Fates and Furies

There are few people in our lives that impact us as much as our parents. From our attachment styles to the voices in our head, they are there. They are there when we look in the mirror and there when we look around our homes. Even when they are physically distant or gone, they are there.

Being an only child comes with some unique gifts and burdens. We are the sole carriers of the genetic line and the family story. The only one to call when ill. The holder of all the dreams, the hopes, the disappointments, the fears. The embodied manifestation of a lump of clay waiting to be shaped into a vase that can contain their values and look beautiful. My parents divorced when I was young and neither ended up with a rest-of-their-life partner. At times I filled that place whether because it was assumed of me or because I placed myself there, seeing the need. Like everyone, my parents are human and had their own issues; some acknowledged and some not. And like everyone, those issues deeply affected me. I'm not unique there and there is nothing special about the challenges that were my particular lot in life. I got many, many good things from my parents. Love was always there, as was the effort to give me a good and interesting life. Support was always given when needed. By all accounts, my childhood was good. Secure enough. So now, as I am 51 and my parents turn 80, I should be taking care of them. Each of them, separately. I should, but I am not. The obvious reason is that I made the choice to move across the world to run from a country that I couldn't recognize myself in and couldn't do anything more but survive, endure. I needed to feel safe again. I needed to know my younger and more vulnerable child would be safe. I needed to know if I was right in believing there must be something better. I was. But had I stayed, I'm unsure of what my relationship and role would have been like with them as they continue to age. I don't expect it would have been approximately the same for each of them as I have very different relationships with them both. I suspect I would have felt a greater sense of responsibility for one than for the other. I also don't expect it would have looked like how most people care for their aging parents. Right, wrong or something in the middle, my boundaries with each of them have changed in different ways and for different reasons over my life.

Generosity is of high value to me. I want to be a kind person and I want to be of service. I try in most times and places and with most people in my life to operate from that place but I recognize that it doesn't always appear that way. It's a different thing of course to think and feel than to do; to act in ways that people can observe. I think I often don't act enough. Or maybe act in the wrong ways. As a result or at least related to this, my parents have had a narrative of me being selfish. It's a label that has always confused me because it feels so incongruent with the fact that I feel like until very very recently I was always thinking about the needs of others and rarely myself but I leave room for that to be the truth or at least a truth. Not to excuse or justify my parent's experience of me but to add some context, for the past 24 years I have been raising my children mostly alone. Complex children in very complex times. So time, energy, money and capacity have been low for a long time now and when I haven't been needed by them or my work, I have treasured and protected my time alone. As an introvert with ADD, its how I recover, repair, unmask. I won't apologize for that because it's necessary for my ability to keep showing up in this world but I can see how it might make me feel a bit inaccessible to others. Less generous and available. Even less patient or kind.

As a neurodivergent person I have never totally mastered the art of following cultural norms and expectations. I used to think it was because I was a free thinker and rebellious, which is hopefully also true but it may have more to do with my simple inability to do things that make no sense to me. So yes, I challenge the rules. Small rules like sending holiday, announcement and thank you cards. Big rules like providing a specific kind of education to my children. Big rules like taking care of my parents as they age. Living in a different country, even one as comfortable as Australia, has allowed me to see more clearly how much, even when directly resisting most, so much of my life in the US was still driven and dictated by invisible paths set before me. All the things we do without thinking about why we are doing them. We need that, to a degree. No one would do anything if we had to be intentional about every choice we made. Life is easier with structure and some norms. Until it isn't. And that's what happened for me in the US. It stopped being easier to choose the path of less resistance and it started feeling dangerous. Here I feel safe. And in that safety I feel less dependent, less in need of the scaffolding dictated by others. Better able to listen to myself and direct my actions accordingly instead of always reacting or responding to predetermined and limited options. And let me tell you; the simple act of eating when you are hungry or going to sleep when you are tired and ready for bed is a glorious act of resistance with profound benefits. It's seriously wild how empowering it is.

Moving here was selfish. Yes, I believe it was the right choice for my younger child but I KNOW it was the right choice for me. It was not the right choice though for my husband, my older child, my parents, my clients. And that is a lot of people to let down. Most have had the gentle compassion to not overwhelm me with guilt about it (I do plenty of that for myself) but it has unquestionably changed or in some cases, solidified their belief about who I am and who I'm not, like a good daughter. Not that that was ever a title that I particularly aspired to but I would rather not be considered a bad daughter which now I do seem to be. Which has all lead me to think about what we can live with and what we can't. Some things of course we don't get to choose but in the times when we can, we are called to really reflect on this or live with the emotional baggage of feeling like shit without totally understanding why.

Hopefully we all understand by now that there's a difference between what you do and who you are and by that I just mean a person can make bad decisions or mistakes and not BE bad person. I'd argue that you'd have to make a lot of truly bad decisions and hurt a lot of people and be really unwilling to look at that to actually probably be a bad person. I don't think I'm a bad person. Because of a big choice I made though, some people likely think I am. It's not a comfortable feeling. And it's tempting to try to correct the narrative and to try to make people believe the version of myself I'd prefer they see or to at least see the whole person that we all are; good and bad, selfish and generous, close and distant, warm and cold. But one of the lessons we all have to learn in life is that we only have limited influence over people's beliefs about us. That doesn't mean we shouldn't keep striving to be the version of ourselves that WE want to be, the version that most aligns with our values and the person we want to be known as. It just means we will never make everyone see it and there is no version of ourselves that can make everyone happy or in agreement on who we are. Part of that is that we all want a villain in our story. Villains give us something to fight and in doing so clarify or justify our own lives and choices. They give us someone to blame and somewhere to place the anger and hurt that swims around in us all, looking for dry land. Anger is energizing. Another part of it is that the mind is extraordinary. It can change a memory into something that fits our belief system better. It can tell a story that we feel so deeply it becomes truth.

Most children both love and hate their parents. Appreciate and resent them. Children now just have more sophisticated language for it. Anyone raised with the internet is going to be more psychologically savvy than those who weren't. It's human nature to advance beyond our parents because the world keeps moving at breakneck speed to accumulate and share more and more information. Knowledge expands and deepens, greater understanding develops based on research and more complex forms of experimentation and data tracking. Language and terminology change because of greater accuracy as well as more awareness and sensitivity. I hope that my children are far more wise when they are my age than I am. And I accept that their version of me may not be the one I wish they'd have. I hope they know how much I love them and how proud of them I am. I hope I don't ever ask for too much from them and that they know that they can always come to me. I also hope they know that they are their own incredible humans completely outside of me. I hope that they know that I will always love time and conversation with them but that they don't owe it to me. I want to be the kind of parent that observes and cheers on with as little judgement as possible and offers advice or help only when it's asked for or when it's clear that it is needed but they are unable to ask. Each of my parents has done well with some of these and poorly with others. Because they are my needs not theirs. And that's why relationships are hard. We all have different needs.

I talk a lot in my work about relationships. It's what I study and it's what people come to me to talk about. My observations over decades have thankfully given me a lot of good material to report on. But the truth is, I think I suck at my own. Or to put it more gently, I still have work to do. It's a bit embarrassing to be an expert in one chair and novice in another but I guess that's the way it is for all of us. It's so much easier to see other people's shadows than our own. I've swung from codependence and independence and I hope as the velocity slows I'll rock more gently in the center. Some of my relationships its easier to do that with than others. That's where I practice. Some of my relationships can stretch to accommodate change and some snap. Ultimately those involved need to collaborate and co-create their dynamic from a place of honesty and integrity to everyone's values and some can't. Or sometimes it's not the right time or you don't have the resources to do that work. It can be liberating or it can be heartbreaking and sometimes its both.

Everything in our lifetime is about relationships. To ourselves, to others, to animals and earth. The nature of a relationship is that it is interactive and reciprocal if not balanced or equitable. We are all going to make mistakes. We are all going to make choices that benefit some and harm others. I will never regret moving here even though I know it has hurt people. Because I can feel joy and sadness, even guilt at the same time. We all can. That's how feelings work. I can do what I can to repair or to soothe that hurt in others if I want to. And I can not if I have determined that they can do the work for themselves or if I can live with them carrying it.

The moral of this story is that we all have our own stories to write and we all make an appearance in everyone else's, as they make in ours. Different realities can and do exist. Feelings can contradict each other and both still be valid and true and choices can help and harm at the same time. I love my parents and I am angry at them and they love me and are angry at me. I love my kids and sometimes they really challenge me. I'll wait to hear from them about how they feel about me and I'll try to take it in with an open mind and a desire to better offer what they are seeking from me while knowing their boundaries and my limits. It's the best I can do. And most of us really are doing the best we can no matter how it may appear to others. We can't possibly know what makes everyone do what they do, what went into every choice a person makes, what it's truly like to be them.

It's nice to be in a different country where everyone is a stranger. It allows me to more clearly see how embedded and inflexible my opinions of others had become in the US and how strongly I was reacting to their perceived opinions of me. Being surrounded by people who don't know me, have no history with me is euphoric. It is a gift and an opportunity. And I love that I am better now able to approach everyone new that I meet without expectations, predictions or assumptions. Maybe its the accent but I give everyone here the benefit of the doubt in a way I couldn't in the US. I hope that someday when I return back there to visit I'll carry that with me. For now, I'm just letting myself grow.