Limitations - from my book Changes

Chapter 2

Limitations

When I was very small, I told my daddy I wanted to be a doctor when I grew up, so I could cut people open and go, “Doodely, doodely, doodely with their guts!”  We laughed and it was our joke, but later in life, when I actually thought about going to medical school, my mother discouraged me because we didn’t have money for that kind of education.  “That’s for rich people,” she said.

We were not rich or even middle class, according to my social studies teacher in High School.  Based on their charts for the United States, my family was in the poverty level.  Fortunately we had everything we needed because our house was furnished with garage sale stuff, and my parents were resourceful and taught us kids to be also.

When I was in fourth grade, I said I wanted to be a cowboy when I grew up.  Mom reminded me that I was a girl, so I could be a cowgirl.  But in my mind, a cowgirl wore a red skirt, a red hat, and red cowboy boots.  That image didn’t appeal to me at all.  I wanted to wear brown pants, a brown hat, and brown cowboy boots.  I wanted to be dusty and sit on the ground by a campfire, playing a guitar to the cows at night.

I believed everything mom told me though, so I let go of that dream.

Later I said, “Well, if I can’t be a cowboy, maybe I could be a horse trainer.”

Again, mom talked sense into me and let me know that being a horse trainer took a lot of money too, because to be a horse trainer, a person needed lots of money to have a ranch and horses, which I didn’t have.

Much later, in in my first year of college, I loved studying human biology, and was very good at it, so I mentioned to my mom that I thought I might actually like to become a doctor, maybe even a surgeon.

Mom told me that it takes 10 years to become a doctor.  And not only that, you have to have a lot of money to go to medical school, which we did not have.  Plus, if I want to be a mom, I wouldn’t have time it have a career like that.

So briefly I thought about becoming a biology lab specialist because I enjoyed working with the microscope, but even that would take me away from my future homemaking and mothering duties.

I ended up going to school for fine art because I thought that was something I could do while home with children.  I went to school with money I earned in the summers but I had to quit when I ran out.  My parents and I were not savvy about using school counselors to help us apply for grants and loans.  It wasn’t until I was going to college with my first husband that he showed me how to get financial aide.

As a mom having a career as an artist was not feasible for me because I didn’t know how to organize life.

I found that when I make art, I get so engrossed in it that being interrupted by little ones was very jarring to my system.  And since I didn’t want to be a grumpy mom, I put off art indefinitely.

Instead,  I spent the next few decades having babies (which I really loved doing) and homeschooling my children, as well as decorating our home and doing the handy man things around the house and in our rentals.

My children and I were a team and they were often involved in the home improvements and the organizing meetings we had every week or so.

I enjoyed all of that, but for all our hard work, the efforts of the children and I were not appreciated by my spouse, either spouse.

Maybe I was too much of a Wendy, and not enough of a Tinker Bell; too much of a Hera and not enough of an Aphrodite; too much of a homemaker and not enough of a career woman or adventurer.

The children suffered too.  As I went through periods of depression they were at loose ends, and they suffered from verbal and emotional abuse as well.

My oldest daughter figured it out first.  She said, “Dad builds us up and then he crushes us.  Over and over, like little plants.”

She was right, but I felt stuck without financial security or personal confidence to leave and provide for myself and the children.

In my perspective at the time I considered myself strong because I could endure so much.  But I would not have had to endure any abuse if I had the education to recognize subtle abuse and gaslighting and how to deal with it.

Here’s a helpful hint about how I became educated, more will come later in the book.

Many years later I was told about two books, The Verbally Abusive Relationship, and Controlling People; both by Patricia Evans, a communications expert.  Patricia teaches lay people as well as corporations how to have better interpersonal communications.

Those books led to the children and I learning together about what makes up verbal abuse.  The books showed me that verbal abuse was more than insults or yelling, I learned that verbal abuse can be disguised in many ways, but it boils down to someone treating another person as less than equal.

That can mean walking out of the room while talking to the “lesser” person, or ignoring them, or deflecting, or diminishing the person’s feelings or thoughts or experiences.

It can also mean pretending to be the other person by telling them what they do, or feel, or think.  Even telling a person that they are thinking wrong, or any number of ways the abuser tries to over ride what the person is trying to communicate about how they feel or what they think.

Once I began learning about the more subtle abuses that can harm us, I put a list up on the wall for the children and I to learn from; the different things we might say to each other that would be considered abusive.  For the next month, as we were learning, I would often hear, “Verbal abuse,” and see a finger pointing to the offender.  It was taken well because we were all learning this together, and it became kind of a joke; but it helped us learn to change the way to talked to each other.  We learned to modify they way we talked and that helped us think differently towards each other too.

My husband was not yet interested in learning this new way of talking to each other.  That would come later, after I left him.