On Care and Codependency

determining the difference between showing love and shouldering responsibilities that are not your own

I wrote a few weeks about about the benefits of becoming unhinged via the spectacular Miranda July novel, All Fours. It certainly seems to be the novel of the moment for a certain subset of women. Thus when I began another novel about a mid-life mother, The Mother of All Things by Alexis Landau, I was delighted that it began with this sentence:

The unraveling started on their way into the desert, the freeway congested, shimmering with heat, Sam and Margot whining in the back seat of the car, a chorus accusatory complaints, while Kasper rolled calls about hiring a DP.

The unraveling is a beautiful way to put what happens to mid-life women, who have kept themselves wound so tight, fulfilling all their roles and what’s expected of them, until the day something pricks them in such a way to start the process of yes, unraveling, or unhooking, or becoming un-hinged. It is a slow process until the spinning gathers speed and then the momentum becomes too much to stop. Where the unraveling leaves us is different for each woman, but in the end, you are not in the same place.

In this story, the husband is a movie producer and must go to Bulgaria for six months to shoot a film. After three months solo-parenting (which we blessedly do not see, I think we all know what that shit show looks like), the narrator and her children head to Bulgaria for the summer. Her husband will still be working ridiculously long hours but at least there will be short moments of togetherness.

I won’t go into the rest of the book but there was one simple passage that hit me so hard I had to grab my journal and spew angry thoughts into it. The narrator and her children, ages 10 and 13 (same as mine!) have just arrived in Bulgaria. They are jet-lagged, tired, and hungry from the long day of travel. They arrive at the apartment that will be there new home. And then, this:

The apartment had high ceilings, wooden floors, and white walls. Large bay windows looked out to the decrepit high-rises across the street. They dropped the suitcases in the middle of the empty living room. The kids were hungry but there wasn’t any food.

Kasper ran out to buy something to eat, leaving her to investigate this strange place that smelled faintly of cigarettes, bleach. And cats.

This is not a complicated scene and yet, there is so much in that simple sentence. The kids were hungry but there wasn’t any food. Of course they were hungry. They’d just spent hours on planes eating nothing but snacks and airplane food. They were jet lagged thus their bodies were likely trying desperately to recalibrate, to figure what it was time for. It was the middle of the night so the husband comes back with little more than a loaf of bread and Nutella because most stores were closed.

To be frank, this was the kind of situation that would’ve driven me into a rage in my marriage. Because if the roles were reversed, and my husband had spent three months managing the kids solo, and then flew with them across the globe, I would’ve done more to welcome them. I would’ve anticipated needs. “Oh, they’ll be exhausted and hungry. Let me make sure to stock up on some food so when they get here they can eat and then crash.” But sometimes it seems like that gear is missing from men, or they’ve never learned to use it. The anticipating of needs gear which is 99% of early parenthood. And I would argue, it is sometimes the anticipation that makes one feel care for. Yes, sometimes this can bleed into codependency. But anyone can react to a need you have and share. True care is that extra step, that soft cushion of concern that someone was thinking about you in advance and took steps to ensure your comfort.

Now again, this kind of care can metastasize into a form of codependency when you feel like reading of minds is what you are supposed to do, rather than checking in and communicating. I’ve written before about how being an identical twin, with someone else whose needs I had to intuit in the actual womb, primed me for codependency and that I am working hard to not shoulder responsibilities that are not my own. Sometimes I think this is a challenging trajectory in motherhood because when they are young, they cannot identify their own needs, so that is your job. At what age does that flip switch and they should be able to name, identify, and ask? How many adults have actually learned this skill?

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“It wasn’t until I started therapy when my youngest started kindergarten that I learned that I was codependent. Now it seems obvious, of course as a twin I would have codependent tendencies. But I didn’t even know what the word meant back then. Codependency was just my way of showing love. It was how you cared for another.

Codependents “attach themselves to people and become detached from themselves,” writes Melody Beattie, a leading voice in the recovery movement, in her classic work Codependent No More. Among the many destructive behaviors codependents exhibit is the tendency to rescue, to take responsibility for another human being - their thoughts, their feelings, their well-being.

Co-dependents ghost themselves, and tune into others.”

-an excerpt from my manuscript, Ghost

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What is care and what is codependency? I’ve long prided myself on this ability to scan for needs and what might make situations easier and solve for them. I think it makes me a great mom. But it also made me an exhausted mom. This care is often lopsided in marriages. One side has been conditioned to do the anticipation and care and the other side doesn’t even see it happening to even think that they might be slacking in the reciprocity category. This is the heart of the “just ask” phenomenon. No. I don’t want to ask. I want you to provide the same kind of consideration and care I do all the damn time.

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I know this isn’t gendered across the board and that some men do this kind of scanning of needs. I don’t mean to say that this is what mothers do, and yet, it is what mothers do. I think of that Bluey episode that I wrote about here, where Bandit takes the kids to the pool but forgets everything they might need while there (sunscreen, floaties, towels, goggles). Eventually Chilli shows up with all the gear so that everyone can actually enjoy themselves.

Mothers are exhausted right now not just because they are holding that mental load alone but because no one is doing that scanning for them. Or if someone is, it is sporadic and on birthdays and Mother’s Day, instead of just part of the infrastructure of what a loving and supportive partnership looks like. Perhaps the desire to be done with marriage that seems to be prevalent in so many of these novels is really the desire to scan for one less person, so that, maybe for once, we can begin to scan for needs that are actually our own.

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GOING FURTHER:

ICYMI:

Lane Anderson

and

Matriarchy Report

are doing an All Fours Book Club!

Summer book club! Who wants to read Miranda July's "All Fours" with me?