It's Only A Paper Rose

As I mentioned, earlier this month I spent a week staying with my mother to help unpack things in her new house.

We worked a lot - getting up and eating breakfast, spending a few hours unpacking or putting togther furniture or running errands, grabbing lunch, unpacking, preparing and eating dinner, and unpacking a bit more. Usually around eight or nine o'clock, we'd start to flag, and I'd suggest getting ready for bed. Mum would sit down for a minute, realize how tired she was, and agree. So we'd go brush our teeth and get into our nightclothes, and I'd settle down in bed with a book.

My mother, however, would continue unpacking. For hours.

This happened at other times, too, when I was trying to take a break, or finishing my lunch; she'd just keep going and going at it. It made me more than a little anxious - partly because I felt like I wasn't keeping up my share of the work, partly because I was concerned about her apparent indifference to self-care, and partly because my hindbrain was convinced that if she caught me slacking she would start yelling at me, because she'd be feeling frustrated and overwhelmed and getting angry was the only way she could muster up the energy to keep going. (Even though that particular pattern hasn't played out in nearly two decades, something about your childhood experiences never really leaves you, especially with the same people involved.) Obviously, I dealt with it, and accepted that my mother's just a bit obsessive sometimes about finishing tasks before she can relax.

Now that I'm home, however, I'm starting to recognize where I manifest that same pattern. I'd always thought of myself as much more easygoing and Type B than my mother, but I'm beginning to suspect that I just avoided committing myself to a career or a community precisely because I was afraid of that anxiety. Certainly now that I'm busier, I've noticed that same difficulty in relaxing when there's Something That Needs To Be Done, to the point where I've been overdoing it and woken up exhausted more than once. Even when I hit that point, if there are Things That Need To Be Done, I'll often push through, promising myself I'll rest on such-and-such a day. (Sometimes I even do, when it doesn't get subsumed into the to-do list as well.)

This was brought into stark relief today, when I strained something in my foot. It felt relatively minor, so I kept on with my schedule, running errands all over Lakeview, ignoring the pain until it started getting worse and I was actively limping. Finally I took the train to my station, limped the three blocks home, and sat down; at which point my foot proceeded to swell up and become far more painful. Luckily it doesn't seem to have been serious - some ice and heat and Advil and a few hours' rest and it's barely more than a bit stiff - but it felt like a warning against overdoing things.

...And yet, despite that very sensible assessment, despite the very real pain whenever I got up, all afternoon and evening I still had to actively force myself to stay on the couch, because there were Things That Need To Be Done.

I find myself wondering what it is about the Things that's so urgent as to tempt me to risk more seriously damaging my foot (resulting in, at the very least, missed work). Clearly none of the individual tasks are that important; sure, it'd be nice for the house to be clean in preparation for Brian's mum coming to housesit for us, and yes, I should get together some of the kitchenware I'm not using for my friend who's moving into her own place, and true, I should at the very least pick up some of this clutter that's taking over the coffee table. But none of it is life-and-death, and Brian's doing a lot of it, besides. So why do I keep having to force myself to stay sitting?

Some of it is a feeling of control - it's frustrating to be stymied by something as small as a minor foot sprain, when I'm used to feeling so capable. I wonder, too, if part of it's a sense of safety. That so long as things are finished and in order, nothing bad can happen. Which is completely illogical, of course, but certainly satisfies my perfectionist streak and my childhood-experience-imprinted hindbrain both. And with Brian working so hard, some of it is probably that sense of inequitable distribution of load, as well.

But at the very least, I guess we've proven I'm related to my mother. Heh.