Possessed, Obsessed, and Otherwise Unwell Getting Advice on Motherhood, Love, Work, Anxiety

Getting What You Wanted, and What It Wanted Back

Welcome back to the only column where the advice is free and the judgment is complimentary. This issue is about getting what you wanted and then finding out what it wanted from you, so naturally the mailbag arrived pre-haunted. Four of you wrote in about the same disease wearing four different outfits.

Before we start, the usual disclaimer, updated for the season. I am not a therapist. A therapist has a license, which means a therapist has things she legally cannot say to you. I have no license and no such restraint, which is the entire value proposition of this column. Your therapist has to gently guide you toward your own conclusions over eighteen sessions. I can tell you the conclusion right now, for the price of a magazine, and I can be funny about it, and you can be mad at me instead of at yourself, which is a service.

I read every one of these twice. Once to laugh, once to feel it, because both are usually the correct response, and anyone who tells you to pick one is selling something. Here is what came in.

Sidelined in Scarborough: Loving a Friend Stuck on a "Maybe"

My best friend is completely obsessed with a guy who will not call her his girlfriend. He texts at midnight, disappears for days, and she reorganizes her whole life around a maybe. I have said everything. She defends him. I am losing my mind and possibly my friend. What do I do?
— Sidelined in Scarborough

Your friend is not dating a man. She is dating the maybe, and the maybe is the most addictive substance on earth because it never runs out. A yes would end the game. A no would end the game. He gives her neither, on purpose or by accident, does not matter, and the not-knowing lights up her brain like a slot machine that occasionally pays in one-word texts.

Here is the part you do not want. You cannot argue someone out of a high. Every time you list his crimes, you become the cop, and nobody quits anything to please the cop. You have made yourself the buzzkill in her love story, which means the worse he treats her, the more she needs you to be wrong about him, because being wrong about him means she is not stupid, she is in love, and those feel very different from the inside.

So stop prosecuting him. It is not working and it is costing you her. Instead say this, once, no lecture attached: I am not going to talk about him anymore. But I am not going anywhere, and when this ends, and it will end, I will not say I told you so, and I will bring the wine. Then shut up and stay. You are not her intervention. You are her landing pad. Keep the runway clear and let the crash do the teaching, because it will, and it teaches better than you do. You are not losing her. You are waiting for her. Those are different, and the difference is the whole job.

Ungrateful in the Corner Office: The Job Everyone Would Kill For

I got the promotion I wanted for years. Corner office, the raise, the title. I cried when I got it. Now I cry in a different way. I hate my life and I feel like a monster for it. People would kill for this job. What is wrong with me?
— Ungrateful in the Corner Office

Nothing is wrong with you, which I know is unsatisfying, so let me make it worse. You got exactly what you wanted, and it turns out what you wanted and what you needed filed for divorce years ago and never told you. The title was a want. Wants are loud. They photograph well. Needs are quiet, they do not have a corner office, and they have been standing in the hallway this whole time going, hey, remember me, I am the one who needs to see her kids awake.

"People would kill for this job" is the exact sentence keeping you in it, so let us retire it. People would kill for a lot of things they have never had to live inside. Their envy is not evidence. It is just noise from people who also do not know the difference between a want and a need, cheering you toward the same wall they would hit.

You do not have to quit tomorrow. That is the false binary, martyr or runaway. But you do have to stop performing the gratitude you do not feel, because the performance is what is actually killing you, not the job. Sit down and write the ugly list. Not pros and cons. What specifically did this cost, in named hours and named people, and is the thing you are buying worth that specific price. Not worth it in the abstract. Worth it on a Tuesday. If the answer is no, the title is not a prison, it is a door you are too scared to be seen walking out of. Being envied is a hell of a drug. It is not the same as being happy, and you already know that, or you would not have written to me.

Under Surveillance in Halifax: When "Just Anxious" Becomes Control

My partner checks my phone, asks where I am, needs to know who I am with. They say they are "just anxious" and they had a bad ex. I love them. But I feel watched in my own relationship. Am I the bad guy for wanting privacy?
— Under Surveillance in Halifax

No, you are not the bad guy, and I am going to need you to stop auditioning for the role. "They had a bad ex" is a reason. It is not a permit. Everyone has a bad ex. Most of us respond to it by being a little cautious, not by installing ourselves as the head of someone's personal security detail with full phone access and a check-in schedule.

Let us name it correctly, because "just anxious" is doing a lot of laundering here. Anxiety is a feeling someone has. What you are describing is a set of behaviours someone does to you to manage their feeling by controlling your life. Those are different. One deserves compassion. The other deserves a boundary, and the fact that a real wound sits underneath it does not change what it is costing you now. Sympathy for the origin, accountability for the behaviour. You can hold both. You have to.

Here is the specific move, because "communicate your needs" is useless and you deserve better than a fridge magnet. Say: I love you and I am not going to keep proving it by giving up my privacy. The checking has to stop. If the anxiety is this loud, it needs a professional, not my phone, because I cannot be your treatment plan and your partner at the same time. Then watch what happens. If they hear it and get help, you might make it. If they hear it and escalate, if the anxiety suddenly needs even more access, you have your answer, and it is not a diagnosis, it is a door. Love is not supposed to come with a tracking device. You knew that. That is why you wrote.

Ghosting Myself in Winnipeg: Grieving Who You Were Before Kids

I love my kids more than my own life. And I miss who I was before them so much it scares me. Some nights I grieve my old self and then feel disgusting for grieving when my kids are healthy and here. Is something broken in me?
— Ghosting Myself in Winnipeg

Nothing is broken. You are just doing something the culture has decided you are not allowed to do out loud, which is feel two enormous true things at once without apologizing for either. Let me say the quiet part at full volume: you are permitted to love your children completely and grieve the person you were before them, on the same night, in the same body, and neither feeling is a crime against the other.

The reason it scares you is that we have built a religion around motherhood where any sentence that is not pure devotion gets read as a threat to the kids. It is not. Your children are not made less safe by your grief. They are not in the room when you miss her. Missing your old self is not a withdrawal from the account of loving them. That math is a lie you were handed to keep you quiet, and quiet mothers do not ask for help, which is convenient for everyone except mothers.

So here is your actual assignment, and it is not a gratitude journal. Go find one hour. Not for self-care, I hate that phrase, it has been to the spa and come back meaningless. One hour to be the person you were before, whatever she did, the loud dinner, the aimless walk, the thing with no logistical purpose. Not to get her back, she is not lost, she is underneath, doing her hair in a mirror only you can see. Just to visit. Prove to yourself she is still in there. Then go back to the people who call you Mom and let both women share the one life, because they are going to anyway, and the grief gets quieter the second you stop treating it like a betrayal and start treating it like proof that you were a whole person before, and still are, tonight, even now.