The Illusion of Control

I think that I am finally understanding that I have been delusional for most of my life.  I spend a great deal of time plotting and planning and orchestrating so that things turn out the way I think they should.  Sometimes it happens.  And it is those sometimes that feed into my delusions, fueling my notion that I actually have control over life.  But when I stop and look back...really look back...I see that the only control I have is over myself, and even that is subject to circumstances far beyond my control.

For quite some time, just when I think I have it all figured out and am ready to start the next phase of my plan, I hit a major bump in the road that has set me back, and that bump is usually accompanied with pain--physical, emotional, psychic.  I am beginning to wonder if this life is about learning that, in fact, I don't have control, and that I need to let go and not hold so tightly to the plans I have made for myself and the people around me.

I have gotten better at this as I grow older, but even now, I experience the sting of disappointment over things that I know I cannot change, but desperately want to.  I have been a "fixer" for most of my life...another of my coping mechanisms, because if I can "fix" whatever is wrong, I have taken control of the situation...or so I think.  I the past five years, however, I have had far too many instances where I have been blindsided by circumstance, providing a regular reminder of my own impotence.

My son's suicide four and a half years ago dropped me to my knees.  As a parent, you think you know your children, and even though my children came to me through marriage, I had been their parent since they were small children, and in the years before his death, Adam and I were very close.  He came to me with his problems and asked for advice.  He opened up about his hopes and fears; he talked freely about his struggles.  Or so I thought.  The Sunday before his Monday night death, he was here with us and his daughter, sharing pizza and his latest problems with the woman he was seeing. Late Monday night, those problems came to a head, and he chose to end his life. We got the call Tuesday as we were coming home from my birthday dinner.  From that moment and for the next several weeks, I was on autopilot because the enormity of what had just happened was just too much to comprehend.  And it still is.  As parents, we both keep asking ourselves what we could have done differently, what we had missed, and what finally drove him into his bedroom with a gun as the only solution.  And we just have no answers.  We could have helped, could have maybe "fixed" some of the problems we found out about later, but those options didn't exist because our child was an adult who ultimately made his own decisions.

Now, as parents, we struggle again with circumstances beyond our control.  Like most parents, we wanted better for our children...better than we had, freedom from the struggles we faced early on, an easier path.  And like most parents, we tried to teach and model how to get to that place in life.  But adult children make their own choices, and whether we agree or not is irrelevant.  We can only sit by and watch how things play out.  We have no control.  And what we want for them is irrelevant.  Yet, we still ask the same questions with no answers.

So, once again I sit on the sidelines, hurting for my child, but not in a position to change anything.  My therapist tells me not to "futurize," and that is difficult for me, because I still plot and plan and orchestrate, even though I recognize I can only do this for myself and ultimately, my outcomes are hit or miss depending more on circumstance...or planetary alignment...than anything else.  The illusion of control is still very pervasive in my life, even with eyes wide open.  Burns knew this long ago...

The best laid schemes of mice and men
Go often awry,
And leave us nothing but grief and pain,
For promised joy!