I said: the texture of day-to-day life feels different. I said that I was raising things sooner rather than storing them, which is still uncomfortable for me but less uncomfortable than it was two months ago. I said that I noticed Nathan noticing things he hadn’t been noticing, which was both good and something I was being careful not to over-interpret.
Dr. Mehta asked about Elaine.
Nathan said his relationship with his mother felt, for the first time, like it was actually his. He said he’d been so busy being responsible for her that he hadn’t been relating to her, and that the difference between those two modes was something he was still figuring out.
I said I’d noticed that my weekly anxiety about what Elaine’s needs would require of our schedule had diminished. Not vanished — I still feel some of it — but diminished.
Dr. Mehta said she thought we’d done good work and asked what we needed from the sessions going forward.
We agreed to continue monthly, at least through the spring. Neither of us is in a hurry to call this done.
## The Kitchen Table, Late
There is a particular time of evening, after ten o’clock on weeknights when neither of us has anywhere to be the next morning, when Nathan and I are most ourselves. I don’t know what it is about late evenings specifically — the tiredness, maybe, the lowering of the guard that comes from having gotten through the day and having nothing further to perform or manage. We’ve always been good at late.