I don’t like to not be in control. I prefer kayaks to canoes because I want to be in charge of my own destiny when I’m on the water. If I flip I want it to be my fault. If I make it through rapids successfully, I want to be celebrated alone. I moved up to management at the bars where I worked because I wanted to be a part of making the decisions at my job that affected me every day.
Motherhood is a master class in learning to relinquish control. I don’t get to decide when I eat, I don’t get to decide when I sit down, and I don’t get to decide when I do anything that relaxes me. I also have a co-parent who gets equal say in all choices made about the tiny humans in our house. And being pregnant while having a baby under one is especially thrilling when I have to pee at least once an hour and get screamed at every time I leave the room.
I think there are very few people in this world that actually enjoy having little to no control. For some, letting others make the decisions in their lives is a way to relax and unburden themselves, and that’s totally ok! But that has never even been close to me. If I don’t have control over the majority of my life, it causes me a deep sense of panic and the anxiety attacks tend to come fast and intense.
In my final few months working as a manager at a local beer and burger bar, operational decisions that I didn’t agree with were being made, and since they were coming from people much higher up than I, there was really nothing I could do. The atmosphere in the bar became very uncomfortable for most of the staff, and we started losing a lot of employees. In that time I developed a few ticks like scratching my hands to the point of bleeding and I got hyper organized. I got a planner with colored pens and stickers, and would list out all necessary daily activities down to finishing bottles of water and using the bathroom. I didn’t feel as though I had any control over the way my people at work were treated, but at least I could control every second and every aspect of my day.
A big reason I feel the need to have so much control over so much is likely because growing up I felt as though I had next to no control over anything in my life. I’m sure a lot of this is not uncommon for a lot of kids in my generation, but I think my childhood took it to the extreme.
There was always a great deal of fighting in my house. It wasn’t necessarily raised voices or physical violence, but even as a young kid I recognized the atmosphere in my home was not the healthiest to be in.
Our family was also always the late ones. When invited anywhere people often told us an earlier time to be somewhere so we’d have a chance of being there when actually needed. I was often even late to school when my mom would drive me, so thanks to a punishment for over sleeping one day, I started walking the 4 blocks to school on my own when I was in the third grade. Suddenly I was one of the first to get to class and could pick out the seat I wanted, get the good pencils, and most importantly the whole class wasn’t staring at me as I walked in 2 minutes after the bell had rung.
When I started middle school I had to take the bus, but I was still able to walk to the pick-up point, where I would always do my best to arrive no less than 10 minutes before the bus was scheduled to get there. I had to be the first on the bus so that I could choose a seat in the middle to back half of the bus, and always sit by the window. It was socially much safer for me to have the opportunity to tell someone they couldn’t sit with me versus having someone else tell me I couldn’t sit with them. I was certainly never one of the cool kids, which came with its own bag of struggles, but at least I could choose where to sit, and to a certain extent who could sit with me.
Group projects have always given me intense anxiety. Sitting in a circle with a few other people, usually with someone who I know doesn’t care about the class or the grade would make me break out in a cold sweat with uncertainty, feeling doomed to fail because someone else may or may not do their portion of the project. If I told you that I never did two or more parts of the project just in case the other person didn’t do their part, or didn’t do it up to the standard I thought we needed, I’d be lying. I’d rather do three or four times as much work as I was supposed to do or even really needed to do just so that I’d know the work would be done, and what quality it would be.
As an employed adult I was never late for a shift unless something was seriously wrong. I was 5 minutes late for a shift once due to a bus breaking down and having to transfer mid route, and when I arrived the manager looked so relieved, and like he was about to send out a search party.
For as long as I can remember I’ve been the one to make lists and labels for just about anything. Every day and special occasion cleaning checklists, shopping lists broken down by store, things to do before baby arrives, and if you hand me a label maker and tell me to go nuts nothing will ever be misplaced again! While in recent years I have gotten better at delegating, I very much still operate under the “oh I’ll just do it” mindset.
But why? I am lucky enough in life to have a very capable husband who not only is able and willing to share the workload but actually wants to, and in past leadership positions I’ve had amazing employees that almost always jump in and help anytime I asked.
On a recent rainy drive to the library for playtime with Eloise I let my mind wander a bit trying to come up with an answer to just that question, and ended up coming up with a few possibilities.
One theory is that it’s about seeking the control I was never able to have as a child. When I was young there was almost nothing in my life that was in my control. I know this is common for most kids, but it’s something I really craved. My parents fought constantly, we were always late for everything, and I never even so much as got to choose what we had for dinner. When I was 9 I decided I was going to be a vegetarian, and that may have been the only real decision I got to make for myself when I was young.
My father was diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder when I was in my 20s, so when I was growing up my mom likely thought he was just particular. I think my mom just hoped life would be easier if we went along with what he wanted to eat or where he wanted to go.
Fortunately, many common practices in child raising have changed significantly since I was small. I do not hold the choices my parents made against them at all, they did the best they could with the information they had, but I will do what I can to let my kids feel they have more control over their day to day lives. You want to wear a tutu and your raincoat to school? Go for it! You don’t want to give your uncle a hug goodbye? That’s ok, your body, your choice! Should we go to the zoo or the park today? This is their lives too, and they should have some say in what happens in it.
Another theory that may only apply to some aspects of craving such control is that it’s not control of the situation exactly that I’m seeking, rather I want people to be mad at me instead of me being mad at them.
When on the water I prefer to be in a kayak over a canoe not because I want to be in my own boat or because I think we’ll all have a better experience this way, but because of the boat flips I want to be mad only at myself. And when doing group projects I didn’t do all that extra work because I thought I was the best at whatever we were doing (in fact I was typically a pretty average student) rather if we failed the assignment I wanted the group to only be mad at me instead of me being mad at someone else in the group.
This has also applied so much throughout my adult life and relationships. I’ll pick where we go to dinner so that if it’s bad you can be mad at me and I don’t have to be mad at you. I’ll choose how we set up the living room so that if it’s ugly and doesn’t function well guests can blame me and not you. I’ll select all the baby items we need and if they turn out to not work the way we’d hoped it’ll be my fault and not yours. It’s taken me a long time to realize that in a healthy relationship you are a team, and you share both the successes and the failures.
My third theory is that as a parent, I’ve done the most work to become an expert in my craft and therefore whatever I say is law. I read the articles, I listen to the podcasts, my Instagram reels are more child development than silly dogs. I’m currently in month 12 of my unpaid job raising a tiny human to be the best she can be. I wake up thinking about what she’s going to do that day, things I can teach her and new experiences we can share. I spend naptimes planning meals or writing so I can get my big feelings out in a safe way to be the best mom I can for her. I make sure she is meeting and exceeding all her milestones and keep mental and physical notes of her likes and dislikes as well as rashes that may appear after certain activities or foods. Yesterday she preferred to be carried every day, but today she wants to be on the ground exploring the world on her own.
It’s all me managing that information. Nearly every hour of every day all of that and so much more is running through my head, not my husband’s, not my family’s, not my friend’s. So why would I want to let someone else take the lead?
My final theory on my need to control is something I plan to explore in more detail in a future post. I recognize that I physically and emotionally can’t do it all, and that I have to ask for help. Especially as I prepare to be the primary parent of two under two, there’s just no way I can manage it all on my own, nor do I have to. But one reason I struggle so hard to relinquish control is that so many times when I have let someone else take the lead it just ends up being more work for me in the long run.
So frequently, not just in parenting but in professional and educational situations as well, it takes so long to explain and demonstrate how I want something done that I could have just done it twice on my own. And then there’s all the energy spent worrying from afar if things are being taken care of to my standards.
“Go enjoy a day off, I’ve got this!”
Cut to me at lunch away from my job, a ball of nerves and anxiety glued to my phone pretending I’m enjoying a relaxing day away from my responsibilities, only to return later to see I am going to have to put in extra work over the next day or so to fix all the help I was given.
Can my need to control every situation I find myself in be helped? The mob boss that lives in my brain would argue that she’s got this and doesn’t need any help, but my aching back and tired mind would say I certainly hope so. Recognizing that some of my issues originated from a rocky childhood and that at the end of the day all I’m trying to do is help my family have the best possible life certainly helps things.
Some more introspection, possibly therapy, talks with my husband, and some deep baby cuddles are definitely on my current to-do lists for working towards being a more collaborative wife and mother
