I’m a recovering control freak. Today I am happy to say the recovery is going well. Tomorrow will probably be a different story if my four year old son and I clash over the household structure. Mother Mary began showing me my intense desire to control everything and everyone from the moment of my conscious awakening. While I was reluctantly willing to admit to my more obvious tendencies to manipulate, I was adamant in my denial of the not so obvious. Growing up in an environment that felt so out of control provided a pressing sense of imminent destruction and chaos unless I stepped in and did something, anything. Understanding why is great as far as it goes, but in and of itself, never seemed to change the behavior and consequently the outcome.

Control is a strange energy to dance with. At times I’m desperate for things to go the way I believe they should go and work to impose my will on those involved. But at the same time I abhor being controlled and pull so far back at the first whisper, I might as well not be in the same hemisphere. And yet, I combed the earth looking for people to tell me what to do and how to live my life. What should I eat, wear, listen to, enjoy, worship, etc… As Spock would say, “fascinating.” How can there be three such powerful dynamics occurring simultaneously?

Mother teaches me not to control others and not to allow myself to be controlled. Over the years those two concepts have become more and more subtle. My latest example of trying to resist being controlled is with email. People send me all kinds of emails. As far as the content goes, for the most part, I enjoy them all. But there is a certain type that throws up my wall of defenses and gets my anger cranked up so fast, I’m surprised every time. You probably have received these countless times. The content is something about love, friendship or spirituality, and I’m reading along and thinking, this is so nice, and then wham! “Please send this to at least 5 people or you will burn in hell and great tragedy will strike you or your loved ones. My favorite is the one where your “gift” from the universe is in direct proportion to the number of people you send it to. And of course there’s the one with St. Teresa’s prayer that if you say the prayer and send it to 12 people including the one who sent it to you, when you get yours back, you get something “special” with the email. I tried it once, against my better discernment and got nothing. It’s as if all the control freaks on the planet finally found an outlet.

It amazes me that the people who originate these emails can’t conceive that I might just pass it on to a few loved ones WITHOUT their explicit directions. Those emails wreck havoc with my guilt because they intimate that if you don’t send it you don’t REALLY love your friends because if you did you would do as you are told! This is how I lived my whole life. Designing ways to control and flinging them out into the world and when that energy came hurtling back to me, blindly sending it out to the prescribed amount of people and feeling so pissed off all the time, I thought I would loose my mind.

Controlling and being controlled is a full time occupation. It doesn’t leave much room for things like, what do I need and what do I think about this, or how does this make me feel. Once Mother gently began to move me inward I discovered a whole new world, me. Oddly enough, the less controlling I am, I have time for things like, my son for instance, my marriage, writing, playing, and eating moderately. I’ll be writing about this theme often, as it comes up daily for me, especially with my son, am I controlling him or providing structure? I worry about that all the time, which I suspect makes me more controlling.

Keep the emails coming, but don’t be offended if you don’t get it back, it’s a control thing.

I am reminded by my darling son daily that I am the maker of my problems and pain. As I commit more each day to be myself rather than an image of myself, I face the risk of loosing love. I have read over and over again that children thrive with structure. The practice should be equally applied to bedtime as well as correcting inappropriate behavior. While I have been able to be consistent with every structure my husband and I have decided for our son, as my mother put it, when she thought no one was listening, when it comes to discipline, I let my son get away with murder. My fear of loosing his love is always running in the back round.

Years ago a friend of mine was visiting from out of town. On the second day he asked to check his email. He commented on how slowly my computer was running and I told him it had been slowing down little by little over the last six months.

“When is the last time you cleaned the cookies off?”

“Um…never,” came my reply.

When he showed me the amount of junk that was running in the back round of my computer, I was shocked. How dare they spy on me. And why would something so dysfunctional be called cookies? Cookies are a good thing, right? Cookie Monster, baking with my mother when I was a child and then eating them warm right out of the oven with a big glass of cold milk, but on the heels of those thoughts came another. My sugar addiction, of which cookies were an integral part, and all the misery it caused me and the people around me, was my undoing. Because of all the junk running in the back round of my subconscious, I was slowing down little by little to the point I was barely functioning.

My spiritual awakening gave me an overview of all the cookies literally and figuratively running not only in the back round, but running my life. I was basing my choices in the present on things that were unknown perceptions from the past. One of those things was a desperate desire to be liked and approved of by everyone. And I mean everyone.

Four and a half years ago I was pregnant and in the process of leaving the American dream. I had a husband who claimed to adore me and want to take care of me, even though he never approved of or accepted me in all that I was, a big house, a lot of money, in short all the things I desperately wanted my whole life. Mother Mary and my son, inutero, woke me up to what this dream was costing me. The price was myself. Finally the pain of trading myself outweighed the fear of loosing the outward trappings of love and acceptance. Once that scale tipped I realized I would never trade myself again for any ones approval. Now living that one day at a time has been easier than I thought it would be, because of all the work that came before, with everyone except my son.

My husband has to point out on a regular basis how much I let him get away with. I see it sometimes and can change my behavior, but I am still amazed at how many cookies are still running in the back round and how quickly they accumulate. The way my son abuses me and treats me poorly shocks my husband at times, and yet this is the way I treated myself for so long it feels so normal, so deserved. As I change and become willing to be kinder to myself and not accept abuse in any form, the more serene my son is. Mother Mary gently reminds me when I maintain the structure of loving discipline for my son, he is happier and his life is easier, when I don’t, he is miserable, as am I.

Cleaning up my cookies means being willing to loose someones love in order to stay true to myself. But the irony is I don’t loose it, I maintain it over the life of the relationship. I just had to be willing to loose it for it to stay.