I have adapted my boundaries to fit whatever the other person needed at any time. There has been no inner north star for me until now, because I have been masking, adapting for survival in an often very cruel world. Aada, my beautiful girl, changed my life when she told me she thought I had a brain that ran a million miles a minute and a body that couldn’t keep up. Finally, someone SAW ME AS I AM. She will always be my beautiful girl because of that, because even when she doesn’t want to be an active part of my life, her past words rock me to sleep.
Because she saw me as I am, I have been able to translate that to others. I can say, “hey, my strength is really in thinking in engineering flows, not carrying heavy stuff.” And even then, it’s a special kind of engineering flow. I see relationships because I’ve studied human behavior since I was a baby. It has been a massive fire hose of information because I have never been with my dad sitting with a couple in marriage counseling, but I have overheard all of the fallout. All of the emotional repair and recovery it takes for the person taking care of you to keep doing it.
So not only have I studied relationships in terms of how I fit into them, but how everyone else does, too. We are all struggling with how to reach secure from either an avoidant or an anxious viewpoint. It’s a spectrum, and we are all lost in it and doing the best we can.
Now, I can make promises to myself because I have boundaries. Here is what I would like to see from me in the future.
- The promise to myself to become the best “third brain” Tiina has because her kids love me. It is not about me. It is about being the best person I can be for the littles in my life. Brian is her coprocessor, and I am there to pick up leftover instructions. 🙂 I am kidding, but I am taking on a much more parental role than I’ve ever had in my life and it is a shift into “oh. Wait. Yes. I am 48.” It’s not just Tiina’s kids, though. We’re having a grandbaby soon. It’s not my grandbaby, but it feels very much like it as I shop, knowing I’m the person who’ll see Tiina’s younger kids through the immediate transition. Brian may be with us at least part of the time, but the plan is for me to be at the farm so that Tiina and Brian can focus on their first-born baby girl and her new baby boy.
- The promise to myself to be a resource. I am not degreed, but I am no slouch with kids. I have worked in a day care center, and I have run youth programs at church. I am Brian’s counterpart, because he runs the youth program at Beth Sholom Temple. He has never asked me about the time I made all the kids lick Cheerios and stick them to their faces, but life is long. I am here for you, Brian.
- The promise to myself to be the best Christian I can be while living in Jewish community… that I am a resource for questions but never an evangelist. That I am inhaling Judaism with curiosity because it is knowing the community in which Jesus was actually a part, and not the religion we made up to honor him after his death. I am always the one who is willing to do pickups and dropoffs from Hebrew school and of course I’ll be in your Purim spiel. And of course if I had my own faith community, everyone would be invited to come with me. But the way I feel about church right now is a mixed bag. On one hand, I’d like to sing. On the other hand, I was a Methodist PK for 17 years and I feel retired.
- My promise to myself that I will do everything I can to support the people that support me. I have a lot of broken relationships in my past because I did not know I was autistic and melted down and burned out with so many people due to lack of knowledge. Autism isn’t the excuse, it’s the reason I couldn’t manage my emotions for whatever reason. Now that I know how to direct my energy, I am less likely to go to either extreme. So the promise to myself is to do more research on my own reactions because having a different cognitive style does not erase accountability; it changes how I process and emote about it.
- I promise to love Tiina and Brian and all of their kids and grandkids in a fundamental, on the ground kind of way. Of course I’ll go to the pharmacy in the middle of the night and of course 10yo can run the music in my car whenever they want. They’re my people, and I go hard for my people. The trick is finding people who will also go hard for you.
Stories That Are All True 