The boys and I finished our weekly gaming session, and I put on an amazing album (Foxing – Nearer My God) that I haven’t listened to in far too long as I got dinner going. Its chicken and dumplings tonight – a bit late to start something so labor-intensive perhaps – but it will go far in leftovers and is cheap to make. As I prepped the vegetables and got the chicken thighs in the pan to brown, I got to thinking along a well-trodden path. Can’t really say why except that this album takes me back to a time when I was so much less sure of myself, and so much more needful of outside validation. The more I thought, the further back it took me, along a line of thinking I have been privately working through for a long time. A thought about relationships, parents, partners, trauma, and what it means to love and be loved. I wonder sometimes (and my therapist is well acquainted with the question) of whether I have ever really known what that means.
I was not blessed with a great example of that in my formative years. My parents had a very mercurial and abusive relationship marked by violence and substance abuse. My mother loved me as best she could, but unknowingly taught me that romantic love was something you had to spend yourself to earn. A person profoundly damaged by the breakup of her nuclear family in her teens, she spent the whole of her life seeking approval from men. As it tends to go, she attracted a long line of abusers and otherwise emotionally unavailable partners throughout her life. Men who were not worthy of her intelligence, compassion, talent, and spirit. She was a person who found magic in everything: a song, a warm breeze rustling the leaves, the flowers of weeds, the way bugs march along a twig – and attracted people seemingly hell-bent upon the singular task of breaking her soul.
I spent a great deal of my life trying in vain to save her from herself, never really understanding that I had the same broken parts within me. I’d never have thought it back then, but I carried that same idea that I wasn’t really worthy of love. That I always had to be aware of my lack, and give extra to make up for it. That it was normal to abandon my own logic, morals, goals, and dreams in favor of someone else – and there always had to be someone else.
Most of my life, I simply accepted it was my lot to put everyone else before me. Early on, as the oldest child (and an AFAB one at that, with all of the inherent social expectations) I cared for my siblings, my parents. In my early teens, it became my boyfriend-then-husband, my children, and after my marriage ended, a series of dysfunctional relationships with hardly a break in between. Especially being a single parent, I was never allowed to forget that my family situation inherently asked for too much from partners, and therefore I was not allowed to need anything that was just for me. My job was to make sure I was constantly, apologetically, atoning for the sin of needing anything at all.
Looking back on it, it’s so easy to see that none of these relationships could be considered healthy. Some were outright abusive. My yardstick for measuring “normal” and “acceptable” had been built upon a childhood witnessing shocking levels of physical violence and somewhere along the line I had absorbed the lesson that this was The Line. Anything short of being beat unconscious wasn’t really abuse, and I do mean anything. It’s unbelievable to me now, but it wasn’t until I was rebuilding my life in my late 30s that I finally understood how much horrific shit I had gone through. “They didn’t hit me unless I provoked them, it wasn’t that bad.” Most often though, I suspect me and each of my successive partners were all just broken people. People with unexplored and unhealed trauma do not attract healthy partners, or have healthy relationships. We were mostly just people who desperately wanted to be loved, but did not know how.
It is, of course, my unfathomable regret that I visited that generational trauma upon my own children before I learned better. It was that shame – that I had failed to do much better than my own parents – that was largely responsible for a breakdown in my mid-30s, the culmination of which would eventually change everything. That wasn’t some immediate transformation, and it would be a number of years yet before I learned to give myself grace. To truly forgive myself for not being a person I had never been taught to be. To find out who I really was under all of that trauma, self-loathing, and yawning emptiness I tried so hard to fill with the love and acceptance from others that I could not give myself. To be comfortable enough with the silence to truly be alone.
As my last relationship reached its end in early 2022, I knew I would not date again for a long time, if ever. I had already been working on myself for a while by that point, but this was going to be dirty work that I could not do while attached to someone else. Moreover, I found that I was not interested. For the first time in my life, I was not driven to find another relationship. I truly dedicated myself to rooting out the toxic self-beliefs and patterns that contributed to my own misery, regardless of the outcome. As the solitary years passed, I began to wonder if that meant there was something wrong with me. I am not sure how much of it is the healing and how much of it is the transition, but I began to realize that nothing I had previously thought about romantic love had been, well, right. It had been obsession, trauma bonds, co-dependence, extreme highs and lows. Had I ever known it at all?
Sometimes in the quiet hours I look back on times when I was infatuated in my 20s and miss that feeling. The rush of it all. But I can no more become that person again than I can turn back time. I wonder sometimes if I have just hardened my heart to it all. I definitely know how to love – my children, my incredible wealth of friends, my art, my community, myself – show me that every day. I am so rich in love. But still I wonder, am I missing something?
It doesn’t occupy much of my time. God knows, I have an incredible, authentic, amazingly bountiful life filled with people and things and dreams that the self of 10 years ago could never comprehend let alone hope for. I am so incredibly blessed that it seems almost sacrilegious to ask for more. I am content with that, I think. Maybe someday that will change, but I am not going to spend my time looking for it. I’m still not sure I would know it if I did. What would that be like? Love without the obligation. Without the fear and anxiety and everything else. Maybe one day I will find out. Until then, I stretch dumplings and drop them into the broth, content for now to leave the questions unanswered.
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PS: Mostly, it seems like everything in our universe is on fire, and I am consistently receiving the message that it is indulgent to spend time in self-reflection. I reject that. If not now, when? I can care about more than one thing at a time, and if anything, what could be more important in my quiet time than to delve deeper into the self? To further understand my own needs and motivations? To put myself into the greater context of humanity itself, and deepen my love and empathy for all of us (me included)? One of my core beliefs is that the true meaning and purpose of life is to continually explore the human condition – revealing its ever-greater depths – most especially my own. For it is impossible to understand the world or anything worth understanding at all without first knowing myself.
PPS: I am including my chicken & dumplings recipe below for anyone interested. Its pretty damn good.
