relationship patterns

Fault, Problem, Care

April 20, 2022 By Julie Leave a Comment

When I was in college, I babysat for a family with two young girls, and their mom, K, did more to reconfigure and reset my world view than probably any other single person in the world.

You see, I grew up in a military family with parents who were, for different reasons, very attached to How Things Should Be Done. There was the right way, and there were all the other ways, and, despite the fact that I yearned for the other ways, I was an eldest rule-follower down to my bones.

K, on the other hand, had one rule for her kids: they had to wear underwear to the table. When E was obsessed with a grapefruit and carried it everywhere and wanted to take it to bed with her, K shrugged and said so long as it wasn’t leaking, who cared. When M wanted to wear to bed the clothes she’d worn all day, K’s only caveat was that they not be, you know, actively grimy or likely to choke her.

K was the kind of mom who absentmindedly assented to the 7yo’s desire for a Halloween party, and then, when she realized what she’d done, groaned but followed through.

One time, when I’d graduated and was back visiting, we were sitting on the porch swing and K told E it was time to get ready for her violin lesson. E didn’t want to go. K told her they were going. E, with all the high dudgeon of a 6yo, stomped her foot and said it was the worst day! of her whole! life! K just swung placidly and said, “I hope so, baby.”

Talking with K, being in her orbit, blew my mind. She had a habit of getting to the heart of things, the piece that really mattered, and focusing on that rather than on the trappings around it. She read books about liberal politics and ran for the school board. She enjoyed paying taxes because of all the things taxes pay for. She campaigned for Clinton, and her eldest daughter, maybe five at the time, watched the returns with me and told me seriously that Clinton was good because he was pro-choice. She honored her daughters’ feelings and preferences without necessarily doing everything they wanted when they wanted it.

My politics changed overnight. (There’s nothing like growing up military to really screw up a worldview.) I thought differently about feminism, about my own prospects and challenges in the world.

And she gave me a magic sentence: “It’s not my fault, it’s not my problem, and I don’t care.”

You see, I did care. My role in the family system was to be simultaneously the golden child and the caretaker. If someone in the family was upset, it was on me to fix it, usually through self-abnegation of some kind.

So the idea that I could, in fact, declare something not my fault or my problem? Completely radical. It wasn’t enough, of course, to undo two decades of growing up responsible for everything, but it helped. It set the stage.

I’m thinking about all of that again because in the past week, two different podcasts have brought up codependency — and not in the trite way I’d previously encountered it, but defining it as preventing people from experiencing the consequences of their actions.

Well, ouch.

There’s nothing like marriage to show you your patterns, and Catharine and I have long joked that we each married the perfect keys for our locks. Our issues and patterns just fit together so perfectly.

So now I’m working on deepening my learnings here. Seeing what’s coming up for me when I have the impulse to protect someone from themselves. Figuring out how this plays out in my work life. Seeing what happens when I don’t do it.

I’m appreciating the new opportunity and also wanting to flip it off. It’s like that sometimes.

The Importance of Solitude in the Care and Feeding of Julies

February 18, 2018 By Julie Leave a Comment

Catharine and I regularly joke that we’re doing things backwards. Because I work remotely for a company in DC (and my family lives out there), I periodically fly east for a little over a week while she stays home. Because we both work from home, that means I spend nine days running around from meeting to dinner to hangout while she sits at home by herself, having her meetings and doing her work, but physically alone.

In the Myers-Briggs system, I am all I. She is all E. If you know anything about introversion/extroversion, you can see what a problem this is.

I come back happy to have seen all of my people but absolutely, completely fucking drained. I want to hole up in a dark cave and not speak another word for three straight weeks.

She, on the other hand, is desperate for human company. The words have kind of built up inside her and are bursting to get out.

We’ve found ways to not make this a complete disaster. She has coffee with people and has a friend or two over to take the edge off; I gird my loins and accept that there will still be some people time even though I really don’t want to have any. We make it work, although the first week back is usually a little rocky.

If only she were the one who traveled and I was the one who got to stay home, things would be kind of perfect. I’d get the week of beautiful solitude, after which I’d be all calm and filled up, and she’d come home from a trip physically exhausted but emotionally replete.

But since this isn’t how it is, and since we do both work from home, we had drifted into a pattern whereby we were home, together, basically 24/7 unless someone had a doctor’s appointment. And since Catharine only goes to doctor’s appointments by herself during my work hours, the only times I had when I was home alone were the (very) occasional weekend coffees or preaching dates.

A few weeks ago, I said to my therapist that I just want a fucking break. For better or worse, my brain is a sheepdog, and if I am not alone, some part of my brain is busy keep tracking of all of my sheep, which means I cannot fully relax. That’s true even apart from the caretaking patterns we’ve fallen into (I once told my friend her 5yo had climbed onto the kitchen counter and was getting something out of a cabinet while we were in the living room — she looked at me like I was from Mars, but sure enough, there he was on the counter), but it’s made worse because of the caretaking patterns we’ve fallen into. I’m also just energetically sensitive. If people are around, I’m picking up on their emotional states, which makes it really hard for me to get clarity on my own.

She pointed out that solitude isn’t exactly something unattainable and asked me if Catharine would be amenable. Once upon a time, she took my need for solitude personally, because it poked all of her abandonment buttons, but time and repetition and lots of conversation have convinced her that it’s nothing to do with her personally — it’s about me and my needs. So yes, she’s amenable. We’ve even talked about it before. We’re just really bad at consistent follow through. Or, at least, our life makes consistent follow through challenging.

So we talked about it again, and the deal is now that every weekend, I get a few hours home alone. Catharine either goes to church or a coffee shop or a workshop or wherever. I don’t care which day it is, and I don’t care where she goes. So far my alone time has coincided with migraine spikes, but everything has coincided with migraine spikes lately, so that’s not exactly noteworthy. We’re going to see if this is enough, or if we need to add a quarterly hotel staycation to the rotation.

For so long, everything was weighted to what she needed, because the consequences to her not getting what she needed were so much more immediate and obvious. We’re trying to course correct, because just because I’m not going to literally die or fall apart in the short term doesn’t mean my needs shouldn’t be an equal part of the picture. We’re getting better at it. But it’s still hard to rewrite the internal assumptions.

I, Cassandra

January 23, 2018 By Julie Leave a Comment

Both ADD and bipolar have this fun characteristic called “lack of insight.” It means that people with one or the other of these conditions can’t always perceive the disconnect between their behavior and the context, or, as it usually manifests in our household, can’t always connect behavior A with consequence B.

We’ve said for years that it’s a miracle Catharine lived through her 20s, because things like swimming in a river in Pennsylvania in January in the middle of the night; or driving very, very fast down winding mountainous roads; or staying up for days at a time in an unventilated basement building Halloween sets with spray paint seemed like a good idea at the time. “It Seemed Like a Good Idea At the Time” — that’s got to the be title of someone’s ADHD or bipolar memoir.

Thanks to medication, routine, therapy, and just growing older, those aren’t the kinds of things we’re dealing with anymore. We’re mostly dealing with more subtle things, like if she skips lunch, she’ll get weepy and miserable around 3pm, or if she doesn’t nap in the afternoon, she’ll get anxious and fall apart after dinner. Compared to the very real risk of dying she flirted with in her 20s, these are minor incidents, but when they happen over and over, day after day, they are also wearing.

I understand that her brain does not see patterns. Her brain doesn’t connect action A to outcome B. But here’s the thing — my brain does. My brain is actually really good at noticing those patterns. In the abstract, she agrees that my brain is very good at this. But in the moment, that lack of insight bites us in the ass.

It goes something like this. She mentions that she has four appointments the following day. I point out that 1) she knows that if she has more than three, that’s too many and requires a lot of recovery; 2) she’s scheduled over her usual nap time, so when is she going to have it?; 3) she needs to make sure she remembers her afternoon meds at the right time if she’s moving her nap. Her response? Oh, it’ll be fine to have four, because so-and-so couldn’t meet later in the week, and she’ll nap between appointment 3 and appointment 4. Really? I say. Because that’s only an hour, and you usually need at least an hour and a half. Oh, it’ll be okay to have a shorter nap this time.

Scene cut to the next day, when she straight up forgets to take any nap during that hour, because it’s not at the right time and she was engrossed in work, and her afternoon meds disappear as well. So by dinner she’s mentally exhausted, under-rested, and under-medicated. Her anxiety, which ramps up when she’s under-resourced or over-done, flares up and attaches to something that does need to be solved, but certainly not tonight and not in this state of mind, so she’s spiraling and freaking out and we spend 45 minutes doing the “but thing!” “this is your anxiety, we’ll deal with thing tomorrow, let’s deal with your anxiety now” “but thing!” dance until she winds down enough to be able to go to sleep.

It’s a miserable night for both of us, and one that could have been avoided. And this, dear friends, is what chaps my ass. There will always, always be those days that whap us upside the head with bad news or triggers or illness or what have you. Okay, fine. But do we have create them ourselves?

Usually what happens these days, because I am over being patient and long-suffering, is that, once the crisis is over (if it’s risen to that level), I point out how miserable things are and exactly how we got here. It sounds like I’m saying “I told you so,” but it’s more “why the fuck didn’t you listen when I tried to spare us this?” And the answer, of course, is that because her brain doesn’t connect behavior A to consequence B, when I raise concerns, it doesn’t feel to her like a real risk, any more than swimming in that winter river felt like risking her life.

We are trying to get meta about it, trying to get to the point where I can say “you’re doing that thing again” and she can connect it, if not to the consequences I’m pointing to, at least to the many, many (many) conversations we’ve had on the subject and trust in the way my brain works. It’s a work in progress.