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(This is the eleventh post in the Serenity Prayer Series)
I didn’t KNOW I was a control freak until I had my daughter.
Sure, there had been the multitude of accusations over the years, but they were usually people who didn’t like me anyway, so naturally their opinions were tainted and therefore invalid. I was NOT a control freak—I just had it in my head how things should go and I was going to make sure they went that way.
Because if they didn’t, then ANYTHING COULD HAPPEN.
And if ANYTHING COULD HAPPEN, then people might discover I wasn’t perfect.
And if they knew I wasn’t perfect, then they would instinctively know I was the exact opposite—I was flawed. I was broken. I was worthless. And, worst of all, I was VULNERABLE. And being vulnerable was NOT something I did well.
So I made it my subconscious priority to make sure everything went “the way I would have it,” in order to keep my anxious, flawed, broken self under wraps.
Just like every other normal, average, well-adjusted high school sophomore.
Or college sophomore.
Or new wife.
Or new employee.
Or graduate student.
Or NEW MOTHER.
Which was when the lightbulb hit me over the head with a two by four.
From the moment I became pregnant I was trying to control my daughter. I thought about the type of child I was, and I basically prayed the opposite for her—I prayed for a strong, passionate, creative, independent young woman. (Not my best idea—but more on that later.) I had all those “praying over your unborn child” books that used to be popular and I chanted these prayers over my full moon belly as if they were incantations, guaranteed to produce a magical outcome.
They did not.
I truly did it all—I ate certain things, drank certain things, swallowed certain things, read certain things, listened to certain things—all in an attempt to produce a certain outcome.
Because, you see, if I could control HER, she would be a “good girl” and people would like her and then they would think I was a good mother and ultimately she would not end up on someone ELSE’S therapy couch (I was a beginning counselor at the time) talking about ME. If I could CONTROL her, I could keep her safe and happy—just like Joy from Inside Out with her little yellow balls. And I really, truly, deeply somewhere in the recesses of my deluded mind, believed this. Turns out, however, that I was so, SO horribly wrong.
My strong passionate independent young woman came out of the womb screaming and didn’t stop until she was five. Except for when she was beaming ear to ear, laughing at the top of her lungs, being the wild and joyful child that she was. She was, truly, the “little girl with the curl—” when she was good, she was very, very good—but when she was bad, she was HORRID.
This meant that many battles ensued over the years—all because I was attempting to control her because she was SPIRITED and STRONG WILLED and EXTRA and I loved that but I feared that because I didn’t know how to handle it without scaring her for life in one way or another.
Kahlil Gibran writes,
Our anxiety does not come from thinking about the future, but from wanting to control it.
Kahlil Gibran
I would have to agree—although I’m pretty certain mine came from wanting to control ALL OF TIME. Present, past, future—I couldn’t stop thinking about any of them and I COULDN’T STOP TRYING TO CONTROL THEM.
And it didn’t help that I could SEE the faces of the people around me from the moment I first brought her out in public in all her energetic and high-volumed glory and I know DARN WELL they thought *I* was the problem, not my colicky, spirited, irritable-boweled, DELIGHTFUL child. Some even went so far as to SAY SO. So I brought every parenting book I could find thinking I could parent her temperament out of her (not knowing, of course, at the time that this was what I was really trying to do)—and some of them made me cry with relief and some of them made me throw them at the wall and one actually went straight into the fireplace. Because ultimately I LOVED her temperament—I just didn’t know how to HANDLE it. And was terrified of OTHER people squashing it, too—like, say her teachers, or other people intent on making children fit into little boxes when we had a free range child with enough energy to power a small car.
So in truth what I REALLY wanted was to keep the parts I loved and parent OUT the parts I didn’t love quite as much.
And that’s a really hard way for a kid to grow up, even when you ARE trying your hardest to be a loving, fun, caring mom.
Needless to say, I was not taking my world, or my DAUGHTER, as it was—I was trying to form them BOTH into how I would have them.
And as a result there were SO MANY BATTLES—and so much desperation on both our behalves to try to control the outcome.
I remember coming out of her room one day, and saying to my husband in exasperation, “I just wish she would do what I want her to do!!!”
To which he laughed and replied, “Do you think perhaps that might be part of the problem???”
I did not think he was funny.
And honestly? It wasn’t ever about what she wore that day or the hair or the makeup—though it was really sometimes about the shoes. (She had a thing for the most impractical of shoes and I had a thing for not hearing her whine about blisters or beg to be carried for the next several hours.) But truth be told, other than the shoes, the “battles” we had really were about how she was feeling and how I was trying to “help.”
But things changed when she got sick. A lot. The battles became much different then—and despite my TWO MASTER’S DEGREES IN COUNSELING, I felt even less equipped than ever. She’d have sobbing jags before school because she didn’t think she was well enough to go to school—and I didn’t know what to do because I was so worried about her getting behind as it only served to increased her stress and made things worse. So I pushed her to go. Should I have pushed? To this day, I don’t know. When to push? When to relent? All I knew was that we had a hole in the wall from one such conversation. And I didn’t want any more holes.
And this is when life began to REALLY change—and we had to determine if we were going to take this new life as it was or fight for the way WE would have it.
Then, somewhere along the line, I began having more migraines. I was catching even more colds than I usually caught. I was having immense full-body pain some days. And I was starting to have these weird episodes in which I felt anemic and spaced out and run down like the first day of the flu ALL AT ONCE. And no matter what I did, they continued to increase in both frequency and severity.
Which was just GREAT. Because that meant I was now failing at keeping TWO people healthy. And I didn’t have the energy to try to make BOTH of us better, so what little energy I had went to my daughter in infrequent amounts. We would try the next specialist, they would tell us essentially that she wasn’t severe enough and they would send us on our way, discouraged and tired of trying. So we would stop trying. Until we couldn’t take not trying any longer, and we would do the whole thing again.
For five years.
Oh! And in between the “if I can’t operate on you I won’t help you” doctors, we would have the doctors who would scold me for doing a, b, or c or not doing x, y, or z. There was a lot of scolding those days. It was my favorite. Exactly what a flailing mom needs to increase her certainty and serenity and to make decisions with bold confidence.
I’m lying. I was about to lose my shit.
And that’s the thing about taking the world as it is, not as we would have it.
Often it means we not only have to give up control of things we never really had control over in the first place, but it also means we have to acknowledge that OUR MESSINESS is part of what we have to accept.
When illness is introduced to your home, you simultaneously grab for MORE control at the exact same moment you have actually completely lost every little infinitesimal bit of control you thought you ever had. And you feel powerless.
I felt powerless, how about that. Maybe you wouldn’t have. But in the face of a daughter who was often bedridden that I had to somehow get through high school on my own while I also felt like absolute crap and had just gotten promoted, I felt very, VERY powerless.
And it made me angry.
And it made me angry because it made me scared. What if I couldn’t fix this?
The years crept by. 9th grade, we pulled her out the school she’d been in since kindergarten. 10th grade, all her friends disappeared and we attempted the outpatient pain clinic at our local Children’s Hospital, but she was not terribly willing to follow through and I was not terribly willing to fight with her. 11th grade, she pretty much spent the entire year in bed. Second 11th grade, she made some friends but they were crap to her which is worse than having no friends at all and she did the Chronic Pain Rehabilitation Program at the Cleveland Clinic and when she got back started taking College Credit Plus classes so she could get dual credit while she finished her requirements to graduate. Graduation weekend, class of 2017, we all avoided social media and sat on the couch together and had a good cry. 12th grade, we learned that you have to learn how to learn—and she’d missed that in our makeshift high school experience, so she floundered a bit getting started. Community college, official year one, we learned what it was like to fail a class because winter sucks and three reading-intensive classes while also working 20 hours a week (her insistence) was not such a great idea. Year two, we learned that online classes are great and that doing the absolute right thing to help a friend in need can often have disastrous relational consequences that don’t so much ripple outward but more sweep away everything in their path like a tsunami.
She said to me yesterday, “You know, the hardest thing about grieving this stuff is that the grief just never ends because there’s always something new you’re losing.”
And I get it. Because I am grieving for two. For three. Heck, for all four of us. Our world is not as we would have it.
And that makes us all very sad, sometimes.
Maya Angelou once wrote,
You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.
Maya Angelou
We are trying—our quirky little family—to not be reduced. To continue to fill the space our family occupies in this world and not be diminished by the events of Keira and I’s lives. And we’re trying to walk out “taking this world as it is,” day by day. We’re trying to pray “Thy will be done.” We’re trying to borrow from Paul’s confidence that:
…we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.
Romans 8:28
And we’re trying, as Ivan Illich wrote, to
…rediscover the distinction between hope and expectation.
Ivan Illich
And we’re trying to learn how that ties to taking this world as it is, not as we would have it.
Because our world is still not, as of yet, how we would have it.
But we’re also becoming more willing to acknowledge that SOME of that is due to US, ourselves—let’s be honest: we can all make better choices about our health and almost-20-year-olds are probably THE WORST. And sick working moms who hate to cook are maybe, perhaps, sometimes the SECOND worst. (But only SOMETIMES.) And some of it, truthfully, is our own unwillingness to “accept the things we cannot change and change the things we can.”
But our biggest challenge taking this world as it is, not as we would have it—and I’m going to guess this is yours, too—is letting go of our deeply beloved expectations of how our world was SUPPOSED to be so we are free to embrace what actually IS.
Sri Chinmoy writes,
Peace begins when expectation ends.
Sri Chinmoy
And THIS, I suspect, is the key.
Laying down all the dreams, all the plans and timelines, all the comparisons to the paths of others… Laying down all the future scenarios you’ve rehearsed in your mind for years—the proms, the parts in the musical, the graduation parties, the gap year, the joy and complete exasperation that is college dorm life … Laying down the master plans for the future, then laying down the plan bs, then the plan cs … Laying down the dreams that are even yet to be dreamed and the hopes we’ve not even begun to hope…
“You know, the hardest thing about grieving this stuff is that the grief just never ends because there’s always something new you’re losing.”
Or does it have to be that way?
Is “acceptance” of something really, when you boil it down, an exercise in not getting attached to a particular outcome? Is it just another way of saying you need to drop all expectations—truly dropping them—and live life open-handedly, allowing God to place in those hands what he will and take out of them what he will?
And does “taking this fallen world as it is, not as I would have it” provide us a way out from under perpetual loss and grief by reminding us WE are not the ones in control here? That the world owes us nothing? That our dreams and plans were just that—OURS?
And—if that’s true: that the path we walk must be completely free of attachment to our own plans and dreams—are we willing to walk it of our own volition, not kicking and screaming and fighting over which shoes are required to be worn to this evening’s event?
Are we REALLY willing to say—is MY FAMILY really willing to say—that we will simply open up our hands and take ABSOLUTELY WHATEVER God puts into each of them WITHOUT complaining and WITHOUT fear or judgement and WITHOUT any comparison or criticism or crap-talk?
When you’ve walked a path that has already been difficult—you know just exactly how risky that kind of faith can be.
E’yen A. Gardner writes,
To be comforted by God is a promise that few of us ever receive, because we are consumed with controlling our situations to avoid being vulnerable.
E’yen A. Gardner
Which brings us full circle.
Control.
Acceptance.
Grief.
Comfort.
Disappointment.
Hope.
Vulnerability.
Risk.
This is our life. Past. Present. Future.
This is walking out the Serenity Prayer.