My mother’s eccentric friend, Chotsie, shared a story with me ten years ago that she had written about during these early days in my life. In it was an important scene that set the tone for my lifelong personality and thus, my relationships. In her story, I wore my bedtime pajamas—a blue “sleeper” that snapped beneath my chin. It was a seventies rendition of fleece, and had white plastic at the toes which allowed me to slide across our wood floors. I slipped around the corner and asked Chotsie, “Why are my parents getting divorced?” Instead of learning from my parents how to make statements like, “I’m sad,” or “I don’t want my parents to get divorced,” I observed their fights and then learned to ask questions of others. I thought that by doing so, it might give me the answers as to how I was supposed to feel. The problem with this was that it never taught me how to figure out my own feelings for myself. And that’s what happened in my relationships.
It took me almost thirty years to see what I needed to learn. Ironically, my learnings came from some children that were learning those very things at the age I should have. I was working at an independent school in San Francisco. Part of the preschool curriculum was to teach conflict resolution to the three-to-five year olds. On their first days of school, both the three-year-olds and their parents were crying about their transitions. By spring, those same three-year-olds were a little older and wiser, and I watched in awe as they turned to one another during conflict and said, “I don’t like it when you do that to me.” The other kid listened. But little did they know that they were learning the important tools which would serve them later in life. I listened too, and decided that in my next relationship I would use those same words in order to ward off potential abuse.
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