Over the past year, I have focused on self-improvement. The way this has manifested itself is through spiritual direction as well as counseling. I remember sitting in the Confessional about this time last year, hearing myself say to the priest that I'm not sure my recurring issues need a spiritual director or a counselor. The Lord heard me and gave me the answer: I need both!
Through my spiritual direction, I have slowly begun to turn over more and more of my life to the Lord. I am learning to trust Him and to include Him in all aspects of my life. I remember when I first started meeting with my spiritual director, Jennifer, how I argued with every suggestion she made as far as making a dedicated daily time for prayer. I was full of excuses. I had a new baby and a preschooler at home. I couldn't be expected to find any time to myself. And what little time I did have, I wanted to use it to relax. "Couldn't you look at prayer as this unwinding time for yourself?" Jennifer asked. Nope, my go-to response. When I thought of alone time, I literally meant alone, not even with God. I wanted to pursue my hobbies, which were reading, watching YouTube videos, or otherwise researching homeschooling, sometimes among other things. I couldn't share this precious time with my Maker. But I dutifully went through the prepared questions Jennifer would give me at each of our meetings, trying to spend about an hour on them once or twice a week. I still don't spend daily time in this sort of long, dedicated prayer. But I have since reframed how I view prayer. Turns out I can and I do pray throughout the day in a variety of ways, and being conscious of this slowly opened up a bit more time here and there. My baby growing into a toddler also has helped, and I expect it to only get better!
Through my counseling sessions, I've discovered that my issues have a name: codependency. Even though I am not an addict in the typical fashion, nor am I married to one, nor were my parents, I nonetheless exhibit classical codependency thought processes and behaviors. My "drug" of choice? As it turns out - my mother's approval. Both she and my dad are adult children of alcoholics, which apparently means that they grew up with a dysfunctional view of the world and then passed it on to me. They tried so hard to make up for the issues in their families of origin, yet they were unable to realize how overcompensating for one problem led to another. I'm sure my personality has a lot to do with how I internalized my upbringing. After all, my siblings have very different attitudes towards life than I do. My counselor, Dr. Brian, noted right off the bat that since I mentioned my faith, we could incorporate my Christianity into our discussions, which has been a great blessing. In the last month or so, I finally realized how being able to include God in my counseling has led me to see His hand in my life, all of it, not just the compartment I labeled as "spirituality".
I have been able to shed some of the guilt I carried for wanting that alone time. I no longer think of it as either-or between my "research for fun" and my "prayer time". I have different types of prayer that I engage in throughout the day, and only one of them requires an extended period of silence and light. I say light, because over the summer I started praying the Rosary every night right before bed. It is quiet, but I can pray in the dark. I don't need to reference anything anymore, since all I need to pray the Rosary I've committed to memory now. Praying consistently every day for five months will do that. I try at least once a week to spend time with my Ignatian Daily Retreat book and prayer journal, reading Scripture, pondering the questions and comments, and praying from the heart without the constraints of the clock ticking. I wish I could do this more frequently, but I don't worry about it right now. As my youngest gets older, I will have more time. For now, I give the Lord what I have.
And what I have is a new understanding of what my issues are, where they originated, and how to proceed. I have started attending Celebrate Recovery meetings that just so happened to have started at my church about a month before I joined. I am bringing to the altar my history, my confusion, my pain, my trials and errors, my hopes and disappointments, my guilt, my efforts gone awry, and I'm turning them over the Lord. I am looking to the future. I am trying to reinvent myself for the first time. Apparently, growing up with codependency has robbed me of the ability to be authentic with myself. I assumed I knew who I was based on what I was told I was. No one ever asked me who I was or who I wanted to be. Now I am making these decisions and it is freeing. Scary, but freeing.
One of my hangups is that I have an internal voice that is constantly asking me what my mom would think about any given decision I'm making. It's like it's playing on auto-replay, whether I want it there or not. I assume that a decision not in perfect agreement with my mother is automatically the wrong decision. I have allowed myself to be handicapped in my decision-making abilities. I freeze when pressed for time and having to make a decision, especially a big one, but even small ones like where we should go to eat give me trouble at times.
Another hangup of mine is that I engage in wishful thinking. If only my mom could see things from my point of view, then she'd be able to relate better to me and we'd have a better relationship. If only she would love me unconditionally rather than imply that I am only worthy to be her daughter if I do as she would do. If only my mom didn't get offended at my attempts to assert myself, then I could assert myself more and live a life of freedom. Bullocks. Dr. Brian has helped me to understand that my mother's happiness is not my responsibility. I actually still get an uneasy feeling typing this. It feels as though I'm saying that I don't care if she's happy or not. But that isn't the point at all. The point is that every one of us chooses to be happy or not, regardless of the circumstances. Codependents like me and my mom often choose to be happy only as a reaction to something in our environment. This is not healthy. I can be happy even if my mom doesn't approve of my choices. I can be happy even if she gets upset that I disregarded her advice. I am not obligated to take her advice. I wish (there's that wishful thinking again), I wish I could ask for her advice, hear her out, and then make my own decision and have her be happy either way. Instead, what ends up happening if I don't take her advice is that she stops giving it. As in, she refuses to give further advice in the future because she thinks the point of giving advice is that it ought to be followed.
Finally, a hangup of mine that was probably the crux of the situation that allowed me to seek out both spiritual direction and counseling is this: I struggle with the first commandment. I don't make golden calves to worship, but I do worry much more about what my mom thinks than what God thinks. In this way, I have long idolized my mother, thinking that I was honoring her per the fourth commandment. I am currently trying to iron out the details of what it means for an adult daughter to honor her parents. As it turns out, it does not mean obedience anymore. It does not mean taking all of my parents' advice. It does not mean doing whatever they want, whether I want to do it or not. It does not mean trying to make them happy. This last one is going to be difficult to overcome. I can't make my mother happy, and yet I still need/want to try. I think that's called loving her.
It's sad that I don't really know what it means to love my parents. Or siblings. I don't struggle with loving my husband or children. I don't have any anxiety in those relationships. I am able to be authentic and vulnerable there. But when it comes to my family of origin, I get all confused. Dr. Brian introduced me to a fantastic phrase that pretty much sums up the story of my upbringing: the undifferentiated family ego-mass. He got the phrase from a wonderful book I recently read per his recommendation. Another term comes to mind that I've long known but never applied to my family before: groupthink.
One of the reasons I struggled with my identity as an adult is because the identity I was spoon-fed growing up didn't match what I felt on the inside. I was told that I was a Scorpio, Polish, "smart, pretty, and polite". These were treated as givens. Now that my faith tells me astrology is not where my trust must lie, I'm having to rethink "my astrological sign's characteristics" and just think about what makes me unique. Being smart, pretty, and polite were handed to me without explaining what I did or could do to maintain or lose them. When times and cultures shifted, the old paradigms didn't fit and I couldn't understand what happened. How come I wasn't considered these things by everyone, if they were a given?
Being Polish gave me the most trouble because I cannot deny being born in Poland to two Polish parents. I even speak Polish, for crying out loud, so of course I'm Polish, right? Except that I now live in the United States. I married a non-Pole. And while I speak Polish, it's certainly not at an educated adult level, so I am uncomfortable in Polish settings. I lack a lot of cultural knowledge because I wasn't exposed to Polish culture outside the home, and I didn't have Polish peers growing up. I'm Polish mostly in name. My experience is not the same as my mom's, who didn't migrate to the US until she was 30. And it's certainly not the same as my relatives who still live in Poland. I'm "Polish, but..." In other words, I'm Polish-American. But I grew up looking down on this phrase because my family associated it with Americans of Polish heritage, people who didn't know the language and probably never set foot on Polish soil. They weren't "Polish enough" to be called Polish. How could I associate myself with them? I clung to my Polishness so hard, that I changed my last name to my mom's because it was more Polish-sounding than my dad's. I refused to check "White" on forms and would write in "Polish". (White, to me, meant Protestant Anglo-Saxon.) With great pride I announced that we were raising our children multilingual, fully expecting to pass on our native languages (my husband's is Spanish) to our kids without much effort. I panicked when this last bit started to become a challenge. At three years old, our daughter already prefers English, and after some reflection, we had to admit that it's because... so do we! We also prefer English! I think in English. I do math in English. I speak to God in English usually. I prefer to read in English. I prefer to watch videos in English. I only find the Bible meaningful in English.
There is a very limited segment of the world that I like in Polish. Namely, those things that I associate with my childhood in Poland. I love Polish Christmas carols and other religious (and patriotic) songs. But there are also plenty of English songs that move me. I am moved to tears by a select few Polish poems, but again, English poetry also has that affect on me. There are a handful of Polish prayers that I learned as a child that I easily recite (I pray my Rosary bilingually), but I don't have anything against the English versions. I clung to these few things and finally realized they weren't enough to build a life around. I felt like I was betraying my family by admitting - even to myself - that I was actually American, not Polish. Ok, Polish-American, but that's the best I could do. Even though I was born in Poland and started school there and even though I speak and read Polish, I am still more appropriately grouped in the category of "Polish-American" than "Polish" (or Polonia na emigracji). I'm not merely living abroad. I have made my home here. For better or for worse, this is who I am. I felt like I couldn't be both, American and a member of my family, but with my siblings, who were born here and don't have these same qualms about who they are, I was able to realize that 1) I am still in the family, and 2) their approval is not what makes or breaks me.
So yes, I have been addicted - to approval by my mom. It has been paralyzing at times. And you know what? It's not her fault! I have blamed her in the past - in classically codependent fashion - but it is not her fault. She raised me based on what she knew. And she instilled a lot of good in me. The rest is now up to me. I can choose to keep letting her micromanage me, because it's what she knows and is comfortable with, or I can choose to set boundaries and assert myself and forge a new beginning in our relationship. No more conditionals. No more, if only. No more. I am who I am, and she is who she is, and that's all I can ask from God, who created both of us.
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