Death by a Thousand Negotiations

On being a twin, the exhaustion of accommodation, and learning to prioritize our own wants and needs

Don’t take it on
they say
as if I should know how
to keep expectation
and judgments 
at arm's length,
instead of allowing them 
to engulf me.

I've been a vessel of expectation
my whole life,
waiting for other people
to fill me
with their wishes.

When I disappoint them, 
I wither,
weaken,
feel I am nothing,
only air.

---

This is a fragment of a poem I started in my notes app. I’m not even sure what was happening for me during the time I wrote these thoughts down. But the feelings are still resonant, a daily occurrence for me, really. Every day is a struggle to assert space in my own life for me.

That concept, “waiting for others to fill me with their wishes,” stems from the very roots of my existence as an identical twin, someone who has never known a life of individuality. From the very moment of my conception, I was having to accommodate someone else. Another being in the womb that was designed for one.

Though I was born first, three minutes before my sister, the story my family recounted about our birth was that the reason my sister was born so quickly after me was because she was coaching me out. She was guiding me, giving me the gumption to enter the world. Like without her, I might have stayed safely inside for another few weeks. 

That dynamic stayed in place our entire childhood. Other than being born first, Annie seemed to do everything else ahead of me, leading the way. She was the first to ride a two-wheeler. When she wanted her own room, she moved into the guest room. I don’t remember being consulted about whether I was okay dwelling in our old room alone. In fact, I seem to remember being nervous, and that we created a schedule where every other night, at least for a while, she would still sleep with me. I needed to be weaned off her constant presence.

Has any psychologist performed a study about co-dependency and twins? If not, they should. The entire situation seems primed for such a state. 

“When we take care of people and do things we don’t want to do, we ignore personal needs, wants and feelings. We put ourselves aside. Sometimes we get so busy taking care of people that we put our entire lives on hold.”

Co-Dependent No More by Melody Beattie

Though our parents put us in different classes, our social lives and extracurriculars were the same until sophomore year of high school, when Annie decided to run track in the spring. That meant that throughout our childhood, we couldn’t simply decide what we wanted individually; every decision was a negotiation. Sometimes these were outright conversations, but sometimes they were intimations, unspoken agreements. We learned to take turns having our way so as to keep the peace. If we each insisted on getting our way all the time, we would have been fighting every single moment of our lives.

What that means is that I learned to mute my preferences. I learned to turn down the dial of my desire. I became conditioned to check in first with others, to take the temperature without words, to interpret wants and needs and prioritize harmony over my own happiness.

I was fine, I likely thought. I didn't care that much. Better to keep her happy. Better to not rock the boat. 

This tendency to subsume my own self came with a cost. Sometimes my frustration at having squashed my own opinions or desires came bubbling up in rage. It was like I’d stuffed it as long as I could, and then my capacity was reached and the top blew off. In childhood, I only remember one such occasion, a time that I stabbed my sister’s arm with a pencil. She still has the mark of graphite to this day. But these situations have also happened in adulthood. When I have complied for so long that I cannot take it any longer. It happened at the Field Museum in Chicago on a family vacation just a few years ago. I got so angry at my sister’s insistence that I have a snack rather than pause for lunch like I wanted to that I almost shoved her down the marble stairs. Another time, after a difficult conversation with my mother and sister about my parenting, I threw a wine glass, shattering it on the table. 

I’m not proud to admit these failings and such violence. But at least I’ve come to see that stuffing myself down, squashing myself, trying to constantly comply with others' expectations is no longer working. In fact, it probably never has.

While Annie and I attended different colleges, and eventually made friends and lives of our own, I don’t think I ever truly learned to give space to my own preferences. First I let religion guide me further into self-sacrifice, where to listen to your own wants and needs was sinful, selfish. Then, I began working at a place where I was a subordinate who was driven and ambitious but continuously told to bide my time, to wait patiently for acknowledgement, promotions and pay. When motherhood hit in my early thirties, it was the perfect storm. The messaging of motherhood already teaches you to lose yourself, to put your child first. I’d been erasing myself my entire life. To do it again felt comfortable, sure, but at a certain point, I was so mired in the wants and needs of other people that I lost myself completely. I could not tell you what I needed because I was so divorced from myself. But my unhappiness was evident to all around. I was a walking billboard for resentment. 

The Holistic Psychologist, Dr. Nicole LePera says that “resentment is a sign you’ve abandoned yourself.” And that’s exactly what I’d done. Not only in motherhood, but in sisterhood, and Christianity, and in being a subservient employee. I’d even done it once I left that toxic work environment, and began ghostwriting books for other people. I leased all my creativity to someone else. Let their voice shine through my own writing.

In fact, being a vessel of expectation probably made me a really good ghostwriter. I was already primed to mute my own voice. I was well-versed in letting other people drive the show.

---

“Women have created ecosystems where their denial of self is what makes everyone else’s lives run smoothly.”

Glennon Doyle, “Landing in Love”

Part of why motherhood has been so exhausting for me is the constant negotiation that goes on all day. When your children are toddlers, they ask for snacks and another show and for you to play with them and more time at the park. Though my children are now older, the negotiations have not diminished. They ask for iPad time, to have something different for dinner, for one more show, for more iPad time, for me to “just let me finish…” their edit, their game, their conversation, leading to another twenty minutes on a screen. My older daughter used to be more accommodating, but she has hit the tween years and now she is not so willing to budge. She is more surly in her displeasure, more firm and entitled in what she is asking for. She is ten. I know this is just the beginning. And I want to celebrate the fact that she is not cow-towing to others' wants, that she is not taking on the mantle of accommodation. She was always my peacekeeper, but I know firsthand that to keep the peace has a cost. However, if I am going to survive the teen years, I’ve got to learn to not always give in. Yet this goes against my very nature, or at least my longstanding conditioning, so I find myself constantly in a state of compromise or I try and hold the line but then cannot tolerate their discomfort and I give in. 

It is no wonder that I am spent at the end of the day. Death by a thousand negotiations. 

I know there are some women who do not have trouble with boundaries, who hold hard and fast to their lines, but I think they are the exception to the rule because our conditioning as women is to be the givers, the sacrificers, the accommodators. To be fluid, willing to give up what we want, able to take one for the team. We are expected to do this. It is how the world keeps working.

Moira Donegan @MoiraDonegan

I do wonder whether this years-long punishment will radicalize more mothers into the realization that they *are* the social safety net.

But what I’ve long wondered during these very tiring days of the pandemic is what would happen if we stopped being accommodating? In our society, in our workplaces, and yes, in our families? Could I still be a good mother and not be so adaptable? I understand why we think mothering means accommodating others; it stems from our very ability to grow life within our bodies, this biological miracle a symbol of how much we take on, how we squeeze into tight spaces, move our very organs out of the way for others. But once the infant is no longer in our bodies, we do not need to give so much.

“...[My] mother groomed me to take on more than I should. Taught me how to form my body into a clay jar to hold the spillage of her. I see now this is always happening to girls. 

Girls are carrying too much. We are spilling over, top-heavy and destabilized, but praised for our maturity and adaptability if we take it, denigrated if we do not. Trained not to rage, we work in code, our bodies the medium. We eat anger and quietly metabolize it to keep you comfortable.”

Nina St. Pierre, “A Girl, Dying”

Part of our work today is to redefine what it means to be a mother, and what it means to be a woman. We no longer have to be dainty, or pure, virginal, or quiet. We are no longer our father’s property, given to our husbands in marriage; we no longer have to be meek, or subservient, afraid to speak up. Like Sue Monk Kidd writes: “I had swallowed enough defiant, disputatious words in my life to fill a shelf of books.” 

Sometimes to learn a new way of being we have to swing the pendulum too far, become the polar opposite for a while in order to ultimately find a place in the neutral middle. For me, I feel myself rebelling, wanting to say all those defiant, disputatious words, thrilling in the transgressive, the obstinate, my identity as a “difficult woman.” Trying to own that what I want matters and has value, and for a while, maybe, could trump everyone else’s wishes.

Not always. Not every day. But just for a time.