Perfectionist Rehab

Manipulation is the unscrupulous controlling of a situation or person. This is usually done to intentionally bend the person or situation to the desired outcome. Manipulation is, by definition, premeditated.

You can’t unintentionally manipulate someone else.

When I was an undergrad, one of my roommates was my best friend. We went to the same middle and high school. We knew each other long before university, and we jumped at an opportunity to share an apartment with four of our friends.

Sometimes I wonder if our relationship would have lasted if we never lived together.

I think she thought I was prouder than I am. I don’t mean ‘proud’ as in confident, or even strong. I mean ‘proud’ in the negative context. Like, egotistical. Self-centered. Vain.

 She believed that the only way I’d do something is if my ego was stroked first.

We shared an apartment with four other women. Unsurprisingly, the place was often a disaster. Picture this – six full-time students with different schedules, all working parttime jobs, all in serious relationships. The demands from our respective routines – showers, classes, homework, shifts, workouts, parties, grocery shopping, commutes, and infrequent sleep – caused our neglectful housekeeping.

There was one afternoon when my roommate was particularly put out by the state of our shared bathroom. She harrumphed.

“When was the last time the bathroom was cleaned!”

I had often taken on the responsibility of cleaning the bathroom in our apartment, because my other roommates flat-out refused to clean it themselves. This fact was elusive however, since my roommates refused to be truthful.

I hate confrontation. I hid in my bedroom while my roommates bickered over who did and did not clean the apartment last. Their shrill lies thudded against the paper-thin plaster walls.

“I cleaned it last time!”

The truth was, for months I was the only person cleaning our apartment. I’m not a performative person, however, so I often chose to clean our apartment when no one else was home.

Big mistake. I didn’t have any witnesses when I cleaned.

“Michelle never cleans! She should do the bathroom, it’s her turn!”

I sighed. Our bathroom had a lot of traffic between the six of us, and I hadn’t cleaned the room in about two weeks. It was a disaster, and you could argue that the state of the room was my fault.

My friend volunteered to talk to me.

“I can tell her that it’s her turn to clean the bathroom.”

My friend came into my bedroom.

“Hey Shelly, how’s your day going?”

“Fine, how about you?”

“Good, good.”

“What’s going on? You seem like you want to talk about something.”

She starts batting her eyelashes, puts her hands behind her back, and starts swaying like a cartoon character.

I should explain that my friend had a tendency of using baby talk to appear less threatening. This instance was no exception.

“I was just thinking about how good you are at cleaning the bathroom. Especially the way you clean the faucet! It’s always so shiny when you do it. I think you should clean the bathroom this time, you’re the best at it!”

She had no idea that I overheard the conversation in the other room. She also had no idea that I picked up on the reasons why she used her baby-voice.

What bothered me the most in this instance was that my friend tried to butter me up with false praise to manipulate me.

Her behavior was so disingenuous that I never saw her the same way again. I agreed to clean the bathroom to keep the peace, which felt wrong in the moment. It was as if my compliance validated her perception of me – that I was some proud child that needed to be coerced into positive behavior.

I believed that I had finally witnessed her true colors. Her tactics were like a fun-house mirror reflecting her warped perception of me. I questioned our relationship after this interaction and chose to limit how much access I gave her.

Our friendship dissolved within a year.

My foster mother often accused me of being manipulative – but as I have said before, I rarely consider the effects of my own actions. I have cultivated hyper-independence to avoid any illusion of manipulation. If other people were not involved in my efforts, I could not have coerced them to behave in any manner that served me.

I continue to struggle whenever someone does anything for me – this could be as benign as getting me a glass of water when they were already getting a glass for themselves.

Perhaps this is to protect myself, and others, from my own selfish desires.

Let me extrapolate. Sometimes I need other people, as well all do. It is delusional to believe that we can truly achieve anything without other people. Even for a recluse, someone likely built their home, crafted their clothing, dried the herbs for their tea, packaged their food, prepared the energy source that they purchase, and bred their dogs.

There is nothing that we own that another person didn’t produce – we can never be truly self-sufficient. This would include growing our own food from seeds that we gathered, butchering livestock that we raised if we choose to consume meat, grind our own flour, weave our own thread that we’ve spun ourselves into cloth that we then cut, pin, and sew into clothing. There’s not enough time in the day to accomplish every necessary task to produce the items we need to survive.

My point is that complete independence is an illusion; something ego-driven. We idolize our efforts to prove that we don’t need other people, don’t owe anyone anything, and that we are truly self-sufficient to prove that we deserve our status and material possessions.

My husband and I have a child together. Sometimes, our son becomes sick.

Obviously.

Our son typically sleeps exceptionally well, but when he is ill he has trouble sleeping.

Obviously.

Parenting can overwhelm me simply because I have someone completely dependent on me. I compulsively, and at times pathologically, meet every need. Most of my actions are fear driven.

“Did I take to long to pick him up?”

“How long was he crying before the sound was picked up by the monitor?”

“I really need to be more patient.”

“I hate how short I was with him today.”

“Why is this so hard for me?! I wanted to be a mother so badly, and I’m suffering. Am I just bad at this?”

I know plenty of people have discussed the overwhelming nature of motherhood – I understand that I’m not unique. I have easy days, and I have challenging days. Sometimes though, I believe motherhood can be even more overwhelming to those of us who have had to depend on ourselves to satisfy our needs.

My childhood was a negative experience. I was abused. My parenting efforts are completely blind – I don’t have the footing other people have. Friends of mine reference how their moms handled different situations. Now, they replicate how they were treated. They know that their kids will feel loved.

I was abused. My childhood memories are not comforting, and I’ll be damned if I ever put my children through my own experiences. Because of that, I feel even more isolated than I expected. I’m learning how to be a mother while trying to reparent myself.

At times I will confide in my husband that I feel stressed out – this is usually in the wee hours of the morning when he is on the way to work. I’ll be in the bathroom, attempting to perform my ablutions and vain preparations for the day. I continue to be the type of person to wake up hours before my children in an attempt to shower, brush and floss my teeth, get dressed, fix my hair, and paint my face. These rituals make me feel like myself.

It’s as though these vain attempts to continue looking like the woman I once was hold me together while the rest of the day demands my taking care of everything and everyone else in my life.

Days like today, when my son is sick, and so he woke hours before his usual time, I become overwhelmed.

I have not yet filled my proverbial cup. My routine is thrown off.

To clarify, I get stressed in these instances not because things aren’t going ‘my way’. I’m stressed because I’m terrified I’m somehow hurting my child by making him wait a few moments while I finish getting dressed.

He only had to wait five minutes.

“Is it abuse to finish getting myself ready while he’s awake?”

“What if he wants me and he feels like I don’t care about him because I’m doing something for me?”

“Am I hurting him?”

I called my husband in the middle of brushing my hair because our son was fussing, but not yet crying, and I was having my regularly scheduled panic attack over my self-imposed frivolity. I rarely feel sufficient as a mother.

I rarely feel like a ‘real’ mom.

I don’t even know what I think a good mother is.

 I often feel that I’m a fraud who’s playing house.

My husband picked up on how distressed I was, so he decided to turn around and come back home.

I didn’t know that.

When our call ended, I ran into my son’s room to pick him up. I was crying.

“I’m so sorry, baby. I’m so sorry.”

I was terrified that my son felt abandoned.

I soothed my son back to sleep, and was shocked to find my husband outside the nursery door.

“I thought you said he was awake!” he exclaimed.

“He was waking up, but I put his pacifier back into his mouth and he seems to have sorted himself out.”

“I wouldn’t have come back home if I knew!” he groaned.

We go downstairs, and we continue to converse. Sorry, that’s a little bit of an overstatement – I spoke while he listened.

Please keep in mind that my husband is now significantly late going to work.

He tells me that he’s going to try to go to the office today, because we both needed to take the better part of this last week off to take care of our son. He realized on his way into the office that he was going to be too late to attend an important training class at work, so he couldn’t just go into the office. He would have been forced to sit in his office while the training was going on, that he was supposed to be at.

He was so enraged because he had to miss another day from work. This whole situation would have been avoided if I had just refrained from confiding in him that I was overwhelmed.

Is this manipulation?

Did I manipulate him into staying home?

I don’t think I did because my understanding of this concept is that there needs to be some sort of premeditative stance to manipulate someone else – you need to have a goal in mind, and you intentionally say or do things to glean a reaction out of the other person that serves that end goal.

Can you be manipulative without trying to be?

I truly don’t know the answer to this.

My foster mother was adamant that I was conniving, manipulative, and calculated. I also have an understanding that we don’t bequeath unto ourselves our truest attributes – and wouldn’t the woman who loved me the most know me the best?

Could she see something in me that I couldn’t see in myself?

What if my own ego is hiding my true self from me because it’s too painful to realize the truth?

Am I avoiding accountability, or was she misguided?

If someone decides to do something for us of their own volition, and we accept that service, does that mean that we have led them to that decision? Especially if they made their decision upon the basis that we were struggling?

I seldom ask for help for this reason – I don’t want to impose myself upon other people.

But when we love other people, don’t we want to help them?

Is it such a problem to accept this help?

My husband tries his best to be there for me as often as he can. The truth is that child rearing is difficult, and this does not come as a surprise. We love our children with our entire selves, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t difficult to sacrifice your every need in the service of a tiny person. I think it’s quite common to expect a community to assist in the process of raising children. Many people have said, “it takes a village!”

There is no village.

Not for my family anyway. I was raised in foster care, and as soon as I turned eighteen, I was homeless. My foster mother refused to talk to me as soon as I claimed myself on my own taxes because now she couldn’t even receive the child tax credit she had become accustomed to. She was furious with me because she felt she deserved that money for taking care of me for so long.

My husband grew up in a fundamental sect of Christianity, and once he decided to cease attending church, his family disowned him. This is common in this particular sect, because fraternization with non-church-goers is akin to other sinful behaviors. It’s kind of poetic, really. Two outcasts, two recluses, two unwanted children decide to pave their own way and make their own family.

My foster mother often reminded me that I would make a deplorable mother.

“You’re too selfish to consider anyone else.”

“When you’re a parent you can’t paint your nails.”

“When you’re a mother, you can’t spend an hour getting ready for the day”.

My perfectionism and overperforming tendencies have consumed every effort I have made as a parent. I can barely breathe when my child cries for fear that he will grow up to hate me. Or worse, that he would see me in my true light: the manipulative narcissist who exists solely to pursue her own agenda, without regard to other people and their feelings.

I wake up approximately three hours before my son does. This allows me enough time to prepare myself for the day and gives me a two-hour buffer to perform any other task I wish to complete before he wakes up. This also ensures that if he does wake up earlier than expected, I have already filled my metaphorical cup and can attend to his needs as soon as possible.

Hygiene activities have become my sole refuge as a mother.

I trick myself into believing it’s relaxing to do the dishes at night before he goes to bed.

I ritualize doing laundry. I pray while I dust. I visualize cleansing away the energetic residuals imparted through the stress of daily life. I mindfully clean my home and pretend it’s the same thing as meditation.

The Tibetan monks teach the importance of monotonous work in achieving enlightenment. Meditation through activity, according to their teachings, is achieved through walking, cleaning, exercise, and nourishment. Dedication to thought selection – becoming sufficiently disciplined to cease constant narration of our daily activities so that we can actually complete them without added stress. It is this narration that obstructs peace, collaboration, intuition, and most of all – connection.

Mindfulness, silence, hard work, discipline, and self-control supposedly allow for enlightenment.

When you stop hearing your thoughts, you can finally hear God.