Some decades ago, I went through a sustained process of self-change. It could plausibly have been labeled the result of a quarter-life crisis. When I was 25, I divorced my first husband and disassociated myself from the Jehovah’s Witnesses, which my parents had each been members of prior to my birth (my father’s parents had converted before he was born). My first husband, similarly, was the result of multiple generations of Jehovah’s Witnesses. This is not common. Most people who are JW’s stop being JWs after a few years.
Jehovah’s Witnesses, like many high-demand religious and related groups, actively discourage many activities broadly accepted within society. In some cases, that’s healthful (you have to quit smoking, for example, to become or stay a member). In other cases, it very much is not. They have a complicated, hostile, largely negative and frequently litigious orientation towards education, health care, mental and emotional health care, etc. They see human life and the universe as a whole as the setting for a War between a Creator God and His primary adversary, and our lives as choosing a side. They look forward to a prophesied end to this battle, and their reward at the end of resurrection to a life on Earth that never ends, and in which they enjoy perfect happiness and health. They are pretty coy about whether or not that will involve sexual reproduction or not for humans, or, really, any creature at all.
Being born into a Jehovah’s Witness family, with a substantial portion of one’s extended family also members of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, creates a world-within-a world. I had not really been aware of the degree to which this was true until after college when I finally left, and thought back to what an anthropology professor had said along these lines to me some years earlier. Because Jehovah’s Witnesses practice shunning of ex-members, and enforce the practice of shunning, requiring even close relatives of ex-members to completely sever ties with ex-members AND because Jehovah’s Witnesses, like most cults and high-demand organizations, discourage ties to people outside the organization, I didn’t have much in the way of a social network when I left. I would eventually learn that I also have autism (and, indeed, a lot of those Jehovah’s Witness relatives do, too), which surely did not help.
What I did have was a highly compensated college degree and a good job. Since the one part of my life that was functioning well was work, I focused on that. Some years later, after retiring from Amazon, and looking at the dying embers of the relationship that had followed my first marriage, I realized that it was a good time to really think through how I was going to live the rest of my life and hopefully enjoy it, in a more or less stable way.
The results of the conversations I had with friends in an effort to figure all that out (and the books and articles I read) went into Exercises in Happiness. (
https://www.seanet.com/~rla/advice/toc.html )The core idea is simple and none of it is new — it’s a mechanical approach to getting one’s basic needs met more or less in priority order. I’ve reread that work over the years a few times, and feel no particular need to go back and correct it. It’s not where I am now, and for that I am grateful.
After several years of enjoying life, developing better relationships, traveling, exercising, learning martial arts and some other things, I decided that it was a good time to try to have a child. I didn’t feel I had to have a child — my friends had children, and I enjoyed being around them and providing some help where I could — but I felt like I would regret it if I did not try. The results of that went into a sprawling and not linearly organized work I titled Reproduction for the Hopelessly Geeky (I would realize that I had autism towards the end of this project). (
https://www.seanet.com/~rla/repro/TopicList.html)
I now find myself — predictably! — at that point in life where the kids are Old Enough so that I can think in a more sustained manner, and consider another large project. (There are also fiction projects, but I’m not talking about any of that here.) I have been working, on and off, on I Can’t Stop Thinking About Your Brother, which is an attempt to help families and individuals figure out how to calibrate Their Crazy Person (we all have at least one), and what kind of relationship it is possible to have with Their Crazy Person, and strategies for collaborating with other friends, chosen family and family with respect to Their Crazy Person. But mostly, about what kinds of mental and emotional health care options are available, and what can reasonably be expected from those options. It’s a remarkably intractable problem, and the terrain around us in mental and emotional health care options is evolving rapidly. I’m not sure I’ll ever meaningfully finish that project.
I find myself drawn more and more to the general problem of reducing extreme swings of emotional response to frustrating and intractable problems. Obviously, there’s the just give up option, but I often don’t like that (and find it very difficult to stick with, too!). In general, I allow myself only goals I believe to be attainable (and I strongly advocate for only attainable goals). But I’ve never limited what I was willing to entertain as possible choices to Obviously Attainable. It can take a lot of thought and research and understanding to recognize what is attainable and what is not (and, equally, one can make mistakes. Alas.).
I am also having a lot of really fantastic conversations with women friends — and some men — of a certain age. The conversations are about our frustrations with our relationships: with our partners, with our partner’s family, with our family of origin. But mostly, these are conversations about frustrations with in-laws, as the preceding generation loses capacity and then passes, and as the next generation leaves the nest, sort of. When I was younger, I read a lot of articles about “The Sandwich Generation”: adult women who were simultaneously juggling full time jobs, growing children, and aging parents. Nothing about what I am dealing with, or what my friends are dealing with, are “The Sandwich Generation”. In general, we enjoy enough prosperity that we are not expected to supply hands-on care to the aged. More typically, the aging in-laws are surprisingly resistant to any assistance or involvement beyond enabling. And also in general, our children are at least well past toddler level demands by the time the press of aging in-laws becomes great.
It is in this context that I am drawn to the general problem of reducing extreme swings of emotional response to frustrating and intractable problems. I’ll be needing a title. Please help.
