In Bird by Bird (and in other places) the writer Anne Lamott talks about the idea that each person has an emotional acre. It’s all yours.  You get to tend it in any way you want, and it comes with a fence and a gate. You can let people in, and you can ask them to leave too. Here’s a bit of what she says:

“As long as you don’t hurt anyone, you really get to do with your acre as you please. You can plant fruit trees or flowers or alphabetized rows of vegetables, or nothing at all. If you want your acre to look like a giant garage sale, or an auto-wrecking yard, that’s what you get to do with it.”

Lately I’ve gotten a bit caught up in trying to tend other people’s acres. It’s easy enough to do, especially perhaps with your kids. I’d say it happens a good bit in marriage relationships too, and certainly in dysfunctional or emotionally abusive ones. I know it happened in mine.

When I was married, my husband’s mood dominated the climate of our household. To survive we learned to read the daily weather report and act accordingly. For our older boys, this mainly involved leaving the house, or locking themselves away in their rooms.

For me, of course, it was different. I found myself in the untenable position of trying to tend my husband’s acre so that we could all carry on without too much of an undercurrent of anger coming our way. I would have given him nearly anything or done nearly anything to keep his rage at bay. This played out in many ways, and it came to mean that I asked nearly nothing of him. In the waning years of our marriage he provided almost zero practical or emotional help with our children, or, indeed, with anything.

I sometimes read a book called The Language of Letting Go: Daily Meditations on Codependency. The entry for May 13 is called Property Lines, and a bit of it says: “A helpful tool in our recovery, especially in the tool we call detachment, is learning to identify who owns what. Then we let each person own and possess his or her rightful property. If another person has an addiction, a problem, a feeling, or a self-defeating behavior, that is their property, not ours… People’s lies, deceptions, tricks, manipulations, abusive behaviors, inappropriate behaviors, cheating behaviors, and tacky behaviors belong to them too. Not us.”

I marked that page in my book a few years ago, and every once in a while I refer back to it. I only wish I’d had that clarity during my marriage, because in failing to allow my husband’s consequences to fall on him and in bearing the burden of his emotional acre, I taught my children some decidedly unhelpful life skills, and now I must help them see what is theirs to tend and what is not. If only I’d paid more attention to my own emotional acre, I might have shown him the gate sooner.