Grace Did It!

I stared at the red paint stain on the pale carpet. I knew how it got there. I had asked Dan over and over not to paint in his room. I had done more than ask. I made it a rule – spread newspaper on the table in the dining room and paint there. Only there. Dan does well with clear rules. They speak to his autistic brain. But apparently not to his artistic brain. How interesting that these two words are so similar. But I digress.

Dan creates beautiful pictures by painting the background and then gluing on intricate origami figures. For example, he might paint a landscape background and glue on flowers and birds. But I digress again. Back to the paint stain.

I called Dan over and pointed to the floor. “Dan, how do you think that paint stain got there?” Dan looked at the stain. I waited. Then he looked me in the eye.

“Grace did it,” he boldly announced.

I tried not to laugh. Dan had chosen a poor target since Grace didn’t live with us anymore. Even so, I was secretly pleased that Dan was able to mentally process the situation and divert blame with a lie, a sophisticated maneuver that many autistic people could not master. Still, it was a lie.

“No, Dan, I don’t think Grace did this.” Dan paused for a moment. “James did it.”

No, not James either. Dan persisted until he had named everyone in the family, including the dog.

Finally, I said, “Dan, I think you did this.” Dan looked at his feet. “Dan did it,” he confessed.

How strong is the urge to shift responsibility away from ourselves, whether it’s for something we have done wrong, or for something that seems burdensome or scary to us.

Grace had a hard time graduating from high school. At the end of her senior year, she had one paper left to complete in her English class. In spite of numerous extensions from the teacher, she continued to stall. After many frustrating and perplexing conversations, Grace admitted to herself and to me her fear about graduating. If she graduated, she cried, she would have to grow up and be responsible for her life.

Somehow we have developed a society (in the United States anyway – I won’t speak for other countries) in which responsibility has become a bad word, at least when it applies to ourselves. “You are responsible” or the more generic “They are responsible” is enormously more appealing than “I am responsible.”

But what price do we pay for abdication? Nothing less than our freedom. The phrase “freedom from responsibility” is an oxymoron because if we are not responsible, then we can be sure someone else is. We give our power away and then become dependent on whoever has it. That is not freedom.

A more accurate phrase is, I think, “freedom of responsibility.” In my own life, learning to take responsibility for myself was liberating. Scary sometimes, yes. Burdensome sometimes, yes. But infinitely freeing and full of joy.

In our family, “Grace did it!” has become the catch phrase for those times when we recognize the temptation to shift blame, to abdicate responsibility, to avoid our own power. Even Grace uses it!

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. –A Course in Miracles