Letting Him Have It

He has never once asked me for anything. I'm starting to think nobody ever taught him he was allowed to want something.

Theo Barrera is six foot four and apologizes to furniture.

He's the man everyone in this organization sets their weight down on - the players, the coaches, my best friend's husband, his own mother. He absorbs all of it and never puts any of it back down. And at a retirement party, in a kitchen with every window in the house open, he asked me where I was going instead of whether I'd be around.

Nobody had ever asked me that.

I'm an emergency physician. I can talk a stranger through the worst hour of his life and I cannot say one true thing about myself without stapling a joke to the front of it. So I did what I do. I set terms. Nobody knows. No staying over. No implications.

He agreed to every one of them without negotiating a single point, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to understand that agreeing is just the thing he does.

So I stopped asking him to give.

I put his hands over his head and told him he wasn't allowed to be useful, and I found out what a man sounds like the first time in thirty-four years that somebody hands him something he has no way to pay for.

He's spent his whole life waiting for permission nobody was ever going to give him.

I'm done waiting with him.