‘OK, let me bore you about confidence for a minute. Ailbhe? Do you need help with your macramé?’
‘No,’ Ailbhe shot back defensively despite the knotted mess in her lap.
‘O-K! So Ailbhe, you said you’ve got more confidence than you know what to do with – that’s nice. And is there anything you’re hiding or lying about right now?’
Ailbhe’s head snapped up and she immediately whipped round to Lindy. ‘Did you put her up to this?’
‘Of course not,’ Lindy protested.
‘You don’t have to tell me what the lie is,’ Amanda reassured her. ‘Just think about why you cannot be honest about this thing. Maybe it’s something about yourself that you feel you cannot be truthful about because you’re not confident that it will be accepted by those you love? We hide ourselves, we hide our hopes, we lie about what we need. We say we are fine when we’re not. All because our confidence has dimmed. Often people think “oh, I’m confident” because they can wear a suede jumpsuit or chat at a party, but that kind of confidence is usually a cover, an artifice. True confidence is being honest about our most vulnerable selves, our dreams and our desires.’
None of them spoke. The silence, it seemed to Lindy, was the sound of sudden clarity engulfing three flailing women.
‘I take it some of this is ringing a few bells?’ Amanda picked up a handful of penne and added them to her cord. ‘So, Lindy, as I said, I think our respective coaching focuses of confidence and regret are very entwined, don’t you?’
‘I do.’ Lindy was grateful that Amanda was willing to pretend that their work was even in the same category. ‘Regret is born from that lack of confidence,’ she said and Amanda clapped her hands, rattling the pasta shells.
‘Yes! Exactly. I think we could have something very exciting if we played around with merging our stuff.’
‘Yeah.’ Lindy swallowed the unpleasant queasiness of failure. ‘I’m not sure that I actually will … keep going, though.’ She hadn’t selected a buffer activity yet and quickly grabbed a stress ball to mess with.
Amanda just nodded at her gently. ‘We can look at recalibrating your confidence when you’re ready, Lindy.’
Next, Amanda smiled placidly at Roe. ‘Right, Roe is ready to recalibrate, or at least you’d better be – we have forty-five minutes till you get on this call! You have already achieved so much in the last few months. Oh yes, a word on why I call it recalibration … I know it sounds like something from a cult but, basically, I don’t like to think of confidence as something we can “lose” or “gain”. We all have it, it’s always in us, just sometimes we need to recalibrate it. So, I keep things extremely simple in the initial stages …’
‘OK, she was amazing,’ Roe gushed after Amanda had wrapped up the session and left. ‘Not that you’re not, Lindy,’ she hurried to add. ‘It’s a very different approach.’
Lindy couldn’t agree more. She opened the computer on the desk and started to get Roe set up on Zoom. She felt like her own perspective had shifted more in that hour than it had in ten years. She’d been lying to herself and then by extension to everyone else for years, demoting her own needs to make everyone else comfortable and make sure she didn’t lose their love.And now I’ve lost Adam anyway.
‘She wasn’t that amazing.’ Ailbhe was sulking on the couch.
Lindy went over to join her. ‘You’re just pissed cos her no lying philosophy doesn’t suit your game plan,’ she told her firmly.
‘Nothing is served by telling Tom,’ Ailbhe shouted.
Woah!Lindy hadn’t realised that Ailbhe was feeling quite so touchy about the situation. Amanda must have gotten to her too.
29
‘COFFEE!THANK YOU!’
The next day, Ailbhe was in the airport. She gratefully accepted the takeaway cup from Tom, who popped back to the counter to grab the rest of their breakfast – Danishes and creamy porridge.
She texted a selfie to the Snag List group with the caption:
On the day you’re skipping off to America, even airport coffee tastes amazing!!!
ROE: Lindy, Eilers and I have a pool going about how long till we get a phone call that something ridiculous has happened requiring us to collect you/bail you out.
AILBHE: LOL fuck you. So touched you are all rooting for me.
She put the phone down and bit into her Danish, eyeing up Tilly twitching in the pram to her right.Do not wake up, you monster, she willed silently.
‘You’re doing the telepathic threats again – don’t think I can’t see you.’ Tom grinned over at her, stirring his porridge – or oatmeal, as he called it. She glared again at her daughter:Don’t you be saying oatmeal too, it’s porridge. And it’s not sidewalk, it’s path.
‘We’d better finish up soon.’ Tom checked the departures board above them. ‘Are you sure you don’t want to wake her and give her a feed before we go down to preclearance?’
‘Tom, are you a psychopath? Never. Mess. With. A. Sleeping. Baby.’ Ailbhe crammed in the last bit of Danish and started to gather her things. ‘I can do it after take-off.’
