In her book Traveling Mercies, (and I may be misparaphrasing from memory, but that’s okay because I am recreating it in the way that I need to, which I think the author would approve of), Annie Lamott talks about how sometimes our hearts get so small and hard that they become walnuts and God has to crack them (and us) open in order to let grace back into our lives. In the Exodus story, there are several instances in which Pharaoh hardens his heart after deciding to let the Israelites leave—midsrash suggests this is his choice—to renege on his promise and to turn away from what he knows is right, not to mention risking even further and more devastating evidence of God’s power and wrath on his people and even himself and his own family. But more curiously, there is also at least one reference to God hardening Pharaoh’s heart. Why would God do such a thing? Why would God make it so that there would be further suffering of so many innocent people, not by the choice of their leader, but by God’s own intervention in Pharaoh’s thinking and actions?
I compare it to the alcoholism debate I heard recently on NPR—is alcoholism a disease, or is it a matter of choice? The most persuasive answer is that it is a mixture of both—the alcoholic can choose to put him or herself into situations where drinking is more likely to happen, and of course, once the he or she chooses has the first drink, probably will become a full-blown alcoholic again in short order—less than six months, by some accountings. But sometimes, so many barriers to making the right choices are put in our way, and so few options seem available to us except to take that drink, and so few supports are (or seem to be) available, that it is almost as if God has intervened—interfered is more like it—and it no longer seems or feels like a matter of our own choosing: we are just there, drink in hand, regressed to the least functional , most destructive coping strategy we have for dealing with the stressors in our life.
William Glasser and his disciples have explicated a great deal about the basic human needs in Choice Theory, presenting the five needs as more or less parallel: Survival, Love and Belonging, Power (Achievement, Competence, and Successful Cooperation/Teamwork), Freedom, and Fun/Joy. When I have used Choice Theory to help teachers (and myself) understand how better to understand individual students’ learning profiles and be able to differentiate instruction for them more appropriately, I always depict Survival as a horizontal bar along the bottom, with the other four needs represented by vertical bars resting on top. Each of us has a different profile, so each bar is a different height (or in the case of Survival, a different length); moreover, our profiles are not fixed, but change throughout our lives, during different developmental stages, in response to different environments, and in response to different events.
In general, and all my life, I have had a very long Survival bar. What this means for me is that I have a very high need for safety and security. I am a highly risk-averse person, which has manifested itself in many ways throughout my life—as a child, focusing only on things at which I felt confident I could excel; being afraid of bike riding, skiing, and other downhill or fast moving sports; and as an adult, saving aggressively for retirement and later, for my kids’ college education, by maxing out contributions to my 404(b), Roth IRA, ESA, and 529 plans.
It also means that I take a great deal of comfort in having lots of rules and guidelines. I am susceptible to advice and self-improvement books. As a teenager, I read Seventeen religiously and made a notebook to better follow all the advice so that I could optimize my popularity and attractiveness. As an adult, I’ve made similar clipping notebooks from health and fitness magazines. As a third grader, I made three hundred New Year’s resolutions. When I lived on my own through my late twenties, I had a budget so itemized it included the coffee that I bought in the faculty cafeteria every day.
This is the underlying predisposition I bring into any new situation or environment. Then, as in the Exodus story, God intervenes. Life adds stressors, or challenges, or just change. Sometimes, like an alcoholic, I remember early enough to keep my options expanded, my support network on high alert, and to stay away from the trouble spots. Since I met my husband when I turned 30, he has in fact been my rock in this effort. He is the opposite of a perfectionist, although he is also a very driven, high-achieving person. He functions on what he and I call flow. Rules, structure, schedules, agendas, to-do lists that are written down, all are against his basic temperament, and are definitely NOT part of his learned coping mechanisms as a child. When confronted with conflicting choices, he makes the one that feels right in that moment, not necessarily the one that conforms to pre-set rules or agreements that I think we have made. He is excellent at reading situations and body language, and thrives in environments in which there are always multiple options. That’s why he needs to be the boss at work, I think—so that he has the most latitude in dealing with change. When I am very stressed, or he is, our styles clash, but I have learned through marital counseling and a book called Getting the Love You Need that he offers me exactly what I need in order to become a more whole person. His coping style of flow and options is the very one that was repressed in me early on, that was denied me by my own family of origin. I learned to fear and devalue it when in fact it needs to be a balanced part of my core, my repertoire of approaches to life. In part, I fell in love with my husband because some part of me sensed that he would be my life teacher in this quest.
The plagues of Egypt came to our family in August, 2009. My husband went to the local hospital—drove himself there, in fact, after sitting down at his desk and eating a salad, because, as he rightly pointed out, who knew how long it would be before he would get to eat again? He was experiencing tightness in his shoulder and arm all the way down to a tingling numbness in his hand. I wasn’t in the least worried when I got the news: this was the third time in about as many years that he had gone to the ER with what turned out to be stress-related issues, and he had told me the night before how stressful his day had been. I was surprised that the cardiologist on duty in the ER that day decided to keep him overnight; that hadn’t happened before. The problems was that while his heart and lungs checked out fine, his blood pressure was unusually high, and the doctor decided to keep him for further testing.
I packed the kids in the car that afternoon to go have dinner with papa at the hospital: they loved getting food at the cafeteria, and I joked with the nurse that I was going to get my husband a double espresso. The next day, all the tests were normal, with no explanation for the elevated BP. At that point, my husband wanted to come home. The cardiologist said he could not keep my husband at the hospital, but he wanted to do one more test. Later, my husband said the only thing that made him stay was thinking about being the father of our three children, which was also what had motivated him to check into the ER in the first place. We found out that the insurance company tried to deny the test, since there was only a 1 in 100 chance it would show anything wrong. But in fact it did show something wrong, seriously wrong, with my husband’s heart: the lower half seemed not to be responding.
He was immediately scheduled for an angiogram at a much larger hospital, and three days later, fully conscious and during the procedure, the cardiovascular team informed him that he had extensive blockage around his heart and would need quadruple bypass surgery. I was staying at our friends’ farm nearby with the kids, and when he called, I immediately did what any supportive, worried wife would do: I ran to get my work-out gear and reduce some stress before driving to the hospital. My husband’s friend, who happened to be there for chemo treatment, got my friend on the phone and said, “Tell RockQuarry to get here now. Her husband needs her.”
As soon as my husband stated that he wanted the surgery (believe it or not, it is optional, even though he probably would have dropped dead of a heart attack within ten years had he not received it), we spent the day consulting with surgeons, anesthesiologists, nurses, doctors’ assistants. We scheduled the surgery for three days hence; I arranged for child care, for my father to come and stay with me during the course of the surgery and recovery, I emailed friends and family to alert them to the situation. In a word, I was coping, and well, mainly because I think I was still in shock, and stayed in shock, for days.
For about two weeks after the surgery, I seemed to be doing okay. School started, and I got the kids squared away. I managed my husband’s medications, scheduled doctors’ and nurses’ visits, arranged for supplemental child care where needed, and provided for all our transportation needs since my husband was not allowed to drive until his sternum grew back together. I told the organization I was consulting for that I couldn’t do any new projects. But the third week saw me fall apart. My parents went back to their home state to take care of doctors’ appointments of their own. The director of the consulting organization called me to ask me to step down from the course I was currently still teaching. My co-teacher sent me an angry email claiming I had disrespected her professionalism, that I was being too controlling, and that, unlike me, she had learned to let go of the need to control so would not fight me for it. The school where I was working also asked that I be removed from the course, and requested that I not lead an in-service that was planned for later in the year. I was devastated. I hadn’t gotten negative feedback about me teaching and consulting in years; I was in essence being fired; and my main support—my parents, who best understood me and my coping style—were gone.
It was at about this time that God hardened my heart, as he had done to Pharaoh’s. I forgot to breathe, to exercise, to remember how to flow. I was yelling more at the kids; they all began to bite each other out of their own frustration and stress (talk about regression), and I knew it was time to call in the professionals. I scheduled appointments for our marriage counselor and a child/family counselor we had met with one in the past. The school was doing a great job keeping my oldest son together while he was there, but once he came home, I couldn’t manage his interactions with his younger brothers.
It’s amazing how long one’s heart can stay closed up like a walnut even in the face of overwhelming evidence that what one is doing to survive doesn’t feel very good. It wasn’t until back-to-back sessions, first when I met with our therapist, then with the counselor, that the first cracks even appeared. The week before, after our first couple’s only meeting with the child/family counselor, I had completely fallen apart in the car, raging about all the ways in which I was feeling judged and attacked for my coping strategies, for being ME. It seemed that every time we approached the troublesome relationship I have with my oldest son, I was advised to change: to use fewer words, to give him his space, not to label him as a bully or aggressive or violent even though he hurt me or his brothers and threw things, and seemed to have no impulse control, nor kinesthetic awareness, nor the ability to listen and follow directions. And a week later, I was told to let go—of the need to control him, of the need to control everything around me, of the need to control myself. My therapist and I actually got in an argument because he insisted that I would not get better until I allowed myself to eat chocolate—and I was on the cusp of beginning a new exercise and diet program to match my husband’s own need for a pre-diabetic, cardio-healthy diet and the directive to shed excess pounds. My therapist demanded to know what my favorite chocolate was, and I refused even to talk about it. I hadn’t sulked and refused to speak to a therapist while in session in at least twenty years. From there, my husband and I met at the family counselor’s office and I sat, furious, arms folded and legs crossed, while she said what she said every session: “What if this is just the way he is? What if all you have to do is accept and love him?”
It took another three days before that tiny crack finally broke open. That weekend, I finally was able to let go and flow again. It was a huge relief. I began smiling more. I created a system that empowered my oldest son to get ready for school, and get ready for bed, without my having to “meddle” (as he puts it). I delivered a successful in-service session at the school that had wanted to switch presenters. I decided to go to bed with the kids every night, meditating myself to sleep, so that I could get up early to write. And what was I going to write? This blog. Though no one has read it, it is important to me to write it. My therapist had told me in the session in which we argued about chocolate that he wanted to start seeing me once a week because my perfectionism had come back with such a vengeance, and in a form unlike any I had seen since my twenties, that he felt I had “work” to do. The last thing I wanted was talk therapy. If anything, I am too analytical and self-reflective. I decided to do that “work” here, in this blog, and save therapy for the things I find too hard to do myself: find self-acceptance, work out hard places between my husband and me, learn to trust in unconditional love—something my therapist and husband both believe exists, and which I do not. Here, I can be as me as I want to be: rigid, structured, controlling. No one to judge me or tell me to change.
My hope is that maybe someone will read an entry and find a bit of themselves reflected or described here and feel less alone. Not validated nor affirmed in being dysfunctional (my therapist says we are all fucked up, after all, and we all fuck up our children—and he says this in his charming Irish accent), but just connected again in a way that all that structure, all those rules, all that rigidity, work against by creating walls, barriers, blockages if you will, more pervasive and severe even than those that the doctors found around my husband’s heart.
