Growing

You can’t see yourself growing, I heard a four year old tell her mother this morning.

Indeed.

I can’t see myself growing and yet I know I am. I know somewhere, deep down, I am shifting, changing, and like a small child, clinging to old behavior. I am disappearing, hiding and being elusive with my wife. I feel myself creating turmoil where there is none.

It doesn’t do me any good. It doesn’t feel right. But still I’m doing it.

I see it in my kids as they shift through different developmental tasks. They grow with one foot, and step back into the previous stage with the other.

Jake spends the day skim boarding and then needs help getting dressed.

Zachary cooks his own eggs at the stove and then reverts to his “Calvin” stage, being difficult like the cartoon character for no reason except to be difficult.

Ben ends his school year with praise from his teachers for his attention to detail and work ethic and then refuses to put his dishes in the dishwasher without a fight.

I can see my kids growing, every day.

I can’t see myself growing.

I feel it, like childhood growing pains in your legs when they seemed to stretch an extra inch overnight. It’s an unsettled restlessness. I can’t quite focus on what is in front of me. I keep looking back.

Back to the person I was before last year.

A place where I was vulnerable to other people’s wailing, insistent needs. Sirens, as I wrote the other day. I know it wasn’t a good place to be- obligated to care of everyone but myself at the risk of my own self-destruction.

It was all I knew.

Now I know better. I know I have great friends who love me and I love back. I know I have people who will set good boundaries for me when I need them. I know how to ask for those boundaries now for the first time.

I heard the song the other day, the song of need, and woe and sadness… I asked for help last night with it. Don’t let me get sucked in. It’s tugging at me…

I know when I’m setting up a triangle and am learning to walk away. Why do I need to make myself more important than I am? What am I trying to get? How can I ask more clearly without causing any struggle?

I hear myself, over and over, doing the right thing, saying the right thing.

I feel my other foot dragging back into the past, causing turmoil where there is none, drawn to someone else’s need.

I can’t see myself growing.

But I know that I am.