Covid Codependency

And a eulogy for the last working door in my apartment.

A small note: Today is my newsletter-versary! One year ago, I decided I would write weekly about issues in the classroom, the place where I worked. Then, overnight, that went away, and I began, instead, writing about my new full-time job, parenting in a pandemic, which is so friggin hard even if you do, literally, have a PhD in children. For those of you who have been here since day one, bless you. For those who are just joining us, come on in! Thanks for reading and commenting and sharing and just being with me these past 360-odd, completely bananas days.

There are four interior doors in my apartment. My landlord, a Victorian romantic, favors glass door knobs that strip as soon as you close them and keep you locked in until you find a screwdriver or a bobby pin or pray hard enough. The only solution to this, years ago, before we had kids or nowhere else to go but here, was for us to remove the locking mechanisms on two of those doors. Another set of french doors, inspired by the constant breeze coming through the ratty old windows, bang open and shut like they are possessed by a spirit whenever you attempt to close them. The final door is to the lone bathroom, which is off of our bedroom, right next to the wall-mounted shelf that I now generously refer to as my “standing desk.” For years, the bathroom door closed properly - not a lock, mind you, we dared not dream of such privacy, but a good, solid click to let you know you had a few seconds lead time if anyone wanted to barge in. Over time, though, the door got trickier. A note that read “turn left and don’t panic” instructed our guests, those phantoms of 2019, on how to escape. In the past few months, it has required more and more elbow grease to shock the door into place, and usually we just give up. Now, my friends, it appears that the only closing door in the apartment I share with three other human beings (four if you count my mother-in-law, who rents the studio upstairs) has officially called it quits.

Farewell, sweet domestic barrier.

According to my therapist, who is always right, I need to do some work on the “B-Word.” Not belittling, bribing, blaming, or binge-eating frozen Thin Mints while standing in the open freezer door (I do these things quite well thank you very much), but boundaries. These little bastards have tormented me for at least a few decades. I am terrible at knowing what I need, asking for it, and not crumbling into a ball of abandonment issues if those needs are not met. And now, perhaps because of how boundary-less this work-at-home, play-at-home, attend-Beyonce-themed-dance-class-at-home year has been, it has become very clear to me that I need a different strategy. But how, I ask you, can I possibly learn to set boundaries when I cannot even sit on the toilet with the door closed???

Experts agree that my boundary challenges probably stem from a little something called “codependency.” According to this nice lady, who does not refer to codependency as a “disease” like this mean lady, codependents take on the feelings and needs of others so much that they become obsessed with controlling them. They engage in excessive caretaking, have low self-esteem and weak boundaries, distrust others, deny feelings, and get angry and resentful because of how bad all of this makes them feel. Thus, my codependency memoir would be entitled “How I Tried To Make Everyone Happy So No One Was Happy.”

When you read a checklist of traits that end up perfectly, eerily, describing you, do you tingle with excitement? Are you relieved? Scared shitless? When I read the checklist of codependent behaviors, this was my response:

Damn.

So how do you create boundaries, the antidote to all codependent shenanigans, when you are, by covid-related circumstance, hopelessly enmeshed with the few people in your bubble? When your partner, children, impulse-purchased-puppy, etc. are needier than ever and have fewer people around to meet their needs? Am I being codependent by keeping my kids home part-time with me, a responsibility I sometimes resent, when more days at school mean more exposure and when one of my children is so cocooned by the last year that they loathe leaving the house? Am I setting a good boundary when I unexpectedly shout that I have to get the hell out of here, and go driving for hours with no apparent destination, leaving everyone to fend for themselves? If I really asked that no one use the godamned open-plan bathroom while I’m working two feet away from it, would everyone just piss in a can?

A useful place to start when wrapping your head around something difficult is to think about what it is not (according to author Mark Manson, whose newsletters my step-father keeps forwarding me, and who has some great stuff to say in a funny, approachable way despite a sometimes off-putting authoritative tone).

“People with poor boundaries typically come in two flavors: those who take too much responsibility for the emotions/actions of others and those who expect others to take too much responsibility for their own emotions/actions.”

“Another way is to think of boundaries in terms of identity. When you have these murky areas of responsibility for your emotions and actions—areas where it’s unclear who is responsible for what, who’s at fault, why you’re doing what you’re doing—you never develop a solid identity for yourself.”

“If you make a sacrifice for someone you care about, it needs to be because you want to, not because you feel obligated or because you fear the consequences of not doing it.”

And then we come to the what is:

“Healthy Personal Boundaries = Taking responsibility for your own actions and emotions, while NOT taking responsibility for the actions or emotions of others.”

Setting a boundary, if you aren’t used to it, doesn’t always feel great. In my first attempts this week, I was flooded with panic. I realized that, if other people being happy, or at least my perceiving that they were happy, wasn’t, in fact, the sign that things were going to be alright, I didn’t know what else to look for. When I asked my therapist what to do with this queasy feeling, she instructed me to say the phrase “I’m okay. They’re okay. We’re okay.” I lay awake at four in the morning repeating it like a mantra and wondering if, when my children finally stopped needing me so damn much, I would feel just as horrible because my orientation to myself and my own needs would be, at that point, completely gone.

One thing that this year has shed some awful, the-club-is-closing-get-your-stuff-and-try-not-to-make-eye-contact-with-the-dude-you-were-just-grinding-with-kinda-light on, is the fact that no external forces are going to create any boundaries for us. Not even a door, whose sole purpose in this world is to shut. No one else is going to make it easy for us to take space, say no, give less. Not now. And maybe, the nice lady would tell us, not ever. And right now, sometimes, especially if the people we love are suffering, it might not actually be okay. That is confusing. But other times, we can look for the smallest of limits. We can plan ahead for a drive to nowhere, rather than hurling it at our family like a punishment. We can put our headphones on and a sign on the door that says “Imagine this is closed and locked.” And then, perhaps, chant a hundred healthy rounds of “I’m okay. They’re okay. We’re okay.”

I don’t know who brought this kid to a club but he knows what I’m talking about.