As the oldest child of four, I was born and I lived my first twenty years in the south of Bucharest with my family, in my paternal grandmother’s apartment. It was quite hard for my young parents to secure a place to live, so my father’s mother had graciously offered her son’s large family a home. That apartment was the place I was born in, the place my brothers were born in and the only place I can refer to as my childhood home.
My grandmother was young (in her late fifties) when I was born, but her spirit of self sacrifice (or was it what the times demanded of women, or the gremlins in her head that told her what her “duty” as a woman was?) pushed her into early retirement from a job she seemed to have enjoyed so that she could help my mother and father raise their four children. I remember never coming home to an empty house. I lived in a time when a lot of my friends were latchkey kids, but our grandma was always home. There was always food on the table. Our clothes were washed, and there was supervision. I’m sure it was hard for my parents to always live with their parent, but for us kids, grandma was as much a part of our family as our parents were. I loved my grandmother dearly and feel immensely privileged to have known her and have lived alongside her long enough that I still have many memories of our life together.
And yet there was a lesson that my grandmother taught me that I wish I had not learned. One of the phrases that my paternal grandmother used very often was to tell us how she sacrificed herself for our sake. She used to tell us that mostly when we seemed ungrateful, when we didn’t eat the food she had prepared for hours, when we did not make gestures that she had expected as signs of thanks. And because I had chosen to live my life as the good daughter and granddaughter, I took her words to heart. I learned very early that in order to be a good family person you must sacrifice yourself for the others all the time and never place yourself first. Sometimes abandon yourself entirely. In order to be a good mother, you must stay in a marriage that makes you unhappy. In order to be a good sister, you must always say yes to requests for help regardless of how ridiculous they may be. In order to be a good daughter you always have to leave everything behind, show up and save.
It has taken me years of hard work and therapy, deep lapses into what seemed like bottomless pits of depression or unbearable peaks of anxiety and panic to understand that something must change in my life. That there was something I was doing that went against a deeply rooted belief or value that I had about myself . Two decades of work later I am far better than I had ever hoped I would be. I was able to allow myself to make choices that made me happy. Today I am able to live the life that I choose, say yes and no as I (mostly) choose and for the majority of time be able to stop and think about what I need without too much guilt. It is of course, work in progress.
I walked my dogs yesterday to the loving voice of my soul sister taking me back to her childhood, hearing her mother say the same things about a self sacrifice that was imposed on her by … life. And I was blown away by the reaction that my sister, as a child, had to hearing her mother complain about how much she sacrificed daily for her family, for her kids. As a child, she told me, she made a vow to never sacrifice herself. To always make a choice. And true to her vow, that is how she lived her life. And through unbelievable pain and struggle we’ve watched her always remember that whatever she does is a choice that she makes.
It’s very easy for many of us to say I had no choice, this is the hand life dealt me. And sometimes that is true about life, it does deal some crappy hands. But we make a choice to get out of bed. We make a choice to go to work. We make a choice to stay married. We make a choice to leave. And we live with the consequences of every choice we make, every single minute. And when we are tempted, as we often are, to say, I have no choice, this is what my life is like, we still actually do have a choice. Because life is seldom what happens to us and so much more often how we interpret or how we perceive what happens to us.
I could attribute the deep unhappiness of my 20s and the first half of my 30s to things that happened to me, to things I had to do and had no choice but do them, but the truth is that I made a choice every single second. I made the choice to stay unhappy because the choice for me to be happy and for the others to be disappointed was too hard for me to live with. Until it wasn’t anymore. Until the balance tipped the other way and I realized that nobody asked me to make these particular choices, that they were mine entirely and that also mine was the power to make different choices. That was the moment I chose myself and love. To say that I never struggled would be a lie, but I can safely say I never regretted making that choice.
I go back so often to the words of Viktor Frankl, that between stimulus and response there lies a space and that this space is the residence of our freedom. May we always step into that space and from that freedom make conscious choices. They will not always be easier roads but the knowledge that we chose the road ourselves will give us power to put one step in front of the other every day and keep moving ahead.
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