Friday, October 12, 2007

• More on Enabling

  Oops, I totally promised you a blog post yesterday.  Enter killer migraine, follow that by puking child.  Argh.

  Anyway, back to my ranting about enabling versus helping in a relationship.

  I've done a little twelve-step recovery in the day, and here's what Al Anon has to say about this topic.  Helping is doing something for someone that he is incapable of doing himself and enabling is doing things he should be doing himself.

  To a point, enabling the way I understand it is a way of controlling things the best you can, even when it's not something one can or should control.  What co-dependents call "three-stepping it" is releasing that control by saying "I can't, God can, I'll let Him."
  

  I have certainly lived that dynamic, and I see the value in examining oneself from time to time to make sure one has not tripped and stumbled right into the old dysfunctional way of dancing with one's partner.

  The objections I'm getting, when being accused of enabling my spouse, are roughly like this:
  

  He should be doing his own laundry.  If he ruins his clothes, he should suffer the consequences of wearing ruined clothing or paying for new ones.  He should be managing his own schedule, by himself.  If he forgets to tell the babysitter when he works, he should suffer the consequences by finding alternate care, going to work late or not at all, or even losing his job.  I'll bet that if you let him do all these things for himself, he'll miraculously be able to do them.  He's just not doing them because it's easier for him to continue to let you do them.

  My response is fourfold.
  

  1.  What about blocking consequences that are huge for the people you love?  Let's take a child, for instance.  Would I let a child spend all his allowance money, and then be sad because he couldn't go to a movie on the weekend?  You betcha.  Natural consequences are an opportunity to learn how to function better in life.  Would I let a child run into the street to be hit by a car?  No way!  Natural consequences can sometimes be too harsh.  But he'd learn, wouldn't he, to stop running in the street!  Yep, he would.  I'll teach him some other way, thank you, and if he never learns to stop running in the street, I'll continue to protect him and not allow him near streets unsupervised.  I will always block those that are too high natural consequences for someone I love, if I can.  Especially if it's easy.
  

  2.  Is there a category for disabled but cooperative versus disabled with an attitude?  I've seen guys sit back and make their wives do everything, or it gets left undone, because they're being passive-aggressive jerks.  I've seen guys with mental illnesses refuse to see their doctors and/or take their meds, which places a huge burden on their spouses.  But what of the guy with ADD who sees his doctor, takes his meds, holds down a job, does housework, parents his kids, but has some huge gaps in his functioning due to the ADD?  Doesn't the cooperative guy catch a break?  Or is it that imperative that he always be made to experience all the consequences of all his actions?
  

  3.  What about a mental disability?  Should there be a category for someone who will never, ever be able to do that task?  Is it less of a disability because we look more "normal" than people with other types of disabilities?  Without medication, my husband would never, ever be able to consistently hold down a job.  We know this from years of pre-diagnosis experience.  Thank God for his diagnosis and treatment!  But even with treatment, there are gaps that cannot be filled, especially when the diagnosis is moderate to severe ADD.  For example, I have not yet been able to go more than six months without overdrawing my checking account.  I don't do it on purpose.  I try very hard not to do so.  But it inevitably happens.  I have for all of my adult life repeatedly experienced the natural consequences of overdrawing my checking account.  Nobody has blocked those consequences for me (but if you happen to need a hobby, I wouldn't object).  However, it's a disability.  Trying harder in the face of looming consequences doesn't help.  (In fact, in the case of ADD, trying harder makes it worse.) 
  

  Tell a person in a wheelchair to just try harder to walk or experience the natural consequences of not being able to eat in a non-ADA-compliant restaurant.  Tell a person who is blind to just try harder to see and they wouldn't need that seeing eye dog.  Ridiculous?  Then why isn't it ridiculous to ask me to stop overdrawing my bank account?  Because I don't wear my frontal lobe on the outside of my head so you can see it's not like everyone else's?

  After explaining the full extent of my disability to my midwife after Sawyer was born, I let her know my plan for timing nursing sessions around my ADD drug.  She asked me if I'd ever tried making lists. 
  

  This has become our family joke.  When we're at our most frustrated because ADD has struck again, and we forgot to refill our prescriptions, or spaced a kid's doctor appointment, or bounced a check, or left the baby at the grocery store (kidding!), to lighten the mood, one of us will inevitably say to the other, "well, if you'd just have made a list!"
  

  4.  What about give-and-take?  Do I do things for my husband that he can't do himself?  Absolutely.  Are they things that other wives don't have to do for their husbands?  You betcha.  Does he do the same for me?  Without question. 
  

  This plays out in other marriages, too, maybe just not to the same extent.  Ever heard of a wife cutting her husband's hair for him?  He could do it himself or pay for a haircut, yes?  What about a wife that packs her husband's lunch every day?  Why can't he pack it himself or buy his lunch? 
  

  I have an online friend that cooks breakfast for her significant other every day, because he doesn't like cold breakfasts like cereal.  What's more, he complains about her cooking and is extremely picky about the things he'll eat.  And yet, she gladly cooks every breakfast for him.  I would not do that in a million years, but it's working swimmingly for them.

  The point is, every relationship looks different.  Different routines, different personalities, different preferences, different temperaments.  I manage my husband's schedule.  That would not work for you.  Does that make you a bad wife?  Not remotely.  Nor does it make me a bad wife for not cooking my husband a daily breakfast. 
  

  What does he do for me?  I cannot count the number of things I let slip through the cracks because of my ADD.  When I lived alone and had no one to take care of me, I was a mess!  I only graduated with my M.A. because of a kind fellow student named Robert Smith (that's his real name!) who checked in with me every day to see if I'd heard the latest deadline from the college, whether I had my homework done, whether I'd researched the paper we were writing yet. . .I'd have been dead in the water without Robert.  Now that I'm through grad school and doing the married-with-children thing, my husband fills a similar role in keeping me on track.
  

  Mike keeps me fed.  There were times when I lived alone that I never ate dinner.  I went months subsisting on oreos and diet 7-up, no exaggeration.  When I walk in the door, he hands me a glass of ice water.  If he's not around to do that, I'll go entire days, 12 hours, without drinking anything, and then get a monster headache.  He helps me get the kids fed, he bathes them and does the bedtime reading, he cooks or gives me tips to make cooking easier when he's not around to do it, or keeps his mouth shut when the kids get Top Ramen.  He runs last-minute errands that arise because I forgot to do something timely.

  Mike gives me back rubs and foot rubs all the time, and I almost never reciprocate.  He never forgets to tell me I look pretty or say something kind.  He puts the baby in a carrier and wears him around the house so I can do something nice for myself.  He does all these things, and a million more things that there is no room for on a blog.
  

  But more important than anything else is his understanding - his complete and total visceral understanding - of my complex feelings when I can't function around something. I absolutely, positively could not be married to someone who does not have any sort of understanding of living with ADD. After the 1,000th time I messed up and overdrew the bank account, or damaged the car, or the millions of other things I can't seem to stop myself from doing, someone else would stop saying "It's OK, I understand, I forgive you" and would instead say things like "what's wrong with you?! Why can't you learn?! It's really easy, you just do x, y, and z! If you'd just make a list. . ." and so forth and so on.

  Even if he didn't say those things, he'd think them in his heart. Mike doesn't think them in his heart, ever. He "gets" me because he's like me too. I would not trade his complete and utter love, unconditional forgiveness, and total understanding of my feelings for any fully functional, neurotypical man on the planet.
  

  I'm so glad that, if I have to have severe ADD, I'm married to someone who also has severe ADD. It's truly a blessing and a gift from God that he paired me with Mike.  So yeah, I'll manage his calendar and print it for him to keep in his pocket, and manage the budget, and do whatever else I need to do to keep our household limping along, because I love the hell out of him and I couldn't ever in a million years find someone that would make me happier than I am right now.

  • 10:55 PM
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