A Season for Everything

Rules.

I’ve always followed them. My parents, especially my dad, had a long list of rules for how to live my life. It didn’t really matter if I agreed with those rules, not that Dad ever asked my opinion. The lesson was learned early on…breaking the rules was NOT worth it. Now, bending the rules was another story. I did that fairly often or at least often enough to find out that Dad’s rules were inflexible, written in stone. My mom once described my relationship with my dad as a train wreck looking for a place to happen. The funny thing is, I never tried to bend any of the “big” rules. I was a good girl (with a barely restrained bad girl dying to get out).

The bad girl got her chance in college. And she ran with it for all she was worth. Again, the lesson was learned that breaking the rules wasn’t worth it when Dad pulled the plug on paying for college (and he never knew the half of what I’d done). I was home for the summer and he made me go to work at the foam rubber plant where he worked. Every single minute spent laminating, buffing, cutting and packaging foam was torture, but I did meet my husband there. We were married 4 1/2 months after our first date. The one and only time I openly and flagrantly went against my dad.

We spent the first two years of our marriage in Orlando, close to my new in-laws, who insisted we needed to “get pregnant.” So, of course, I did. Then my grandmother, who was rattling around alone in a four bedroom house since my grandfather’s death said with the baby’s birth we needed to come home. So, we did. My grandmother chose rooms as her own, told us which would be ours and promised to let me be the mother and not control our lives. She lied. And I let her. She was, after all, my grandmother and respect for my elders was one of those rules drummed into me by my dad. Tim came to hate living there so much that he found a job in Pittsburgh and moved in with my parents to be close to it. He started out coming home every weekend, but dropped back to every other weekend or even less often as my grandmother became more and more controlling and critical. I was miserable, but how could I tell my grandmother? She’d done so much for us. It took me seven months to gather enough courage to tell her Tim was not coming back and the baby and I were leaving to be with him.

Then there is Tim. Over the years I have let him talk me into things I’ve known would mean finacial disaster. We’re currently in a reorganizational bankruptcy and paying back a lot of debt. I’ve put up with him working hours that go far beyond long. I’ve put up with him hardly ever being here for me or the kids. I stayed through the bouts of severe depression he goes through from time to time. I stayed after finding out that a year of pure hell he put me and the kids through was because he was having an affair. I stayed even though he refused to enter into counseling. Why? Because one of the rules in my life is that marriage is forever whether it’s good or bad and the thought of divorce causes me anxiety that is not to be believed. And because I do love him and I want it to work.

My former church really screwed with me, too. My god, the expectations! The pastors and leaders (all my friends, I thought) really laid it on thick. If I was living the way I should as a Christian I should be at every event in the church, I should be active and involved in many things, volunteer as much as possible, be a specific kind of wife and mother, tithe and have no financial problems, etc. The pressure to meet that standard and the guilt I felt for not living up to it were enormous. Is it any wonder I never felt I could turn to anyone there for love and support to help me get through the messes going on in my life? Still, as unhappy as I was, I played along, always wearing my game face. To this day no one there has a clue that my personal life was in tatters.

It’s been since I turned 40 and started examining my life, that I’ve put a lot of thought into this. My whole life I’ve played by the rules to a) keep the peace, b)please others, c)make people like me. In taking stock, I’m seeing that I didn’t always accomplish those goals and I’ve made myself pretty miserable in the process. I’ve been the daughter, wife, mother, friend, church leader, person everyone has told me to be. The one thing I don’t know how to be is who I want to be. Who am I? What do I want to do? Where do I want to be? I need a roadmap that leads to me.

I was thinking about all of this when I named this blog, because there is a season for everything, but now it’s my season. My time to be whoever I turn out to be.