"We wear the mask that grins and lies/It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,/This debt we pay to human guile;/With torn and bleeding hearts we smile…"
It was an introductory poetry course in school when I read that. I didn't think much of it really, just a catchy set of lines but, then again, I only took the course to try and win over a girl… a girl who later left me. It's not something I'm grieving about now but at the time I wondered how you could share so much with a person and then just leave them.
What had I done to deserve that?
I guess we all react to our midlife crises in different ways. When you lose have of your net worth in a divorce but you still have too much money to spend and a dark and empty house you want anything but that. So I took my money, practically tore down my house, and built a mother's home… after I qualified as a midwife.
Yes, I can imagine no one's ever seen the confused faces when a man in his midlife crisis joins a class of endeavoring young women. They were confident they knew everything, like I'd been once, and yet so naïve at the same time. It was like watching myself in the mirror… if I'd been a woman instead of a man and twenty years further down the line.
I don't remember texting through my courses… we passed notes then. 'Course if I'd tried to train as a midwife then they wouldn't have let me. Men and babies weren't a thing.
But how funny it all seems now.
Especially after I met her.
That's when I really agreed with Mr. Dunbar, the man who wrote the poem. She came into my clinic looking every bit the expectant mother and I tried to be as encouraging as possible. Her attitude was reserved, as I'd come to expect first-time mothers to be, but her mother…
That's when I felt something off.
There's something they don't tell you in training and it's that people are in awe of your skills just enough that, if they're not thinking, they'll do whatever you tell them. So I told her mother I needed to speak to her alone, for her good. The mother listened and I pulled a chair closer to my newest patient.
"I hope, Ms. Smith, you don't mind me asking but I'd like to know about your mother."
"My mother?" She frowned, "Why?"
"I was a psychologist before this-"
"Quite the step to the side isn't it?"
"It's more fulfilling." I took a breath, "But the training never goes away."
She lowered her eyes, "And what's your training telling you?"
"That you're not the first-time mother, excited for her baby and she's not the anxious grandmother." I reached out, gently laying my hand on hers and she didn't pull away. Good sign. "Why is that?"
"Because I'm a single mother."
"It's more than a different life choice I think."
She nodded and I used my other hand to flail for the box of tissues a minute to hand them to her. "She doesn't want me to keep this baby."
"Why not Ms. Smith?"
That was when she told me. The whole story from beginning to end. That was when I knew Mr. Dunbar's words "Why should the world be over-wise,/In counting all our tears and sighs?" never seemed more true.
No one should see what I really felt when she told me. I was a professional and it was my obligation to be nothing but her caretaker. She never let anyone else see it. Not after what happened to her.
But in my office that afternoon, with other patients and her mother on the other side of the door, her mask cracked. The mask she made of nothing but willpower and desire lifted for me. I'd never been very religious but I prayed for her then.
Because I finally understood, "We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries/To thee from tortured souls arise."
From that moment onward, we stumbled toward the tree at the end of the rod together. She'd tried to make it on her own, shunned by all who knew her, and wore the mask to hide how the world hurt her. They didn't deserve to know.
In the end she left the mask, in its shattered deception, behind her.
She allowed me to help her step forward. Helped her find the freedom she desired but couldn't find on her own. She didn't need the mask any longer because someone finally saw beyond it.
Maybe it's too presumptuous, and even after all these years I wonder if I gave myself too much credit. She was strong enough on her own but tears often aren't from the weak, they're from those required to be strong far too long. But she deigned to let me be there for her.
And I was honored.