The Boy was in town over the holidays and he was a little jealous of his friends' independence. Most of them can drive and have access to cars. Two friends could drive to the mountains to ski (which terrifies me as a mom, but whatever) and another drove to a park to hike. He wished he had that independence.
Sidebar: I heard an interesting talk about jealousy recently. We can be jealous of all kinds of things, like money, fame, and love. I see jealousy as having these components--
The speaker said jealousy can turn into hatred, but I think it starts with self-hatred. We hate ourselves for not having that cool job, great car, or thighs of steel. We might not recognize that as self-hatred at first, or it might not be hatred. It could be grief. The Boy might be sad that he doesn't have the same freedom his friends have. He might regret the choices he made that led him to needing to go to Wilderness therapy. We can also move to acceptance, where we know we can't have what we want. I can't make my mother's Alzheimer's go away, for example. I could fight and argue and scream, but it wouldn't change her condition.
Back to the Boy.
"You have the shitty part of independence," I told him. "You don't have a car. Instead, you get to do your own laundry, make your own breakfast, lunch and dinner. You have to grocery shop and have a budget. You have to clean your own toilets."
"It's called 'responsibility,'" he said.
Yeah. That. He takes care of himself first, and then also takes care of his housemates when it is his turn to make dinner and clean the kitchen.
The Boy is learning responsibility first, independence and freedom second. I wonder why the Founding Fathers came up with the Declaration of Independence? Should they have also come up with a Declaration of Responsibility, too, to balance it out? Or were their wives and slaves taking care of all that: the kids, the home, the crops, etc.?
My good friend Eleanor Owen turned 100 years old last week. Her life has been bookended by pandemics. Her mother's firstborn son died of the 1918 Flu. Eleanor's mother stayed hidden away for three years during the 1918 pandemic. "My mother was either carrying a baby, delivering a baby or nursing a baby during that time," Eleanor said. "She had to hide."
I was talking to a friend this weekend about the 1918 Flu. Were people as downtrodden as we are now? How did they cope?
Perhaps some of the answer is in our perception of responsibility v independence. Eleanor's mom felt a sense of responsibility to care for her three young children. Did it make her less miserable to focus on her responsibility instead of losing her freedom and independence?
Maybe. I remember Eleanor's story about living on a farm in upstate New York ten years after the pandemic. When she was young girl, the family's cow was in heat. The neighbor refused to let her bull impregnate the DeVito's cow. Eleanor and her sister's recognized the problem. In the middle of the night, Eleanor and her sisters dragged their cow out of the pen, and brought it to the neighbor's farm where the bull took care of business. Ten months later, the cow had a calf. All was well. At an early age, those girls had both responsibility and independence. They took care of their cow, and did it on their own. Too much responsibility is dreary. Too little can make us spoiled.
Okay, now I sound like someone writing two hundred years ago about big topics like Responsibility versus Independence. Ugh. Here is a cute picture of my dog. Why? Just because. As soon as a blanket fell on the floor, he claimed it as his own.
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