ERNIE AND ERNESTINA: Searching

Book Two, Chapter 306: Sleepless

Some nights, sleep won’t come. Tonight is one of those nights.

If I’m even a little hungry I can’t sleep, so maybe I’m hungry. I eat tomato soup. Cheese and crackers. Spicy crunchy gingerman cookies. I eat gingerman cookies without counting, just pluck one, then another and another, from the bag. I promise myself I won’t buy another bag of gingerman cookies.

Sleep still won’t come.

I pick up a manuscript I’m editing for Peggy, owner of a self-publishing company, and review my revisions once again. The opening still needs work. Finally I smooth out its awkwardness to my satisfaction. Now can I sleep?

Nope.

What’s keeping me up?

Joshua. Thinking about Joshua. After a full year of talking to him, off and on, about my co-dependency, I finally know what I really want to say to him. The words I haven’t been able to find, I think I have now.

We both have blue eyes, Joshua. This is genetic. We both have fair skin. This is genetic. We both are co-dependent. This is environmental, what we both were born into. We can’t change our blue eyes or our fair skin, but we can develop beyond our co-dependency.

Needy people get into relationships with needy people. That’s the unholy bargain we strike. I’ll help you if you’ll help me. But we don’t have to stay stuck in our neediness. We can develop a self we’re honest with and trust and respect. Then we’ve freed ourselves to choose the people we want to be close to, a choice not based on mutual need but on mutual and growing love.

Joshua is resistant. He may say to me: I’m not a co-dependent. I’ve lived on my own. I’m a working actor, a member of Screen Actors Guild. I’ve restored houses and motorcycles and cars and pinball machines. How is that being co-dependent?

All this is true. Joshua is an enormously creative and competent person. But this is also true. Co-dependency shows up in relationships, Joshua. Co-dependents are secretive, guarded, walled in. We suffer from shame at what we perceive is weakness within us, and this shame eats away at our self-esteem and affects any relationship we enter. It sets up the deceit. We don’t want the other person to know how helpless and insecure we feel, which may make the other person lose faith in us. Keeping the relationship going is all-important. We don’t want the other person to leave us. We don’t want to be alone.

Joshua doesn’t see Ernie or me as we really were. Co-dependents are actors. We put on a great show for ourselves and for others. So he may say: I don’t believe you. You’re telling me Daddy felt helpless? And so did you?

Yes, Joshua. At our core, we felt helpless. Ernie wanted someone to help him write, and I wanted someone to give me a life. We used each other. We didn’t know we were doing this, but we did. Eventually, because neither of us felt truly known or understood or loved by the other, we grew resentful and were unkind to each other. My work now is to uncover and develop my own self. That’s your work, too.

Joshua will probably look at me with hard, hurt eyes. He’ll say: Maybe all this is true for you but not for me. I’m my own person.

I’ll ask him: Have you ever been in a healthy, happy relationship with a woman?

He can’t say yes. If he does, he’s lying to himself. He’ll say: Daddy didn’t abandon me. He loved me. He took me everywhere with him. And I didn’t abandon my daddy. I helped him every way I could. I loved my daddy.

It was love based on need, Joshua. That’s all he and I knew, and it’s what you learned from us. There’s no blame here, no guilt, no shame. It was what it was because we didn’t know a different and better way to be.

It’s five-thirty in the morning. I’ve talked all this out with myself. I will talk to Joshua.

Perhaps sleep will come now.