SYTB 1:Honor Thy Mother
A dynamic look at boundaries
Imagine making a motion picture film of your life.
You are the writer, the director, the producer, the main character and the star of your own story. It’s a big responsibility. You get to write what kind of people, lifestyle and events you want in your life. You audition the characters. You are really happy with your choices, but shortly into production you realize you chose an actor who is difficult to work with to portray your mother. She seems ideal in so many ways. She looks the part. She is the right age. You wish she would be ideal in the role, but she just sets you off. You start trying to write and rewrite the story to make her the mom you want to her to be. You spend so much energy on her that you start to become a secondary character in your own story. Your directing is all around her. She ad libs her own lines that undermine your character. You never know how she will show up or if she will show up. Sometimes, she comes on set totally smashed from partying all weekend. What are her motivations? Why does she act a certain way? What are her triggers? What can you do to avoid conflicts with her? How do you help the other characters deal with her? How has dealing with her affected how you treat the other characters? How can you and the other characters and actors change to appease her or shift in some way to get along with her and keep her in the picture?
She somehow inadvertently took over the production without lifting a finger. The rest of the characters start to circle around her as the primary subject as you make them more amicable to her, you lost focus of their place in your story, you mistreat them, and now you’re losing other characters you liked as you have focused your directing energies almost entirely on and around her. They’re walking off the job and picketing the production. You’re going into debt trying to keep the film afloat. When you finally get a moment’s peace with her in the role as your mother, you realize you have written yourself into a supporting role and the story is now about this mother f*** and your auxiliary life making her happy or somehow contending with her dramatic personality. She is the star of a nearly bankrupt production you didn’t even want to make. If you are in it at all, you are a person trying to hold the pieces of your own life together while being absorbed to obsession with this runaway character and plot. Who is going to be responsible for all the debts: you.
Many people believe this is how you “honor your mother.” And I guess it’s tempting to want to honor your mom with a motion picture if she was a great mom, but that’s her story to tell. You have to live your own life. You still have the task of telling your own story with your life. If you make telling other people’s stories the primary focus of your life, no one is going to make a story about yours. The only people we make great movies, songs, books and plays about are people who were in some way amazing lead characters in their own right-even if they seemed humble and did a great job honoring others.
What is it to truly honor another?
A person once said, “I am so fat and ugly. You are so skinny and beautiful next to me.”
The beautiful person responded, “Don’t do that. It doesn’t flatter or amplify me for you to debase and belittle yourself. In fact, it marginalizes the compliment. A compliment should be objective, or better yet, personal. What you have done is to let me know you see my beauty only subjective to your ugliness. I am beautiful because I am. It has nothing to do with how others perceive me as relative to their own diminished feelings about themselves.”
As a lead, always strive to be the beautiful person. The ugliest thing anyone can be is subjective-of oneself or others.
People often look at boundaries as a pen or an enclosure. They focus on what to keep out and how. I think that’s why so many people think having good boundaries is about the ability to say “no” and determine what you don’t want. This is also the reason so many people fail at boundaries. The problem is that trying really hard to eliminate behaviors in another or yourself on behalf of another through self reflection and self transformation means that all one’s effort are about someone else even if you think you are working on yourself to be a better person overall.
It’s not wrong. It may end up being just what you needed to grow for a time, a worthy endeavor as the end “somewhat” justified the means. But, the focus has been turned into a subjective one. Your worth, your personal growth has become subject to how well this possibly impossible person responds to you. You may well have been getting better in your peacekeeping abilities. The problem is, it may never be reflected in that relationship. Moreover, the obsession to keep peace with a violent (from to violate) person may be a destructive course of action to your life purpose. At some point, you have to stop. The more one works to address conflicts one has with another, the more focused on the behaviors one doesn’t want, the further one has moved away from creating good, healthy boundaries. In fact, it does something else. It makes the motion picture of your life turn into a story of gymnastics to try to amplify the best hoped for behaviors of another.
This is why I think of boundaries as framing. It’s how we author or frame our story in relationship to others, sometimes, that help us construct good boundaries. We always have to keep our eyes as the director on the overall plot, making sure we don’t get lost or pushed out of our own story. However, it’s what we keep or desire in the framing of the picture though that best directs our choices as pertaining to what we perceive as healthy boundaries. People who have good boundaries focus on what is essential to their plot, almost without deviation.
Now, I will concede that for a parent, it’s definitely in the job description to bend and change with and for one’s children for a time. It requires a certain amount of sacrifice. As a grandparent, similarly, to bend and change for one’s grandchildren and to assist one’s own progeny in transitioning and sacrificing for the grandchildren are the skills one must acquire to keep the role. Children also get molded and transformed in this process, hopefully for the better. This can be a powerful phase of positive, personal growth. It’s not the time for grandparents to show up, being difficult and unruly, acting like children with demands that everyone circles around them as the leading role. Each generation has to make way for the next while maintaining integrity in their own right. Integrity of character is the key. These are the intricacies of moving pictures. Sometimes it takes a lot of grace and finesse to be a good parent or grandparent.
However, the focus for a person with children is to still imagine storyboarding what this scene calls for in order for a parent to maintain the lead role while having the character one desires to emulate. There may be scenes where the lead character makes sacrifices for the sake of her children. She doesn’t have to sacrifice the lead or trash the whole picture to do so. Jesus does such a wonderful job of modeling this for us. Jesus sacrificed His whole life for others and never gave up the lead. Take note: nor should you. But He also was able to rise again, to transform death to life. Unless you have figured out a way to do that, I don’t suggest selecting dying for others as your plot. Martyrs and victims rarely make good leads. It gets done poorly more often than the wind blows. People love Han and Leia, pan Luke.
With or without children, it’s important to maintain the lead in your life story and to fill the storyboards for each scene with the character you most want to portray therein. This is why I am constantly saying that maintaining health boundaries is more about framing your story and what you want in it, than focusing or even fixating on what you need to keep out or eliminate. Your integrity depends on what you do and doing what you want over the long run. It’s the stuff in the picture that matters, and this is not necessarily in a selfish manner, because what you truly want this picture to say about you may require courage or sacrifice sometimes. It may require that you change to objectively become a better person overall. In fact, it will absolutely necessitate that. People who never change do not make good leads, either. However, if your entire identity as a “better person” is wrapped around this subjective ideal of how you get along with your mother, you’ve stepped out of the lead.
I found out that staying in the lead is hard even after having fired my mother from the cast. I didn’t want my character defined by how I got along without my mother anymore than with her. For a space and time, before my last interaction with her, this maintenance was a burden for me. I was just struggling to get by without her. A ghost story erected. Eventually, I was thriving in her absence. It went from a ghost story to a survival story, but a better one. It took a long time before I was just living my dream life and whatever she was had at one time to do with it was completely written out of the plot.
The best way adults can honor their parents is to become qualified leaders who choose to keep their parents involved. It’s one thing to say, “my children don’t need me.” It’s an honor to say, “my children don’t need me, but these independent people desire to keep me involved.” But, there’s the caveat. A big part of that happening falls on the parent to be honorable enough and worthy enough to deserve this honor. You can’t honor dishonorable people. Any attempt to do so becomes a study in living without integrity. You can’t have a lead without some level of integrity, some cohesion. You lose yourself, you lose the plot and you trash the picture. Now, no one has honor. How do you like them apples?
As a parent of adults, if your children are struggling to keep you in the picture… there’s no honor in this from them or for you. This is the ugly person story. You see, your honor doesn’t come from your children. It comes from you. When children “honor their mother and father” it’s the activity of acknowledging the honorability that is already there. If that isn’t there, if the worth hasn’t been shown to the children, it’s not on them for not picking up on it. It’s on YOU for not showing it to them. It may be that you sacrificed the lead in your own story. You may not have changed dynamically enough. You may have become codependent with your children. You may have made choices that called your character into question as exemplary. Very few monsters, even Scrooge had a story worth telling without some level of transformation.
You can only choose immediate gratification for so long before you’ve written yourself into a secondary character to your lust for recognition or money or food or drugs or even personal accomplishment in some specific area of your life. It could be a million things that turn a person into a non player character with little value to others. A singular desire to learn guitar and party after a while gets one dimensional. Then the only thing about you that’s interesting, having maybe recovered from addiction is a cautionary tale. You: an aged rockstar on Rogan demonstrating that you have about as much personal knowledge, development and maturity as a flea. Monster talent, hollow shell of a human being. It can be a powerful cautionary tale, though. Don’t get me wrong. Everyone should watch at least a little bit of that podcast with Steven Tyler. I have dated those guys. So myopic, they lost the plot. Right?
The thing to remember is to maintain the lead in a dynamic way. That means storyboarding (vision boards, goal setting), staying on target with production goals, showing up as the best you you can be, not losing focus of your various duties and welcoming opportunities and people who help you to pivot, shift and grow objectively while maintaining your lead. Keep your eye as the director keenly focused on the plot. These are all the ways in which you can start saying “yes” to boundaries.
And if you can’t honor your parents by choosing to keep them around, you honor yourself by getting on with your life. Sometimes, it’s the best we can do.