When the Locus of Control is Always External, Chaos Governs Your Life
by Sabrina Dawkins
About a week ago at the end of a long day of manually mowing my lawn, manually tilling and amending the soil, and transplanting several pots of young plants into the garden, when the sun was about to go down and I had about one more pot of plants to transplant, a neighbor approached me. She inquired about my garden. Seems she chose me for her catharsis; it was only our second conversation in three and a half years. During the first, a few years ago, she had told me she used to work but had a heart attack and was now waiting for her disability check. In this second conversation, she was mad at her daughter, never married, 24 years old, and pregnant with her fourth child. My eyes lids sprung up. Casually, she said there was nothing she could do about it, kind of shrugged it off as something that just happens, kids running off, doing what they want.
The husband, wife, son, and daughter are obese. She is morbidly obese. Her son, she said, is disabled due to diabetes. He is also morbidly obese. I looked at her and wondered what her daily eating habits were and what she had regularly fed her children.
She didn’t like her last landlord but likes her current one, a foreigner who also owns several other properties, because when something breaks, she tells him and he quickly has it repaired. She said she had a dispute with her next-door neighbors, also renters, because when they have parties, they tell their guests that they can park on the invisible boundary between their landlords’ properties. She was afraid one of the alcohol-consuming teenagers would hit her car and drive off. So the renters went to their landlords to try to establish the property lines. And judging from her slight annoyance, the problem has not been solved. She was also having a “gathering,” she called it, in a few weeks.
She said she was growing tomatoes and that when she had planted one or a few cucumber plants a while back, she had so many she had to give them away to the whole neighborhood. Hint, hint. I just so happen to have a garden filled with cucumber plants. The strange thing is that she lives in a house with at least four people on a small lot. So it’s hard to believe that a few cucumber plants would produce so many cucumbers that she had to give them away. Cucumber plants fill a large portion of my garden (no trellises so that leaves keep the ground covered, cool, and moist during the summer), and I have just enough to live on. She even gave me some unsolicited gardening advice.
After listening to her tell me all this information and more, all things that she clearly felt she had no control over and apparently wanted me to do something about, seemingly 20 minutes of her unloading all of her frustrations on me, I was reminded of the surrounding chaos. Thinking back on the casual and nonchalant way in which she told me that her daughter was pregnant again and how disability, in her mind, didn’t seem to be linked to bad eating habits, I felt a slight sense of falling into despair, a black hole of poverty, degradation, and death—no control, no way out. She said she was mad about the fourth pregnancy and at such a young age, but nothing in her body language showed it. You would’ve thought she was telling me the weather forecast if you had seen us speaking from a short distance away, where you could see mouths moving but not hear actual words.
She told me that she had congestive heart failure. My face didn’t show any shock or emotion, not because I was being insensitive but because I wasn’t surprised. She was shockingly obese, and as recently as a couple years ago, all the adults in that household were smokers.
But the disability of her obese son due to diabetes and the inability of her daughter to stop having babies as a young unwed mother were just things beyond human control, the way she presented them to me. She wanted to support and provide for her children as a mother but seemed to find no locus of control inside of herself in order to alter her life or theirs.
I couldn’t help her. She didn’t come to me for advice. She was offering me gardening advice. She unloaded her problems on me like a passive victim. Fixed in her worldview, like an automatic program, she came to me to pour her troubles onto me, to see if I would take some away or take some on, I suppose. But the advice I would’ve given her, had she actually wanted my advice, she wouldn’t have liked because I would’ve given her advice on how to change herself.
Since I couldn’t help her, I hope this will help those who are willing to listen. It’s dangerous to depend on someone else to fix something that you could and should fix yourself. Let the Bible and Holy Spirit be your teacher, and those led by the Holy Spirit. And obesity, which can cause many illnesses, is a condition that a person changes by altering eating habits and exercising. I remember my grandmother telling her kids and grandkids multiple times as we sat close to the restaurant buffet after Sunday morning church service in front of mountainous plates of greasy and fried foods that we had slow metabolism, and that was why we were overweight. Only a family member by marriage only would challenge her, a slim, toned woman with dark, glistening skin married at the time to my uncle. She seemed very uncomfortable listening to the matriarch regularly indoctrinating her family with harmful information that placed the locus of control forever outside of the person. She tried to get words in about exercising and eating correctly.
The mother and daughter wear perpetual cloth shower caps outside, African-textured hair always hidden, as if it is a source of embarrassment. The only time I saw the mother without the shower cap on, she was wearing a ridiculous wavy blonde wig cut in a bob. And the only time I saw her daughter without a shower cap on, she had very long fake black braids with blonde highlights—like mother, like daughter. The mother is lighter brown, and the daughter is dark brown, both with fake blonde hair or perpetually hidden African hair. Perhaps in her various sexual relationships, the daughter was looking for her own self-esteem; she couldn’t find it inside because her locus of control was not inside, but it existed, in her mind, on the bodies of those who had sex with her and then left.
But the mother was determined to show me that she was the victim, who only wanted to provide for her kids and didn’t judge her daughter too harshly for her multiple unwed pregnancies. After all, it’s just something that happens. There’s nothing we can do about it. And her poor son just happened to be obese and also disabled. The caring mother who didn’t discuss the subject of her early parenting or habits behind closed doors painted the picture for me of a nice woman who was surrounded by chaos but managed to keep her cool and still love her children. But at the same time, her actions told a different story. She was so desperate that she had to unload on a stranger, so internally out of control that she couldn’t even bring herself to ask me for any real solutions or possible pathways out of the ditch.
I wouldn’t wish her situation on anyone. The internal hell of feeling like you have no control is the worst experience because no matter what good advice might be out there, no matter what pathways out of chaos may be in sight, you can’t see or acknowledge them because the chaos within has taken over; it now defines you, and its only goal is to sustain itself and you at the same time. So it creates a false image for you to take on, the image of a perpetual victim so that you will become acclimated to it living inside of you and ruling over you.
Perpetual victims have left the driver’s seat. And as chaos pulls them evermore into the dark chasm, they are lulled and comforted by images of being helpless victims that are looked on with pity. But I looked at her as a danger to anyone she encounters. I could envision her trying to suck strangers into her complex web of self-deceit, trying to subtly alter their minds to accept her false reality and bend to her will in order to help soothe the chaos that now rules over her. She feels compelled to plant securely into the minds of even strangers the false image of herself because her inner chaos knows that it is completely unproductive and will need to leach off those strangers to continue to survive.
After her false-reality spiel, I continued my manual labor in the garden and got the rest of my plants transplanted in the dark. I watered them in so that I would have enough crops in order to cut down grocery store visits to the bare minimum, mainly for meats, toiletries, and some nuts. No time to construct a victim identity to entrap others and myself, one stretching forever into the future, because, “Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof” (Matthew 6:34). In other words, I am too busy on any given day trying to solve the day’s problems to have leisure time to construct a false identity within a false reality and try to convince others to accept it as well in order to continue living “comfortably” alongside my growing, established internal chaos, which has replaced self-control and initiative.