Love with Limits
Rev. Diane Rollert
Unitarian Church of Montreal, 1 May 2022
I met my friend “Lo” when I was in my first year at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City. I’ll call her Lo, though that wasn’t her real name. I was 18, beginning an associate’s degree in jewelry design, kind of the equivalent of starting CEGEP here. I had already been living and working on my own for a year in Boston when I moved to New York. FIT, as everyone called it, insisted that I live in the dormitory as a new, young student.
I hated the dorm with its metal doors that continuously clanged shut throughout the night. I was constantly irritated by the vapid conversations — or at least what I deemed vapid — of the mostly young women on my floor. And then I met Lo, a student who was commuting from home at the time. She strangely appeared in my dorm room one evening with some friends of my roommate, and decided that I was her project. She was convinced that she could transform me from a small-town girl (Boston and Chicago were small, in her mind) into an aspiring Manhattan socialite. I guess I played along, with limited success, subjecting myself to her constant critique. I was never going to be as cool as Lo.
Lo fascinated me. Ukrainian was her first language and we had roots in common. I loved to listen to her argue with her parents on the phone, trying to guess from her tone what was being said. She was doing everything she could to escape her own ethnic identity. That was sad to me. I thought of her as a modern Anna Karenina or some other tragic, beautiful female character from a Russian novel.
Her older sister had become a designer and lived in the most glorious historic building on the Upper West Side, complete with a five-star downstairs restaurant that had a famous mural. On the top floor was an elegant turn-of-the-century swimming pool, where she begrudgingly let us hang out. We lost access when Lo’s sister married a famous French baker and moved to Paris. Several years later, this very same glamorous sister and her husband died when their helicopter crashed during a ski vacation. Lo and her sister had fought constantly, but the loss was devastating.
In those two years at FIT, I was supposed to be the failure and Lo was going to be the star. After all, she was worldly-wise and I was naïve. But as time went on, we seemed to trade places. I grew in strength while her strength diminished. She drank, she struggled, and she called on me often to rescue her. Then I went on to study politics at New York University and Lo took off for Paris and then Egypt.
Periodically, she would return to New York with lots of fascinating and strange stories to tell. Her life seemed both perplexing and exciting to me, always on the wild side. Then she’d disappear, only to resurface months or even years later. Each time, she’d call me, begging me to save her from yet another difficult situation.
The last time we spoke, she called me from a payphone at a bar hours away. She wanted me to drop everything, to drive at least three hours to bring her home. But I was home with a newborn, and I firmly said no for the first time. I struggled with that no. Could I put the baby in the car and drive the distance? Would she even still be in the bar by the time I got there? For years, I hadn’t been able to find the courage to say no. I knew our relationship was unhealthy. But I didn’t know how to set limits. How could I drop someone who needed me so much?
That final phone call was the end. I set the limit, and we never spoke again.
Lo seemed to eventually get herself together, without any help from me. She married, had two kids. She sent me their birth announcements and an occasional postcard. I did the same. But we lost touch, both busy with parenthood and work.
In my fifties, I found myself wondering what had happened to Lo. I looked, but there wasn’t a trace of her on the Internet. No LinkedIn, no Facebook, no news articles. And then I discovered that a gallery had been opened in Paris in her deceased sister’s name. I emailed the gallery manager who put me in touch with Lo’s niece. “I’m sorry,” her niece wrote to me. “My aunt Lo died from liver failure when she was forty. But she raised two beautiful children.” The niece reached out to her cousins, Lo’s children, to see if they would talk to me. When she wrote back to say, “They aren’t ready to talk to anyone about their mother,” it saddened me, but I understood.
I felt such emptiness learning about her death so many years after it happened. I cried. There was a moment when I asked myself, “What if I had been there? Could I have made the difference?” That was my ego talking — as if I, above all others in her life, had the magical powers needed to save her. But I learned long ago that we can offer all the love we have, but we ultimately cannot control the choices that others make. I needed to take care of myself. I needed to take care of my own family. I needed to learn how to set boundaries, or I would been consumed in the fire — and then what good would I have been to the very people I loved?
As a young person, I took care of a lot of people. I carried heavy burdens that I didn’t know how to set down. I thought love and loyalty meant giving up all your own needs in service to others. I absorbed the hurt of the world to the point of being overwhelmed and practically ill.
There’s a story that Rabbi Edwin Friedman tells in his book Friedman’s Fables, a book that focuses on the relationship patterns we fall into that become fables that we enact again and again.
A man is standing on a bridge admiring the river rushing far below. Another man comes running along the bridge. “Hey!” he says, “can you hold this rope for me?” Before the first man can even consider the proposition, he finds himself holding one end of the rope. “Thanks!” shouts the other man as he takes hold of the other end and jumps off the bridge. Now the first man is responsible for the other man’s life, with no clear way to resolve the situation. He’s stuck.
The first time I heard that story, I completely related to it. I knew how many times I had let myself get emotionally stuck in impossible situations. Those experiences certainly played a part in my becoming a Unitarian Universalist. We believe in love. We want to take care of each other and the world. We affirm the inherent worth and dignity of every person. These are all values that speak deeply to my heart. But this also means that we can find it very hard to figure out the limits of our love.
If you came in through the front door today, or in the past months since we’ve been back in the sanctuary, you may have encountered the man who stands on the sidewalk in front of our building with incomprehensible signs picketing this congregation. He has been doing this for the last 25 years of his life. I don’t want to go into the whole long story. But it really began with a loving, caring community opening the doors to someone who needed boundaries early on.
Eventually, he was asked to leave because of his behaviour. But by then it was too late. No matter what boundaries we have tried to set, legal or otherwise, including months of caring mediation, he will not let go. I truly wish he could find something more important in his life than his anger.
I wish that I had all the answers. I wish I could say, “Here’s what you have to do to set healthy boundaries.” But all I can say is that there are times when we have to stop and ask ourselves, “Is this relationship healthy? Is it healthy for me? Is it healthy for the other person? Is it healthy for everyone else?” Sometimes, we have to set limits.
For ministers, this isn’t easy work. Many people in the helping professions find it particularly hard to set boundaries. If we gave back as much as people sometimes expect, or as much as we expect of ourselves, there would be nothing left for us to give. We’d be completely burned out. This is our challenge: How do we give without completely losing ourselves?
I said earlier that my loving, naïve heart brought me to this faith. And yes, as with anything, there have been pitfalls. But Unitarian Universalism is also what has saved me. We are a covenantal faith, constantly developing and refining our commitments to each other. We are all in this together. That means we have to take care of each other. But our values also tell us that we don’t have to accept unacceptable behaviour, and we don’t have to accept unacceptable expectations. We can love with limits, just like a loving parent sets limits for a child.
We begin by affirming the inherent worth and dignity of every person here, and that dignity deserves boundaries. Boundaries are what enable us to be truly loving. Holding onto the integrity of our whole selves is integral to the commitment we share, as well as our ability to be full partners in our covenantal relationship. That’s what I didn’t understand when I was younger. That’s what this faith has taught me.
Lo was my friend and I loved her. She was an important influence at a very impressionable time in my life, as I know I must have been in hers. We were both so young. At the time, I didn’t have the skills to support her the way she really needed to be supported. I deluded myself, thinking that she couldn’t survive without me. I needed her to need me, and that wasn’t healthy. Perhaps, in the end, she found her way to happiness, but her body simply failed her. As her niece told me, she raised two beautiful children, and that statement speaks volumes for the measure of her life.