Nice People

[eredien]

My dad and I got into a fight today because he didn't respect my opinion about something and then later tried to shush me loudly and rudely when I tried talking to him about why I was upset, and my mother has a totally racist 'funny' work forward printed out and sitting on our kitchen table that I am trying to figure out how to confront her about, but those are not the only things that have me thinking, "something's badly wrong here, in this place."

My mom and I just came back from the Muppet movie--I'd been wanting to go, so she took me. It was pretty fun (I am really looking forward to the Studio Ghibli adaptation of the Borrowers, which was like my favorite book in 3rd grade!) until we got to the parking lot after the movie, at which point a panhandler walked up to our car. My mom rolled down the window a crack, and the woman asked, "look, are you nice people?" My mom repeated the question sarcastically--"are we nice people?"--rolled the window up, said, "I guess not," and drove away.

I sat in absolute stunned silence all the way home while my mom made the following comments:
- "See, those other people next to us didn't help her either."
- "There was this guy in front of my office who used the 'I need help' spiel on me and my coworkers without realizing he'd said it before, and when he'd used it before we'd given him help and places to go and he went there for a while and then was back in the same spot using the same old story a month later."

We paused in the parking lot of my parents' home:
- "I want you to know, [Eredien], that if she had really needed help I would have helped her."

I interjected at that point, saying, "how do you know what she needed? You didn't even listen to her."

My mother: "If you really need help you don't go up to people and ask if they're 'nice people.' You go up to people and say, 'I need help.'"

I don't always give to panhandlers. I didn't tonight because I didn't have my wallet on me, and I haven't been giving lately because I'm deep in debt and need to save my money to get out of the spot I'm in. But there's a difference, a big one, between listening for a few moments and going, "sorry, I can't help you today," and meaning it, and saying, "well, I'm not a nice person!" But I wish I had my wallet tonight.

I am baffled, and hurt, and angry, and shocked, and deeply saddened. I am also angry that I'm angry, and baffled that I'm baffled--what the hell else did I expect? Must I truly grow a tougher skin again and pretend like everything that offends or upsets me doesn't matter just so I can live in this place without daily screaming fights?

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

All that said, you don't have to grow a tougher skin, you just have to figure out what is About You and what is Not. That's the boundary that matters. What your mother does or says about a beggar is not about you. Even when she wants you to buy into her justifications and validate her, it's still not about you. You can't change it, you can't fix it, because it's not yours.

I think this is true. Thank you.

I have to think more about what you said about the correct way of responding to somebody--I still think it's just really weird to claim that you're not a nice person explicitly in order to avoid somebody's pitch for money *and then* spend a ten minute car trip claiming that you are a nice person in order to avoid feeling guilty about avoiding the pitch. It's not even the avoiding so much as the justification that bothers me.

It's been harder for me to ignore stuff like this since I've come home, I am basically living here on my parent's sufferance. Incidents like this leave me with a feeling they'd actually be really mean to me when I needed help if I wasn't their daughter, or unless I ask for help in the 'right' way (which has in fact been the case in the past when I've asked for help), and I don't know what to do about that.

[eredien]

Oops, that was me!

[foleyartist1.livejournal.com]

Here's my totally outsider perspective, if it's useful (and if isn't, disregard it):

1. Someone asked your mother for help in a way that seemed manipulative. Since we don't know this person's circumstances or her character, we don't know whether (a) it was unintentional, (b) it was intentional and intended as a scam, or (c) it was intentional because she desperately needed money and calculated that this approach was her best bet.

2. Your mother did not like feeling manipulated, and responded by making a sarcastic comment and driving away.

3. Your mother later felt uncomfortable with what she'd done, and possibly also with the fact that you'd seen her.

4. In order to make herself feel more comfortable, she attempted to reassure herself of her basic goodness and convince you of same by assigning a reality to the situation that would make her actions perfectly excusable.

5. You felt baffled, angry, etc.


There are a lot of things about that situation that are pretty fuzzy and a lot of different reasons you could have felt the way you did. But to me just looking at it from the outside, I see all parties and the whole situation as understandable. Understandable, but there is just one point where it breaks down. And that is the point where your mother assigns a reality.

That isn't a problem in the sense that your mother is wrong about the panhandler. It's a problem in the sense that--as you pointed out to her--there's no way she can know whether she's right or wrong. She basically decided that 1(b) above is reality, whereas neither she nor you have any information about whether reality was (a), (b), (c), or something else. All you know about the situation is what you saw, and what you saw is only enough information to form opinions, not declare facts. But your mother felt so uncomfortable in herself that the only way she could reconcile her conflicting feelings was to decide that the feeling of guilt was not necessary by deciding on one option as the correct one.

I'm actually reading a book right now on unintentional unethical decisions (link here). According to the authors, one of the most common ways that humans behave unethically is by a mechanism called "ethical fading," where they unconsciously choose to view the situation in a way that fades the ethical dimension of their decision out of sight. It also talks about how even though we're used to thinking about moral reasoning as a process like this:

I have a choice to make --> I go through some moral reasoning --> I make a moral decision

When we're stressed or under time pressure, the process goes more like this:

I have a choice to make --> I make a moral decision based on my emotions in the moment --> I construct some moral reasoning that supports the decision I made

I think that's really true. And I think as humans, we're bound to have those cognitive errors sometimes, where we make a decision that isn't aligned with what we would have done if we'd actually thought more about it first. And since we're humans, I think we have to forgive ourselves for that--but in order to really repent and be forgiven (to use Christian terminology), we have to genuinely understand the sin. So if your mother had said, "I acted this way because I thought she didn't need help/was manipulating me," that's totally fine.

But the fact that she said "I acted this way because she didn't need help"--assigning her opinions as facts--means she did not or could not look at her actions and understand/own the fact that she did make a snap decision.

And although I don't know, it seems to me like that may very well be why you were angry. Not because she acted in a way you found uncool, but because instead of acknowledging that she did something based on her opinions that might or might not be right, she hypnotized herself into believing one of several possibilities as reality so that she wouldn't have to live with the discomfort of knowing that she might or might not have handled it the way she would've wanted to with all the facts, and she'll never know.

This self-hypnosis doesn't make her "good" or "bad," but it is dishonest. And from my experience of you, dishonesty really freaks you out. Which I like about you. :)