"These ivy covered walls feel like they're closing in a little more every week," Allison Murphy found herself thinking each Tuesday she made her scheduled trip to the small, rustic New England Catholic school campus where she'd been contracted to apply her trade as a psychiatrist and youth counselor.
"It doesn't help that everyone here is half your age either," Allison chided herself, knowing that at the ripe old age of 41, most of the students she passed on the way to the classroom she used for her sessions were not even born yet when she was in college.
"But it does all seem like yesterday somehow," she continued to ruminate. "And to think about all the water under the bridge since then. An 18 year marriage, two kids, an abandoned career, a divorce, middle age gets here before you can breathe."
"God I wish I could tell all these kids to be a little more selfish with their time once they get out of here and on with their lives," Allison would think each time she pass a bright eyed and optimistic face in the hallway. "They don't have a clue what's waiting for them out there."
The light, inner reminiscing Allison always did during her trip across campus to her makeshift 3rd floor office in McCullough Hall each Tuesday always seemed to come to a grinding halt however once she arrived and opened her shop for business. Then things inevitably began to get very heavy.
Even though she had finished her degree and kept up her license to practice while married, Allison mainly worked part time after her children were born, basically running her counseling services by referrals and word of mouth. It wasn't until her and her husband split about a year earlier that Allison was able to commit herself fully to trying to get her career off the ground.
The timing of Allison's life change happened to coincide with the fallout of the Catholic church's sexual abuse scandal and that, in a macabre but fortuitous way, enabled her to land her first major run of steady and well paying work.
The school that had offered Allison the counseling contract had discovered that several of the students currently enrolled had one in way or the other been victimized by those horrible abuses of power years earlier and wanted someone on staff to help those young men have a consistent and confidential place to deal with their trauma.
Selfishly, it was a huge opportunity for Allison to build her resume and the ample monthly check that came with it could help a struggling divorcee with two teenage kids as well. A practicing Catholic herself, Allison also saw it as a small way to salvage her faith's besmerched image by helping the unfortunate souls that had been victimized and showing them someone truly did care.
On a personal level, the new job also served as a indispensable conduit for Allison to get her self esteem back in one piece after having it ripped apart by a long failing marriage and the nearly year long divorce that ended it. Without a Husband, and with both her boys away at a private school in Maine, Allison could focus solely on making her career work.
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While all of Allison's intentions had been good, the sessions themselves had proved to be an emotional and painfully draining grind. With two children of her own, both boys not much younger than the college students she was counseling, it was a chore for Allison to apply her professional detachment and clinical understanding to what the boys described rather than allowing her anger and parental protectiveness to kick in.
Adept and trained at understanding the peculiar workings of the human mind, deep down Allison also knew she was submerging much of her own dysfunction into helping mediate the troubles of others, but often she questioned if she had bitten off more than she could chew with the abuse cases.
As any sane person would in her chosen field, Allison had made a promise to herself never to bring her work home with her, but as the Tuesday sessions at the school continued, she found herself more and more trying to make sense of what she was hearing late into the evenings.
"Price you pay for having so much drama in your life for the last few years... when there was a drama free vacuum there after the divorce Allison... naturally you found something to fill it," she would rationalize.
"Besides... each of those boys' stories sound so much the same... it's horrifying... you need to spend the extra time away from the meetings to try and keep their situations separate and special to try and find some common thread to help them out of the darkness."
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Allison would have freely admitted to being somewhat geeky and a bookworm in school. Her plain features and boxey figure present from the onset of puberty, she always knew she'd have to count on her brains more than her looks. Never one to slave to be part of a social circle, Allison made it a pastime to continually look inside herself, and others, to find the motivations behind human behavior and her pursuit of Psychology as a career grew out of that. If you can't join them, so to speak, at least understand them and maybe beat them.
Not that she was single again, all those same insecurities of her teenage years that Allison thought she had conquered, had risen from ashes. Those feelings were only heightened by having to put herself back on that college campus. Even though she was on the backside of 40 and was a trained and well compensated professional, the same queasy bitterness Allison felt towards the popular and good looking 'in' crowd when she was in school came back in a cold, dull rush.
Through some strange quirk of fate however, some of the rich, preppy pretty boys she was now in charge of counseling, ones who would not have given her a second look when she was in school, were now laying themselves down on her couch and spilling out the most acidic secrets humanly possible from their souls and Allison fought mightily to keep from taking any joy in that. Yet in those private moments of justification, there was still a vague but persistent need gnawing at her, a hunger left over from adolescence for appreciation, attention and self worth.
A need that had been bubbling beneath the surface like a long dormant volcano, one that with all her training as a psychiatrist she would have easily diagnosed if it were a patient, but like a moth to an ever-intensifying flame, Allison found herself being drawn to it even as she approached the crossroads of middle age.
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Allison's new business, for the most part, was running smoothly. Her Monday sessions she had allotted time to counsel women who were going through divorce and other major life hits as sort of a cathartic kinship for herself.
Wednesday through Friday, Allison mainly served a walk-in crowd at her small, rented downtown office and most of those cases were easy money walks in the park compared to what she had to deal with during her Tuesdays at the college.
