The Limits of Our Power

Several years ago, I had a discussion with my youngest son, who was going through a hard time.

I listened and asked questions, and did my best to enter into his experience. My agenda wasn’t to rescue, fix, or advise, just to let him know I cared and help him think about options.

My intentions were good, but I walked away feeling as though I’d only irritated him and made things worse. I questioned what I said and how I handled this interaction. Was I patronizing? Condescending? Obnoxiously optimistic? Aggressively parental? Didn’t I listen well?

Or maybe my questions were the problem, not because they were bad questions but because they were good questions. I was reminded of people in my life who have approached my distress with the kinds of questions that made me want to hang up the phone or slap their face. Their questions challenged me to break out of the shrinking cage I was in. They challenged me to take control, take responsibility, face my fear and think outside my usual box.

They challenged me to find my power and claim it.

These people redirect me back to what I can do right now to help myself, and away from everything else, and sometimes they’re not gentle about it.

This is tricky because it’s counterintuitive, at least to me. When I’m faced with a problem, I want to square right up to it, obsess, throw myself at it, beat my head against it and leave the rest of my life unoccupied. It’s either an all-out wrestling match or I eat ice cream out of the carton (a big carton!), stop taking showers, binge watch 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' all night and sleep all day.

Neither of these approaches has worked for me. The only thing that has ever worked is to identify where my power is right now and let the rest go. I don’t know why it works. I don’t know how it works, but I know it does.

When I was a low-income single mom, what this meant was realizing summer was ending and the boys would need new winter coats I couldn’t afford, and we would need groceries a lot sooner than that, but I had no money. And yes, I was working. At one point I worked two jobs and attended school.

Anyway, I developed a habit of shaping the day around what I could do instead of what I couldn’t do. I tried not to think about the next day, the next week, the next winter. I figured out what we’d eat that day from what we had, and I did what I could do — all the things that can be done without money. Like playing with Legos on the living room floor, or taking a walk, or reading aloud to the boys, or doing laundry, or working in the garden, or scrubbing the kitchen floor.

Some days were so hard I just lived five minutes at a time. It was all I could handle.

My kids are in their thirties now. All those five minutes, all those one-day-at-a-times passed and we weren’t homeless, we weren’t without food and we always managed winter coats, thanks to Goodwill. I have no idea how it all worked. I didn’t know then and I don’t know now.

Now, it’s true I found jobs, got trained and educated, did without things like cell phones and cable TV. I did what I could to help myself through those years, and I had a lot of outside help, too. But my point is I tried not to get stalled with my nose touching a brick wall. I tried to look in another direction — in a direction where I could make choices. Doing that didn’t make the brick wall disappear, but somehow it allowed me to move past it.

Getting back to my son, I tried to ask questions about where he did have power, but he felt powerless in every direction and the questions only reinforced the feeling instead of helping him reconsider his situation. I left the conversation feeling upset and frustrated and decided I needed to take a step back, give my son space and let it all unfold.

Within 24 hours, my son got what he needed from someone else, made some hard choices and found a way forward.

I tried hard to persuade myself this didn’t make me a failure, but it was uphill work. Additionally, I had a sneaking suspicion part of what I felt was nothing more than injured pride. As long as I’m confessing, there might have been jealousy in there, too.

I had also relearned the thing I wanted to teach. It was clear to me I couldn’t be an effective support to my son that day. However, two cords of wood were sitting in our driveway, so my partner turned on music and we stacked it in the barn. He and I cleaned out a closet and I got my fall/winter clothes handy. I was scheduled to work on Labor Day weekend and the day after, so I showed up for work and did my best. I wrote a few pages of my current book and a blog post. In the middle of all this my son came to me with the beginnings of his own solutions to his problems.

Maybe the most helpful thing I did was step back and live my own life. That, after all, is where our power is.

Now, eight years later, I have inherited money upon the death of my mother, who haunts the pages of The Hanged Man, not because she ever read it or supported anything I write, but because she was such an important teacher and so significant in my life. My life with Mom taught me about power dynamics, and for ten years power has been at the core of all my creative work.

Image by Engin Akyurt from Pixabay

I’m almost 60 years old, and I’m suddenly released from financial stress. In these last weeks, as my brother and I coped with Mom’s second broken hip, hospice, and her subsequent death after a ghastly week of struggle and pain during which we kept vigil with her and each other, I have been deeply, deeply grateful. I am grateful for this unexpected financial resource (I thought she had written me out of her will). My gratitude is mixed with anger, shame, guilt, terror, shock, and sorrow. My deepest gratitude, however, is for all my years of poverty. They were hard years, certainly, even traumatic years. I will never take abundance for granted.

During those years, however, I learned the difference between love and control, between abuse and love. I learned how powerful I am without money. I learned how to take my own path, how to be a scapegoat and an outcast and thrive anyway. I learned how to love myself. I allowed myself to be a writer in spite of little support and no money.

I learned money in the bank is like a gun in our hand. We might use it for protection, for provision, as an expression of love and gratitude for ourselves and others, as a tool to provide wind under wings, or we might use it to imprison ourselves, to create fear and paranoia, to withhold, to manipulate, to destroy.

Poverty is limiting, no question about that. But power of any kind is limited, always, in spite of the sad people who believe otherwise. Money can’t solve all our problems or protect us from hardship. We must each come to peace with our limitations and consequences. Adulting 101.

I confess I’m daunted by this change in my circumstance, which is why I’m grateful it’s come late in my life, when I’ve gained some wisdom and experience. I know the glitter and glamor of money casts a dark shadow in which some people are simply lost.

Money, in spite of its seduction, does not equal power. The ability to choose equals power. Love equals power. Resilience and creativity equal power. The ability to live in the present rather than in a fearful future or an anguished past equals power. Integrity and simplicity equal power.

Stepping back, allowing our loved ones to live their lives as best they can while we do the same equals power. Money or no money, some days we stumble. But some days we dance.