The Wake Up

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

And it was a big thing, to be happy. A huge thing.

But she was standing a few steps away from him now, figuratively speaking, in some indefinable place inside herself. And, worse yet, she had closed the door to that place, leaving him alone on the outside. Exactly where he had been his whole life, minus a couple of wonderful months.

All of a sudden you’re changeable. Maybe it goes back and forth, how do I know? All I know is . . . I just have no idea what I should expect from you anymore.”

weighing and measuring the uncharted iceberg floating just under the surface of this discussion. Reimagining his terrible night as a mere jumping-off place for a situation that had only begun to fester.

Not everyone responds to fear with the same behaviors.

He stared out the window for another moment. Tried to see the buildings differently, now that he knew she didn’t like them, either. Tried to see her differently. It felt strange to think they had anything in common. Even something small like that.

people come into our lives and point things out to us for a reason.

He’d come here, he now realized, for an easy answer. What he would get would be far messier, less exact, and more complicated than he could possibly have imagined. He could feel that now. He would have to tear open everything.

There was something different about that day. There was. Even before it became painfully obvious.

and nothing was more important than to prove you were tough enough to shake it off. Whether that was the truth of the situation or not.

That is, if it was accidental at all. Later he would look back on the moment and wonder.

His emotion was a rubber band wound up until it snapped. The ends would fly. Nothing would come back together. Not now. Not anymore.

We couldn’t do as much harm if people could feel what they were doing.”

She does this thing where she controls people with her anger. She wants life a certain way. If you don’t do everything just right, she’ll punish you with her anger.”

But you don’t simply shake off a thing like that. It’s too bad you can’t, but you can’t. It’s in your bones, it’s in your cells. It needs time to move through you.

It’s like if a person loses their sight. Their other senses become stronger. I think we develop whatever senses we need to get by in the world.”

“So you’re saying she makes it easy to love her.” “Yes, exactly.”

You don’t have to pay for what you didn’t do.

Because I don’t want to live in a world where we have to punish ourselves for things that we could have done but didn’t.

Look. I know what’s troubling you. I really do. It’s a turning-point moment in people’s lives, when you look yourself in the face like that and realize that who you are, and who you become, and what you do seem to rely on a combination of factors that are partly out of your control. It’s not whether a person could ever commit a violent act that’s a reasonable question, but more how far you would have to push that person to bring it out. Be glad you passed the test this time. But I get it. It scared you. Plus it opened up some other unfortunate cans of worms.”

“Well. Now that you know you could be pushed over the edge, in which case you would have been a decent person doing a terrible thing, you need to consider whether you can see Milo in the light of that same humanity.”

“No. I can’t. And I won’t. Because he didn’t stop himself.” “Right, no. He didn’t. But he’s not you. He may have been through some things you haven’t. So you have to ask yourself if you’re absolutely sure you could go through the experiences he’s been through in his short life and not act out with violence. I’m not saying it’s an impossible thing to do, or that everyone would react the same way. Some people can absorb a lot of abuse without outer-directing their anger. They turn it in on themselves, usually, instead.

Milo’s abusive father probably suffered a great deal in his life and reacted to it by outer-directing his rage. If we’d somehow seen him as a young boy being abused, we’d feel terribly sorry for him. We’d properly see that younger version of him as an innocent victim. But now he’s all grown up and acting out the shape he’s been twisted into being, and we have nothing for him but our hatred.”

“I’ve never met anybody who was mean for no reason,”

“I’ve met some people who were mean for reasons I may never know. But I never met anyone who I think was born that way.

But a caution: Until you get it that he’s only what his experience has shaped him to be, you’re seeing him as subhuman. As ‘other’ somehow. And the danger in the meantime is that he’ll see that. He’ll know how you view him. When you see a child as ‘less than,’ it’s not long before self-fulfilling prophecy comes into play.”

Everything changes.

It was a little like moving through a darkened room. It was something you did one step at a time, working purely by feel.

“But, really,” she added, more softly now, “it’s not sudden at all. Things haven’t been right with our marriage for years. Maybe more so than I’ve let on—I’m not sure. But every morning I wake up knowing it. And I have a choice. I can force a change that day, or I can get through the day and pass it off till tomorrow. Just keep kicking it down the road like an old can.”

You can’t do much better than the best thing ever.

And in one careless move, it can all be undone.

But that’s the problem with shutting everything down. You can more or less understand a thing in your head, but you don’t have your feelings about it to guide you. So it all ends up looking blank and muddy, like something you could stare at all day without it ever coming clear.

But he learned something in that moment, something he would never forget: the difference between a horse and a person. A good old horse won’t hold your mistakes against you. The horse will let you have another chance.

But there’s knowing and then there’s knowing. And, as it turned out, one of the varieties hurt more than the other.

And all that trouble because you couldn’t just hold still and listen to what I had to say.”

That was how their new relationship became a two-way street. That was the moment when both their failings lay on full display, and it was up to each of them to decide what they would do with the vulnerability of the other.

And now here it was. This new living thing.

It’s easier to see the big picture when you’re standing a few steps outside it.”

I think your subconscious played a trick on you to get you to see something you were trying not to see.”

Not good, just familiar.

It struck Aiden that he had never much liked Jed Donovan. Seemed like something he would have known, and a thing that would not strike suddenly. Aiden had known the man for years, but only at the periphery of his life. He had never had any call to form much of an opinion. Jed was simply there. And Jed was what Jed had always been. But as the grind of Jed’s tactlessness and overall unlikability settled in on Aiden, it came as no real surprise.

You hope for the best for your kids. You want them to be happy, and you want to feel close to them and help them. So when you see them moving in what you think is a good direction, or think you see it, you hope. You hope wildly. And, as a result, having a child tends to mean getting your heart broken on a regular basis. It takes courage to hope for something you know you might not get. But the alternative is not to believe in your child or hope for great things for him. So I’m a big fan of the heartbreak method myself.”

But they loved each other. I swear they did. In both directions. It was just . . . in such a toxic way.”

It’s always easier to feel for those who remind us of ourselves.

“I wouldn’t make assumptions about his level of caring,” she said. “I know he’s showing it in a very different way than you did when you were seven. Bear in mind you were on the inside of that experience. So you felt your excitement, but it’s hard to know how much someone on the outside of you would have seen.”

But I guess I thought she was perfect. But she’s not. She hurts people, but it’s okay, because she just needs to learn to do better.

“He has a hole in his heart,” Uncle Edgar said, and then puffed again. “So many of us do, but I expect his is bigger than most. We think we’ll fill it up someday, somehow, but in most ways we never do. We just learn to live a good life with a hole in our heart. We make space for it. We work around it. You were a boy with a hole in your heart, and I’ll bet anything it’s still there.”

“Human nature. After something works out, we forget the frustration of the steps we took in getting there.”

Are you doing what your heart says to do?’”