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Welcome to episode 262 of the Non-Anxious Leader Podcast. Before we get into today's episode, I just want to remind you that if you want to connect with me, you can go to thenonanxiousleader.com, and you can email me at jack@christian-leaders.com. I love to hear from you. I love hearing your questions and getting ideas for podcast episode. If you will contact me and let you know what you want to learn in terms of how to be a non-anxious leader, I would greatly appreciate it. Now, without further ado, here is episode 262. How can someone who is trying to help be so annoying? I lie to my mother virtually every night. She is now 100 years old, and she's living with us. She came to us at the beginning of the pandemic when my and I decided that we did not want her living in a retirement community.

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We were so glad we made that decision because she would have been sequestered for who knows how long. At some point, we decided that she was better off living with us than living alone in a retirement community, and so we sold her place. Every night when we go to bed, she asks me, What time should I get up? Now, typically, she has nothing on her agenda, and so there's no reason for her to get up But I usually say 9:00 AM because I figured she doesn't want to sleep all morning. And then she asks, If I'm not up by 9:00, will you knock on my door? And this is when I lie to her. I say, Yes. One of the main reasons I can get away with this is because she has short term memory loss. It's not dementia, but she doesn't often remember conversations that we have. And what I found is that if I try to convince her that she doesn't need to get up, then we get into a long conversation that can sometimes end up in a conflict of wills. I'm trying to convince her she doesn't need to get up, and she's trying to tell me she needs to get up.

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In the end, when she says, Will you knock on my door if I'm not up? I say, I will, but then I don't. I figure at her age, if she needs to sleep, she'll sleep, and if she needs to get up, she'll get up. Other than her memory loss, she's in pretty good shape, I figure, what's the point in me getting her up? It just actually makes it more difficult for me to work because I'm going to have to attend to some of her needs, not all of her needs, because she's pretty good about taking care of herself. Now, you might be thinking, oh, but to be self-differentiated, you need to take a stand. You need to say what you think to her. And maybe I do. But I think, actually, it works better for me to just give in and say, I'm going to wake her up. It may be adaptive, but I think it works best. The thing you need to know about my mom is that she is an amazing woman. She's had a wonderful life. She grew up in Seattle, Washington, in a Japanese-American community. And in 1933, she was went back to Japan along with her four siblings and her mother, so her father could maintain the family-owned business, a wholesale fish company that was the first non-anglo-owned business on the Seattle waterfront.

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They lived with my grandmother's family in Hiroshima until my grandmother decided she needed to be with her husband, and she came back to the United States in 1937. My mom and her siblings were given the choice to return to the United States, but at that point in time, they felt more Japanese than they felt American. That's where their friends were, and you know how kids are about friends, and they decided to stay. Unfortunately, they were in Hiroshima when the atomic bomb hit, although my mom was actually a couple of towns visiting a friend to get rice, but four of the five siblings survived. My youngest aunt, who was 15 at the time, was never found, but four of the five survived, and they ended up coming back to the United States in 1947. My mom got a master's degree in mathematics, and in the late 1960s, she went to work for Service Bureau Corporation, a subsidiary of IBM, where she was one of the first female systems engineers. She ultimately went on her own as an independent contractor in the mid-1970s and did some pretty important jobs like computerizing auto trains ticket system and doing the payroll for the International Monetary Fund, which had to pay in over 100 different currencies that fluctuated daily.

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She and my father skied well into their late '70s, traveling all over the world to ski and maintained an active life throughout their '80s and into their '90s. She turned 100 last May, and CBS Mornings did a piece on her as it coincided with the G7 summit in Hiroshima. I'll put a link to that piece in the show notes. The question is, how can someone who is such an amazing person end up being annoying to so many people in my family? My mother has two love languages, food and warmth. She loves to feed people. And now that she doesn't cook as much anymore, even when we're sitting at the dinner table, she's always offering food to people. And she does it to the point now where people naturally push back and say, no, I don't need anymore. In fact, one of the more humorous things that she does is whenever we have salad and she sees that my son-in-law doesn't have salad on his plate, she offers it to him. However, it's because she doesn't remember that he doesn't like salad. For the most part, we are very polite with her and say, No, thank you.

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But every once in a while, you can sense a little bit of annoyance in someone's voice, whether that's me or one of our other family members, my wife, my children, my grandchildren. Her other love language is warmth. I can remember countless times when I was growing up, when I would fall asleep on the couch or take a nap somewhere, and all of a sudden I could feel her cover me with one of her handmade Afghans. I don't recall this being a problem, and I've seen her do this time and time again with many members of the family. But it seems like in the last few years, people have started to rebel. They say, No, I don't want to blanket. No, I don't need it. I'm fine. I'm reminded that people don't like to be told what to do. They automatically resist. For some reason, at this point in my mom's life, people are resisting. My sense is that as she has fewer and fewer things under her control in her life, she's doing the things that she thinks will make the biggest difference. And in her mind, with her love languages, that means giving people food, and that means keeping people warm.

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Just today, she was trying to put socks on my grandson who didn't want to have socks on. Why? Because she felt like his feet were cold, and she did not want his feet to be cold. So how do you handle a situation like this and try to maintain a non-anxious presence? One thing I am constantly reminding myself is that my mom can't help herself, and she means well. So it's important to me that I let her have her way when it is possible. This means learning to regulate the automatic desire to resist. This has taken me a little bit of time to figure this out. For example, we live in a house with a reverse floor plan, and so the kitchen and the living room and our guest bedroom are on the second floor, which is also where the main entrance is. And then Our bedroom, along with a couple other bedrooms, are down on the first floor. Every night before she goes to bed, she asks if all the windows are locked and all the doors are locked. This took a little bit of getting used to because we didn't use to lock our doors before she moved in with us.

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I would try to convince her that things were safe, but of course, she would always say, But I'm the first one they're going to get when they come in. I tried at first to be playful by saying, Well, I know you can take them, but that didn't seem to help allay her fears. This is especially problematic in the spring and fall when I like to leave the windows open to let the cool night air come in and cool the house. Even if the only windows that open or 10 feet off the ground, she still feels unsafe. Ultimately, I learned that the best thing I can do is just give in, let her have her way, lock the windows, lock the doors. When I get up first thing in the morning in the spring and fall, I open the windows up when the air is still cool. I figure it's a small price to pay for her to feel safe. You've probably heard me say this before, but self-differentiation isn't always taking a stand. Sometimes it's giving in. Sometimes it's adapting because emotional connection matters to you, because the relationship matters to you. And as long as you do it because that's what your priority is, that's where your values are, and you own it, then it's fine.

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That said, there still is one thing that I will push back on, and that is when she tries to put Vicks on my chest. One of the legendary stories in our family is back in 1995, when I was graduating from seminary, our best friends were taking us to Jamaica to celebrate. Our three older children were staying with friends, and our youngest was staying with my parents. So the night we were supposed to leave, we're at my parents house because we were dropping my son off and we were flying out from an airport nearby the next morning. As it turns out, I had a bit of a cold where I was coughing and I woke up in the middle of the night. I don't know what time it was, but it was in the middle of the night and my mom was rubbing Vicks' Vapo rub on my chest. I was 34 years old at the time. I don't know if you've ever had Vicks rubbed on your chest, but it feels like Vaseline and smells like a menthol bomb. We all laugh about that incident now, but my office, my desk, is right outside of my mom's bedroom door.

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Some mornings, I'm waking up and I'm feeling a little congested and I'm coughing. Other mornings, I'm not even coughing. But every once in a while, she will come out with the VIX and want to rub it on my chest. This is where I draw the line. Mostly, I start giggling and I just say I'm 62 years old. I can take care of myself. And she says, Well, how old am I? I'm 100, and I'm still your mother. In the end, she goes and walked back into her room. The good thing is she doesn't take it personally, and she doesn't remember. Why do I share all this? Because relationship systems are complicated. We talk about theory, and we talk about being self-differentiated. We talk about taking non-anxious stands, but it's not always that simple. Self-differentiation isn't blindly taking stands. It's knowing what matters to you and then figuring out how to do that as hard as it can be sometimes. In my case, I'm grateful that my mother still alive. I'm grateful that she's still healthy, even as she has memory loss. For the most part, when she tries to be helpful, and I get annoyed, I regulate it, I hide it, and I do my best to give in.

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I figure that's the least that I can do. That's it for episode 262. A little more personal, but hopefully you found something in there that can help you. Don't forget, you can contact me at jack@christian-leaders.com, and you can subscribe to my Two for Tuesday email newsletter at thenonanxiousleader.com. I will put a link to that in the show notes. Until next time. Thanks and Goodbye.