Let Go of the Leash

A friend sent this meme to a text chat that we were having yesterday. We mothers were lamenting how hard it is for us, when our “remote kids” (grown and/or away at school) are going through stresses and we can’t be there to “fix” everything. We all laughed and related to the meme. I related to the meme so much that I spent a lot of yesterday afternoon thinking about it. When my friend sent the meme, I immediately texted back, “I think that’s what my family can’t stand the most about me.”

A few years ago, one of my sons angrily stated that I held all of my kids “on a leash.” That statement stung. (Obviously, it stung, as I am still remembering it and writing about it now.) I was floored by his statement. I was flabbergasted. I was so completely angry and incredulous and insulted. Was he kidding?!? A leash?!? I was the mother who went out of her way to give her kids privacy. I never opened doors without permission to enter. I never went through their things on snooping missions. Unlike many of their friends’ parents, I never tracked their whereabouts on my phone. I wanted to raise confident, independent, adventurous and autonomous children. I was the one who championed studying abroad, and I made the appointments for them to get their drivers’ licenses, as soon as legally possible. My mantra had always been to trust my children, until I couldn’t, and I stuck with that mantra valiantly, for the most part. I really never understood what my son meant completely with his “leash accusation”. I think we dropped the whole argument back then, and we moved on. Yesterday, though, I had an “aha” moment.

Despite my best and highest intentions, I realize that I do sometimes keep my entire family “on a leash.” The leash is never physical. The leash is never about whereabouts, or rites of passages. It’s more about happiness and comfort and security and control. It occurred to me yesterday, though truly unintentionally, I sometimes keep my family on a tight “emotional leash”.

For some backdrop to my point, I would like to talk about codependency. “Codependent” is a term that was first used to describe a spouse or a close family member of an addict. A codependent gets themselves so wrapped up in the addict’s life, keeping up appearances and responsibilities that really should be the addict’s duties, that they lose themselves in the process. A codependent’s happiness and security is only felt when they are keeping the addict’s life on track. If the addict is happy and behaving appropriately, then the codependent is happy. But trying to control an addict, and the consequences of addiction in an addict’s life, is a lot to deal with, and codependents often end up exhausted and depleted. Codependents often get extremely frustrated and resentful of their addicts, because they believe that everything that they are doing for their addict, often goes unreciprocated and unappreciated. The codependent has this idea that if they take care of the addict’s life, then it follows that the addict will “owe them” and return the favors and help to meet the codependent’s needs (whose needs tend to be mostly for security and control), but of course, that rarely, if ever, happens. Security and control do not blend well with addiction. Even more crazy, when an addict sometimes does do the hard work and heals their addiction, and then takes responsibility for their own life back, a codependent’s life typically falls apart. The codependent has made it such a total part of their own identity to keep the addict together, that they have completely lost focus on their own self (and sometimes their own mental and physical health) in the process. And whose really to blame in this scenario? Many people would say “look what that terrible addict did to that poor person”, and many times codependents do get a martyr status, but at what cost? Who gave their life away in this toxic system? The addict gives their life away to their substance or habit of choice. The codependent gives their life away to the addict. In the end, it is often the case that the codependent finds himself or herself to be equally as sick as the addict. The codependent is addicted to fixing the addict’s life, at the expense of working on their own lives, and growing their own interests and fostering their own health and well-being. And that is why they say that addiction is a “family problem.”

Now, thankfully, none of my children are addicts. The above explanation is the severest form of codependency, which I have used to drive my point. Codependency is a trait that a lot of us women have a tendency to veer into (even without the problem of addiction), particularly those of us who are mothers. There’s a whole spectrum of codependency and there is a whole spectrum of caring. Those of us women who have made raising our families, our highest callings and our highest purposes in life, often lose ourselves in the process, without even realizing it. That was never our intention. It’s just that we get so ingrained in our family members’ individual lives, that we forget about our own individual interests, and our own needs and our own well-being. We feel happy when everything is going well for our family members, and we feel devastated when it’s not. Now, some people would say, “Well, that’s just love and there is nothing greater than a mother’s love.” And that is true to a point. Of course, it hurts to see a family member struggling. Of course, it is exciting to see the people, whom we love with all of our hearts, triumph. However, when our own emotional states are so intertwined with the states of other people’s lives, to the point that we are losing sleep, taking on responsibilities that aren’t ours to take, making our loved ones feel incompetent because we step in all of the time and take over the wheel, and in the meantime, find very little of meaning or have very little focus on our own individual lives, that’s when we’ve crossed into unhealthy codependency. That is when we start holding emotional leashes. That’s where the term “helicopter parent” comes into play. When we make others feel responsible for our happiness, mostly because we have made ourselves responsible for their “happiness” (as we have defined it), this is an unhealthy equation that does not bode well for close, authentic relationships. We are not independent or interdependent in these types of relationships. Instead we are dependent on each other, and thus “codependent.” When others feel they have to be a certain way, or feel a certain way, or act a certain way, in order to keep our equilibrium okay, this system is bound to fail. It isn’t real. It makes everyone on edge. It has become a family system based on false security and a desperate need for control.

In the end, each of us is responsible for our own happiness. It’s not even possible to make anyone else feel anything. We each make our own feelings, and our own responses to, and boundaries around, things that happen outside of us. We each are responsible for our own lives, our own boundaries, and own satisfactions. No one deserves an emotional leash. Every adult in a healthy family deserves to be “free range.” We deserve to meet each other in our beautiful, familial meadows, sharing individual and shared adventures, without feeling a responsibility for anyone else’s responses, emotional states, or perspectives of these experiences in life. As much as caretaking is important in motherhood, so is modeling a healthy way of being. It is interesting to me that a meme that at first made me laugh at myself knowingly, made me introspect as much as it did, and seriously so. It made me reflect on life lessons that I thought I had already learned and mastered. Ha! (the story of my life) The meme made me want to get my proverbial scissors out, and to cut some leashes, for the betterment of my family and also, for the betterment of myself. Snip. Snip. Snip. Snip. Snip. And now, only love, authenticity and abiding faith remains.