Let Me Fix You, please, by Giving up My Self: A True Story

I have to laugh at this one, only because it is so me.  As a child I learned to be very self reliant and took on care taking responsibilities (out of necessity) that were age inappropriate.  Part of this was a good thing and part of it familiarized me with experience of intervening to care for and fix the problems of others.  Added to that construct were the routine teachings of my Catholic education from primary school.  My belief system was fully loaded with Confession, Contrition, Examination of Conscience and Self Sacrifice, all of which are inwardly focused and do not address the possible fault of the other. Yet another childhood coping skill I employed in response to the chaos of my male dominated family home was Conflict Avoidance. Instead of confronting disruptive behavior, I chose to isolate myself in a creative world of my own invention where I felt safe.

In eighth grade I had a boy friend whose mother had written me asking for my help intervening in his drug use. She saw my potential for care taking and fixing others even then.  This was the kind of stuff good girls did in order to go straight to heaven, that and saving dimes for the adoption of Pagan Babies!  I need to mention that I regularly prayed for my deceased mother from the ages of 5 to 12 in order to get her out of purgatory where I was taught souls waited before admission to heaven.

Armed with my religious training, an early history of taking responsibility for and fixing others and a habit of conflict avoidance I became the perfect candidate to surrender my self in the face of an others complex problems particularly one whom I thought loved me, my husband.  Despite my later exposure to feminism and self empowerment, when I married I reverted to patterns that had served me as a child.

Am I all better today? Not really, but I'm working on it with a vengeance and I've created this blog to reinforce what I now know to be true and I'm sharing it with the sisterhood. I hope my story has prompted you to think about what childhood lessons you learned and how they may not be serving your  life today as an adult.

Here's an image of an adolescent Saint (me!) who much later in life became a Rusty Feminist!