𝐅𝐨𝐫 𝐁𝐞𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐨𝐫 𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐬𝐭

24

Janey Brewster

"How have you been Janey?" Dr. Lauren asked me.

"I've been pretty good, just working on myself" I smiled.

"I have a few things I want to talk about, but is there anything you want to say first?"

"I'm not really, I came here prepared for whatever you're gonna throw at me."

"When you say it like that, it makes me sound bad." She laughed.

"Well we don't always talk about the best things things in these sessions." I wiped my hands on my jeans feeling them sweat.

"But, I have to over the-"

"Bad to get to the good, I know." I smiled at her.

This session was going a lot better than I thought it would.

"I want to do an activity that I do with all married couples going through rough times ." She spoke picking up a whiteboard.

"Ooouuu, are we going to draw?" I asked getting excited.

"Not exactly, I want you to make a list of the pros and cons of your relationship with David."

I sighed, "Now or when we first met?"

"Let's focus on now and then we'll go from there." She handed me the board.

It was a lot harder than I thought it would be. I found myself listing more cons than pros.

"Okay this is interesting she said looking over the two list."

"A lot of your pros have to do with your daughter."

"Well at some point she was the only thing we could agree on. Our love for her is much stronger than our love for each other." I frowned.

"And that makes sense, she is your daughter. You guys brought her into this world."

"We've been arguing a lot about who gets to see her on what days."

"Why don't you do three and a half days or three days and then four days?"

"We tried that and got into a argument about who gets the extra day."

She sighed nodding her head, "how do these arguments usually go?"

"Well they always start off as a small disagreement and then because we can't communicate without getting an attitude with each other it progresses."

"Why is it that the two of you can't communicate even when it comes to your daughter?"

"Because he doesn't know how to talk to people respectfully. He always has to swear at me or raise his voice."

She sat up in her seat and looked at me over her glasses. "And when he gets like that, what do you do?"