There is a committee that meets in my head. It is available throughout the day, but somewhere around ten at night, when the apartment gets quiet and nobody needs anything from me, it seems to have everyone’s full attention. Nobody elected these people. I have never approved the membership, and yet they continue to show up with things to discuss.
My mother chairs the section on my body. She never needed to say very much to make her opinion known. She had a way of looking at my plate, and somehow that look is still available to me almost twenty years after she passed. My ex-husband is in charge of tone. He is less interested in what I said than in how I said it, and he can find something to review in a perfectly ordinary conversation.
A few students sit in, usually one at a time. I know that something a seventeen-year-old said came from a seventeen-year-old, but apparently that does not prevent it from being brought up years later. There is a doctor from Florida who didn’t believe my daughter, or me. He gets about four minutes. Reluctantly. And there is a principal who is actually several principals I have worked with or for, combined into one committee member. Twenty-nine years in education will give you enough material for that.
My daughter joined too, which I suppose I should have expected, although I was not truly ready for it. In real life, she is mostly nonjudgmental. The committee has selected the version of her from the occasional judgmental day and given that version a permanent seat.
She tells me I am talking too loudly. She tells me I am not walking correctly in the street, as though I had not been doing it for years before she came along. There are things that need completing, and her preferred timeline is usually quicker than mine. Sometimes she has the same look as my mother, which is particularly interesting because they never met. They share a name, but their paths never crossed. Apparently, they have found plenty to agree on anyway.
My father sometimes joins them. He was usually supportive, but when he disapproved of something, he could be harsh. Other times he is the one trying to smooth everything out before the presentation gets to me. There can be an entire conversation between my parents and my daughter in which I somehow feel left out, despite the fact that the whole thing is happening in my own head.
Then there is the member who sounds exactly like me. She is the one who wonders whether everybody else was right. I don’t always notice when she joins in, because by then their opinions have started to sound like my own.
Here is the part that cracks me up. I have a doctorate in psychology. I have taught this material and can explain quite a bit about what is happening. Knowing what something is and making it stop, however, are two very different things. Who knew?
For a long time, I argued with them. I defended myself to people who were not there, revisited conversations that had ended years before, and came up with excellent responses long after anyone could hear them. Nobody ever conceded. The committee has never been particularly interested in my closing argument.
Now I try to take attendance before I start defending myself. That is my mother. That is my ex-husband. That is a doctor who was wrong about us. Naming the voice helps me remember that it came from somewhere. It is an opinion I remember, or a look I learned to interpret, and I can notice it without treating it as a fact about who I am.
I would love to tell you that I always manage this gracefully. I do not. Sometimes my daughter and my mother present a united front, and I listen. Sometimes I answer. Sometimes I spend far too long explaining myself to an audience that has no intention of changing its mind.
Eventually the meeting ends, or I stop paying attention. The cats join me then, for the cuddles I sometimes need after everyone else has had their go. They have very little interest in my tone, my timing, or what I should have said on a Tuesday ten years ago.
They would like me to sit still. For once, that is a request I am happy to meet.
