On boundaries

The thing about boundaries, and the lack thereof in my family, were the worst. It was this place where we weren’t allowed boundaries, we were not allowed to be ourselves. “Porous” is a word that comes up for me.

The word has a special meaning for me. It was permeable. The people who are always coming into and within my boundaries were the ones who I let do it the most. My youngest aunt typifies this example. Just one example of her inability to come into her own in terms of boundaries: her deciding that everyone is just like her, it’s as if she haven’t seen to the end of her nose, and her one question to me after all the years that I have been married: “Do you even cook?”

Her single life means that she orders food a lot. But I am not her. What has she missed in all my years of growing up?