Good girls don’t cry; they plough through.

Driving to see my knee surgeon 4 months post reconstructive patella surgery made me upset again. I sat in the waiting room hiding my tears. I wasn’t upset about the accident though.

I’m always deeply touched when people who don’t know me at all, are nice to me. Why are you so nice to me? Do I not need to be ‘worthy’ of your attention and kindness?

I always had to be ‘worthy’. I needed to earn it. And so, I’ve spent most of my life proving that indeed, I am worthy. Best school grades, best competition results, Best Model of Poland[1].  I cleaned the house, I cooked, I did the gardening, I babysat my much-younger sister, and my drinking mother. I had two jobs in high school while preparing for matriculation, I travelled to Warsaw on my own quietly coming back home at 1am so as not to wake up my parents or they’d get mad. I didn’t cry when my mother passed away, I had a presentation at Uni on Monday. Good girls don’t cry, they plough through. Falling apart would not bring my mother back. Crying was frowned upon. Apparently, I cried a lot when I was a child, only to be ridiculed for being a baby. But Nobody Puts Baby into a Corner.

So, I didn’t cry. I took drugs instead. And I befriended an eating disorder. It didn’t happen overnight. It crept up on me slowly. Modelling was just an excuse for controlling my food. Modelling was great as it made my father proud. I was worthy. I finally did something good!

But the hype never lasts.

I’ve just finished the biography by Elle MacPherson, and she talks about going to rehab for alcoholism. She protested when placed in a ward with “the anorexics”: I’m not one of them!

You see, sometimes we pretend for so long, the mask becomes ingrained. We don’t even realise we are wearing a mask. Is it really my personality or I’m in survival mode again?

And if we pretend long enough, we can’t distinguish between the two, we can’t remember who we are.

And so, when I had to sit for a week with a broken patella waiting for the surgery, I suddenly started to remember. I had nowhere to go. I had to sit with my weak ‘baby’ body. I became a baby. I had to ask for help. I had to be looked after. I was a burden again. I felt like a burden.

And I had to sit with my feelings. And in those moments of grief for my former able body, in those moments of stillness, I started to re-remember. Or maybe, for the first time I realised that I cannot do it all alone. That I cannot go on pretending that I’m this or that.

So, the unravelling started to take place. I had to decipher what’s mine and what isn’t. Like after a break-up.  I was divorcing myself. I had to start and find myself again. But who am I without the shield? In my mind, without a shield, without my perfectionism - I’m a sticky goo. A needy baby in a crib.

Carolyn Cowan poignantly puts it in her book ‘Shame’: when you drop, when you lose yourself, you return to the place when you’ve been shamed. When I was a baby, I cried all the time. So, on many occasions, my parents left me in my room crying myself to sleep. My parents told me this story many times.

Clearly, I was too needy, too weak, too pathetic in my baby-ishness to deserve love and attention. I had the best training to understand this early on. So I buckled up. I zipped my mouth shut.

And so, this patella experience opened a can of worms. I thought I hid it well. Buried it deep. And the unwanted tears came flooding. All these bottled tears.

I cried for this baby in the crib. For not being good enough for my parent’s attention. For not crying less. For not smiling enough and for not being a better baby. Surely, I could have tried harder…

Like a shipwreck survivor spat out on the ocean of tears, I had to start anew. I had to realise that nobody is going to love this baby. We can’t turn back the time. I must become a parent to this baby now; me myself and I. Nobody is coming. I think the thought in itself is so incomprehensible that you want to drop again.

But once you realised there’s no other way, you can start anew.

And so, at the age 47 I’m a baby again. And I’m parenting this baby at the same time too. But this time I’m trying to parent it with love, not with strict punitive discipline. Because I’m consciously choosing to be a better parent. A parent to myself.

And so, I’m learning to be myself. Once the mask came off, and the divorce case settled, and I’m no longer married to this resilient perfectionist, I’m left with nothing.  

And I think that’s the scariest part. We often don’t choose to divorce because we don’t know what’s going to be left. We often don’t even try to do this inner work, because it requires us to start again.

On reflection, the accident was a gift. Some people get cancer; some people have a near-death experience. I got a broken leg.

And a newborn baby.

[1] I only took part in this competition in 1995; I didn’t win it though. I wasn’t thin enough…