In the early years of my DIY experience, there were some days (actually, lots of days) I just wanted to give up. I knew when I bought it, a three-year-old, two-door Honda Civic was going to be too small for some of my needs, but people in my shoes didn’t always have a lot of choices. It was pretty much the only car anyone would sell me. Even at sixteen percent interest when everyone else was paying four percent, I had to take it.
But the day I tried to shove my lawn mower into the trunk to take it for repairs almost made me give up for real. And there went the voices in my head, ‘No wonder the husband bailed. No wonder Door Guy ran the other way. No wonder Beautiful Carpenter can’t commit. Maybe if you had better credit someone would love you.’
I knew this wasn’t true, but it didn’t stop me from thinking it. I mean, I was in therapy so I wouldn’t screw up my relationship, my kid, or my life in general, but I still heard this stuff in my head. ‘A loser like me, ‘I thought, ‘doesn’t really deserve love. Maybe you don’t know when to give up. You’re always trying to make things work that don’t want to work.’
It’s always something small-ish isn’t it? A job loss or a beating I can take, but a fucking lawn mower that won’t fit into the back of my little car-that is my undoing, my unraveling again. Ben was trying to help me, and as we hoisted the mower into the trunk, he caught the handle on the trunk hood and it bounced up and smacked me in the face. Then the tears came; the pain in my face only part of the reason. ‘Geeze, how do I get myself into these ridiculous situations?’ I thought. But again, not many choices here.
I don’t know how I finally got the mower into the trunk, sometimes will is enough. But some days will and determination and even god aren’t enough. That day felt like one of those days, and I still had Tae Kwon Do class, a twelve-year-old’s birthday present to buy, and other general parenting to do. On top of it all, I had a girl’s night out that I’d rather not go to.
A colleague at my day job, who had a much better position and a whole lot more education than I, liked to write inspirational things on her white board—I think maybe just to make the rest of us feel bad. Usually it said something like, “If you never try, you will never know.”
Ben, on the other hand, had a quote from Homer Simpson on his sixth-grade Freedom of Speech poster that said, “Trying is the first step to failure.”
As much as I sincerely believe the first quote, I can relate much more to the second one most days. Trying seemed to get me nowhere; trying to be good, trying to be thin, trying to meditate, somehow led to failure more often than anything. And forget trying to parent the way the books say, because no one has yet written the book about me and how I was raised, and then how I married young (the first time), then how everything imploded so many times since, and how that affects my parenting skills.
Trying to parent by the book is like trying to live up to my colleague’s white board every time she puts up a new inspirational message. It just makes the rest of us feel bad. All I can do is work by trial and error, and it seemed the more trials I faced, the more errors I made. But my kids always forgave me and we always started over, even when I didn’t think I deserved it.
So I tried not to be too hard on my own parents about how much they screwed up and how many wrong things they said, and how they forgot to pick me up from kickball practice once or twice. Especially because as they grew older, and I found myself complaining about driving them and Ben places, I recalled they had more than twice the number of kids I have and it’s not their fault that parents nowadays are too fretful to let their kids walk to the mailbox, let alone walk home from school or to the swimming pool in the summer. Driving my parents around was only a small trial anyway.
At one point during all of this, I started thinking it would be good to write a book with my dad. I’d grown up watching him fix things and build things, and he was always there to lend a tool or some good advice. He was always saying, “If you want anything done right, you have to do it yourself.” I always thought that would be a great title for a book. So one day I secretly recorded myself asking him questions about how he learned to build houses, fix engines, and smooth the dent from a car fender. Listening to it later, I had to laugh at how many times he said he learned it all by trial and error. The big trials, the ones that require a certain amount of clean-up afterward, are the ones I seem to screw up most. Like when a marriage fails, a utility gets turned off, or say, I start remodeling a room in my house and find a year later that it’s still not put back together. Those things make me a little grouchy and it just might show up in my parenting style.
Such as the next day when I yelled at Ben in the car for being late, then pulled off the highway when he got snarky and refused to take him to his birthday party. Then I watched while he got out of the car and slammed the door in anger, and then I almost drove away but didn’t, then he got back in the car and we both sheepishly said we were sorry, then I silently drove him to the birthday party anyway. No one has ever put that in a book on effective parenting.
But it happened, and we still love each other, and I’m sure it happens to other people, but they just don’t talk about it in polite company. And as my parents aged, we didn’t talk about the past much, but we talked about what we should do when one of them died and the other one stuck around for a while, or how they both worried about using up all the money on health care and the other one wouldn’t have enough money to left to live on. But only some of that happened.
DIY Recovery 