How are you? I am busy, and not in that good way when you feel productive after finishing a project. No, I'm just busy, flitting from task to task, chore to chore, and wondering why everyone thinks that educators have summers "off." The truth is we continue to work all summer long, prepping, studying, shopping, planning, raising our own kids who have the summer off, and a majority of us take 2nd and 3rd jobs to supplement our incomes. As an hourly worker, this is especially true for me. But even the salaried employees frequently take on extra work to support their families. And, "summer" is not June, July, and August - three glorious months of fun and sun, but really the last 2 weeks of June through the first 3 weeks in August. If we're lucky that's 10 weeks total.
At any rate, in the hectic pace of my summer I have been writing a lot, in my head, which although valuable in its own right, fails to share my thoughts as effectively as when I actually write them down. As I have continued my work in providing parenting for my 2 sons and "sitting" for 2 other boys, while dispersing contents of my mother's home, I have found myself less and less motivated to write. Which ultimately means that I need to spend even more time writing if I am to save my sanity. So, here I am, present to the true needs of my life, having survived another brutal heatwave, questioning my often self-defeating behaviors.
I've had many therapy sessions this summer, most of which have been delving into my learned patterns of sacrifice and martyrdom. It is a vicious cycle that was modeled for me throughout my entire childhood and continues to be utilized by both of my parents to this day.
1) Feeling unworthy of love and/or generalized unworthiness.
2) Attention seeking words and behaviors.
3) Offering myself and my resources to others in unhealthy ways due to fears of rejection.
4) Resentment for being treated poorly or underselling myself.
5) Self inflicted sacrifice of my needs and wants because of feeling unworthy of love.
6) Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
Intellectually I can fully understand this crazy loop and that I ought to be able to find ways to prevent it, stop it mid-cycle, or at the very least stop the sacrificing of my needs and wants when I realize what I've done. If only it were that simple. The patterns of these thinking and behavior have been seared into my very being. It reminds me of trying to merge on or off of a roundabout in Paris, France or Augusta, ME, either you go full bore into it and make the loops until you can actually get off or you freeze before entering and decide that abandoning your car is the safer and easier choice.
All of this has its roots in my family of origin and my upbringing. I could spend pages upon pages concerning incidents that cemented the behaviors I have nurtured and used to torture myself and others, detailing each wrong or hurt that I experienced. Instead, I will attempt to pull the meaning out of the minutiae, leaving the disturbances behind, in the past where they belong. And this is what I have spent the most time working on during the past few months, learning to sift through the muck of my past and see where the real accountability needs to be placed. I am learning to separate my parents' accountability for their actions from their mental illnesses, and subsequently my own negative patterns and the choices I have made and sometimes still make in my daily life.
My parents' influence on me and the molding and shaping that they did from before my birth is the starting place. From the beginning of their marriage they were an unlikely pairing. They had known each other since the 1st grade, from sunday school and church, and from living in a really small town. The two families were actually related, and my parents' are indeed 5th cousins. Having gone their separate ways after high school graduation, mom and dad re-met at a Christmas Eve service, both having recently ended relationships. They were engaged less than a year later. The wedding itself occurred mostly because my aunt had decided not to marry her fiance at the last minute, and my grandmother was bound and determined that there would be a wedding come hell or high water. So, my parents married and began a miserable life together, each sacrificing their own wants and needs for the "happiness" of the other. My mother relinquished her New York City operatic career, and my father left his friends, family, and academic career to move to a tiny beach town next door to his in-laws so that his wife might act "less crazy." I think that from the outside most anyone could have seen the disaster that was already underway, but from the inside, it must have been harder to visualize. My father resented the fact he had sacrificed, as did my mother, the marriage itself was a sacrifice for both parties, and my birth was the ultimate sacrifice for both of them. But one must remember that they both made choices. This concept has become very important to me as I have dealt with my own struggles.
In the end, I found that I had to ask and then answer some difficult questions. Does all of their sacrifice mean that they were not accountable for their thoughts, behaviors, and actions? Because they both suffered from mental illness are they exempt from culpability when it comes to the suffering and pain that I endured? Do their life choices, because they were made through lenses of borderline personality disorder, anxiety, PTSD, undiagnosed autism spectrum differences, ADD/ADHD, and their own learned behaviors from their parents, grandparents, and other family members excuse what they did to me? Do their lives trump mine? Are their beasts of mental illness stronger than mine? Are their beasts allowed a greater freedom than mine?
In order to answer those questions I realized that I had to turn to my own learned behaviors and how I have enacted them throughout my life journey so far. Up until recently my preferred method of dealing with emotional conflicts was through passive-aggressive mutters, whines, and rants along with physical isolation, hiding, running away, driving at unsafe speeds, and putting my loved ones and myself in danger. I reenacted almost all the scenes from my childhood with minor adjustments to fit the situations. I got stuck in that loop of ugliness and just kept going around and around it until people around me moved farther and father away from my reckless spinning through life.
These frightening revolutions have been devastating to my personal and professional life over the years. Much the same way as they were for my parents. That cycle of unworthiness that sometimes seems to ooze right out of my skin has been at the foundation of my sense of self. I loathe myself, and then I loathe others, and then back to loathing myself. It is like a tire stuck spinning in mud, sinking deeper with each revolution. The more you try to gun the engine to move in any direction, the more you are sucked into the mire below you.
It is an ugly truth of my life, the mud I have spun myself around in has led me to abandon those I love for selfish and self-centered reasons. And in the end it comes down to a single word that I fear more than most, choice. If I have choices to make and I make poor ones, and I have mental illness, am I accountable for the consequences, and to what degree? Some of my choices have indeed been driven by my beast of mental illness when it was untreated. But many of my choices have been driven by me. The hard fact is that I am the one who is ultimately accountable for my beast's actions, because I am the one who can choose to let it run boundless in through my world. I am also accountable because I can choose to go to therapy, take medications, make healthy living decisions, have a spiritual life, and pay attention to myself and others when my beast tries to raise its wild and flailing self in the middle of my life. Whether I like it or not, I have the choice to let the madness take over, or I can choose to keep the madness in check.
So, what am I telling my beast to do? I am telling it that it doesn't need to fear being a father to my sons. Now, I have been their parent since the day each one was conceived, albeit through extra measures that did not include my DNA. And when each beautiful, wonderful, and miraculous son was born I was there, laughing, crying, present to the moments of becoming for all of us. What I wasn't was able to be listed on their birth certificates, because at that point in time my own birth certificate still had the wrong sex listed on it. I was also not legally married to my wife because gay marriage wasn't legal yet. When we did legally marry as man and woman, after my birth certificate and driver's license were corrected to say Male, the State of Maine recognized me as my own children's step father. In the legal analysis we determined that I would have to adopt my sons in order to correct my status as their father and to get new birth certificates for them.
Now, what does my beast have to do with all of this? It turns out, that the answer is, everything. I/it was afraid that my wife would leave me, and take our boys away from me because of my mental illness. My beast was trying to convince me that it would be less painful if that happened, if I was never legally their father anyway. My beast and I were terrified of losing two of the greatest joys in my life. And after much therapy, I saw this for what it was. It was an excuse to stay in that cycle of unworthiness. By allowing myself to believe that the worst would happen I was perpetuating the model that I had learned and lived - I am not worthy of love - and would punish myself and others because of this.
As I cried in therapy, literally for the first time after 2 years with my therapist, I realized how much I do love my sons and that I am accountable for my role as their father. I saw that I must show them that they are truly worthy of love by my choice to adopt them. That I am choosing them over my own anxiety, fear, feelings of unworthiness, and my beast. I can model that they deserve to be people who can receive G-d's love and shine it back out into the world. That their worth is more valuable and precious than anything else to me. I can give them exactly what I was not given, unconditional, affirming love from a parent who had to make a conscious effort to do so. I am stronger than my beast and want them to feel that right down to their very cores. That is what I am accountable for.
So, as I enter the legal and financial process of making our family whole on paper, I am committed to making our family whole in love. As I break that vicious cycle of pain, suffering, and deconstruction, I find that I can grow as a man, and that I can then help my sons grow into men as well. Perhaps this is the greatest gift, to be the father I am called to be and choose to be that man, no matter what. I thank G-d for being a G-d of second, third, fourth, and even hundredth chances. I thank G-d for the chance to be a part of a real family, created on a foundation of dignity, respect, and worth. I thank G-d for calling me into choice.
Thank you for being present to my accountability.
Be well, love your neighbor as you love yourself and remember to actually love yourself.
-Ari
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