Denying the Defensive Crouch

When what I do post-decision might matter more than the choosing.

The metaphor:

Look, I get that it’s weird to just ask someone what their principles are. It’s not a standard question: the terms aren’t clear, and even if they were, most people haven’t thought about it like that. I mean, I couldn’t list mine, if someone asked me, but I wish I could.

The story:

Last week, I wrote how my mom taught me to treat my sister like a friend. It was helpful to have her spell this out, and I accepted the principle because I could see that it worked.

Beyond advising us how to treat each other, my mom had principles for her behavior, too. “You can ask me anything and I’ll answer,” she’d say to my sister and me. As we got older, she gave us rules and advice about situations we might encounter, but she also told us she’d be there if things went sideways. “If there’s something you don’t want to do, you can always blame me and say I won’t let you,” she’d say. “If you’re ever in trouble, you can call and I’ll come get you, no questions asked.”

My mom is a trustworthy person. She’s caring and reliable, she’s thoughtful and kind. But I believed she would stand by these principles because she told me that she already had – at what she considered to be a great personal cost.

Throughout my childhood and to this day, one of her go-to stories about hard parenting is the time I asked her if Santa Claus was real. I have no memory of this, but in her regular retellings, it was moments before the school bus was due. Maybe I was in first or second grade? She says she bent down to hug me goodbye and I gripped her collar, a primary school mobster. “I need to know,” I apparently insisted. “The other kids on the bus all know.”

“I tried to sidestep,” my mom recounts with distress. “I said something like, Well, we’re all Santa’s helpers, and you were not having any of it. No! You said, shaking my collar. You wanted the truth.” The retelling seems involuntary, like the memory haunts her. “I thought about how, in the future, you might need to ask me something important. I wanted you to know you could come to me. Finally I admitted, Santa isn’t real. The light went out of your eyes a little, but you squared your shoulders and nodded. Then you went out the door to catch the bus.”

To this day, my mom’s still telling that story, like she hopes it can exorcise her guilt. I wouldn’t wish the guilt on her, but it shows the stakes for her of ruining Santa Claus for me. The fact that she did it anyway shows she holds her principles close. She told me what’s important to her, on the principle level, and she demonstrated it’s true through real decisions.

I’ve been writing about decisions: how others’ questions about future decisions made me feel behind. How my sense of what I want has been confounded, and my fear of the unknown can create dread. I have this growing sense that I’ve spent too much energy trying to make the right decisions, what principles are the place to focus instead.

There’s one decision in particular that’s weighed on me: whether or not to have kids. On one hand, I’ve never wanted them. On the other, I’ve been afraid of what it means to make a decision that I can’t take back. I’ve worried about this since my early twenties, living in DC, so I was excited to attend a March 2013 event called “Maybe Baby.”

Hosted by Sixth & I, the event promised an interactive discussion for “women unsure about having children.” The biggest thing to know, the speaker had said, is there’s no perfect reproductive choice. “Whether you have children or not,” she told us, “there will be moments in your life where the opposite choice would have been better.”

I hadn’t realized I was looking for a single perfect answer, but it was a relief to get permission to stop. It’s hard to accept that I can’t protect my future self from hardship or even regret, but when I do, it takes the pressure out of the decision. Twelve years later, I wonder if that advice applies more broadly. If there are no perfect decisions, the time I spend sorting through options would be better spent practicing how to be grateful and content now, when things aren’t perfect, rather than hoping there’s a decision I can make to protect myself – hoping I can create a future so good, I won’t need to resill.

I think of this mindset as a mental defensive crouch, bracing against an imagined future blow. Partly, I think I learned it from well-intentioned teachers, who painted the future as a scary place that could only be endured through hard work now. In middle school, they warned me I had to buckle down if I wanted to be ready for high school; in high school, they were clear that I needed to focus to be ready for college. College, they made clear, was foundational for a good life, though no one explained how. I’d have a stronger network and higher earning potential, but no one was talking about what a good life actually entailed, just how to make sure I didn’t preclude one with bad decisions.

Then I graduated, and suddenly making decisions was much harder. I was still nervous for the future out of habit, though I wasn’t sure exactly what to fear. Was the defensive crouch supposed to last forever? When was I supposed to learn how to relax and enjoy myself? For the first few years of my twenties, I had a pit in my stomach every day, feeling like I should be sacrificing for some future end, but not knowing what it was. Like with my relief at Maybe Baby, I didn’t fully understand what I was afraid of until I heard two quotes that helped release the pressure.

A friend of mine shared the first quote: “You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” I’d been trying to figure out where I was going, what success would look like in my career and my life. When I heard E.L. Doctorow’s words, I breathed deeper. If I wanted to be happy later, maybe the best way to build towards that was to find what made me happy now.

The other quote appeared in a hotel room, painted into the art that hung on the wall. “How we spend our days is how we spend our lives,” it read, which I would later learn Annie Dillard wrote. Life wasn’t some dinner party I was setting up for: life was happening now.

Having a better handle on these concerns helped me recognize them in Oliver Burkeman’s words with Ezra Klein. “This specific sense of racing against time,” he says, “of trying to get on top of our lives and in control — to make this the year when we finally master the situation of doing our jobs or being parents or spouses or anything else — is a really specific, acute modern phenomenon.”

Ironically, he says, this anxiety stems from our sense of progress: “Go back to the medieval period when people would have lived in this situation of completely endemic uncertainty...They wouldn’t have postponed [happiness] until they felt in control. They wouldn’t have said, ‘Before we can have a festival, before we can sit back and look at the stars, we have to know what we’re doing here and feel in charge and in control of things’ — just exactly because that possibility of being in control of things, for most people anyway, was so remote.”

I think focusing on decisions is a way of focusing on control. When I internalized the principle of deferring gratification in order to achieve some platonic ideal, it was at the expense of learning how to cultivate happiness now, in this day, in this life. On the other hand, letting go of specific decisions and trying to steep each day in principles like my relationship with my sister, that’s when I feel most grounded. Sort of like a serious primary kid who’s just had their Santa Claus beliefs crushed – but knows she can trust her mom.

The question: How long did you believe in Santa?

Thanks for reading! If something resonates, please consider clicking the heart, replying with a public comment or private email, or forwarding to someone else.