I am back in my home country, feeling some heaviness with respect to my relationship to home again. This time I feel stronger due to experiencing a different kind of home in Tucson, with my beloved. A very supportive home, a very supportive community. Which I have never had growing up here in Croatia.
Lack of support during childhood (and until very recently) meant that my self-worth has never been laid on great foundations. This has made me vulnerable to different types of disrespectful and sometimes abusive relationships. The lack of support and diminished self-worth runs in both my ancestral lines in different ways. In my immediate family the roles are distributed in very patriarchal ways, which has set me vulnerable in particular to patriarchal harms and sensitive to unpacking them.
One of the arenas where I experienced this the most has been in setting up (and renovating) my house, my home. No wonder I guess, since it has all started for me in my family home, and since construction is such a masculine profession.
First, I was cheated by guys (army and police officers) who sold me the house. I’ve have had crazy neighbors, who harassed me, among other things, through institutions, including police.
I’ve still persisted in my vision of the home sanctuary. And I had some beautiful angels come and help, mostly as volunteers.
But I had a very problematic paid worker. The guy, who was recommended by another “friend-of-a-friend” who presented himself as a gentleman but was a immature person with alcohol problem, had serious alcohol problem, which became obvious relatively soon, after he drunk all the alcohol I had in my house. He did sloppy jobs, treated his assistant badly, and at the end did not finish the job, even though he took the money. There were so many signs that that relationship was not right – pissing in my yard and throwing cigarette butts, screaming at me to give him money in advance. And I had all the patience and understanding, and some fear as well about who is going to finish what he started. As my mother always has had for any disrespectful behavior from my father and other people in her life. I even befriended his wife, who came a few times to check on him, both of us pretending that we don’t see that he was an alcoholic. When he left with his money, I did nothing. Writing this feels as some sort of reparation.
I took me some time to continue with my vision of creating the sanctuary I was dreaming of. After I came back from the US this summer, with better boundaries and more self-worth, I decided to try again. As always I first went into a ritual, a prayer, asking for the Universe to arrange it as it would.
And a young man, a partner of my friend, showed up. He could also dream big and offered an easy and fast and relatively cheap way to bring this vision into life so I let go of all control, again. It mostly worked pretty well, but there have been some issues which I again am feeling unable to address. He really did help a lot, he is a really nice person with good intentions and my friend’s partner, so can I rock the boat? The boat that is still on the shore.
Meanwhile, another man was supposed to do some work on my windows. He took them for a two-day repair 10 days ago. I have been cold for the last week. He apparently has a fever. I have a feeling he has alcohol problems, but I did not say anything (yet).
But what kind of a problem do I have? Why am I not able to trust what I feel and react accordingly and express freely how I feel? Why am I not able to call people on their blind spots, particularly men I “depend on”? Why am I so tolerant of behavior I don’t really endorse, even in my own home, the one that I am building myself, not the one where my father ruled?
This is my blind spot. Heathy boundaries. (Self)trust. Staying true to myself.
One of the reasons is that this was what my mother has always done – pretended that certain things don’t exist, finding excuses for people’s bad behavior, to avoid conflict, to avoid having to deal with it. Not to make it worse. This is very ingrained in me.
The other part, and also related to my mom, is that I am not sure that it can be better. I feel indebted almost for every little thing someone does – particularly man, even if I have paid for it. And this brings me to another thing I am able to see currently, which has to do with scarcity mentality that I also still have. It also has to do with the type of relationship I choose, where there are no clear boundaries, as it was the case in my home of origin. And finally, my dream of community, of people being self-responsible, not needing rules and formal agreements to regulate their behavior, contributes to my inability to set up the rules myself.
What will it take? What will it take personally, and for us as a society to have healthy, respectful relationships in all areas of life?
Why are there so many problems in the relationships between construction workers and homeowners, men and women, people in general? When will we be able to integrate masculine and feminine principles within ourselves and in our relationship? And when will be able to move from scarcity mentality into one of abundance? So that there is a natural flow running through solid containers. I am trying to build my solid container. It has not been easy, but there is no other choice. As always, writing helps me.
