You Are Responsible, But You Are Not to Blame

It was half past eight and I had asked him three times. Maybe five.

The sixth time I didn’t ask. My voice came out sharp and fast and landed somewhere it shouldn’t have, and the worst part wasn’t the volume. It was that I recognised it.

Not my voice. Hers.

A particular clipped rhythm I have known since I was five years old,

coming out of my own mouth, in my own kitchen, at my own child.

He went upstairs. I stayed where I was with the tea towel still in my hand, running it back, sentence by sentence, working out what kind of mother that made me.

I’m very good at that part. I’ve had decades of practice.

Poland, late eighties. Dzieci i ryby głosu nie mają. Children and fish have no voice. Everybody’s mother said it, mine included, and nobody meant anything cruel by it that was just the arrangement.

Good and quiet were the same word, near enough.

Thinking of it, I can’t remember learning the next part… I only remember always knowing it. If something went wrong, the quickest way back into the warm was to say it was me - say it first, look sorry enough. Then the temperature in the room would come back down.

So guilt isn’t new to me. We’ve known each other since I was about six. The problem is that it never arrives looking like guilt. It looks like taking things seriously,like being someone who cares about getting it right, and that’s the disguise I fall for every single time.

It isn’t, though. I have stood in that kitchen for forty-five minutes hating myself, and not once did it make me a better mother. It made me a worse one, later, because by the time I went up I was so full of my own shame there was no room left for him.

There’s a line in A Course in Miracles that took me a while to accept:

“You are responsible, but you are not to blame.”

I read it twice the first time. It sounds like it’s arguing with itself. But sit with it a while and the two halves come apart cleanly, because they’re facing in opposite directions.

Blame looks backwards. It wants payment for something that has already happened. It runs on a quiet belief that if I suffer enough over this, I’ll have earned the right to do better next time - which is not how any of it works, though I’ve spent years testing the theory.

Responsibility looks forwards. It isn’t interested in what my shouting says about me as a person. It only wants to know what I’m going to do about it, starting now.

Guilt asks: what does this make me?

Responsibility asks: what happens next?

Only one of those questions has an answer.

The psychology says something similar in colder language. How we behave under pressure is built out of what happened to us when we were small. Nervous system patterns. Survival strategies. Ways of coping we picked up at an age when nobody consults you. I didn’t choose that clipped rhythm, it was installed, and most of what comes out of any of us at half past eight on a Tuesday was installed.

That’s the part I’m not to blame for.

But the moment I hear it and know what it is, something changes. I’m responsible for what I do with it now. That isn’t a punishment. It’s the only real freedom on offer.

So I went upstairs.

I sat on the edge of his bed and told him I was sorry, that I got it wrong, that being tired is not a

reason to speak to him like that. He said okay in the way they do, already halfway back to whatever he’d been doing. That was it. Ninety seconds.

But he saw the whole thing. He saw a person get it wrong, notice, and come back. Which is more use to him than a mother who never got it wrong in the first place, because he is going to get things wrong for the rest of his life and he needs to know what people do afterwards.

Nobody came back for me. That’s not an accusation, it’s just what it was - you can’t hand out what you were never given. But it did mean I had to learn the coming-back part from scratch, in my thirties, badly, with a real child standing in front of me.

Healing isn’t deciding it didn’t happen. It’s being able to look straight at it without needing to punish anybody, including yourself.

So put some of it down. Not because you’ve stopped caring. Because you cannot walk a child towards love while you’re standing in the kitchen at nine at night quietly taking yourself apart.

They’re watching how you treat yourself.

They’re taking notes.

With love,

Ewelina