Getting Closer Close Enough: Understanding Boundaries

What exactly are boundaries...?

I want to share some of what I've been learning about understanding boundaries. But first...I’m curious.

What’s your definition of boundaries?

Mine was something like: the way you stop people from doing stuff you don’t like. Or: things I don’t like but don’t want to tell people about because then I’ll look picky or selfish or bratty and get banished.

Prentis Hemphill has a great definition of boundaries:

"Boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously."

I remember when I read this for the first time I thought, oh. This makes no sense to me. So...boundaries are not just about keeping people out? They’re about...love? I didn’t understand what that meant.

I didn't really start understanding boundaries until I stopped speaking to my parents last summer.

Being a good girl

My relationship with my parents is complicated. We fought a lot when I was a kid, a teenager, in my twenties. In my thirties, after I had kids, I knew I wanted things to be different. I wanted my children to have grandparents that were around regularly. And so I stopped fighting and got agreeable. I became a peacekeeper. I decided that I was going to smooth everything over, make everything okay. I made plans I didn’t want to make, bit my tongue. I felt responsible for their happiness.

I thought I was doing a good job. Being a responsible daughter. I read books like Codependent No More and did things like learning about my attachment style. I went to therapy every week to process and heal. I wrung myself out trying to be a good girl.

And really, it wasn’t just with my parents. I've been trying to please everyone for a very long time, much earlier than my thirties. Creating safety by hiding my true preferences, wants, needs, and standards. I thought I was being a good daughter, wife, mother, friend, co-worker, and fellow citizen by erasing myself for what I told myself was for the good of the other people around me.

What I was actually doing was preventing anyone from truly knowing me at all. Because I had no boundaries.

But what are they? And if they are so important, why don’t we get taught about them?

Actually, we are born with boundaries. As children, we don’t need to know what they are or get taught about them because we just...have them. We say them freely and with great abandon, sometimes even yelling them at the top of our lungs. They are actually trained out of us. We are slowly, day by day, erased from our own lives until we forget that once upon a time we knew exactly who we were and what we wanted.

What could boundaries be?

To me, boundaries are the things that let you know who I am. What I need, what I want, what I’m okay with, how I like to move through the world, and also what matters to me. They are, most importantly, neutral.

What boundaries are not: judgments of you or other people, burdens, things that keep people out, ridiculous, problems, difficult, or selfish.

Why is having boundaries seen as a bad thing? It seems like a good idea to have a world full of humans who know their own minds and limits, who can say, “This is okay with me, this is not okay with me.” Having and understanding boundaries provides clarity. But also...the inconvenience, the lack of uniformity and efficiency. The discomfort of uncertainty. I can hear society stomping its pointy feet, boldly bellowing, “No one has time for this nonsense!” Ugh.

See if any of this sounds familiar:

I’m three years old, and I don’t want to wear a coat, I’m not cold. I don’t like the taste of broccoli, and it hurts when I fall down. I don't want to share my toy. The tag in this shirt is itchy.

I’m told: it's cold you need a coat, the broccoli tastes good, and falling down doesn’t hurt. Sharing makes you happy, and that tag isn't itchy.

I’m thirteen years old. Geometry is bullshit to me. I do want to be popular. It does matter if people don’t like me. I do care what people think.

I’m told: math is important, being popular isn’t important, it shouldn’t matter if people like you, and you shouldn’t care what people think.

I’m thirty years old. It is hard to be an adult. I don’t believe the hype. I question the system. I don’t believe it when people say “that’s just the way it is”.

I’m told: ha ha no one said being an adult was easy, you’re not trying hard enough, you should have done better before, it is just the way it is.

I’m fifty years old. I’m not just imagining it. It is something to cry about. It does feel like forever.

I’m told: we told you so.

I’m three years old. I call ketchup chechups. I say that birds are flying mice. That I can be an astronaut.

I get corrected.

I’m thirteen years old. I think school is stupid. I want to wear stripes and plaid together, or white pants in winter. Grow up to be a writer.

I am corrected.

I’m thirty years old. I don’t want a 9-5. I don’t think work should take over my life. I don’t believe money is everything.

I am corrected.

I’m fifty-four years old. I have my own business. My children don’t care about college. I say they can live with me forever. I stay married but live in a house seven minutes away from my husband. After six years we decide to move back in together. I trail run with a hip replacement.

I am no longer willing to be corrected.

Boundaries aren't a problem

To me, it’s totally fucked up that for the sake of convenience, efficiency, and uniformity our humanity and complexity have been made into problems. Deliberately and subversively creating deep lines of self doubt in children so that long into adulthood we can't remember who we are or what we want. How weird is it that just being old enough to be called a grown up is what’s supposed to "bring back" all the things that were systematically deleted? Oh right, now, just because I’m eighteen, or twenty five, I magically remember what boundaries are and how to communicate them.

A three year old who is told they like broccoli when they don’t turns into a thirty year old with a lack of imagination who over-functions because they don’t trust their own signals. When their system says “something isn’t right” they automatically answer it back with “you don’t know what you’re talking about”. A thirteen year old who is repeatedly told “it doesn’t matter if people like you” when it feels like the most important thing to them at the time turns into a fifty year old who can’t answer the question “What do you want for dinner?”.

What do we do about this?!? It feels like society tells us one thing, but it’s actually another. We wander around sensing something is off, but going along with it because everyone else is going along with it too. We have to learn how to know what we want, how we want it. Not to be selfish, to be human.

I do not want to ignore this

My parents came over for lunch on the last Sunday in July. I got fresh corn from the farmer’s market so I could make corn chowder, because I knew my dad would love it. I chatted with my dad in the kitchen while my mom and the kids talked in the living room. My mom made a rude comment that crushed my daughter. My dad wanted to ignore it. I did not.

In that moment, in that tiny blip, I made a life-altering choice: I do not want to ignore this. I mentally grabbed the rungs of a long forgotten ladder, the one that would lead me back to my erased boundaries. Even now, six months later, I can feel the slow motion, sense where everyone was standing, and the exact instant when I lifted my foot and put it on the bottom rung of that mental ladder. I pulled myself up off the ground I’d inhabited for the last fifty years.

No, I said. We can’t just ignore this. We need to talk about it.

It devolved. My dad acts like an eight year old bully when he doesn’t get his way. My mom likes to gloss it over, pretend nothing bad happened. I know that comes from self preservation, and usually I let it slide, but today? I’m committed. I’d already left the ground. I climbed up another rung.

My dad walked out. Done. Went outside to stand by their car in the hot July sun. My mom, the kids, and I tried to talk more. It wasn’t working. My mom asked in a shaky voice “Do you want me to leave?” and my daughter in a steady voice said “Yes.”

Even now, the power of that moment makes me cry. My daughter was the adult, and I was the child, a little girl who just wanted her mama, willing to erase every bit of me so my mommy and daddy would love me. I walked my mom to the door, and when I say I clung to her like a three year old child, I mean I felt it, my head bowed over her shoulder, my arms clinging to her, our bellies tight against one another. I felt my weight leave the floor, I became small for an instant, a memory. Tears ran down my face with the permanent sorrow of a possible last goodbye.

I shut the door behind her and sank to the floor, sobbing. My mouth open wide in gasping pain, my children rushed to huddle around me, all of us little but bigger now. Eventually we stopped crying, got up and ate some corn chowder, all agreeing that my dad would have loved it.

I wish it wasn't like this

I thought my boundaries were going to cost me my relationship with my parents. And they did, for months. They cost me all of the fall, a sliver of winter, right up until Christmas Day. I emailed them late Christmas morning:

I don’t know what to do, I don't want to get hurt by you anymore. I don't mean disagreeing about things. I mean the way you use words to purposely hurt. I miss you, I wish it wasn't like this. I want to have you in my life.

My mom emailed back soon after:

Do you understand anxiety? Waiting to be attacked; always insecure. What I carry peeks out before I have time to choose the words. I’m sorry I hurt you, sometimes I can’t manage myself very well. I am a know-it-all without an answer...Love always, your mama

I called her immediately.

We talked for an hour.

Understanding boundaries

What I realized, over the five months I didn’t see or speak to my parents last year, is that I want to take responsibility for myself. I want to know myself, what's okay and not okay with me, and share it out loud. I want to see myself as separate from them, that I'm not responsible for their ease, happiness, or well being. We don’t have to agree to be in a loving relationship.

The more myself I am, the closer we can be. I had to take time away to understand and integrate that lesson. Then, eight days after Christmas, in our first in person conversation since last July, I was a version of myself I’d never been with them before. Composed. Adult. Aware. Grounded.

Boundaried.

I finally understand that me smoothing everything over is just kicking the can down the road. It just prolongs the agony for all of us. Me not honestly telling them my own needs or wants hurts our relationship. And the same thing is true with my husband. The same with my kids. Same with my friends, colleagues, and fellow humans.

Boundaries are not selfish. They are not problems, burdens, or walls that keep people out. They are ways we share ourselves with the people around us. They are a doorway into feeling safer, more secure, more at ease. Not because they are easy or convenient, but because over time we teach people who we are.

When we understand boundaries, we don’t spend most of our one wild and precious life expecting people to read our minds. We don’t feel disappointed or misunderstood when others don’t magically know what we need, want, or think. Boundaries take all the guesswork out of it, so no one has to guess anymore.

We know.