for most of us, that means flailing about, limbs akimbo, like Elaine in Seinfeld .

They should really combine this with the laughing session—two birds, one stone.

We also do letter writing on Sundays, which is very similar to the “making amends” bit of Alcoholics Anonymous.

They tell us the letters are just for us and we don’t have to send them, but there is also subtle encouragement to send them.

My letters have been lame so far—staccato sentences that read like something written by a five-year-old.

I feel sad. I feel shame. I have regrets.

I’m sorry. Crystal says this represents my reluctance to tap into the enormity of my emotions.

My roommate, Marie, has warmed to me, which infuses me with satisfaction. Crystal says this means I am too reliant on external validation. I say I am a woman; I have been conditioned this way.

Marie’s story would horrify people in the outside world, but nobody bats an eye at it here. Like me, she stopped working (she’d held a fairly high-up position in the finance world) to care for her children—twin boys.

“Having twins, that did me in,” she told me on the night of our initial confessional. This was last week. We each sat against our respective headboards, not daring to look at each other, as we traded our truths.

“I really only wanted one,” she said. “And I wasn’t even sure about one. I had all the typical worries about how a child would change my life. Then I got two of them.”

She considered terminating one of the fetuses—such a thing is possible—but there were risks involved for the other fetus, and she didn’t think she could live with herself if that baby also died.

“How old are they now?” I asked.

“Three.”

“Such a hard age.”

“Aren’t they all hard?”

“God, I hope not.”

One day, while her architect husband was working in his home office, she told him she was stepping out to run an errand, and she just didn’t come back.

For two weeks. Actually, she didn’t even come back after two weeks.

Instead, she finally responded to her husband’s frantic texts to say, simply, “I’m fine.

I’m at a hotel in Seattle.” He came to get her and then brought her immediately here.

“So you haven’t seen your boys since you left for ... the errand?”

She shook her head.

“Do you miss them?”

She looked at me then. “Do you want me to be honest?”

“I do.”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. I know they’re doing okay, maybe better without me. I like having time to myself. I’m not sure I ever should have been a mother.”

Many of the women here say things like “Maybe I’m not cut out for this” and “I love my kids, but I hate raising them.” The therapists assure all of us that maternal ambivalence is normal, that we would all be better off if it was more socially acceptable to admit to its existence.

“Do you miss yours?” she asked me.

I sensed she wanted me to say something similar to what she had, but that wouldn’t have been true for me.

“I do.”

It is Monday, and I am sitting in Crystal’s office. I know who her other four clients are, and I like to think I am her favorite. I suppose she would say that’s me craving external validation again, so I don’t inquire about whatever hierarchy of favorites she may or may not have.

“You look good,” she says. “More rested, maybe.”

“You think?”

She nods.

“Does that mean you’re going to start going harder on me with the therapy?”

She laughs. “Just to be clear, my intention is never to go hard on you. But yes, I do feel like you’re ready to start exploring some things a bit more.”

Exploring some things. She’d warned me of this in our last session.

“Sounds terrifying.”

She laughs again. “It might be, just a little. But that’s normal. We can pull back at any time.”

I shove my hands under my thighs, clutching myself, bracing for whatever conversation she has in store. There are so many topics to choose from. She must have an extensive checklist in the binder that’s on her lap. I imagine her spinning a wheel, making a game of the disaster that is my life.

“I know most people start at the beginning,” she says, “but I was thinking we could start at the end.”

“The end?”

“Why don’t you take me back to the day of the accident, and then we’ll go from there.”