Want, again

You might think that the worst thing about the separation and divorce was becoming a single mother, or seeing my income drop by 60%, or moving from a big detached house into an apartment, or losing most of my hobbies to the ravages of a new schedule, or being alone all the time, or helping Frances deal with all of her losses. While all of these (especially the last) were emotionally difficult, they weren't the hardest--the most technically difficult. The most intractable technical problem was decision-making.

It turns out that when making decisions, it helps to know what you want. Who knew?

I hit a wall this past winter. You might have guessed. It happened like this: single mom with type 1 diabetes whose adorable daughter has an undiagnosable genetic syndrome and whose ex-husband censored is being ground under the weight of various minor responsibilities, each one of which has the mass of a gnat but which in combination feels like a Hummer, and has made a number of disastrous personal decisions, the results of which are beginning to become clear; but the worst, the absolute worst part, of the whole mess is that she doesn't know how to fix it because she can't figure out what she wants instead.

The rest of it could more or less be dealt with. The hardest part was feeling stuck, feeling that I couldn't move forward because I didn't know what I was moving toward. Imagine trying to get a car out of a muddy ditch when you don't know where the road is, or darning something when you can't tell if it's a sock or a sweater. It was like telling up from down in an Escher drawing. When someone tells you that your life depends on the distinction.

This is what happens when you spend your life believing that wanting is bad, that you earn your share of oxygen by supplying other people with what they want, and then compound it by marrying someone who knows very clearly what he wants. It was undeniably destructive but at the same time it provided a structure: I knew exactly what to do. Sometimes I didn't like it, but at least I didn't have to make up my own mind. I was relieved of the burden of knowing what I wanted, of being selfish.

And then I was single, and everything in my household for the first time in my life depended on me making decisions which meant that I had to have some kinds of goals. Unsurprisingly, I ended up choosing goals based on the wants and values of other people: a stable professional job; a respectable savings plan; an up-to-date scrapbook; complicated homemade meals; a BMI of 21; homemade christmas cards. Unsurprisingly, I did not end up happy. For a few terrible months, I really thought I might have destroyed my family and ripped my daughter's world in half only to make myself even more miserable.

Dating was where a lot of this played out, as exemplified by the following bit of internal dialogue:

I don't like him.

Yes, but he likes you.

I know. But I don't like him. I don't want to see him again.

Yes, but he wants to see you.

OK! I know! But he's kind of creepy and I don't think I can trust him.

But he wants to see you! Are you going to put your own wants above someone else's?

I don't even know him! It's only been two dates! I don't owe him my life because of two measly dates, I don't like him! He's controlling and aggressive and doesn't manage stress well and it scares me how much violence seems to turn him on. I don't think that's good for me. I think I deserve better.

Oh my god, I can't believe how selfish you're being. Who do you think you are?

So the next time someone accuses you of being self-abnegating, you can show them this. Because I think this might be a new level of self-abnegation.

I figured out last year that I didn't have to endure unhappiness because someone else's wants required me to do things that I hated, put up with things I hated. And then it took me another long, slow, torturous year to figure out that resolving bad situations isn't enough; you need to have some idea of what to replace them with which, if you're not careful, could involve removing one person from the throne and sticking someone else there instead. I was hoping to fall down the rabbithole and find Wonderland; instead, I sat around in the hallway at the bottom for a year trying to get the key off the glass table. Which turned out to be: I was actually going to have to be selfish, I was going to have to want things all by myself and take responsibility for them.

The thought of it still makes me dizzy. All of those long-nurtured voices that masked themselves as virtue and perspective still pipe up: you already have more than you deserve, you should be happy with that; your wants don't matter anymore, Frances's do; you are just one person out of six billion, you are not special; most of those six billion people have so much less than you do, you should be focused on leveling that pyramid, not scaling it; how could you be so selfish? I'll let the sources of those particular voices remain anonymous. The point is, they're still there and very noisy but at least I've figured out that they are not the Voice of Reason.

In the meantime I'm going to have to accept that wanting anything is hard for me and do it anyway. Here's what I have so far:

I want to write. I want to have more time with Frances. I want to spend more of our time together doing creative things like cooking or baking or crafts or gardening. I want to have a good relationship with her, now and in the future. I want her to have good friends who deserve all of the affection that her big heart lavishes on people. I want to have more time to do creative things myself. I want to read really good books that make me see the world in a different way. When I write books, I want mine to do the same for other people. I want a garden--nothing fancy, nothing labour-intensive, nothing too groomed, just a green tangle I can see out the window for a few months a year. I want a home that is colourful and peaceful and relatively clean and uncluttered. I want to learn as much as I can. I want to have good friends I can relax around. I want someone to love me who hears me when I speak and understands what I say. I want to spend my days doing something that makes me think and lets me keep learning new things. I want to be able to talk to my parents about something other than the weather. I really want to know why my coworkers get up and walk to the kitchenette to throw their paper in the garbage when there is a recycling bin under their desk. I want to always be able to afford the really good cheese at the grocery store. I want to figure out how to get a bigger christmas tree in the apartment next year. I want enough money that I don't need to worry about the future, though I fully know that this is a number that gets bigger the more you have. I want work that I enjoy enough that retirement is not a daily dream, that I'm ok with "needing to work" when I'm older because work won't be some dreaded thing. While I'm at it, I want an end to bigotry of all kinds, a workable solution to the global climate change crisis, a lifetime supply of new books, all the time I'd need to read and understand them, and a cure for type 1 diabetes, in no particular order.

I can't quite figure out how any of that would harm any one of the one billion people who live on less than a dollar a day. Yet those voices insist on it.

Unsurprisingly, my life the way it is currently set up is actively preventing many of those dreams from coming true. That has to change. Which is where the school thing comes in--but more of that in June.

At the moment, what I really want is a nap and a few hours to finish reading My Name is Red, though I'm not too sure what I think of it right now.

Posted by Andrea at May 30, 2008 9:17 AM under Change Addict

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