Change

 

People will not modify their behavior until their desire to change becomes greater than their desire to remain the same.  -Kain Ramsey, course instructor of Modern Applied Psychology.

Why have I made the changes I have made in my life?  Because my desire to change was greater than my desire to remain the same.  I have committed to not defining myself by my circumstance and I embrace my commitment to myself with joy, wonder, and curiosity.

Before I had a world view, I knew that I wanted my life to change.  The circumstances of my childhood included more than one reason to change.  I wanted my mom to be part of our family.  This was something that I couldn’t change.  None of us could change this.  I wanted my stepmother to be nicer and fairer.  I couldn’t change that either.  I can list a lot of things that I could not change and very few things that I could change.  The sense of helplessness that causes is a brand.  It becomes a way of thinking.  It becomes a behavior.

As I stepped into the world outside of my childhood, I managed to take a sense of helplessness with me.  I believed that I needed someone else to help me, take care of me, or in general change things around me so that I could be happier.   I was taught that I was to be taken care of, so making choices that put me in charge were rare and definitely not thought on deeply.   I did make some pretty big choices for myself, the first one being to keep the baby I carried and at nearly 16 years old I chose to run away from home because I believed that my stepmother would kill my baby while I was at school.  In this case, the facts are not near as important as the belief.  I can’t say that I had any kind of adult sense other than to protect my baby.  I had hoped my boyfriend would take care of me but that didn’t work out. 

My desire for change outweighed my desire to stay with the status quo.  I moved in with my mother believing all would be well and good now that I was with the one person I missed most in the whole world.  My storybook perception of her was the thing that made everything okay during that short period of my life.  She let me eat all the bananas I wanted and she introduced me to shrimp. YUM!  She was extremely permissive as a parent with very few rules and a relaxed structure of family life that bordered on neglect.

Through my mother I met Ben Davis.  He was the most interactive down to earth person that entered my life up until that time.  He had three kids and even though he was divorced and had full custody of his children, he continued to attempt to deal with their mother.  His attention to responsibility was very much like my own father but Ben was and still is one of the most intelligent and educated men I have ever met. It was his intelligence I saw consciously.  The resemblance to the circumstance of my father didn’t become clear to me until years later.  Some people are intellectual and some people are incredibly physical.  Ben was both, an oxymoron who dodges a finite description. 

I turned 17, April 25, 1975 and I married Ben May 3, 1975.  Several of you who are reading this knew Ben, so you have a picture that the others can’t see.   I chose to marry Ben because I was in love with him.  That is how I perceived the first several years of our marriage.  I still believe that I loved him but subconsciously, I was drawn to the safety and stability that he represented.  I know that it is hard for anyone to see how a 17-year-old girl was going to succeed in marriage with a 27-year-old man with three toddlers.  I am certain that it was the fact that I had a baby and was not in school that made this a viable option to my parents, although my mother did warn me about the difficulties I would be facing.  She was unable to change my mind.  

Many things changed once I got married and most of them were for the better.  I had stability.  My husband had a job.  He came home from work every day.  I always knew where he was.  He loved his kids and he loved me. 

As I grew up in that environment, I saw things I couldn’t align myself with and the most prominent one was that Ben didn’t want his oldest daughter to know she was not his biological child.  I knew from my gut and the bottom of my heart that he was wrong not to tell her the truth while she was young enough to process it.  I knew that I couldn’t live in the relationship with him knowing that he was willing to withhold this most important information from his daughter.  I knew that too many people knew the truth for this to bode well for Missy.  I knew that her mother and my mother would probably let the information slip when she was at a vulnerable stage in her life that would cause her irrevocable pain.  I don’t know how I knew this stuff.  Most of all I knew that I wasn’t willing to live with his decision.  I tried to talk to him sensibly about it but he was adamant.  This is where his EQ began to make itself apparent to me.  I took a stand I didn’t know I would take.  It wasn’t calculated.  It came from my personal sense of ethics.  I told him that I wanted a divorce because I was unwilling to watch what was going to happen to that child.  I was willing to make a huge change in my life without any thought as to how I would support myself.

He capitulated.  It wasn’t gracious but he did prove that he didn’t want to lose me.  He called Missy to him.  He was crying as he got down on a knee in front of the five-year-old.  She looked at him with concern but waited for him to speak.

“I’m not your real Daddy,” He said. 

She didn’t even hesitate for one second.  She threw her arms around him and hugged him really tight, “It’s okay, Daddy,” She said, “I still love you!” 

She never even concerned herself enough to discuss it again until she was a teenager.  She did go on a quest to discover her biological parent and interviewed the two candidates Ben knew of.  She decided for herself which one she thought it was and once satisfied that was the end of her quest.  Ben was always her daddy and she upheld that even in the face of her own curiosity.

Maybe not all drastic change has such a beneficial outcome but as I look back through each change that has happened to me that I chose, I see clearly that they were the easiest changes to come to grips with.   The changes that were out of control like Ben’s brain tumor and John’s suicide, were not so easy to rebound from but in retrospect each left me in a state of starting over, of creating a new life, and most of all, taking responsibility for myself. 

I am still in the process of reconstructing my life and I believe that I will always be doing that because I’ve seen the rewards of making changes on purpose, with deliberation, and with love.  As I reconstruct and rebuild my life, determinedly practicing self-love, I am exposed to life’s beauty and love in a bigger way than ever. 

 

Sincerely, Carmen Davis