I have ‘em!
So I’m wandering around the web today and every new blog I clicked (ok, there were only 2) had music up. One was a Karen follower who had a song that was really great to the point where I hunted down the song and paid for it. I’m a rebel when it comes to the whole not wanting to be sued by Universal thing. It’s by Waylon Jennings’ son. I’ve since looked at a few of his things on Youtube, and I really like it. That’s usually how I find new musical things…accidentally or by hearing it on a tv commercial. I ain’t hip. This I know. There are some blogs that I read and go, “Uh nope.” I may even add them to my reader. I may try commenting a time or two, but in my heart I know that, as fascinating as I find them, I fit in there like a purple chicken in a swamp. Easy to spot and devour. I actually like that though. It must be hard to try to be hip all the time. It reminds me of that King of the Hill episode “Uncool Customer” where Peggy meets this gal that knows all the coolest things and near the end of the show you find out that this lady spends most of her life online trying to keep up with the next hot trend. Sounds exhausting. That’s one of the great things about getting older. You learn to let go of the exhausting. Easy ain’t half bad (another great country song title waiting to be written).
This week has been easy. It’s been nice. Paladin and I have been easy. Therapy was almost fun yesterday. Not because it was easy. Far from it. But, I did enjoy watching Dr. Mark try to talk to Paladin about co-dependency vs. the Zen ideal of the self being a non-entity. It was hard not to go, “SEE!” It was nice to see someone other than me try to get through the Paladin logic. Eventually, Dr. Mark acquiesced and changed the subject. Well, that and we were running out of time. If he hadn’t had another appointment, we’d have been there until closing.
I do almost feel sorry for Dr. Mark when we come in the door. We are the hardest of cases not because our problems are devastating or taking over but because they are in the finer points. It’s those little fiddly, nagging things that can send people over the edge. And, unfortunately, we are two people who think. We have brains and we actively use them. Paladin is always worried that we’re over-analyzing and making things harder on ourselves. I feel like Lisa Simpson in that regard: the only way to be really happy in life is to be an idiot. If you don’t know what’s happening, it’s easy enough to ignore it. From what we’ve been reading about ourselves, that’s not going to happen.
One of our homework assignments last week was to take a co-dependency quiz. This was the best one we found. Feel free to play along. I got a 6 and Paladin got a 10 (I honestly would have scored him at a 13). When I told Dr. Mark my score, he said, “Oh so, you aren’t really at all.” I corrected him. Although 3 of those answers related to the past, my 6 answers are a picture of who I used to be and who I sometimes struggle not to be. I’d call myself a recovering co-dependent. I’ve learned to be selfish. It was an uphill battle and there are still times when I’ll buy something for myself and feel like I’ve taken something away from those I love. I’m worse about that when it comes to time. That’s one reason why I didn’t blog this summer. I gave up my time to those I love and in doing that I gave up myself in large part. Not a great way to try to live indefinitely. I need to get better at this time as currency thing. I shouldn’t feel guilty about walking out the door alone, but I do. Even though I’ve been going out to Mom’s, it’s still not the same as being alone; it’s just a way for me to get out of the house without feeling too guilty. I know that it’s going to catch up to me soon and I’ll have to get over my guilt for taking time for me alone without my family or friends. Sadly, even when I am seeing friends, it’s more a chore, an obligation for me than fun. I hate saying that, but it’s true. Everything in my life is a chore, a hurdle to be forded. I do wish I could relax and let go and enjoy the people around me, but I’m too wound even in the easy moments to do that.
Of course, therapy is doing what most treatments do. It’s bringing things to a head, making things worse before they get better. When Dr. Mark changed the subject, he chose to focus on the upcoming kid’s weekend. I find myself tensing up the second that subject comes up. It’s become such a no-win for me, and that’s a very depressing thought. He was asking if there were an example of a way in which Paladin could make the kid’s visit better for me. The truth is that when they are here I’m so busy trying to set an example for them and to teach them to care for themselves and their family (it’s like a blind spot there…they interact with one another only in 2’s…there’s no sense of family between the 5 of them) that it becomes about trying to take advantage of that window of opportunity to better their lives. At home, from their own mother, they seem to either be ignored or treated as playtime. So when they’re here, I try to show them that you can work together and be happy too. Life doesn’t have to be compartmentalized into this person is for fun, this person is for work, this person is for figuring out whether they are going to be work or fun. I explained to Dr. Mark that when it’s just me and the kids, we get along really well the vast majority of the time. We do a little work (I do dishes/clean…they do whatever I’ve told them to do) and then we rest (sometimes we pile in the living room and watch tv…sometimes we retire to our own interests as in they disappear into tv’s or their room and I go to my room where I’m generally followed by at least one or two kids). It’s not hard living. It’s simple and easy. The kids know their boundaries with me. We know what we expect from each other. That’s the way I like it. But, Paladin feels the need to move, and that’s what the kids are used to. They are used to family time meaning, “We go out and ignore each other in public.” Sometimes I feel like they’re almost afraid to just sit and talk to each other. Like they’re trying to fill up the spaces so that they don’t have to know one another. It’s just not me. It’s not the way I am with anyone much less family. I’ve met strangers in Walmart and have gotten more emotionally close to them than these children are to one another and their parents. I wish I didn’t see that. I wish I could turn a blind eye to it. But, it makes me sad to see it. It’s not “FAMILY” to me. Know what I mean?
Getting back to Dr. Mark, I told him about the different changes I’ve made in the dynamic that the kids have going. I focused on Indie and how clingy she tends to be and how I’ve had to pretty much force Paladin and the other children to make Indie act more independently. And how much Indie has changed! She has become so independent and open with people that even I do a double take sometimes. When the kids first came, the Borrowed Girls (3 youngest kids…age 8 to 3) didn’t even brush their own hair. Bell, the oldest, did it for them. That’s ridiculous to me. Ok, I do put their hair up if it’s a ponytail or something like that, but they brush their hair themselves. Paladin tends to baby them. He loves them and misses them and has a lot of guilt about not being able to stop some of the things that have been going on in their lives. In other words, he becomes a bowl of jelly. He tries to do everything in his power for them. So right away, we have two opposing goals for the kids. He wants to make their lives easier to give them a haven, and I want to make their lives harder (so that they know even when things are hard they can make them better on their own…that they can stand for themselves).
When I told Dr. Mark what Paladin could do would be to back me up more instead of stepping on me, he asked for an example of a situation where I felt things had been left to Paladin and then just got dumped on me (my words…Dr. Mark was far more PC about it). He got two instead (I don’t remember how one morphed into the other). I started with Mull’s intent to emancipate Bell. The short version of this told Dr. Mark a bit more about what we’ve been up against with Mull, and he had at best a disdainful look on his face when I explained how Mull and Bell had come to an agreement that Mull would help Bell get emancipated (I don’t know if I’d gotten into that here or not…basically, we found out that Mull had been kicking Bell out of the house which made Bell happy because she’d go stay with her boyfriend, Sanjaya2…then Sanjaya2 had to move to a nearby town…so now Mull kicking Bell out would mean Bell would have to come to us, a huge downside for Mull…instead, they cooked up this scheme to let Bell and Sanjaya2 get a place of their own). I found all this out by Paladin coming into our room and telling Bell, “Ok, tell her. “ (I’d went to bed early because I knew Paladin and Bell were going to have a discussion about her going off without calling to ask…and I wanted him to do that parenting) I was put in the position of being the hard-ass parent and telling her straight up, ‘”NO WAY. No, judge will do that unless you meet certain conditions for a start, and even if you meet those conditions (which Mull was going to help them do), your Dad & I will be right there telling the judge, “We don’t agree. Send her home with us.” It’s not that we hate you or Sanjay2, but we’re not going to let you ruin your life without a fight.’
The second situation was again with Bell. She came in telling me that Sanjaya2 was probably going to break up with her and he didn’t feel welcome here anymore and I needed to fix it (aka it’s all YOUR FAULT!). Oh yeah, all this was because we didn’t drive her over to his place at 9:30pm to drop off a trinket she’d bought him at the zoo (I picked her up from his place at 8:30 that morning…it wasn’t like they’d been apart forever). Don’t you just love teenagers? During the entire thing, Paladin stood there watching. After she left, I asked him, “Where were you? Weren’t you going to say anything?” He swears that he had no idea what the conversation was about and didn’t realize we were arguing even though he was within 2 feet of us (which is understandable…she was crying and pouting and I was being a no-nonsense hard ass during it…we weren’t yelling but the conversation was heated if you weren’t listening to the words you wouldn’t know). But our conversation quickly turned into Paladin telling me that I didn’t know how to parent and that the only kid I’d been a real parent to ended up in jail. I almost laughed aloud. Dr. Mark got this whole “oh no he didn’t” look on his face. I half-expected him to say it. LOL I was just like, “Yeah, he did go there.” Unfortunately, Dr. Mark got a call right about then that his next appointment was waiting. He barely even had a chance to give us some very vague homework along the lines of “try to be mindful of each other while the kids are there”.
No, it’s not all roses here. But, I’ve been much more calm and at peace this week. There’s been a lot more of the glancing across the room and thinking “I love him” stuff. I love spending extra time with Paladin and focusing on us and not every other d**ned thing in the world. I want us to have more of that. I’m going to demand it, in fact. We are going to have our time apart this week and hopefully a trip to the zoo together! My supervisor is coming out, yet again, on Wednesday and I’m going to spend the night at Mom’s on Thursday; so no blogging from there.
But I’ll be around off and on until then. And for the weekend, I’m going to leave a pre-post with some of that music!