Controlling

I remember a time after my sister and I were in high school that my dad didn’t want mom to work outside the home. Even his mother had said that mom would make a good real estate agent. But, no, he didn’t want mom to work. Hmmm, I wondered why, finally. It hadn’t phased me at the time when I was a teenager. He’d always made the decisions and gotten his way. There was no discussion between my parents.

I could go off on a lot of tangents about this. How I noticed when I spent the night with friends that their parents sat and talked whereas mine did not. How I ignored my parents’ arguing, my dad’s yelling and loud voice and how that conditioned me to ignore it in my relationships after I grew up. How when I look at pictures now of my mother then, I see depression.

When I was 12, I fell in love with the Rocky Mountains and determined to move to Colorado when I grew up. However, when I graduated from college, I did not move. I did not have the courage to leave my family and move across the country where I knew no one. Finally, when I was 33, I did move. I stored some things with my parents including my summer clothes since it was fall when I moved.

I remember a couple things happened then with my dad’s involvement with me. When I went home for Christmas and was riding in the back seat of my parents’ car with them in the front, I asked if I could use the car to visit a friend. The answer was “no.” My dad didn’t think it was safe for me to drive his car an hour away to where I used to live even though I’d driven my own car 1500 miles by myself from Atlanta to Denver two months before. I remember saying out loud at the time that someone in the front seat wasn’t thinking straight. The other thing was that in the spring, I needed my summer clothes sent to me since I had to travel to the tropics for work. I realized then that my dad had thought that I would not like living in Colorado away from home, or maybe that it wouldn’t work out for some reason and was holding my summer clothes since he believed I’d be back before I needed them.

Now I see that both these actions were controlling.