Page 152 of The Havenport Collection

Josh

I never thought I would enjoy therapy and had spent years avoiding it at all costs.

But Lord knows I needed it. For the last thirty years, I had obsessed about success and making my parents proud, and that fixation had almost cost me my family.

So I was a new man. A man who approached therapy like I approached everything else in my life—with absolute and total commitment.

“What’s on your mind?” Dr. Marty asked.

I had been seeing him for about six months at the recommendation of my friend Callum. He was really good at his job, and on a professional level, I respected that. But on a personal level? Fuck, I hated how he backed me into corners and forced me to confront some ugly stuff.

“I’m thinking about Maggie. And I’m thinking about how I miss when Jack would wake me up at night to tell me he had a weird dream.

His dreams are so entertaining.” Jack had never been a good sleeper and would frequently stumble into our room in the middle of the night, desperate to tell me about the robot fight he’d dreamed about.

I would tuck him back in and listen as he drifted off to sleep again. That kid had an incredible imagination.

“You miss your family.”

“I do. But I see them all the time. The irony is that I spend more time with them now than I did when I lived in the house with them. And the more time I spend with them, the more I realize how much time I wasted.”

And I had missed so much. I met Maggie my freshman year at Boston College. She was pre-med, too, and ambitious. I admired her determination and her intellect. Unlike other freshman girls, she was serious, intense, and not interested in partying.

I lived every day of college in fear that I’d fail a test and lose my scholarship.

So I did all I could to win every award and ace every test. It wasn’t hard, especially after I talked Maggie into becoming my study partner.

We were stronger together than alone, and we pushed each other to be our best.

I knew within weeks of meeting her that I would marry her.

It wasn’t because of her beauty or intelligence, but because we both possessed the drive, the hunger, the grit that very few others did.

I recognized it in her immediately. She had also been raised by a single parent after her dad died, and that similarity made me feel less alone.

She had suffered the same kind of loss and felt a compelling drive to do more because of it too.

It didn’t hurt that Maggie was beautiful too. Tall and graceful, yet strong. She had shiny dark brown hair and sparkling green eyes. There was a smattering of freckles across her nose and a dimple in her chin. I used to kiss it every night before we fell asleep.

Huh. When did I stop doing that? I racked my brain and couldn’t pinpoint a date. At some point in our marriage, I had stopped our good-night ritual and hadn’t even realized it.

“So you feel guilty?” he asked.

“It’s more than guilt. It’s sadness. I fucked everything up.”

“We’ve talked about this Josh. Marriage is a two-way street. You’ve taken responsibility for your actions and you’ve sought to change them. You have made tremendous progress in the time we’ve been working together.”

I had heard this speech multiple times. He’s proud of me, blah, blah, blah. But it wasn’t enough. Maggie hadn’t forgiven me yet.

“I appreciate your insights, but there are whole years that I missed. Birthday parties and kindergarten graduations and movie nights. They’re so grown up, and I missed so much of the good stuff.”

“You have to forgive yourself, Josh. It’s the only way to move forward. You can mourn what you lost, but you know that a fresh start requires forgiveness.”

I nodded. He was right. But I was so angry at myself. I had prioritized achievement and money without a clue as to how much I was missing.

My mom had died when I was seven, and my dad raised me on his own.

My hometown of Newton, Massachusetts, was affluent, privileged, and overwhelmingly white.

Being biracial—my mom was white, and my dad was black—I had always felt like an outsider.

No one I knew understood my experiences and viewpoints.

So I learned at an early age that I had to scrap and fight for every opportunity I got.

My parents taught me to be proud of my heritage and my abilities, but it was so difficult to fit in.

My parents were teachers who had met and fallen in love later in life. They instilled the value of education in me and taught me to trust myself and my potential. I was loved, and the three of us were really happy in the years we had before a brain aneurysm took my mother from us.

Dad’s teaching salary alone didn’t go far in such a pricey town, but he was determined to keep me there because the high school was one of the top in the state.

So we made do after Mom passed away. Dad worked weekends and summers tutoring and picking up bartending jobs when necessary.

I got my first job at twelve and never let up.

He taught me the value of hard work and to take pride in who I was and where I came from.

No one was prouder the day I graduated from medical school.

Thankfully being a doctor had allowed me to get him out of Newton.

I moved him up to Havenport, where he had a condo in an over-fifty-five development on the north side of town.

He played bridge, volunteered at church, and was president of the town’s horticultural society.

He was spending his sixties living the leisurely kind of life he had dreamed of when he worked double shifts on weekends to pay for my SAT prep course or tutored each night to cover the cost of braces.

My diplomas hung above the mantel in his living room. When I received them, he took them, framed them, and promptly hung them up. He said he sipped his coffee every morning admiring them, and every guest in his home was made to stop and pay respects to my academic achievements.

My very existence filled him with pride, but it weighed on me most days.

The weight of his expectations, the weight of his sacrifice, was always on my mind.

It was what challenged me to work so hard, to earn scholarship after scholarship and graduate at the top of my class.

It pushed me into the emergency department despite my passion for internal medicine because it was more prestigious and came with a larger salary.

But I gave so much of myself to my career that I had little left for my family. Unbeknownst to me, Maggie and I had been going through the motions for years.

The day Maggie and I agreed to separate, everything snapped into place. The fog lifted, and I could see how much of a mess I had made. We were like strangers living in the same house. I barely knew my kids, and I didn’t recognize myself.

“Have you thought about next steps, career-wise?” he asked, pushing his glasses up his nose.

I sighed. He had been on me for months to network, research, and work toward redefining my career goals.

But I had put it off. I loved medicine. Of that, I was certain.

But I hated the lifestyle of a surgeon at a large city teaching hospital.

I’d spent years climbing the ladder, only to be rewarded with more work and more responsibility.

And my mentor, Dr. Collins, had pushed me so hard.

He was the one who had encouraged me to try to transition into the pharmaceutical industry.

“I want to work. I miss it. But I’ve done so much work on myself, and I don’t want to backslide into my old mindset and habits.

” Eventually I’d have to reconcile my desire to practice medicine with my desire to make every soccer game and violin concert.

But I couldn’t even think about it until I worked things out with Maggie.

“Have you applied anywhere? Networked locally?”

I shook my head. “I will. I promise. In the New Year I’ll get focused.

” I cringed at how unmotivated I sounded.

Work had always been my top priority, the thing that gave me purpose and meaning.

I worried constantly about money, obsessing about my retirement account and college savings for the kids.

But even after paying off my school loans, which were equivalent to the GDP of a small nation, Maggie and I were doing ok.

Her practice in town was booming and we were finally comfortable.

And the knowledge of that comfort allowed me to take this time off to think things through.

The day I walked away from Maggie, our kids, and our home was one of the worst of my life. I knew that now. I was smarter and stronger and had successfully removed my head from my ass, which, for a doctor, was a pretty amazing feat.