So I stood four feet away and let my daughter be furious with me for about eleven minutes.
Then I said: “You’re allowed to be angry with me about this for as long as you need to be.
There’s no time limit on it and you can’t use it up.
And I’m not going anywhere while you do it.”
Things improved noticeably after that week, and Dr.
Roshan said that was not a coincidence.
The practical side mattered as much as the counseling, and that is the part people leave out.
I moved to a staff position for the last eighteen months of my time at Carson.
It was a lateral move at best and it took me out of the running for one or two things.
My career survived it.
If it hadn’t, that would have been an acceptable price, and I’d have said so at the time.
Samantha and I put an actual schedule on paper — not an understanding, a schedule, with names and dates, covering every training period on my calendar for a year.
Hannah has a copy of it taped inside her closet door, updated, to this day.
In September she knows who has her in March.
And I started doing one thing at bedtime that Dr.
Roshan suggested, which I found excruciating for about two months and now cannot imagine going without.
I ask her one question a night.
It is always the same one and it is not “how was your day.”
It is: “Anything you’re carrying?”
Most nights the answer is no.
Maybe one night in nine it isn’t.
A few of those have been about very small things and four or five of them have been about very large ones.
She is fourteen now.
She still answers it.
