Doing Too Much

I was trained to do too much for everyone around me, which I think is true for many women who grew up in the fifties. Being a good ‘care-taker’ made us good women! A friend’s mom continued to ‘give her a bath’ until she was more than ten years old, actually leaning in to wash her. That was a prescription for disaster for both the mom and my friend, neither of whom were learning a thing about being a genuinely good woman by her actions. Nevertheless, it has taken me years to retrain myself to not jump in to take care of the problems my friends, kids, or loved ones are having. First of all, my help might be seen as intrusive. That was a difficult concept for me to take in: how many times had I upset people I cared about by offering solutions, taking charge – you name it – when what I thought I was doing was trying to help. Usually, though not always, I now wait until I’m asked for an opinion or action, though when I become perfect, maybe it will be always! Not only was I trained as a care-taker by the society around me when I was a young girl, but by my family of origin as well. My mom had her first heart attack when I was four, and I was assigned the job of keeping her alive by my overworked father. Which is a whole other topic of course. What it means now, even after dealing with his orders in therapy many years ago, is that I feel anxious when I think someone needs help, which makes it even harder for me to step aside. A friend and I were talking about this issue a few years ago and she said something that helped enormously. “If you always take care of the problem, you may be giving the other person the message that they’re not capable of doing it themselves.” Boy, did that make me sit up straight. When I feel compelled to ‘help’, I repeat that thought in my head, a mantra that helps keep me on my side of the street. It has also lifted a burden I have carried for a long long time.