But below that level of conscious intention there was an older picture, one he absorbed from his parents’ marriage and from his family’s general orientation, and when I left my job the older picture started doing things the conscious intention would not have approved of.
Telling his family I was unemployed was not a calculated decision. It was an impulse that served something he did not know he wanted served: the picture of himself as the one who provided. Once the story was out there he kept it because correcting it would have dismantled the picture.
I am not excusing this. I am describing it. There is a difference, and getting that difference right mattered to both of us.
“I need you to understand something,” I said to him one evening about ten days after the workshop. “My work is not supplementary. I do not do it to keep myself busy or to feel useful. It is professional work and it brings in professional income and I expect it to be described accurately.”
“I know,” he said. “I get that now.”
“You got it then, too,” I said. “That’s the part that matters. You knew. You were at the table when we did the projections. You saw the client list. You’ve seen the invoices. You knew and you still told your family the other thing.”
He did not try to argue with this. “Yes.”
“So it wasn’t that you didn’t understand what I did. It was that you preferred a different picture.”