Dueling Co-dependents
I am constantly amazed by how different my children's personalities are. I Wren's personality is much more like Frank's and Dermot favors me... Poor kid. The other weekend was a prime example of how similar we are and how we are both so co-dependent.
I came over to the house in the morning so that Frank could go to a seminar. I knew that he was low on groceries and was waiting for a grocery delivery so I brought over a treat for breakfast for the kids. I went to Dunkin Donuts and ordered egg wraps and picked the donuts Frank thought they would like and some milk.
Well when I got home we discovered that they had gotten Dermot's egg wrap wrong and that he did not indeed like the donut I had picked. Wren was perfectly happy with hers and, as she sometimes does, seemed to delight in her breakfast just a little too in his face.
Now Dermot is a passionate fellow. He can be joy personified about 80% of the time but that other 20% can be pretty hairy. He is also one of those rare kids who does not like ketchup or cheese and isn't really a big fan of chocolate so his fast food orders often come to us wrong. Normally I remember to check them, but I had forgotten and his sandwich had cheese. He really got upset and was angry about how unfair it was that Wren got her breakfast but one didn't get the right one.
I was on the porch and could hear his tantrum. Frank was talking to him and offered to make him something else but Dermot wasn't able to calm down and accept that yet. As I listened I got more and more uncomfortable. I felt sorry for him, I felt guilty and I wanted to fix it. I went inside and said to Frank that I would go back and get the sand which he wanted and Frank urged me not to. As we discussed it, Dermot came in the room and got even more upset because he didn't want me to go back and spend more money because that would make HIM feel guilty. It was a comedy of errors.
I felt guilty, he felt guilty. It was like dueling banjos of co-dependency! I laughed and said something like, "Dermot, we are as bad as each other!" So I took him in the kitchen and offered again to make him breakfast. He had calmed down by then and we made him something else together.
I worry sometimes that I did this to him either through genetics or by the chaos my addiction has wrought on the family. I realize however that I can't get stuck in that kind of thinking and instead do just what I did, laugh about it so as to lessen the strength of it, and show Dermot that there are healthy ways to solve problems.
