PRESENT
I don’t know how far I was into Rebuilding When Your Relationship Ends when I realized what is
really wrong with me.
My entire life, I’ve been searching for a family that was
actually healthy. I remember being
despondent in my teens and twenties, sure I was so fat no one would ever love
me, that my legs were too thick and bunchy and didn’t look “beautiful” enough,
that my butt was too big. I remember substituting daydreams for love instead,
and having this odd sensation: Wasn’t this actually supposed to happen to me sometime, here? Where is it??
And then I found it! I met Simon, and we dated almost four
years and had a wonderful marriage.
And I was happy.
It never even so much as occurred to me that this wasn’t the
natural state of man, what we all look for and what we all need to be happy. I
mean, look at all this literature about relatedness and connection, and how
people are unhealthy without it, and how society is the worse for it.
Disconnection and people feeling unloved is the root of most social ills. Even
Mother Theresa said it.
This information is all over the place! You’re nobody til somebody loves you. So many social scientists
wring their hands over the problems of aloneness and disconnection in this
country that there’s just got to be
something really wrong with aloneness and disconnection!
I never, ever imagined that they’re actually normal. That we’re all supposed to grow
strong enough in ourselves to be happy all by ourselves, with no one and nobody
else. Maybe the cosmic reason our society is
so disconnected and so many people are
all alone is because we came into this
life in order to do just that.
Relationship, relationship, relationship, relationship. It’s
supposed to make the world go around.
So of course as soon as I was absolutely alone, I mourned
the absence of relationship. I’d
never have anybody close in my life again. I’m old, and I’m not young, sexy, or
pretty anymore, so no one was going to want me! (Certainly nobody else like
Simon, who was my perfect match. They broke the mold when they made him.)
What was going to happen to me, as I grew old alone? What would
happen to me when I was in trouble? If I got sick or had an accident and couldn’t
work? If I woke up in the middle of the night having a heart attack and I was
all alone? When I got my first cancer diagnosis? No one in this entire world
gives a shit about me, and I’d be left to struggle all alone.
Always I was looking back, back, back, back to when I had
someone to be with all the time, and I was happy just knowing he was there to
come home to. Waking up and living my days with someone as happy, optimistic,
and fun as Simon made everything worthwhile, no matter what I had to give up in
terms of time and my old dreams. And as his illness progressed, that turned out
to be quite a lot.
If I had him, I was fine. It didn’t matter anymore that I
was never going to be a real writer. Those were just silly dreams; they never
happen to people anyway.
That’s what we do. When we’re in a relationship, if it’s a
good one, we get so happy and comfortable there that our personalities twine
all around the relationship, and—*POOF!*
We’ve changed. We’re not our old selves anymore.
Maybe we’re not even who we were supposed to be anymore.
But we don’t know that. We think that all of human existence
is nothing but Relationship. And we have to have at least one with somebody, or life is no good and we’re
not safe.
There’s no doubt that my relationship with Simon was the
happiest time of my entire life. I doubt very seriously that I will ever be
that happy again. And, when you find a person and a relationship and a time
like that, perhaps it’s right that your personality deforms to accommodate it.
That relationship was a precious eleven years for me. It will never happen
again.
But sometimes, when you deform your personality to live in
relationship with someone, you do something wrong. You do something to your
personality that you should not have done, and then your relationship becomes
unhealthy and then it breaks up. You stopped changing. You stopped learning.
You stopped growing in order to be in your relationship. Or maybe you just
stopped being yourself.
Then your relationship ends, and you have this horrible,
miserable transformation you have to undergo, in order to find out what your
mistake was, and how you need to unkink your personality again and grow back in
the direction you should have been going. You have to be alone for a long, long
time in order to do that, because if you reform another relationship before you
do that, it’s just unhealthy in the same way and it will break up.
The whole trick in relationship is being your real self in
the relationship while accommodating to living with another person. Too much
your way or too much their way, and somebody gets stifled to death and the
relationship ends.
I’m thinking of Chi and Rory here. If there was ever a
textbook example of someone stifling themselves to death in order to
accommodate themselves to a relationship, that was it.
But I’m also thinking of myself. As happy as I was with
Simon, part of the reason was that I finally felt secure. I felt secure because
I finally had someone with me who was big and strong and knowledgeable and
adult in the ways I wasn’t. Someone who had always done well at work and owned
his own business for twenty-five years. Emotionally, I was still a child who
felt “too little” to handle big things in life like buying a car or an air conditioning
system or big travel arrangements or washing the windows. I had Simon for that,
thank God! And I was definitely the junior partner in the relationship. The
sicker Simon got, the more the awesome and frightening responsibility I had to
shoulder. I definitely didn’t feel ready for any of it, and I was better at
some aspects of the job than others. It was something I would never, ever have
willingly taken on, and I think one of the reasons he died while I was still so
young was to show me that I could do it.
There are some healthy reasons to wrap our personalities all
around a relationship.
Then, there are the UNhealthy ones. Yeah…the ones I’ve spent
the last four and a half miserable
years learning all about.
What I’m talking about up there, accommodating ourselves too
much to the relationship, is codependent and a way we try to fuse emotionally
with someone else. And I got that; on some level, I understood that.
What I didn’t understand is that this is normal in childhood. I found this in
this book in a way I’d never seen it spelled out anywhere else.
I mean, think about it. When we’re little, ideally, Mom and
Dad are right there all the time. Are you
okay, honey? How did school go today? Do you need help with your homework? Why
are you crying? Oh, it’s so wonderful that you did that! I’m so proud of you!
Look how big and beautiful and talented you’re growing! You can be anything you
want to be! Here, let’s pop a big bowl of popcorn and cuddle in bed together
and watch Harry Potter movies! I love you, honey. Maybe we can order a pizza!
We’re emotionally fused with Mom and Dad, and emotionally fused into this
hand-holdy, sing-songy, fluffy-warm and safe and cuddly relationship that makes
us feel good inside and okay. Oh, those images of Mom making us eggs and hot
chocolate before school on a cold snowy morning! (That, I never got, because my
mom didn’t want to get up for us, bitched and screamed about how slow we were
the entire time, put out bowls of cereal, then went, “You’re so slow I don’t
want to stay up and yell at you! I’m going back to bed!”) That not-so-lovely
scene in the parentheses excluded, isn’t the preceding paragraph just your warm, fuzzy picture of ideal
family life?
When we’re little kids, when we’re one and two and five and
seven and nine, we need this absolutely. When we don’t get it, or if we only
get it if Mom wants something from us, when she threatens to withhold it or
punish us if we aren’t the children she wants us to be, when she uses this warm, loving
quality of time to reward us only when we act like the children she wants us to
be, that’s what makes us codependent.
Little kids can’t find their own sense of warmth and safety
and OK-ness. Little kids need to get that from Mom and Dad, and they need it in
order to grow up healthy emotionally.
Where most of us have gotten hung up is, we think we’re
supposed to have this as adults all the
time, and we think we can’t live without it.
Which is one reason I’m so unhappy. After eighteen-plus
years of that kind of a mother, eighteen years of rejection from cruel schoolmates,
and thirty-two years of believing, truly believing, I’d never even have sex ever
in my life because I was too fat and men would think me repulsive (Fuck, man. Is
it any wonder Fifty Shades and Twilight are our cultural ideals of romance,
when most people are raised like this?), Simon and I got together and I finally had this kind of experience of love
in my life!!
And then he died. And then he was gone. And then it was
over. After not even seven years of marriage.
And I stumbled into the sunlight blinking, rubbing my eyes, thinking,
That was it? That’s all? It’s all over?
That’s all I get?? Ever, ever again? Really??
I still need to be emotionally fused to someone in order to
feel okay. But, what we’re supposed to do
in this life is grow ourselves up emotionally so we’re able to feel okay
whether that’s present in our lives for us or not.
Yes, it’s true that as we become elderly, we get old and
frail and we aren’t able to cook and do for ourselves anymore. It’s also true
that if I had a car accident tonight and I was laid up and not able to work for
six weeks, I would fall behind in the bills and I would most certainly need
help! The same goes if we have heart attacks or cancer.
But if none of these things are true, we’re supposed to be
able to feel okay without a warm-fuzzy, hand-holdy, sing-songy relationship in
our lives all the time. We really are!
The trouble is, our society does not recognize this fact.
And neither the fuck did I.
And inside, I’m still six years old, missing emotional
fusion in my life, looking for it, longing for it, trying to make Chi fit the
bill whether he actually does or not.
I mean, look at this. Because my mother had BPD, and used me
as her emotional confidante literally ALL
THE TIME, I spent all my life on this planet up until Simon died
emotionally fused with someone. (Up
until now, I always had at least one close friend.)
I didn’t have that emotionally warm mother who got up and made
hot chocolate and pancakes and eggs, but I did have a mother who was
emotionally up in my business every hour of every day, asking me every single picky
little detail of who I sat with in school and what I said and what they said
and whatIsaidandwhattheysaidandwhatIsaidandwhattheysaid on and on and on until
I wanted to run away from home. Sharing every single picky little detail of
every single little problem she had with another person (and demanding I agree
with her view of things), and since she had BPD her life was nothing BUT
problems with other people. And, you know, come to think of it ... that was the only way we kids were important to our mom. When we were tending to her needs. So now my brother is twice divorced and whining on Facebook all the time about how nobody wants a nice guy and he's so lonely and can't find anyone.
(What went wrong in those marriages, anyway? Anyone care to take any guesses?)
I have spent my entire life emotionally fused with other
people’s lives, and for the first time in forty-five years, there was nobody
there. I was utterly alone.
No wonder I don’t know how to be emotionally independent of
other people, and why I’m longing back, back into the past, when somebody was there all the time.
This isn’t healthy. I’ve been left alone in my life so I
could grow out of this. And that’s the job I was supposed to have accomplished
by now, or I’d be so desperate I’d take Chi back no matter what—and he hasn’t
done any emotional health work on himself. He’s still hideously codependent,
and life with someone hideously codependent
guarantees you won’t be treated well.
You’ll think you
are, as the other person contorts himself to please you because he believes he’s
unlovable, killing himself in the process—and then it will all blow apart, when
the other person can’t stand the pain anymore and cheats on you.
(Codependents are
known for cheating, y’all. This is why.)
I was supposed to have grown out of this need for emotional
fusion with another person by now, so I wouldn’t do this to him or me. My job
is to stand my ground and insist he get well, and walk away unless and until he
does.
Only I don’t know how to live without emotional fusion. I’m
still looking back, back, back into the past, to that golden time when I was
happy. (That ended after barely seven years.)
A fine mess, huh?
I keep falling back into that trance, of looking wistfully
back to those happy times I had with Simon, and a few with Chi, thinking those
were the times I was really happy and that the present moment sucks. That I’ll never be happy
again. That what’s the point?
I do better when I remember that that’s a child’s way of
being in the world, a child’s way of looking at life, and that I’m supposed to
just be me and focus on me and focus on developing my talents. There’s nobody
healthy within a one hundred mile radius, and, as the incident with Jane just
demonstrated, if you dandle unhealthy people on your knee and show them endless
patience while hoping they’ll finally begin to treat you better … all they do is
kick you in the teeth.
I hate to say it, but currently Chi falls into this
category.
Anyone who hurts themselves that much is eventually going to
explode and hurt everyone else. You can’t treat other people any better than
you treat yourself, because treating yourself and other people truly well always
involves HONESTY, and it NEVER involves acting. Acting is NEVER kind, because
THE TRUTH ALWAYS COMES OUT, and the longer it takes, the more it hurts.
I’m tired of the sick people like my mother and Jane who
have serious emotional problems and only want to look at others’ problems and
never apply themselves to real, serious work on their own.
I don’t treat other people that way. I work hard so I don’t hurt myself and others, and that’s what love
is. I need and deserve someone who will do the same for me.
Chi has one more opportunity to elect to be that person who
will apply himself to the work it takes—on HIMSELF, not other people—to be healthy.
I don’t want to be so backward and so stuck in childhood
that I’ll accept another Mom or another Jane. Because when it’s your husband or
your significant other, being treated like that is the longest, cruelest,
ugliest cut of all.
I just need to keep reminding myself: This is a child’s way of being.
And I’m supposed to grow up…supposed to grow up…supposed to grow up…supposed to
grow up. That means focusing on my talents, developing me, and forgetting about
other people.
At the moment, there aren’t any healthy ones out there.
