Such an interesting word, don’t you think?
“Child, you are trying my patience,” can be heard from the mouths and probably from the depths of the very souls from many a parent—at least those in the South.
And then there’s the standard usage, the one that many of us either say or at least think when working to do better or maybe to do at all. “I’m trying,” we say as the energy flags and the doubt presses in.
Drill sergeant types bark out, “Don’t try. Do,” and if you had one of those kinds of parents, those words might ring in your ears as you give it one more go.
In a former life I had a career as the director of a program for women starting over after divorce or widowhood. Women needing to figure out how to take care of themselves after being dependent on a spouse. It was the dark ages, and women in those post-WWII era had been sold on the dream that you got married and had children and ran your home with all the many tasks it takes to keep a family functioning.
They were called homemakers, a perfect description, but the position was tenuous, and it always depended on a functioning marriage to succeed. When it didn’t, for whatever reason, wives found themselves in the uncomfortable position of being unprepared to support themselves.
I and my team were there to guide that transition. and it took a lot of attitude adjustment, self-worth renewal, and confidence-building to get a woman to the point of being willing to put herself out there—for employment or for training. To try.
One of the discussions we held had to do with the words we tell ourselves—one of which was “have to.” I have to pick up the kids, keep an appointment, call my parents, take, do, go.
“What if, instead,” I would propose, we simply said, “I’m going to do” whatever it is? What if we introduced the idea of choice by saying, ‘I’m choosing to do xyz?” So often we’re bogged down by all the “have-tos,” I would say. If we instead say that we are going to do something that we’ve convinced ourselves we have to do, does it make us take a look at that thing and perhaps begin to question how many of those things are really necessary? Have we simply make ourselves feel essential and given ourselves all these burdens of responsibility so we can feel important—overwhelmed, even?
I wasn’t advocating that anyone NOT pick their child up from school, but simply asking that we—all of us—take a look at the fact that we had begun to box ourselves without choices. Going about life doing all these have-to-do this and have-to-do that, removing the empowerment that comes from deciding which things we could say no to and which ones we chose to do.
It wasn’t wrong.
I wasn’t wrong.
It was simply hard to do.
I think we are hard-wired to feel responsibility. Maybe from Pilgrim days, who knows? An anthropologist or historian or someone much more qualified than I am—maybe even AI—might know. Might even find my conclusion faulty.
What I do know is that by sliding toward the bottom of Maslow’s Hierarchy, I find myself with fewer choices and more have-tos.
And it’s making me cranky.
Talk to me, please. I’d love to make this more interactive.
