Without attachment, a child flounders. Like a boat without a sea, a bird without a sky, unattached children feel uncomfortable in their own skin. As a buoy bobs according to the weather and waves, an unattached child vacillates from calm to chaos in the span of seconds. The slightest provocation can unmoor. I’d seen it again and again.
The way Jack unraveled at a change in routine or schedule.
His inability to do simple tasks — the folding of socks or picking up of toys — without a meltdown.
The way he screamed in terror at ordinary houseflies.
Not to mention Peanut’s penchant for taking toys and trinkets from friends at school, without thought or remorse. And Princess’s crazy lying and elaborate fabrications, delivered with expert skill and manipulation.
When a child can’t trust the presence and protection of a parent, they learn the only person they can count on is self. So they do what’s necessary to survive. Lie. Steal. Manipulate. Hoard. Rage. And always, always maintain absolute control.
He left it in the middle of my desk on his way out the door for another day of school. A sixteen-by-twenty poster with the four letters of his name spelled out in fat black-and-red marker.
J-A-C-K.
I knew why he put it there, in the middle of my office, the center of my desk. Because he knew that’s where I’d sit working while he went to school. He didn’t want to take a chance I’d forget about him.
As if I could forget.
Soon after his arrival, Troy and I nicknamed him Radar. Both an affectionate and accurate name. Because from the moment he woke in the morning until he went to bed at night, he pinged the world with constant reminders of his existence.
Incessant chatter. Nonsense questions. Crying, whining, and every other manner of making himself known. And a steady and unending bombardment of “I love you’s.”
I’d come in from the garage: “I love you, Mommy.” I’d pass through the family room where he played with his sisters: “Mommy, I love you.” I headed upstairs to go to the bathroom: “Mommy? I love you.” Over and over, he pinged me with those four words, words that grated more than warmed by the hundredth hearing.
His “I love you’s” weren’t so much a declaration of feeling as a compulsive exposure of need. Somewhere along the way he learned that the only way to hear those words is to say them first. Behind each offering lurked desperate, gaping questions:
Do you see me?
Do you like me?
Am I good enough?
I knew this. So I offered one hundred “I love you’s” in return, hoping my words would meet his need, fill his gaping hole.
Only they didn’t. Minutes later, he’d find me hidden in my office or bathroom and ping me once more. Or he’d leave a sixteen-by-twenty poster in the center of my desk with the four letters of his name in black-and-red marker.
Bless his heart. I could poke my own eyes out.
His never-assuaged neediness frustrated the life out of me. Not the clingy type, I’d never been the mom who needed my children to need me desperately. Instead, I fostered independence, self-sufficiency. To have a child so codependent stretched thin my last nerve.
Intellectually, I understood the why behind his behavior. My heart hurt for him. So I kept pouring, pouring, pouring myself into his cavernous black hole, hoping my offerings would bring some measure of filling. I determined to fix him, bandage his wounds and turn him into a “normal” boy with the magic of my supermama love.
Instead, like a bucket without a bottom, all the love and kindnesses I poured spilled out his holes.
How long could I keep this up? It didn’t make sense to keep giving to someone who couldn’t receive it. Who pours money into a bad investment? Why spend myself for someone who has no appreciation of the cost?
Isn’t that what I did? With the cross?
Holy two-by-four. God whacked me upside the head.
The cross. The single most significant and foolhardy investment of all time. A sacrificial offering, made once for all, for a people who’d never appreciate the cost. People who would scoff at it only moments after receipt.
And what for? To help an unmoored people know they had a place to anchor.
Jack and I are no different. I may be older, taller, and dressed in grown-up clothes. I may have a good job, a solid circle of family and friends, even a few talents that give me a sense of place and purpose. But all it takes is a bad day or bad moment to cause me to spiral into a gaping black hole of insecurity.
It’s hard to admit this, to shine light behind my well-polished, together exterior, to expose the girl who wants to be loved but secretly fears she’s not worth it. I’d like to think I’ve grown beyond that, don’t need the love I clearly crave. But the evidence is too obvious.
A friend sends a hurtful email. A reader leaves a disparaging comment. A group of friends doesn’t include me in an outing. I may not rage, but I can transform from happy to despairing in record time. Then, like Jack, I ping the world with reminders that I exist. A dozen social-media posts and hours spent measuring the replies. Text messages to a handful of friends, hoping to hear a kind word back.
I chase people and position, hoping for enough affirmation to make me feel better about myself. I call, write, schedule my days until each moment explodes with the noise of my life. Behind all this activity, all these pings, sits a single need: to know my existence in this world matters.
The science of it is plain. John Cacioppo and William Patrick, in their book Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection, explain it this way: “If you asked a zookeeper to create a proper enclosure for the species Homo sapiens, she would list at the top of her concerns ‘obligatorily gregarious,’ meaning that you do not house a member of the human family in isolation, any more than you house a member of [Emperor penguins] in hot desert sand.”23
You and I, we need each other. Attachment isn’t optional for those of us who walk and breathe in human skin. It’s part of who we are at our genetic core, required for our survival as much as air and food and water. It’s not that we can’t live as independent individuals. But independence driven by fear and insecurity isn’t independence at all — it’s isolation. True independence finds its anchor in relationship.
This is what I needed to remember during the hours of my son’s raging when I reached the end of myself and felt terrified about the adult my little boy might become. I needed him as much as he needed me. It was in relationship that we’d find our way.
A counselor once told me that wounds suffered in relationship are also healed in relationship. That’s both the rub and the beauty of it. The very thing that brought us pain will be the means through which our healing will come. For Jack, he needed to learn to trust the arms of a new mom. For me, I had to learn to love in spite of the gaping holes, without retreating and slamming my heart closed.
And for both of us, we needed to dig deep to find a faith that believes even the deepest wounds can be healed by a healing God.
When human love fails, a greater love remains. A healing, filling, securing love that fills the darkest black holes. Even when we swallow up the gift and forget the beauty of the offering.
“Can a mother forget the baby at her breast and have no compassion on the child she has borne? Though she may forget, I will not forget you! See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands.”24
My name. Jack’s name. Carved into the safety of God’s hand in fat red letters.
CHAPTER 18
The Grace of a Rough Draft
As I aimed to become a teacher, God made me a student. My spirit as a questioner does not affront Him; rather, it reflects Him, and honors Him, and pulls me toward Him. Through our gifts and weaknesses, our strengths and shortcomings, He works in each life thus.
— CAROLYN WEBER, Surprised by Oxford
We are meant to be real, and to see and recognize the real. We are all more than we know, and that wondrous reality, that wholeness, holiness, is there for all o
f us, not the qualified only.
— MADELEINE L’ENGLE, Walking on Water
I CAME HOME FROM HIGH SCHOOL ANGRY. THE TEST SCRUNCHED in my hands. Throwing my backpack onto the floor, I flung my adolescent self onto the bed and sobbed.
I know. Hard to imagine me the drama queen. But there you have it.
My parents must’ve heard the commotion, because soon Mom opened my bedroom door, squeezed her head between the door and frame.
“What’s wrong, honey? Bad day at school?”
I’ve never had much tolerance for obvious questions. So I launched into a louder and more frustrated wail. Award-worthy, people.
“I’ll never be good enough. Never! No matter how hard I work, it’s never enough.” I threw the crumpled test to the floor.
To her credit, my mom neither laughed nor reprimanded. I’m not sure I would have shown the same mercy. Instead, as I remember it, she picked my test up off the floor and pressed flat the paper. For a moment, she didn’t say anything. Just analyzed the document.
“Is this what you’re upset about?”
I sniffled and nodded. Didn’t she know? Couldn’t she see the grade marked in ink at the top?
“It’s an A minus, Michele.”
I knew that. I started crying again.
She should’ve called in the family for a public mocking. Or doused me with a bucket of ice. Instead, she saw my heartache through the theatrics.
Against all reason, I couldn’t see the A. I could only see the minus.
I’m not sure when I became a perfectionist. Perhaps I was born this way, the perfection gene delivered right along with my seven-pound, one-ounce self. Mom says I was a perfect baby, sleeping, eating, and pooping in the right order and on time. The fact that I receive this as a compliment hints at my dysfunction.
As far as birth order is concerned, I’m a typical firstborn female. Driven, high-achieving, and a fan of personal excellence. (You saw how I did that, didn’t you? I called it “excellence.” We perfectionists like to come up with new names for our disorder.) That would imply my perfectionism is the result of both personality and environment. And then there’s the wee little fact that I was raised by two perfectionists.
I didn’t stand a chance.
So, hi. My name is Michele. And I’m a raging perfectionist. I’ve been in recovery for four decades, and I’m happy to report I’m slowly breaking free of panic, paranoia, and the need for everything within the silverware drawer to be perfectly aligned.
Nonetheless, perfectionism nips at my heels. If you see a typo somewhere in this book or on my blog, don’t tell me about it. Or, rather, do tell me. But be gentle, positive, and infinitely affirming. Otherwise, I’m likely to throw myself on my bed and sob.
The good news is I’ve discovered four sure cures for perfectionism: Parenting. Marriage. Writing. And parenting.
But mostly parenting.
Being the overachiever I am, I managed to log multiple personal failures in each category before my fortieth birthday. I was a divorced, remarried, perfectionist biological mom and stepmom who made her living as a writer and just acquired three special-needs children.
Like dynamite next to an open flame, my friends. It had all the makings of a major disaster.
The note was waiting in my email inbox by the time I got home.
Moments before, I’d dropped off the twins for another afternoon of preschool. At the same time, I left two bags of snacks and drinks for later that week, my assigned date. I had to catch a flight and wouldn’t be able to bring them in on the assigned day. So I took the stash in early and privately patted myself on the back.
Look how prompt you are! What a good mom you are!
I hoped all the other parents noticed. I should get a sticker.
Anxious to get started on the day’s work, I drove straight home. Preschool lasted two itty-bitty hours, and I knew the time would disappear like a rabbit in a magic act. I settled at my office desk to get to work. That’s when I noticed the email. From the teacher.
“It has come to my attention that a lot of snack is being brought in days and sometimes weeks before scheduled snack days, and it has become extremely difficult to remember who has snack and who doesn’t. Please bring in snack on your scheduled day only.”
An email blasted out to every parent on her list, including the parents I’d just seen at drop-off.
My humiliation wouldn’t have been greater if I’d been forced to squat on a miniature stool in the corner. Sitting at my desk, I could feel anger bubbling up and filling my face with heat. A public reprimand, by a preschool teacher. I doubted she was old enough to have her driver’s license.
Behind the outrage, I felt shame. Shame at my inability to do this mothering thing right. I couldn’t even get the snack schedule down. Every day, I showed up late to school. In the evenings, I struggled to get dinner made and baths done. A coworker commented on the increasing typos in my emails, and several friends mentioned my disconnect from relationship. My boys struggled and my littles cried. Everywhere I turned, I felt like I was failing. The snack fiasco confirmed my worst fear: I was a terrible mother. I’ll never be good enough. Never! No matter how hard I work, it’s never enough. Waaaaaa!
I wrote a curt reply to the teacher, filled with plastic apologies, and then fumed for the rest of the day. Intellectually, I knew it wasn’t a big deal. We’re talking snack schedules, not life and death. But this public and embarrassing reprimand landed as the final straw in a camel-back-breaking string of motherly mishaps. After nearly two decades in this gig, I’d become the chronically tardy, homework-neglecting, appointment-missing, snack-schedule-disrupting mom. I was a disgrace to the position.
Parenting is easy before you become a parent. After you actually have a baby and acquire the title, you discover you can change a diaper but don’t have a clue how to get the crying to stop. You can teach a child how to hold a fork, but that doesn’t mean she’s actually going to use it. And you can talk about stranger danger, the importance of speed limit signs, and the seriousness of choosing your friends. But that doesn’t mean he’ll stay away from the weird guy in the white van, drive thirty miles an hour, and hang out with the “nice Christian kids from the youth group.”
If there were a championship game for the most controlling mother, there’s a good chance I’d captain the team. It wasn’t that I was a power freak. I just wanted my kids to make good choices, love God, and honor others. I felt the weight of responsibility to raise them to be functioning and respectful adults. And so I did what I could as a mom to help them get there.
But then we’d get a call from the school. A letter from a teacher. Unravel a mess or a lie. Find illegal fireworks in a bedroom. Every wrong turn and bad choice, if I followed them like a trail of bread crumbs, led back to me.
What kind of mother would let this happen? Where did I go wrong?
Irrational, yes. But perfectionism isn’t rational. It’s poison.
The first major blow against my infernal perfectionism happened in the ten-by-ten-foot home of an African woman named Macey.
We sat in the darkness of her shack, a lean-to with dirt floor, mud-brick walls, and scraps of sheet metal propped up as the roof. A thin scarf wrapped her head to tie at the base of her neck. In spite of the sun filtering through open door and window spaces, she pulled her sweater tight around her shoulders.
She had AIDS. Of course, she never admitted as much; the shame kept her quiet. Instead, she labeled it tuberculosis, likely the truth, at least in part. But I knew AIDS to be the disease behind the disease.
This was our third or fourth visit in the course of a two-week mission trip. In bits and pieces, over hours and through a translator, Macey shared her story. A single mom raising a son. Unemployed, unable to work. Terminally ill. Her husband left a year or two before, choosing another wife and family, leaving her sick and without any means to raise and feed her eleven-year-old boy. Her eyes bled grief.
I knew the story, felt the ache
of familiarity. Ten years before, a counselor, John, recognized the similar despair in me. My first marriage was weeks from ending, and I knew I could do nothing to resurrect it. Twenty-seven and with an infant son, I’d failed in the most profound way. My life was over, and I didn’t think I could go on.
Determined to resurrect a dwindling spark, John cracked open the thick book in his lap and started to read:
He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted . . .
to bestow on them a crown of beauty
instead of ashes,
the oil of joy
instead of mourning,
and a garment of praise
instead of a spirit of despair.
They will be called oaks of righteousness,
a planting of the LORD
for the display of his splendor.25
“God is not finished with you yet, Michele.” He looked at me with an intensity birthed of deep belief. “Someday you will be an oak of righteousness, a planting of the Lord for the display of his splendor!”
I heard his words, the words of Isaiah 61, but couldn’t receive them. It seemed too good to be true. I couldn’t believe such a gift. Couldn’t believe it could be given to a wreck of a woman like me.
Until Macey. Until ten years later when I sat across from a broken African woman, no longer a broken woman myself, and understood the miracle of Isaiah’s offering.
Feeling the urgency, I handed Macey a Sosotho Bible. This would be our last visit, a Bible in her language a parting gift. Then, with it sitting on her lap, I cracked open the pages and thumbed through until I found book, chapter, and verse. After pointing to her page, I opened my own and read Isaiah 61 aloud for both of us to hear.
“A crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of joy instead of mourning. . . . They will be called oaks of righteousness, a planting of the LORD for the display of his splendor.”
Undone Page 15