Thank-You to my Terrible, Horrible Neighbor: Why You Ask?

It has taken me years, no decades, to realize that I actually do not need to tolerate bad behavior in others. I am not speaking about the children and adults with whom I work. I can and do tolerate their behavior, although I introduce therapeutic and ameliorating strategies.

I am speaking about how one engages with friends and family, add in lovers too. Pause there: I am speaking about my internal, personal life. And, while my insights have not arrived overnight so to speak, I do have new remarkable awareness …. a terrible, horrible, no good nasty neighbor (words taken from a children’s book title many may know) enabled this. Her recent behavior (and the cumulative affect of earlier behavior) have pushed me forward.

Let me explain.

I grew up, to sum up a long story, with a truly mentally ill mother. And, as both a child and an adult, I did everything I could to garner her love. I was over-regulated; I was compliant; I was silent in the face of horrible behavior. I was willing to do anything (well almost anything) to get my mother to love me. And this is not uncommon behavior. Who doesn’t want their biological mother to love them? (I have had a non-biological, logical mother and sister for over 50 years and they are both amazing and supportive and deeply loving; I am forever grateful to and for them.)

Sadly, and I have identified this “compliant” behavior for decades, I know full well that you cannot get a mean, unloving, mentally ill person to change and to love you. You cannot reverse narcissism with kindness. It’s like putting lipstick on a pig, as the saying goes. You can move both heaven and earth and then some but the desired change still will not happen. Yet, even in the face of academic, rational clarity, I kept at it. I kept trying to get my biological mother to love me. But it isn’t that simple because that behavior carries over to others who become surrogates/stand-ins for one’s mother, oft-times without awareness. (Check that box for me on the latter point.)

To be sure, I recognize that there are benefits to listening and being accommodating and understanding the plight of others. There are benefits to being hypervigilant and overworking and trying everything and anything to solve problems: I was the person you wanted and still want to hire. And being giving is a gift, as long as I can receive (another problem there). And, yes, I care about giving back to improve our world so that the next generation inherits a planet that can not just survive but thrive.

But as one very very smart friend of mine observed (citing one of her mentors), my approach was like a slot machine. The mentality: Keep putting in more and more money and expecting a return. But, nothing ever comes back. Yup, I have the slot machine mentality; make that past tense: I had the slot machine mentality.

Back to My Horrible Neighbor

Now fast forward. I live in an amazing place on the water on Cape Ann. I have a vibrant living space; generally speaking, I have amazing neighbors. I am near culture and restaurants and artists of all sorts and authors and fashion mavens who run boutiques and jewelers and wonderfully creative people. I can paddleboard and kayak by stepping outside my door. I see sunrises and sunsets that are glorious and my photos of them are not photoshopped. I see fisherman and women daily doing their work and boat repair teams fixing damaged ships.

I live in a place that combines creativity with hard hands on work. It is, in sum, a magical place.

Now, as perhaps is true everywhere for everyone who knows their neighbors, I have a horrible neighbor. I have written about her before in other blogs. I will spare you the details. She is, in short, both mentally and physically ill. She has OCD and her memory is fading. She doesn’t like the water (she can’t swim); she doesn’t like art (doing or seeing it); she doesn’t read and can’t discuss books; she has no hobbies or activities. She actually is a misfit in this amazing location.

But, this is the part that is startling. For almost two years, I have listened to her complaining; I have accommodated her often irrational requests; I have given her gifts including my art (largely wasted); I have made suggestions for therapy and medical intervention (mostly rejected); I have tolerated her yelling at me; I have let her remarkably narcissistic behavior go unchecked (don’t ask me about the HVAC situation); I have driven her to her church so she can triple check that the backdoor there is shut and locked because the uncertainty of it being open is disquieting (italics because I am coming back to this). I have offered her my parking spots. I have shoveled her walkway. I have repaired her outside wood posts (wood composite and paint). I visited her regularly when she had a fractured pelvis. The list is endless.

But, I have gotten and now get almost nothing in return over the passage of time. Helping the world doesn’t require reciprocity but friendship and love relationships certainly do. And, there is little (well, virtual no) reciprocity between this neighbor and me. No more than twice has she asked about my recent surgery requiring 30 stitches (thankfully, it was not cancer). A few token gifts, yes. Gossip yes. I have never asked for or gotten help lifting groceries, painting communal porches. She hovers outside when I engage with others, eager to join in when it is not her conversation. She tells me to stay away when her family is there (too much confusion and the dogs can upset) and she has actually asked me not to share her odd behaviors with her daughters. My engagement with her is NOT about my saving the world; that’s a whole other moral schemata.

And, here’s the kicker: I tolerated this neighbor’s awful behavior. I complied. More accurately, I enabled her behavior. I did not set boundaries. Remember, she is NOT my mother and I know/knew that.

A wonderful smart, witty, ever so upbeat generous neighbor (who would give you the shirt off her back, which she actually did when I complimented her lovely top, which she took off and handed to me) asked me: why did you drive her to the church? Why didn’t you say you were busy or tired or working or reading or doing art? She isn’t your mother.

There you go. The question that changed me.

There it was: plain and simple. I was acting as I always had with my biological mother. I was always doing and performing and acting to please her and to get her approbation and to win her love. My neighbor is not my mother. I owe her and all of humanity decency and kindness and help but I do not need to bend over to accommodate her mental and physical demands of me, ones that are awful and disrespectful and downright horrible.

The Realization

While I am still processing this new found internal realization (that has been in the making to be sure over years), I cannot attribute my insights to just one horrible neighbor’s behavior and an incident that broke the proverbial camel’s back most recently.

This is an issue on which I have worked for decades. Several other recent events and conversations and friendships have shed some light on my past behaviors. These individuals are deserving of thanks. And I am grateful because, perhaps for the first time, I am actually internally freer to be me. My neighbor is not my problem, although I enabled her to be. I was the problem. My own problem.

I get that not being loved by one’s mother is devastating. It is a lifelong struggle. But, for the first time, I am me. My nasty horrible mean neighbor penetrated internally enough that I could see her for who she is and I could see what I had done and was doing to meet her needs, while mine went unmet. That’s it. It finally sunk in.

Without naming names, a heartfelt thank you to GK, JC (the shirt off the back woman), JV, MDH and KL among many others who came into my life at just the right times. They deserve credit for allowing me to walk a new internal path where decency, honesty, self-respect and remarkable reciprocal giving and learning and growing and sharing are possible now and moving forward.

Wow.

NB. Since posting this piece, I have heard from many people who assured me that they, too, had awful mean neighbors. I want to be clear and I wasn’t born yesterday: never ever have I had a nasty, mean, selfish neighbor in the places I lived previously. Sure I’ve had neighbors where we didn’t connect or they kept to themselves or in some rare instances we never actually crossed paths.

This includes DC, NYC, Evanston (IL) among other places. Places I lived for decades in some cases. Our NYC neighbors shared a landing with us and our kids went back and forth and doors were always open. I’d come home from work and never knew which kids were in which home. We’re in touch still.

All the more reason to be taken aback by the neighbor described here. That said, it seems I am not alone in having unneighborly neighbor(s).