Boundaries

I never had any. This post put it in mind. I wasn't allowed boundaries. I wasn't allowed to take care of myself. I always thought I must be the most awful, selfish person who ever was because I couldn't do what was asked of me by my own family with anything but loathing and rage.

I still think that, actually. I'm getting better now, but it always lurks in the back of mind, ready to pounce when I'm tired or depressed. "God, you're so selfish," I'll tell myself. "Being sick is no excuse. The woman you love has asked if you want to go out somewhere, and you have no right to say no." And then I get all uncomfortable, and she has to remind me that it's totally OK to say no, and then I relax and say no, but it still eats away at me afterward.

Growing up, I lived with my grandparents and their son, my uncle, who is mentally about 12. No, I mean literally. Once I was older, it was expected that I would help care for him. And my jobs around the house were doing the dishes and the laundry. All of them. By myself. Every day. And on top of that, I had to be on call 24/7 for anything my grandmother might need. This meant that I would be up in my room playing a video game or listening to music, and then I would hear banging on the wall from three floors down. I would drop whatever I was doing and rush downstais before she could call me again because if she did that, I was in trouble for not listening. And heaven forbid I didn't hear her for whatever reason, because she would be livid. And then once I was down there, I would...answer her question. Or fetch a backscratcher from 5 feet away. Or stand with my head down while she lectured me about forgetting the laundry again.

And let me just reiterate something here. The backscratcher was kept by my grandfather's chair about five feet away from her chair. My grandmother was not an invalid. She did have a health condition (doctors never figured out what), but even on her weak days, she had no problem standing over the stove, running errands, weeding the garden.* But as soon as she sat down in that chair, it was way more convenient to make me run down three flights of stairs than stand up again.

And speaking of that banging, there's a lot of construction going on around our house, and sometimes when it starts up, I flash back to those days. I hear the banging of hammers and machines, and oh, shit, I missed hearing her the first time. She's pissed now. I'm going to be grounded for a week again. I'm going to get yelled at. And even if I manage to fight off the panic, I can't relax again after that.

Oh, right. This post was about boundaries. Well, that's why I don't have them, I think. When I moved out of my grandparent's house, it was to move in with my mom. She actually does have a lot of physical problems that make things difficult for her, which meant I felt even less comfortable saying no to her. I couldn't do it, and I hated her for it, and I hated myself for it. She would call me on my cell phone from her chair in the other room. Every time the phone rang, I knew it would be her wanting me to grab something from the fridge or let the animals out or run an errand. I learned to hate the sound of that phone. I have a different phone now, with a different ring, and I still can't stand to hear it.

Well, I moved out finally, but after Hurricane Sandy, my girlfriend and I went back to stay with them while our house was under construction. Things were pretty OK for about a week or so, and then they started pushing against my boundaries again. My grandmother was dead by this time, and my grandfather didn't ask for much. It was my uncle who started things.

He's lived without me for years. I moved out of that house long before I moved out of Missouri. But as soon as we got back, I was the only person who could make him food. He suddenly couldn't handle that himself anymore. He couldn't make his own tea, even though he'd been making it himself for my whole life. At first, he was pleasant and polite and grateful, but he quickly just turned demanding.

There was one day specifically where my girlfriend and I were about to do play a game together, and he knocked on the door and yelled for me to make him a sandwich, and I dropped everything and went to do his bidding, just like I'd been conditioned to do. It wasn't until afterwards, when my girlfriend confronted me with her hurt that I hadn't even acknowledged her, that I even realized it had happened. It was just automatic.

And my mother, who's muddled along without me for a good three or four or five years at this point, suddenly needed me to do everything for her, too. She has her own house, so she wasn't calling me every five minutes to get something or handle something. But every couple days, it seemed, I had to go shopping for her or take her somewhere, and I could not say no. If I said no without a good reason, I got guilt tripped about how things are hard for her.

God, the emotional manipulation in this family...

And this went on for not quite a year, something like eight or nine months. Both of us were just so beaten down by this time that we left. We spent two months driving across country and up and down the coast because neither one of us could handle it anymore. I'm still recovering mentally, and it's been a year since then.

It seems kind of weird, actually. Staying with them during that time has ruined my relationship with my family in a way the first 28 years of my life couldn't. They don't call too often anymore, and I don't really call them. I suppose I might be willing to call them more, but I have to psych myself up for days in advance before I can even pick up the phone.

One last thing. It was towards the end of that stay. I can't even remember what we were arguing about. The incident with my uncle had been a wake-up call for me, and I was trying to set a boundary. Mother was angry and screaming. I was screaming. I don't really cuss, but I yelled at her to shut the fuck up. She was so surprised that she did. I tried to make my case about whatever this was, and here's the one thing about this conversation that I remember clearly.

"Taren, do you really hate this family so much?"

And I almost said yes. Almost. But I stopped myself because that's not really true. And then I hung up.



*She later developed much worse problems and lived with a broken back for months before it got diagnosed as such. But at this time, she was still pretty spry.