This is my take on an ending to GeorgeAnderson's "February Sucks." It starts about a month after the end of the original. As much as possible, I've shewn closely to the story canon and only made additions to the history of the characters where there's a reasonable extrapolation based on my interpretation of their behavior in the original story. Or where I screwed up and missed something. There's some additional commentary about the original and story notes for my ending at the bottom, but read this first; there are spoilers down there.
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Therapy with Tom, Session 4 - Late September
"How are you doing, Jim?" Tom had out his notepad and pen. I knew the sessions were being recorded, but he was still kind of old school. I found it oddly comforting, like writing it down somehow made it more real.
"You know. Doing okay. Just trying to keep on keeping on." I made a little noncommittal shrug.
"Mmmhmm. So, do you want to just pay me to hang out? Because people, especially people with stories like the one you told me, don't come to me because they're 'doing okay.'" He leaned forward. "I'm here to help you, Jim. Help you get past this and figure out what to do next. How are you really doing?"
"... I've been better."
"Okay. Okay." He chewed on the tip of his pen, a gesture that identified him to me as a fellow ex-smoker. "How are you feeling?"
I thought for a long moment, then spoke. "Tired. Sad." I hesitated, and Tom looked at me encouragingly. "Stupid." I lowered my head. "Weak."
"I completely understand feeling tired and sad. Those are normal reactions to a trauma that's as all-encompassing as this one. And I understand why you might feel stupid and weak, but you're not. You need to understand, your story..."
He frowned and put down his pen and notepad.
"Jim, I don't do this very often; maybe a dozen times in the thirty years I've been in practice. But I'm going to take my therapist hat off and tell you this, man to man: it was one of the most capital-F, capital-U Fucked Up things I've ever heard."
I laughed at his unexpected candor. "Yeah. Yeah, it really is."
Tom shook his head. "You are entitled to feel whatever emotions you feel about what Linda, your friends, and L. W. did, not to mention Marc and Ellen. That's the 'appropriately professional' thing I'm supposed to say. Here's the thing I'm not supposed to say, or at least not this directly: you are absolutely justified in feeling betrayed by almost everyone in your life. You are not stupid. I've seen cults that used less effective brainwashing techniques. And the fact that you pushed through it because you want to do what's best for your kids? You're anything but weak. Man, I am in awe of that level of self-sacrifice.
"Thanks, I--"
"Not done yet. 'In awe' isn't necessarily a positive thing, Jim. I'm in awe of a tsunami or a charging rhino, too. But those are dangerous and destructive. Your stoicism in the face of..." He made a face that was both incredulous and angry, his hands gesturing wildly. "...literally everything that's happened to you? It's not healthy. Not for you, not for your relationships, and not for your kids."
He hesitated, as if he wasn't sure he should say something. Then, with a look of resolve, he forged ahead. "I'm going to tell you another thing: your story was so out there that, after our first session, I had it checked into a little bit. I honestly was worried that you might be having paranoid delusions. I thought you might be an undiagnosed schizophrenic; that's how outlandish your claims were. But everything that I could check out did check out. I cannot imagine you having to actually go through this Kafkaesque nightmare for the last seven months."
I frowned. I had spent our first three sessions detailing everything that happened to me as a result of Linda's affair. It was extremely painful to relive it, but it felt good to talk to someone who I could trust to be completely objective. Well, not completely; I was paying him, but I was paying him for his honesty as much as his abilities. I needed to figure out what to do to get past this, one way or another, once and for all.
He took a deep breath. "There's so much here that we need to dive into. But I want to start with this: in the story you've told me, literally every named adult that you had personally known when it began, other than the woman who watched your kids and the waitress at the diner, either lied to, betrayed, or gaslit you. Sometimes all three! That is absolutely fucking bonkers." One other thing I'd liked about Tom, from the moment I met him, is that he usually eschewed clinical language. I didn't know if it was a rhetorical tool or just how he was, but it was comforting. No doublespeak about 'psyche' or 'attachment' or any of that other bullshit unless it was absolutely necessary.
"Your stoicism isn't healthy, and I think you know that. Deep down, I think it's why you're here. My initial impression is that it's a response to the fact that everyone you know tried to prevent you from taking steps to do anything about what was happening to you. You tried to take action but were stymied at every turn. And, because of that, you had to become stoic. It was the only way to cope with the fact that you knew this was all wrong, but were actively discouraged by everyone from actually doing anything about it."
He started to tick items off on his fingers. "You tried to stop Marc and Linda from dancing, and then slow dancing, but your friends stopped you. You tried to get Linda to leave with you right after the dance, and she left with Marc instead, lying to you in order to do so. Your initial response to your wife leaving with Marc was to try to follow her, but you were blocked by Dee. Then your other friends tried to tell you it was really no big deal. You knew that it was, and you were right, but they made it impossible to actually stop Linda. Then, they kept trying to convince you for weeks afterwards that this was perfectly normal, and you just needed to get over it. Linda came home and told you all of that, pardon my language, complete and utter bullshit that you knew was complete and utter bullshit, but she and your friends just kept hammering on it."
Tom was on a roll. This session was the first time he'd strung more than two sentences together in a row since I'd started coming to see him. He had already run out of fingers to tick on one hand, and we weren't even a third of the way through my story.
"You go to see your lawyer-- your lawyer!-- an old family friend, and he tells you that this is a normal thing that women do, that it's to be expected. Even sort of, kind of, acceptable. Then he gives you the spiel, which is completely inaccurate, about how important it is that kids have two parent households.
"Don't get me wrong, that's definitely preferred, but a household where..." he made the 'all of this' gesture "... happened is not going to be a healthy place to raise kids unless the people involved are willing to pay for a couples counselor's vacation home. I love my profession, but there are limits to what we can do."
