Encouraging Independence, Building Hope

This morning I stood in front of Vickie’s tomb and apologized to her for not letting her be more independent and for not giving her hope at a time when she really needed it.

• For those who are new to this blog and do not know me, Vickie is my late wife. She passed away unexpectedly six and a half years ago while recovering from knee replacement surgery.

So why do I share something so personal with you? Well, I almost decided against it, but then figured that maybe you can learn from my failures. So I hope you do.

When Vickie and I married, she was fiercely independent and I was a control freak. After a couple of years, she finally helped me to see I was a control freak. And, I also realized that one of the things I admired about Vickie was her independence. I appreciated her desire, her need, to do things for herself. Yet I wanted to ensure I always protected her.

In time, she helped me to not become controlling and paranoid, and I worked hard to find the right balance between letting her do for herself and providing a safety net for her. As I look back, I erred on the side of being over-protective. I think she lost some of her self-confidence as a result of this, and as a result of things that happen in life.

My message to you regarding this is that this might be a good time to assess whether you are protective-to-a-fault with someone you love.

And then there is the matter of building hope. I have always been the eternal optimist, despite having a persistent questioning attitude and being highly critical. Vickie was always able to look to me for optimism when things weren’t going so well. Until raising our oldest granddaughter got the best of both of us.

I gave up hope first. Something I do not do often. But, the teenage granddaughter’s taking advantage of and disrespecting Vickie, the lies, the stealing, the skipping school, … all got to me. My view was that it was time for Vickie and I to stop pissing in the wind, that it was time for us to stop trying to change the world and time for us to live for ourselves. We had given our best, and we had spent a fortune on her, but it was not working.

And then Vickie gave up, too. I do not regret our decision to send our granddaughter back to her mother: you have to realize when your efforts are in vain, and take different actions.

My failure was not giving us, Vickie and I, anything else to hope for. We all need hope.

I look back on these failures as the greatest failures of my life. I hope you can learn something from these failures, before it is too late for you. Apologizing to someone in a tomb never corrects a failure.