On the front lines of living
Couples therapy, have you tried it? For the wood panelling and the comfy chairs alone, I would recommend it.
The only thing anyone knows couples therapy from is American films. The couples yell. The couples accuse. They say insane things and the therapist pulls them up, clearly taking the side of one or the other, especially in comedies. It normally signals the death knell, whatever that variety of knell is, for the marriage. It’s like when someone coughs in a movie: you know they’re toast within the next 20 minutes.
This was what I expected. So as the hints had come from Kate, I resisted interpreting them correctly. Surely not, I thought. Don’t we want to avoid the knells?
The podcasts turned my head a little. Kate would be listening to these couples therapy podcasts, and they were reasonable and insightful, the couples understanding and forgiving. Or one would rage and be listened to, then the therapist would summarise their rage back to them in a calm voice, and provide interpretation.
I won’t bore or titillate you with the actual therapy. The point of my poem 'Couples Therapy', included in my latest collection Stupefying, was just to go there. Ashleigh Young, my editor, had said she liked the harrowing poems. I like them in others too, the truth-telling from the front lines of living. I thought of Amy Brown’s book Neon Daze and that sort of reportage from the early days of motherhood. Where had I been that others maybe hadn’t? Couples therapy.
I mean it was the death knell, but the chairs were comfortable, and I had a chance to be impressed by my own reasonableness. And I do recommend it. Having a third person in the room. Not that room. Or, I guess, go for it. But you know what I mean. *
Couples Therapy
The couples therapist lived in Highbury, down
a sudden little valley. We parked the car
near the top and toe-heeled the slope,
making jokes,
the way the walking dead do.
Through the door there was some brickwork
and also wood panelling. Nothing is more
reassuring than brickwork and wood panelling.
I take it back; there was a 1970s laissez-faire
in the sunken lounge with a log burner near
the steps down in. A large glass ornament was
incongruous though, on a table
just distant of the three chairs.
I would look it at from time to time and frown.
The chairs were deep and soft, but it would
feel inappropriate to loll back into that softness
and really enjoy
what the chair seemed to delight in offering.
Mostly I perched
on the edge and held my fingers interlaced,
in a way I imagined my father would do when
looking attentive and priestly. Walking back
out to the car, we joked some more, but
in the car, safe
from the ears of the dark and leaf-sodden street,
we recapped a little, talked more.
Had the couples therapist taken my side too
much? I wasn’t sure that she had, but another
analysis presented itself to me. Perched there
with my interlaced hands, not crying
or expressing anguish
and turmoil, I was the most polite.
I was thoughtful,
eager. You were trying to utter your truths, and
I was nodding, buoying up, validating,
commiserating, but,
also, trying
to get the couples therapist to take my side.
The new poetry collection Stupefying by Nick Ascroft (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $25) is available in bookstores nationwide. It will be launched with all due great and spectacular fanfare tomorrow night (Thursday, September 15) at The Hudson bar in Chews Lane, downtown Wellington, from 5.30pm.
