“Why do you NOT have more issues?!?”
The voice of my friendly mentor came across the phone loud and clear. I had to laugh. I could hear the incredulous tone in her voice. I’d just revealed to her one of the defining moments from my teen-aged years…something only a few close people know about me. Something my own mother refused to discuss with me.
“Why do you NOT have more issues?!?”
I thought I had plenty. With some to spare and maybe even share. Would you like some issues? I’ll give you some of mine.
I grew up as the oldest kid in a strict and punishment-filled house. We weren’t praised for our efforts, only judged on our accomplishments. Or lack of. My mother had a certain way of making sure that you knew you were a burden to her. She even went as far as telling me that she wished I was never born.
And she wanted us to do things her way. Or else suffer the consequences of being grounded, spanked, or slapped.
My mother had an ideal standard of doing things that we had to unquestionably adhere to. Her expectations were high. To this day, I fold my towels using her method…the way she expected us to…the way she demanded.
Once, out of a rebellious streak that surged when I moved into my own apartment, I decided to fold my towels the “wrong” way.
I tried to break that hold my mother had over my regarding TOWELS…and I couldn’t do it.
By the time I was 19 I was a product of my upbringing. I liked folding towels “her way”. I was tainted. In my head there resides a right way and a wrong way. Not only did she teach me how to fold laundry she also taught me to be controlling about it.
I come up with reasons for my towel-folding mania:
- They fit better on the shelf
- They look neater by folding them in thirds with no edges showing
- It’s easier to fit two towels on the towel bar with way
- Al the nice hotels fold their towels like this
Maybe my mother’s way is the best way. It doesn’t matter now. Even if I stumbled across a better way to fold towels or jeans or t-shirts, I’d have to work through 48 years of conditioning to change my behavior. Is laundry folding where I want to spend my behavior-changing energy at this stage in my life?
In the grand scheme of things, folding towels is no longer a blip on my radar. The only reason I thought of it recently was because I encountered my sister’s towel folding while I tended to her post-surgery needs.
Now I am a leopard changing her spots. Yet even that is a bad analogy because I am a human being not an animal. I run on choice, not instinct.
This last weekend I fell back into the downward spiral with Husband #2…we both went to our old behaviors and it took a bit of effort to pull back from that vortex. I don’t know whether to feel proud or mortified that I recognized my bad behavior. Stepping back, I decided to calmly explain something from the past, something from before Husband #2 and I even met, and let him in on the level of loneliness and rock bottom-ness that I felt during my first divorce. Whether he chose to hear me or not doesn’t really matter at this point. To expect interest or compassion on his part is falling back to old behavior. Instead, I practiced my new behavior-changing efforts and kept opening up to another person just so I could practice opening up about a difficult time from the past.
So why is it that I don’t have more issues? Maybe it’s because somewhere along the line I figured out how to change my own behavior. The biggest lesson of all is that there is no right way or wrong way…there’s just the effort that I’m willing to put in to concentrating on the changes that matter.
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