Independence Day

This post is now linked to the Weekend Linkup at Write On Edge. To visit other links, just click here.

(This is a serious post and it is long. I have broken my PG rule in this post because I cannot tell you this story without it. The catalyst for change for me – my Independence Day -- came in the form of a four letter word. Please stop reading, though, if you will find it offensive.)


I grew up in a rigidly disciplined family. Things were done a certain way at a certain time and there was no grey area. Ever.

It was my parent’s way of raising us, and I am not faulting them for it.

But as an imaginative, tender, middle child, this caused me pain in many forms…from headaches to ulcers and horrible self doubt.

I was a dreamer. And dreamers did not exist well in an unyielding, precise military-type environment. In my house, if you painted a picture the skies were blue and the trees were green. In my house, clothes were folded precisely and put in closets just so, and all the forks, knives and spoons were parallel to each other. There was no room for painting rainbow colored trees or arranging clothes according to color or setting the table in a different fashion. Those were “stupid” ideas and they were wrong.

This is not a criticism. It’s just how it was.

I was suffocated by these controls. And frustrated by the fact that no matter how hard I tried I could rarely please my parents. I was always too flightly, too off on a tanget even back then, and I always asked way too many questions.

Thought I recognized at a very early age that I always disappointed them, I always, always wanted to make them proud of me so I struggled even harder to be "good".

When I graduated from high-school, I married my parents. I wed my first husband, a very rigid man who believed in classifying men’s work and women’s work and who firmly believed that only two colors existed in the world...black and white and neither were to be trifled with.

He was a good man in many ways, but we were constantly in battle. I was always too flightly, too off on a stupid tangent, and I always asked way too many questions.

After several years of marriage, I was miserable. True, deep unhappiness engulfed every fiber of my being. I tried to be perfect. I tried to do things in ways that would make everybody happy.
I believed that if I was perfect, my parents and my husband would love me. That my perfection would one day allow them to say to me, “Wow, Jenny, you are actually pretty cool. We just never noticed it before,” and they would see ME. See my heart. See my being. See that I was "good"! Somehow, magically, it would become OK to be all the things I was inside.

As more years passed, though, that just never happened. At the time, I believed it was because I didn’t try hard enough. I felt that I just didn’t put enough energy and effort into following all the rules and regulations of being a “good” person. And I ran even faster on that hamster wheel of self-recrimination with no hope of ever actually getting anywhere.

One day, however, I received an unlikely catalyst for change from an improbable source.

Our nearest neighbor on the beautiful, rural country road we lived on was a guy I had gone to school with named Walt. He had remarried a much younger woman whom I had befriended. They had two children and we all hung out together quite a bit.

Walt worked night shifts, and he and I spent a lot of summer hours together swimming with our five combined children. We would talk about this and talk about that, but we were never really close, confiding friends…we were really more like hang-out buddies.

One day my parents stopped by for a typical visit. In retrospect I’m not sure if these were ever really visits, but more inspections of my never-good-enough life. As always, my house was not clean enough. My children were not dressed right. My iced tea had too much sugar. My cookies were under-baked. The yard looked bad. As always, I felt like a failure.

Trying to be the perfect daughter, I would scurry around trying to correct all my flaws. By the time one of these visits were over, I would be a wreck. My stomach would hurt. My head would pound. I would be disgusted with myself.

Then I would begin gearing up for my husband to get home from work. I knew the dinner I made would not be right, he would be in a bad mood (which would somehow be my fault), the house would not be clean enough, he would be tired from work and unable to help with the kids and I would end up revolted and dismayed at myself because I could never, ever, get anything right.

Pleasing these unpleasable people became so important to me that I forgot about myself. I forgot that I even existed as a person, with my own thoughts and ideas and dreams.

But on one particular July afternoon changed all that for me. During all the hours Walt and I hung out with the kids during the summer, he had watched the comings and goings and criticisms and my constant mini-breakdowns around my “loved” ones.

After one upsetting visit from my Dad, I was floating on a raft trying to regain my composure. In my mind I can clearly see the towering white clouds in that cerulean blue summer sky. Walt had just given the kids a snack and he came over to me and dumped me off the raft. When I came up sputtering, he was right in my face.

He told me that he just couldn’t watch it anymore. He told me that it made him sick how my family treated me, that they were bullies, and that they were taking advantage of my niceness. He told me there was nothing wrong with me that growing a backbone couldn't fix. He told me that I needed to stick up for myself, and that I deserved to be treated with respect and kindness. He told me I was an amazing person.

And then he told me, grimly, “You will never please them, Jenny. Just stop trying.”

I can still see the drops of water in his wavy, brown hair.

I started to cry.

I told him that they had to act like that because I was such a screw-up. And that I did everything wrong.

He hit his fist on the water and told me that it wasn’t true. He told me to stand up to them.

I told him I couldn’t. They were my family. They loved me.

And then, lowering my gaze to the sparkling water, I told him I was afraid that if I stood up to them, they wouldn’t love me anymore.

And he said, “They don’t love you now. They love who they want you to be. They don’t love who you really are.”

And I thought about that for a moment. I had been a good, obedient, trying-to-be-perfect person for 31 years and I still didn’t please them. And I was miserable. And my heart felt like it was dying.

Keeping my back to the five oblivious children sitting on the deck stuffing themselves with potato chips and grapes, I cried harder.

“I don’t know how to stop doing it, Walt,” I said.

He leaned very close to me and said, “You just tell them to fuck off.”

Now this might not seem like such a big thing to you. But it was electrifying to me. Not only did I never swear, no-one around me swore. I mean the extent of bad words at our house might have been, “Damn!”

I’m sure my mouth dropped open…and stayed open.

Walt leaned in again and said, “Did you hear me?”

And I said, “I can’t believe you said that out loud!”

Walt retorted, “I’ll say it over and over again until you listen. You deserve to be happy, too.”

The kids had finished their snacks by then and jumped back in the water. The splashing of the water could not silence Walt’s words echoing in my brain. It was like a perpetual loop that would not stop. “Just tell them to…” I couldn’t even say it inside my own head.

The perpetual loop kept playing all through dinner and continuously for the next several days.

And finally, I decided to grow a very small backbone.

When my Dad started criticizing me for having a messy linen closet one day, I looked at him and thought the words Walt had told me to say. Though they didn't leave my lips, they worked for me! As my Dad looked at me, waiting for me to scurry to tidy it up, I shocked myself and said, “Dad, this is my linen closet and I LIKE IT MESSY!”

When my husband complained about dinner I thought those words even harder and said, “If you don’t like what I made, there’s the kitchen.”

I didn’t become all mean and nasty. I just decided that it was OK for me to stick up for me because, obviously, no-one else was going to. And by not sticking up for myself I was really telling these people that I didn’t deserve any respect or consideration. My silence was tacit agreement that, yes, everything about me was wrong.

My loved ones did not go gently into the good night of my changed attitude.

They pushed and pulled and shoved and questioned and pondered and complained and cajoled and bullied me, but I just kept thinking about what Walt had told me.

I’m not going to say my life was totally and magically improved. It wasn’t. They didn’t wake up and say “Wow, we were wrong, we’re sorry, we’ll never act like that to you again.” While I think that’s really what I wanted them to do it never happened.

And after more time passed, I didn’t need to hear that from them anymore.

I just needed to be true to myself and all the things that made me unique.

I find myself going back to that moment over and over again as I encounter other people in life who would prefer to tear my wings off rather then to just let me fly in my own way.

I don’t know why there are so many people that find power and pleasure in making others doubt themselves. It saddens me, but it is true.

Maybe you know some of these people who speak to you in harshness and criticism and denigrate who you are “because they love you”.

Maybe you stay in situations because you’re afraid if you stand up to the people who are trying to crush you, that they will no longer love you.

I did.

And sometimes I find myself wanting to fall back into that old pattern of accepting someone else’s vision of me as the truth.

Their visions are not true.

I know who I am. You may not like me, and that is your perogative. But you will not change me by cruelty and by harsh words and by criticisms.

I may allow myself to change, but it will be me making that decision. The choice will not ever be made because you tried to shame me into it.

That day in July many, many years ago was truly my Independence Day.

There is a quote from Thucydides that really speaks to me of that time. “The secret of happiness is freedom. The secret of freedom is courage.”

My courage came from the unlikely source of a four letter word. But it came nevertheless.

We are approaching a holiday that is about freedom. On July 4, 1776 the colonies that became the United States of America declared they were independent of Great Britain. They made up their minds that they would no longer accept things as they had been, and that they would find a new way according to their own truths.

Martin Luther King said, “Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”

We all deserve to be ourselves, to be unique and to be true to what makes us happy. No-one has the right to take that way from us.

We must DEMAND the right to be ourselves in our own lives.

People can only take our hearts and souls away from us if we let them.

And on this day of Independence and courage I say to any of you who are doubting yourself...

Let Freedom Ring.

Happy Independence Day, my friends.