"If I could just arrange for her happiness first, he thought, and in the confusing night he forgot for the while what experience had taught him - that no human being can really undestand another, and no one can arrange another's happiness."
In the confusing night I also forget even though I too have been learning it for many years.
I wonder what makes some of us feel this mistaken responsibility and others not. Is it something we learn as children? A combination of factors from our childhoods?
For instance I am the eldest of three. I was charged with looking after my siblings, particuarly as migrants in a country where they didn't speak the language (I was six years old and so the only one old enough to have learned before arriving).
My mother was shy and didn't like to make phone calls or interact too much with people. She was very unhappy, isolated, having left her warm, southern European home for a cold climate without the comfort of friends or family.
Maybe I learned early that it was in my power to make their lives easier through my efforts; that it was my duty to do so.
I don't think that responsibility for others is a bad thing. I lean more towards community than individualism. I value support networks. I have benefited greatly from the care of others and have not felt like my contribution has been out of balance until now.
But there is a line which some people see clearly. On one side of that line you can interact meaningfully. Less a line than a kind of common zone, a Checkpoint Charlie (without the uniforms and, hopefully, the weaponry).
Beyond it is the unkown other; that foreign land which is another person. Bureaucracies of the mind that baffle outsiders, laws of obscure etymology, subject to change without notice.
What an arrogance to presume that I can navigate that territory without an insider (and there's only one) to guide me, or worse still without permission.
But the border isn't obvious to me. I'd go as far as to say that we're all actively encouraged to forget about it, to feel that we can get inside the skin of a loved one, become one with them; that it's our duty to know someone inside out before being able to claim that we love them.
Maybe it's a confusion of aloneness with loneliness.
I feel like my whole life has been a process of learning to see what's in front of me. (And forgetting again and learning again.)
Flo
I learned to be responsible for others' happiness at my father's knee. Looking back, it's obvious to me now that he was a man with severe episodes of depression, but we didn't know that then, we just called it "Papa's moods."
ReplyDeleteI seem to have done the classic thing of marrying my father, repeating the awful patterns I grew up with (my mother doing all the work, all the child rearing and bill paying etc), repeating that horrid experience. And yet how could I have suspected that this is what I was doing? My husband had his first bad episode of depression several years *after* we married. I thought I'd married a man very very different from my father. Were their clues I missed? Warning signs I ignored? This haunts me.
Certainly my training in being a care-taker as a child (expected to live life in accordance with my father's ups and downs, expected to share the burden of running the house with my over-stretched mother in lieu of my father's help, expected to be a buffer between my desperately unhappy parents and the younger kids in the family) is now coming to the fore in dealing with a depressed spouse. Perhaps without that training I would have walked away.