From a recent post by a fellow blogger:
“There’s another something I want to throw out there. A tough lesson for us moms to learn. Not everyone likes kids. Not every store wants your baby in it. I’m telling you, the more they move, the less appropriate it can be to bring them along. The reality is that there are shops (and their patrons) who are totally not into babies. Right or wrong, that’s just life.”
Let’s try a little thought experiment:
I am struggling to remind myself that it is spring. I can smell it in the warm rain and hear it in the call of the robins plucking earthworms from my garden and see it in the green shoots pushing their way up out of the earth, but I am having trouble feeling it.
My husband tells me that he worries about me, and I tell him that there is a difference between the oppressive dark that settles upon one in a depression, and unhappiness, generally. I can be depressed, I tell him, and not be, strictly speaking, sad, or unhappy. I tell him that there is a difference between the dark clouds of depression, which settle upon the horizon of my psyche and linger there, casting shadows, and the rain that comes with sadness, that comes in short or long bursts, that falls lightly or heavily, that pelts my heart and dampens my spirit. And unhappiness, I say, is another thing entirely. I might be depressed, I said. I also might be sad, because the sadness – the sadness related to grief, the sadness related to dread and worry – it comes and it goes and it doesn’t announce itself. But I am not unhappy, in any meaningful sense. I don’t think. I can still smile. I still laugh. It’s just that, sometimes, I am overcome by the dark.
When I was twelve years old, I was confirmed in the Catholic faith. The priest who administered the rite of confirmation was a man that I – in the manner of all judgmental twelve year olds who recoil at elders who seem weird and smell bad – did not like, although I did not, at the time, dislike him quite so much as I did the nun who led the weekly catechism classes for young members of the Church. Sister Anne was elderly, and terrifying; she wore her black habit like a suit of armor and carried with her a old wooden ruler, the kind with blade-like metal embedded along the outer edge, and she would menace us with it, sometimes cracking it down upon the side of a desk when some unfortunate child failed to list the Seven Sacraments on command. Sister Anne, my classmates and I decided, was not on the Right Side Of God.
Nobody that frightening could be good, we told each other as we congregated outside during a class break. God wouldn’t stand for it. “She’ll be punished some day,” someone said. “She’ll go to hell.” That thought was somewhat reassuring.
One of the boys disagreed. “God doesn’t seem to care all that much if the priests are scary, so why not the sisters? And the sisters don’t even do anything, not like the priests. He lets them” – he practically spat the word – “be the bosses of the church.” A few of the other boys nodded, and there was much shuffling of feet. Somebody murmured something about creepy being worse than mean, and a couple of the boys moved away from the group. “God doesn’t really care about what those guys do. He just cares that we know the sacraments,” he added. “It sucks.” I had no idea what he was talking about, but I knew that I really didn’t like the way church felt at this parish – a parish that my family had only recently joined, after relocating – at this parish, with this priest and this nun and these scared children, and it seemed to me that if anyone was to blame, it was probably God, who was in charge of the whole business, as I understood it.
Emilia has decided that she does not like the hollow chocolate bunny that was left for her by the Easter Bunny. “It doesn’t have an inside,” she informs us. “That’s wrong.”
“Why is that wrong?’
“Because everything has an inside. This bunny just has an outside. Also, it smells like peanut butter.”
“So, you don’t want it?”
“No.”
“Can I have it?”
“No.”
“But if you don’t want it…”
“I’m giving it to Candy. Candy doesn’t care if something has an inside.”
Meet Candy:
Last month, I listened as a friend stood up in a conference session on video-blogging and told the room that someone had once advised her to never put herself in front of the camera. “He told me,” she said, “that I have a ‘far-away’ face.” A face, that is, that is best viewed from a distance. A face that one’s mother could love, and maybe some others, but not everybody, and certainly not a camera.
Everyone in the room gasped, of course. Most, too, I suspect, cringed inwardly at some similar memory – a schoolmate teasing them about their hair, a friend commenting on their weight, a well-meaning relative remarking that ‘she’d be so pretty if it weren’t for her nose’ – some memory of some statement that maybe wasn’t meant to hurt, but did, because it aggravated all those insecurities, all those doubts, all those misgivings that we have about how we are seen. We were all, I am sure, thinking that the words that were spoken to Loralee were ridiculous and wrong. But we were – many of us, some of us, I am sure – also thinking that those words could have been spoken to us. It is easy to see the beauty in others. It is so hard to see it in ourselves.