I ran across this excellent short essay about The One Sentence That Gets My Kids to Take Responsibility. It reminds me of the old marital advice to not use “you” statements in arguments, which has stood me in good stead over almost 20 years, so there must be something to it.
Their sentences are filled with the words: he, she, they, and what they did to ME!
They’ll try to say “I . . . am really mad because so and so hit me.” We back up and I tell them to start over. We’ll stay there until they’ve filled in the blank with their own actions.
The other sentences that use the word “I” are just as important. “I’m sorry. I did this _____ to you.” Those sentences can be equally hard to spit out.
For relationships, for careers, for parenting, for taking responsibility and for advocating for yourself – the word “I” matters.
It’s not about taking blame, it’s about owning our actions and moving on.
Ever tried to have a conversation with someone who has mastered the art of deflection and passive aggression? Nothing gets solved.
How much faster does something get fixed when someone admits that it’s broken and how it broke?
Today was the birthday of a good friend of ours. Someone whom my husband has known since his teens: he was at our wedding, and he set up the interview that turned into my husband’s job for the past 15 years. It is because of him that we moved here, where I finally found a place I could feel like I fit.
He and I and my husband had a tradition to take the afternoon off for the premier of every single one of the LOTR movies. We made it to all six movies together. No one ever made an excuse.
Despite knowing him for so long, I didn’t get past his façade for a long time. He put on a front of sorts, being on the surface a hard-partying kind of guy, who dated strippers and lived fast. So I didn’t really get to know him until a couple of years ago, when we went on a trip to Las Vegas for a reunion of sorts with a few of my husband’s other friends of that timeframe. We had a couple of good conversations then, during which he “admitted” to us that he, too, is atheist (after which I high-fived him). I asked him if he was conservative or progressive, and he said progressive. I asked, how does a former military guy, raised Catholic, become progressive? He said, “Thinking.”
I felt like we then became real friends, safe in the knowledge that we had shared values, but he spent a lot of the ensuing time in China for work. During that Vegas weekend I said I didn’t have very many people with whom I get to have an enjoyable, intellectual conversation (not one that wasn’t an argument). I didn’t have much chance to have more such conversations in person with my new friend, but we became friends on Facebook, and I found out we had a few more things in common.
He was more than just a friend. He was starting to feel like family — like a brother. He had the same name as one of my FOO brothers, too.
And then he died three months ago, very suddenly, in China, at the age of 48.
There are certain dates that are more or less etched in my memory. January 13th. January 30th. March 26th. July 18th. August 7th. Sibling’s birthdays. I took them off my calendar but they are still in the back of my mind (although now I don’t usually notice the days when they actually happen, but maybe a couple of days later).
November 2nd. I never had a chance to celebrate this new brother’s birthday with him. Between the time I found out what it was, and the actual date, he was gone. I feel like a heel for never asking before.
And I feel like shit for not being able to fully support my husband in his grief for his lifelong friend — especially since he just lost HIS mother this spring (actually, both my husband and our friend did). Not having been especially close to my own mother, nor to his mother, I haven’t been great about supporting him in that loss either. Which is particularly crap, because he tried very hard to support me when my parents died and we were both too young to know anything about grieving, let alone all the other shit that came with those losses.
But I’m too wrapped up in my own lousy baggage. This loss, on top of everything else, seems to be too much, and I have a hard time putting my own grief aside for his.
I lost a good friend and co-worker fifteen years ago, in Texas, to a car accident — someone who I ate lunch with every weekday, and who immediately volunteered to take care of my cats, twice a day, for two solid weeks, when my husband had already left for his new job and I got word of my father’s cancer diagnosis. Steve died in that accident while I was away on that visit.
I had an online friend in New Zealand, whom we got to meet in person when we visited there in 2008, at The Wirld’s Most Nawt Northerly Cheezemeet. She and I shared a birthday. Kim died of breast cancer in 2011.
I lost Morgan, my beloved cat of nearly 19 years, a couple of days after the anniversary of my father’s death. Morgan had been a birthday present from my brother Joe (although I think he got my birthday and my sister’s mixed up because they are only a week apart. Our birthdays were on Fridays that year, and we went the Saturday after her birthday, not the Saturday after mine).
I lost both my parents in 2001, when I was only 31 — well, 31 and 32, respectively, even though their deaths were only 3 months apart, because guess what? My birthday was in between.
I lost the whole rest of my family between then and 2012. (Well, I lost the illusion of having a family when I asked for a little too much.)
My FOO has never celebrated my birthday as a group. There have been milestone birthday celebrations for just about everyone else, including several that I got on a plane for. When my own 40th was approaching, at one of the reunions I tried to start a conversation abut what we could all do together to celebrate my first milestone birthday. The only person who even joined in was my BIL. My family (or rather, my sister) refuses to celebrate the day I was born, the day I should have become a part of the family.
And now, just when I thought I had a new log in my raft, a solid, dependable friend and brother — we’ve lost him too. And I never got to tell him “Happy Birthday, Joe.”
One thing that strikes me, after reading this excellent essay, is that out of all the people who know about what happened in my family, no one (outside the family itself) is being a jackass about it.
“Some things in life cannot be fixed. They can only be carried.”
No one else is telling me I need to “get over it”. Mostly, the people I speak to about it say things like, “Man, that really sucks.” (And a fair amount of “That’s fucked up.”)
Obviously I have chosen my friends well. They are normal, healthy people who offer their empathy, not defensiveness or blame. (To be fair, that’s partly because they don’t have any skin in the game, other than being my friend. Objectivity and normalcy come easily from people who are not personally involved in what happened. Defensiveness and blame come easily from people for whom empathy would require that they take their share of the responsibility.)
The things that happened can’t be fixed. Won’t be fixed, for sure, because the people who need to fix them don’t have a need to do the work. Why should they? Theystill have a family — albeit it is short a couple people now. Sure, their little sister got mad about “nothing”, “threw a fit”, “picked a fight”, held a grudge, went off the deep end, broke off communication with the whole family over “nothing”, shrug, what can you do? Losing her isn’t important enough to make anyone do anything about it. They probably miss my husband; I doubt many of them miss me.
Yes, I know what I asked for is hard. What I asked for also happens to be normal, decent treatment of a valued family member. And you know what? When you care about someone, you do the hard shit for them.
If the roles were reversed, I know everyone would have come down on me like a ton of bricks for being disrespectful to Susan. It would be the easiest thing in the world. (In fact, Joe did exactly that: telling me that specific words that I supposedly used when I made my request were “disrespectful to Susan’s job”. ) But they won’t do it for me, because I am somehow less important than Susan, in my own family.
So I know they are capable of the “normal, decent treatment” part. It’s the “valued family member” part that they can’t manage. And they don’t want to understand, because to understand would require work, would require questioning things that have never been allowed to be questioned even when they make no sense, and it would be hard.
“People tell others to take responsibility when they don’t want to understand. Because understanding is harder than posturing. Telling someone to “take responsibility” for their loss is a form of benevolent masturbation. It’s the inverse of inspirational porn: it’s sanctimonious porn.”
I’ve been thinking of a metaphor lately: that life’s relationships are like logs in a raft. If you have enough good, big, logs in your raft to hold you up, you can weather the currents and the storms that come at you. They still suck, but you can weather them, because you have your raft to depend on to keep you out of the water, to get you safely to the next port.
For a decade or so, I tried to gather up the pieces of those broken, rotten logs, and fit them back into a raft that I could float on — because those logs had alwaysbeen a part of my raft, and I thought my raft had to have those logs in it, or it wouldn’t be a raft.
Then, over a few years of hard work and a lot of painful realizations, it became clear to me that those rotted logs were actually what caused me to end up back in the water, time and again. And even if I could get them back in my raft, they weren’t going to hold me up.
I lost a total of 23 people when my raft fell apart. Twenty-three people.
(I guarantee that if any of them are reading this, they have just stopped to count and see if I am correct in that or not.)
That, frankly, is a shitload of loss to deal with. No wonder it took a few years to come to terms with it. Fortunately, I still had a log or two to cling to, and they kept me from going under.
I’m finding other logs, and I am building a new raft. None of the logs are quite as big as the originals — there’s not much that can make up for 40 years of shared history — but they float. And I can depend on them to hold me up.
… if anyone tells you some form of get over it, move on, or rise above, you can let them go.
If anyone avoids you amidst loss, or pretends like it didn’t happen, or disappears from your life, you can let them go.
One thing that has been tough is giving up a lot of personal history. I’ve mentioned before that I have no one with whom I can reminisce in a positive way about my childhood or my father. And there are other bits and pieces that come up from time to time.
My love of rock music comes straight from my oldest brother. When he lived in Minneapolis, which has a thriving music scene, he would record stuff on the radio overnight (this was probably about 30 years ago. Cassette tapes and the radio, that was it.) and see what he came up with.
I still remember sitting in the kitchen, playing one of his “fishing” tapes for myself, and hearing “Senses Working Overtime” by XTC for the first time and being completely blown away.
And falling in love. Up to that point, my notion of “rock music” was a lot of 70’s classics. I had NO IDEA it could be as cool as that.
This love of music also contributed directly to my marriage. When I first met my now-husband, he was impressed upon seeing my CD collection. When he subsequently sent me a French pop CD as a “farewell have a nice life” present, that gift started a chain of events that has lasted over 20 years and has included going to see hundreds and hundreds of shows. Last year, when that French pop artist toured for the first time in forever, we went to see him. (In Brussels. Which was awesome.)
So this music thing has been a huge part of my life, and it all started with my brother.
The same brother left a lot of books and records stored down in the basement when he moved out. When I was bored, I’d sometimes go looking through that stuff for something interesting. I know that’s where I found Madness’ album “Keep Moving”, another eye-opener. British pop, not quite ska but getting close. I still love that album.
This fall we went to see Madness. (In Britain. Which was also awesome.) They only did a couple of songs from that album, but they did this one. They have aged incredibly well and still sound exactly the same. It was a great show, not least because we were staying at the home of some long-time online friends, who are now a part of my new family. When we got back to their house from the show, they pulled out a bunch of snacks from their fridge (“tapas”!) and a couple of bottles of wine and the four of us stayed up until 3:00 a.m., just talking and having a great time.
It’s good to have a brother again. He doesn’t get the New Wave music thing but at least he cycles. 🙂
I hear the sound of rain falling in my ears
Washing away the weariness like tears
I can feel my troubles running down
Disappear into the silent sound
I feel the rain falling on my face
I can say there is no better place
Than standing up in the falling down
In so much rain I could almost drown
It’s raining again
A crack in the clouds reveals blue skies
I’ve been feeling so low (low)
But now everything is on my side
The sun and the rain
Walk with me fill my heart again
Do de do do de do do do
Do de do de do de do do do
…
After a convo I had yesterday with an online friend and mentor, I was left wondering about something that has been a question for a long time. Namely, what DO I want out of all this?
For the most part, I have little in common with my siblings, and in general they don’t seem to actually like me as a person any more than I like them. As my husband once pointed out, my sister has never called me in all the time he’s known me (20 years). We have never had occasional chats on the phone, without there being a birthday or some other “reason” to call. Casual emails have historically gone in one direction only. My husband has long been mystified as to why these people, who are so little a part of our day-to-day lives, why they even matter to me. Why does it matter what they think? What am I trying to accomplish? Intellectually I know I will never convince them to hear, let alone validate, my POV. Why isn’t a better understanding of what happened enough for me to have for myself?
Also, going way back, even before I started figuring out my scapegoat role, I have always felt a lack of “the right to be here”. I often feel as though I don’t have an automatic right to even exist, let alone automatically be considered an equal part of the family. I have to be sure I clean up after myself, and not leave any trace of where I’ve been. I’ve generally put that down to the lack of a mother’s real love for me, and probably her irritation whenever I made a mess or caused any kind of housework for her. (SO RIDICULOUS. Who the hell has another kid without realizing that this will entail actual work?)
That attitude continues to this day, mostly through my sister. Once my husband and I were talking about my sister and how she treats me, and I started to say, “It’s like she thinks I have no right to be — ” and I got stuck for what to say next, and he pointed out that the sentence was in fact complete.
So yesterday I was trying to re-locate this quotation that I had seen one of my friends post on Facebook. And in googling what little I could remember of the phrasing, I stumbled across a paper.
“All parents also notice an important change at around 2 years of age when children manifest ‘‘self-consciousness,’’ the so-called secondary emotions such as embarrassment or pride in very specific situations such as mirror exposure or competitive games… Toddlers become typically frozen and sometime behave as if they wanted to hide themselves by tucking their head in their shoulders or hiding their face behind their hands. They show embarrassment. This is a robust phenomenon and one is naturally tempted to ask what it means psychologically for children in their development. The literary quote reproduced below captures this important transition:
There is a thing that happens with children: If no one is watching them, nothing is really happening to them. It is not some philosophical conundrum like the one about the tree falling in the forest and no one hearing it: that is a puzzler for college freshman. No. If you are very small, you actually understand that there is no point in jumping into the swimming pool unless they see you do it. The child crying, ‘‘Watch me, watch me,’’ is not begging for attention; he is pleading for existence itself.
M.R. Montgomery Saying Goodbye: A memoir for Two Fathers.”
I’ve always had a weird sort of conflict between wanting attention, wanting to be noticed, and then being embarrassed when it happens — just like a 2YO. I’ve put this down to a mother who didn’t really like it when I got attention, especially from my father. But what little kid DOESN’T want attention? That’s a normal thing for a little kid. But I think I was taught that it was wrong, that it was being a show-off, and that I should just be quiet and entertain myself and not make a mess and not bother anyone. Meaning Mom.
I think I was about 18 months old when my sister went away to college, and the other two of the Triumvirate went away over the next 3 years. They would probably have been a big chunk of my day-to-day (mostly) positive attention, and they went away. Just when I was becoming aware of myself in relationship to others, more and more the mirror I had to reflect myself back to me, the person I spent all day with, was a mother who basically wanted me not to be there.
Most of my early memories are of playing by myself. When I was alone, I at least didn’t have anyone reflecting back to me their annoyance at me being there. I still feel safest when I am by myself: there is no one to get mad at me.
I have a memory of the time I “ran away from home”. I was not in kindergarten yet, because it was in the afternoon, and I was in pm kindergarten. But I was old enough to run away, so everyone else would have been old enough to be at school, and I was the only kid left at home all day. (At least, I don’t remember anyone else being home at the time, as in the summer.) So I was maybe 4 or at most, 5YO.
I “ran away” by going up the sidewalk until I couldn’t see my house any more. Once I was out of sight of our house, I plonked myself down in front of the second house from ours, maybe 300 feet up the hill.
I don’t know how long I sat out there, but I eventually got tired of being a runaway and went home. I found out much later that the neighbor had seen me sitting on the sidewalk in front of their house and called my mom, WHO JUST LET ME STAY OUT THERE. Where I wasn’t a bother to her.
Her excuse was that well, once the neighbor called, then she knew where I was, so that was OK.
I don’t think normal moms do that. I mean if a neighbor called and said your 4YO kid was sitting out in front of their house — you’d go get them, wouldn’t you? A normal mom might even go out and sit down with their kid and ask them why they wanted to run away, and listen to them and give them a big hug and tell them they didn’t want them to run away because they loved them, and maybe even go home and have some cookies or something.
I got left to sit out there alone, because that was more convenient for my mother.
And my siblings sit there and claim, “well, she wasn’t actually neglectful.”
Maybe the mom they knew wasn’t neglectful.
The mom I knew was.
And they knew it too: on some level, they know they have to make that statement, that excuse, before someone comes right out and says that she was. They were teenagers when I was born, and they had to know about what my father told me: of physical neglect, to the point where I had diaper rash so bad that my butt was bleeding. They know, and they still believe that she should have been granted custody of the younger children. My sister even testified to that effect. My oldest brother refused to testify for either side, preferring to stay out of it, and the third was deliberately wishy-washy when questioned by the lawyers, so they left him out of it.
Interestingly, these are the same behaviors they exhibit in today’s family crisis. My sister defends the narcissist; my oldest brother just wants to stay out of the whole thing. Joe, who would normally be the one considering both sides of the issue, and playing the role of “devil’s advocate” or mediator is married to Susan. No chance that he could be allowed to see the other side of any conflict that involves Susan.
So I know there’s no way anything will change or heal with regards to them. The question is, where do I go now to heal the little girl who got ignored or abandoned by almost everyone she knew, except for one person? The answer might be that one person — my father — if he weren’t gone.
My whole world disintegrated the night he died. And fucking Susan stood there, laughing. And refused to go elsewhere when I asked her to. And she and Joe yelled in my face the next day, when I called her on it. And everyone else either defends her, or refuses to take a stand. Well, Fuck. Those. People.
There was one person whose attention mattered, and he’s gone now. So, watch me — or don’t. I’m still here, I still exist, and I deserve to.
At some point, possibly as a graduation gift, my mother gave me a plaque with Max Ehrmann’s “Desiderata” on it. I read it often, and half-memorized it. I remember that to my mind parts of it sounded like woo-woo bullshit, and I dismissed it.
But the very lines that irked me then, although I didn’t quite understand why, are the ones I am remembering now: and no wonder they pissed me off. This was exactly the opposite of the message I got from her.
You are a child of the universe,
no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.
“…constantly flowing and as they flow they meet obstacles. Some are minor and others major but a relationship either flows around the obstacle or it is blocked, and if permanently blocked, it ends. This is not cause for stress or anger, resentment or jealously. It is what it is. Move on with appreciation and without bitterness for the relationship that is no more, and open your heart to other possibilities that life presents. The most important factor in maintaining a meaningful relationship with lovers, family or friends is simply acceptance. You need to accept them for who they are and they need to accept you for who you are. If you cannot accept another person for who they are, you need to stop inflicting stress on that person and to walk away. And if another person does not accept you for who you are, you need to walk away no matter the nature of the relationship. Stress kills and living with a person who does not accept you for who you are is like living with a person who is slowly killing you.” ~ Captain Paul Watson
That “lack of anger or resentment” is a helluva lot easier said than done — especially when it involves all the people on earth that you’ve known your whole life — but I’m working on it.
More than I can say for anyone else.
(ETA: Whoops, a little bitterness there. Like I said, I’m working on it.)
I am certain that my FOO prays about all this. They probably pray for me to come to my senses, realize how horrible I’ve been, apologize to them all, beg forgiveness, and plead to be allowed back into their tribe.
Some are probably at least praying that I take this blog down.
They can pray all they want to. I doubt it will do any more good than all my mother’s praying did any good for the marriage. (I admit that Russia does seem to have been converted, but in the grand scheme of things that doesn’t seem to have done many people any actual good, nor does it seem to have brought about world peace, as promised.)
But as they say, no prayer ever goes unanswered.
So – is this blog God’s actual answer to those misguided prayers?
After all, the inspiration for it just kind of hit me one day. Maybe God put the idea in my head, and He inspires the very words I type. Mysterious ways, and all that. He is omniscient, after all, so I expect that He knows that in order for any healing to take place, my FOO needs to begin by listening to me, hearing and understanding, and facing up to what they are responsible for. And they need to recognize who is really responsible, rather than throwing all the blame onto one convenient scapegoat. They are too proud, and not humble enough, to admit that they, and Mom, might actually have a part in this mess.
Of course, pride is a sin, and humility its opposing virtue.
Pride (Latin, superbia), or hubris (Greek), is considered, on almost every list, the original and most serious of the seven deadly sins: the source of the others. It is identified as believing that one is essentially better than others… Dante’s definition of pride was “love of self perverted to hatred and contempt for one’s neighbor“… [or, perhaps, one’s husband, father, or sister.]
Humility is defined as “Modest behavior, selflessness, and the giving of respect. Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it is thinking of yourself less. It is a spirit of self-examination; a hermeneutic of suspicion toward yourself and charity toward people you disagree with. The courage of the heart necessary to undertake tasks which are difficult…”
As one of my friends said, “No one wants to have that conversation. No one wants to admit that they were shitty to a little kid.”
Another opined, “They have to accept, not only how they treated you, but how they supported their mother against you. That is a lot to have to come to terms with. Also, it’s very hard to say I’ve been wrong for 40 years.”
When you look at it that way, even God is going to have a really tough time of it with this bunch. Makes my failure to get my point across — well, not really my failure. Good luck with that one, Big Guy.
One of the worst things about the family situation is that I have almost no one with whom to share any good memories of my dad.
Here’s one for the 4th of July: my dad loved this piece, particularly the piccolo solo. I played the flute for years in junior high and high school, and he almost bought me a piccolo so I could learn it.
