Instead of limiting ourselves to one role or version of ourselves, it’s good to recognize that each of us has an entire family inside. There’s the childish part, the one who wants everything now and fast and easy. There’s the childlike part—the curious free spirit, adept at following whims, instincts, and desires without judgment or fear or shame. There’s the teenager who likes to flirt and risk and test boundaries. There’s the rational adult who thinks things through, makes plans, sets goals, figures out how to reach them. And there are the two parents: the caring parent and the scaring parent. The one who is kind and loving and nurturing, and the one who comes in with voice raised and finger wagging, who says, “You should, you must, you have to.” We need our entire inner family to be whole. And when we’re free, this family works in balance, as a team, everyone welcome, no one absent or silenced or ruling the roost.
My inner free spirit helped me survive Auschwitz, but without my responsible adult on board, she can make a lot of messes, as my granddaughter Rachel—Audrey’s beautiful daughter—can attest. Since she was young, Rachel has loved to cook, and it warmed my heart when she asked if I’d teach her some Hungarian recipes. I decided to show her how to make one of my favorite dishes: chicken paprikash. It was a special kind of heaven to be in the kitchen with Rachel, the smell of onions sautéing in butter (a lot of butter!) and chicken fat. But soon I noticed her father, Dale, at my elbow, wiping up the spatters of schmaltz and dustings of spice that flew from my spoon. Even patient, down-to-earth Rachel was growing exasperated. “Stop!” she finally said, grabbing my arm before I threw a bunch of garlic and paprika into the pot. “If I’m going to learn the recipe, I have to measure and write down how much you’re putting in.”
I didn’t want to slow down. I love to cook by instinct, to let go of measuring and planning and just go by heart. But that wasn’t giving Rachel the foundation she needed. To effectively pass down my strength and skills, I couldn’t rely on my inner free spirit alone. I needed my inner rational adult and caring parent in the room to round out the team.
Now, Rachel makes the best chicken paprikash and szekely goulash, and when I made a nut roll the other day, I had to call her to tell me whether to add a half or full cup of water to the dough. She didn’t have to look at the recipe. “It’s a half cup!” she said.
It can be especially challenging to balance our inner family when we think our very survival depends on filling a specific role. After decades of maintaining an unhealthy pattern with her sisters and parents, Iris is trying to break out of the confining role she grew accustomed to filling in her family.
Her father served in WWII and was discharged from the army after a tank he’d worked on exploded with men on board. He became a psychiatric nurse, but began drinking heavily and suffering from depression, paranoia, and schizophrenia, so much so that by the time Iris, the youngest of four children, was born, he regularly spent large stretches of time in the hospital. She remembers him as a gentle, sensitive, brilliant man. She loved to sit in his lap after her bath and have him comb the tangles out of her wet hair. Or she would pretend to fall asleep on the couch in the evenings so he’d carry her up to bed. It felt good to be in his arms. When she was twelve, he had a massive heart attack. By the time the ambulance arrived, his heart had been stopped for twelve minutes. The medical team managed to revive him, but he was severely brain damaged and became a permanent resident at the same hospital where he’d once worked. He died when she was eighteen.
At a young age, Iris learned to fill the caregiver role in her family. In one of her earliest memories, her parents had been in a heavy discussion. She could sense the tension and slipped into the room, hoping to lighten the mood. Her father scooped her up and held her. “You’re my favorite,” he said. “You don’t cause any trouble.”
This message was reinforced by Iris’s mother and sisters. She earned the A’s in her family by being the responsible one, the person others could depend on. Her mother, a hardworking, nonjudgmental person always sensitive to the hurt or shame or embarrassment underlying others’ behavior, remained steadfastly loyal to Iris’s father throughout his worst years, but had a nervous breakdown when Iris was a teenager. Years later, when she herself was ailing, she told Iris, “I feel I’m in the middle of a stormy sea, and you’re my rock.”
Much of Iris and her mother’s relationship centered around their mutual concern for Iris’s sisters, who’d endured rough and chaotic lives, suffering among them the traumas of sexual abuse and domestic violence, as well as struggles with addiction and suicidal depression. Iris and her sisters are now in their fifties, and she continues to grapple with complex feelings that stem in large part from
