Unwelcome Pity
My husband just arrived home after a four day fishing trip. Five minutes before he pulled into the driveway he sent me a forewarning text, “I’m so tired. I’m going to have to lay down,” to soften the blow of actually saying something this ridiculous to my face. I’ve been home alone with two children under five for the last five days and daycare has been closed all week, so naturally I responded “That’s a fucking joke, right? No way you’re going to lay down when you get home.” It’s sufficient to say, I’m also tired. He wished I would take pity on him. Instead, just before I did the dishes, put away the leftovers, picked up the toys I’ve been continually tripping on and packed my daughter’s lunch for school tomorrow, I forwarded him some of my writing and asked him to please skim it over before bed. With eyelids at half mast, he pleaded with me, “It’s just not my genre. I don’t want to read about how depressing your life is.” Correction, my life is not depressing. I hope when I write it’s everything but depressing. I want my writing to be uplifting, but honest. I want this to be proof that you can overcome life’s worst circumstances and thrive. You can find interest in things again. You can do all these things and not feel guilt while doing them, something I struggled with for a long time. Still do.
The pity in my husbands words seared my ear drums. It triggered me in places I haven’t hurt in a while. I’m reminded that pity is the cloud my and my family’s life is enshrouded in. Pity comes in the form of whispers minutes before I walk with my children up the driveway and into a house full of people who haven’t seen me since June died. It’s the gaze cast downward by the nurse who enters the room to administer chemo to June. Pity is a lack of eye contact altogether. Pity is discomfort. Pity might be someone projecting their discomfort on you.
Let’s save the pity for the people we went to high school or college with who married the wrong person and are miserable. Save it for the guy who cheats on his wife and she leaves him. Now he’s begging her to take him back. That’s pitiful. Save the pity for the people who make poor decisions and complain to you about them.
Pity is the opposite of love. Pity is words coming from a person’s mouth that have no meaning. Words that flippantly float off the tongue. Pity is shallow. Pity is superficial. Pity is attention seeking. Pity is perceived power. One person who pities another may feel above them or more fortunate than the person they are pitying. Pity is best expressed and most frequently expressed as gossip. As if that doesn’t say enough. I could say, “I pity my husband. That fool thinks he’s going to get a nap after he’s been away from me and the kids on vacation the last four days.” Cue a maniacal laugh.
I read an interview once with a person who was wheelchair bound. They shared that one of their greatest desires was to have other people make eye contact with them as they walked by. They further explained that people often look up, straight ahead, or purposefully away every time they walk by him. I imagined myself every time I’d walked by someone in a wheelchair. Then I imagined someone doing that to me: intentionally acting as if I don’t exist. I could hear an elder’s voice in my head “Don’t stare hunny. It’s rude to stare”. Who said I was staring? Had I been allowed to look at the person a bit longer maybe we would have exchanged a gaze or even better, a smile. Whoever taught me as a child that it wasn’t polite to stare at people had it all wrong. Don’t we stare for connection, for recognition? A child stares into the eyes of the unfamiliar out of wonderment. When we tell that child to stop, we tell her to stop being curious.
When my four year old gives a complete one-hundred-and-eighty degree stare at people in the grocery store, I say nothing and wait. I know what’s coming next. Either the person who is being stared at rolls their eyes at me, or makes an inaudible comment as they brush by, or both. What interesting is people don’t acknowledge her, my daughter doing the staring. Instead, they pin her stare on me, despite me not being her, and her not being even a mere extension of me. I’m not going to tell her staring is rude. When she walks by someone, including a person in a wheelchair, I want her to look that person respectfully in the eyes. If I were to tell her it’s impolite to stare, wouldn't I be implying that somehow one person is better than another or in the very least, we are different than them? Wouldn’t I be teaching my kid, albeit inadvertently, to pity people who aren’t the same as us? To feel sorrow for someone who may actually have a much happier existence than us? Pity is self-imposing one’s beliefs onto another because we are uncomfortable, while allowing a predetermined narrative to take flight. It’s possible the root of pity is plain unhappiness. When an adult acknowledges my daughter with their eyes, their voice, their energy, the four-year-old staring spell is broken. A brief connection is made. All is well. I’m going to save my pity for the next person my daughter lays her eyes on. I’m also saving some for myself for when she gets rebuked because we know how that’s going to go. That’s what pity is good for.
Practice putting away your pity when you meet someone who has lost a child to cancer or has a child in treatment. Pity scratches the surface of superficial wounds. It hurts on the receiving end. Pity is like throwing acid on a burn or skinning your knee just after it’s scabbed over. It’s not healing, it just making the cut a little deeper.
