Reinvention

Julie's Hump Day Hmm this week is "How far would you go for yourself or someone else?" This was the first answer that came to mind.

"Solitude" is a story by Ursula le Guin story in The Birthday of the World where an anthropologist visits a planet without a society. There are humans on this planet, they have a culture; but they do not appear to congregate or form bonds. This anthropologist moves in with her two young children and tries to crack the culture's codes.

The adults never speak to each other. When they need to communicate, they speak to children in the presence of the adult they need to share something with, and in this way information is passed along. Each adult woman lives in a hut she makes with her own hands with her children. Men congregate in tribes on the outside of the villages; a man and a woman will have sex for a brief time and then separate, and she will raise the child within the village while the man returns to his tribe. They call this state of radical independence "being a person." In the end, when the anthropologist tries to leave with her children, the older daughter cannot readjust to a world where people are so rude as to talk to each other, to tell jokes and laugh, and so she fights until she is allowed to go back and make her own hut and raise her own children by herself in the village.

This resembles my immediate family to an uncomfortable degree. Everyone built their own hut with their own hands, metaphorically speaking; everyone met their own needs by themselves. On the rare occasions when communications had to be made, they were made indirectly in the presence of safe third parties. Connections were brief and meaningless and formed for pragmatic ends, and dissolved when the need that gave rise to them was past. It's only now as an adult, looking back, that this seems as crazy to me as it probably seems to many of you. Even now, the thought that people might actually tell each other how they're feeling about something, say what they would like to change, and have the expectation that a change might result from that conversation seems slightly shocking, almost taboo. Like walking behind the counter at a baked goods store, helping yourself to a couple of muffins and cinnamon rolls, chatting cheerfully with the staff about the weather, and strolling away without paying.

I carried this into my marriage, and so did my spouse. Needless to say, in most cases marriages will not thrive where each party considers themselves a self-sufficient island of one, making reconnaissances for necessary goods and services at unpredictable times, communicating indirectly via third parties, and expecting that whatever needs exist will somehow be met through this convoluted chess match.

It took almost a year from the date of the separation until I was willing to even begin to face my role in the breakdown of that marriage. It's the sort of breakdown where it would be very easy to claim victim status--and I'm skirting the edges of my gag order here--and that status is one that others have occasionally tried to shove me into. "It wasn't your fault," they say; "you were deceived and manipulated!"

That's true. I was deceived and manipulated. But, just like that Austrian wife who you can't help but think must have wondered what her husband was doing over the course of twenty-four years in that new extension he had built on the house and which he protected with a keyless entry, I wasn't just deceived and manipulated. I did a lot to foster, encourage and tolerate that situation; and it's only beginning to occur to me now, as I look back and see how different I was and how much some of my previous attitudes horrify me and how destructive my own actions were, that I can actually admit to my part in that mess.

I don't stay the same person from one season to the next here, do I?

I read in Mother Nature years and years ago that attachment styles should not be understood as disorders; that, if you are born into a world where you cannot count on other people to provide for your needs or care about your feelings, then the extremes of avoidant attachment styles--even sociopathology--are adaptive. Our ability to form different kinds of relationships depending on how people treat us as infants and young children has an evolutionary basis; be born into a cruel world, learn to be cruel. Be born into an indifferent world, learn to be indifferent. The people in "Solitude" are born into a world where they are required to meet every need they might ever have on their own, and their families are the microcosm in which they are taught to do this--it's adaptive. The problem in our world is that many of us are still born and raised within a microcosm that is cruel, indifferent, chaotic or unpredictable, and we adapt to it in all of the traditional ways; then leave that world and find that the skills it gave us are completely maladaptive because our families were broken systems that did not reflect the world. When you grow up in Solitude it can be painful and disorienting to try to live in society--just as it was for the anthropologist's daughter.

I'd like to say it's culture shock just because it would fit so nicely with the metaphor, but it's not. Culture shock is a timid, tepid experience next to this one. It's more like discovering that foundational elements of your personality were never intrinsic parts of your inherent temperament, but trained defensive responses to environmental stimuli; you wake up one day and discover that your Self is a suit of rusting iron battle armour ten sizes too small that you put on for a war that's been over for a decade. Clearly happiness will be impossible until I learn to take it off and let it go: I'm not in the army anymore, I am not walking over minefields or defusing bombs anymore; I don't need battle armour.

Peeling it off is slow, hard, and often painful work, but as much as I expect it will make my life better, I'm not just doing it for me.

Frances is, in every way, the opposite of that suit of battle armour. Her sensitivity and fearlessness, the way she wears her big heart wide open on the front of her shirt, is what I find most special and beautiful about her. But the people who grow up in Solitude aren't open, sensitive or fearless. It's enough of a tragedy for someone already self-contained and introspective to be that way in the world, but for Frances to learn the rules I grew up under, to learn to be an island of one without needs or the ability to communicate or feel, would mean breaking her in a fundamental way. And it's not something I would need to consciously set out to teach her. Just being that way myself, interacting with her that way, would be all I'd need to do.

If I am going to be the mother she needs me to be, the one who can help her learn to navigate the world as the person she is meant to be, then I need to learn how to break all those rules myself. Take the pathological independence, the indirect communication, the too-literal selflessness and let it all go, make a new Self with rules that work in the world I actually live in. Leave Solitude, and take my daughter with me.

Posted by Andrea at June 18, 2008 11:14 AM under Change Addict , Me

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