Fast-forward 20 years: she is a young lady, recently graduated from her Masters, widely acknowledged as stylish, poised and responsible. All agree that under her family's combined tutorage, she cannot set a foot wrong; her future is all but assured. Sure, she has had the odd mis-step, a major heartbreak, and a few bruises, but it would be stretching it to say that she has faced any truly trying moments (except perhaps for the heartbreak - that was pretty rough, how rough we may never know)
I know you hear a "but" coming, and you are right: I find myself unable to relinquish the power that I once held over her going down the road to play with her friends, or provide all the answers to her "why" questions. In short, I am unable to cut the proverbial apron strings. This flash of realisation hit me on the first day of 2011, when for the hundredth time I caught myself bitterly complaining about her choice of boyfriend. In my opinion, and truth be told, many of her friends and family share it, she is totally wasting her time with him. By her own admission, he was the safe choice after her big heartbreak, and she while she can be with him now, she does not see a future with him!
Believe me when I tell you that I have examined myself concerning my motives regarding this matter, especially being the unmarried older sister for whom apparently no one has ever been good enough. Maybe I have no business imposing my impossible standards on her, or more precisely, imposing MY standards at all. After all, when I pressed her recently to tell me what really drives her to continue in this relationship she told me that the man makes her happy. Now really, what else do I want to hear? Nevertheless, I pressed further:
"Happy?" I asked "Why? How?"
"Well, he likes me; he is good to me; he, I mean..." she trailed off.
"Chick, so what if he likes you? That is irrelevant if you do not feel the same!"
"Yeah, I know, but - well, he likes me! He is nice to me. He has been there for me... Given all this, I recently decided to give it a chance, and date him properly"
"Date him properly?" I exclaimed, "What, out of gratitude? How can you say you see no future and then in the same breath decide to 'date him properly'? Both those statements cannot be true: one has got to be a lie."
Sighing, she admitted that this was indeed true. Before I could ask her to tell me which it was, her phone rang and she told me she had to go, he was at the gate and they had to go.
It was at that point that I decided to simply stay out of it in future; I mean really! The girl could not be helped. Starting with the new year, I would keep all my opinions to myself, and would ask her also to simply keep mention of him to me to a minimum. Discussing this resolution with an aunt of ours a few days later, she advised me to indeed keep out of it, but that rather than forbid her from mentioning her boyfriend to me, I should endeavour to keep our lines of communication open, and assure my sister that I would respect her choice henceforth. This way, she would know that I would still be there for her whatever happened, and not force her to choose between him and I.
"After all," she reasoned, " we have all made mistakes in our lives, and we survived; not only that, we were even stronger and wiser for it"
Truer words were never spoken, and this is what finally cut through my blind obsession with this issue: I too had made some spectacularly bad decisions in my life, and I was infinitely better for the experiences that followed! I just had to trust that she would be o.k. too, and that I ought to quit trying to control and manipulate her (which was the essence of my threatened ultimatum concerning mentioning her boyfriend to me). Boy, was that a severe wake up call: who would have guessed that all my efforts were aimed at trying to control her and keeping her under my thumb? I certainly couldn't. Not a sweet pill to swallow, but hey, I guess I too still have a thing or too to learn!
