Perspective: All in How You Look at Things

Life is such an interesting thing, and so often seems to be full of contradictions.

Reading The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls made me think some about this and why that is and how challenging it can be for children to comprehend. Or maybe how easy it is for adult to ignore or rationalize away...

In this memoir there are so many circumstances shared that you wish could just be fiction. Things that made me frustrated with humanity. And at the same time, everything together made me so impressed and inspired by the resiliency and capacity of human beings. It reminded me that we really do have the ability to choose how we will respond to what happens to us in our lives. We always have a choice. Sometimes making the right one, or the most productive ones, is harder than others, but we always have a choice.

Take this passage, for example:

                  Lori gave me a hug when she heard I'd told off Erma. Mom was upset, though. "We may not agree with all of Erma's views," she said, "but we have to remember that as long as we're her guests, we have to be polite."
                  That didn't seem like Mom. She and Dad happily railed against anyone they disliked or disrespected: Standard Oil executives, J. Edgar Hoover, and especially snobs and racists. They'd always encouraged us to be outspoken about our opinions. Now we were supposed to bite our tongues. But she was right; Erma would boot us. Situations like these, I realized, were what turned people into hypocrites.

"I hate Erma," I told Mom.

"You have to show compassion for her," Mom said. Erma's parents had died when she was young, Mom explained, and she had been shipped off to one relative after another who had treated her like a servant. Scrubbing clothes on a washboard until her knuckles bled--that was the preeminent memory of Erma’s childhood. The best thing Grandpa did for her when they got married was buy her an electric washing machine, but whatever joy it had once given her was long gone.

“Erma can’t let go of her misery,” Mom said. “It’s all she knows.” She added that you should never hate anyone, even your worst enemies. “Everyone has something good about them,” she said. “You have to find the redeeming quality and love the person for that.”

“Oh yeah?” I said. “How about Hitler? What was his redeeming quality?”

“Hitler loved dogs,” Mom said without hesitation. (p 144)

Without giving too much away, this scene opens after a truly horrific encounter that Jeannette and her brother had with their Grandmother, Erma. Something that should never happen, under any circumstances. Something that a parent should ALWAYS try to protect their children from if it ever did happen.

But instead of protecting them, their mother blames and punishes them. It made me ill to read.

But Jeannette is right. There are situations that make it very difficult not to become a hypocrite. What happened should never have happened. And, based on the parents’ behavior earlier in the book, under other circumstances they would have responded in a more appropriate manner in protection of their children. However, they were in a very difficult situation. Do you respond how you should to a situation and find your children without a home? Or, do you bend where you normally wouldn’t and make sure they have a roof over their head? Not a choice anyone wants to have to make. And it seems really easy to look from the outside and say what someone should do. But, if I’m honest, I know I become a hypocrite in difficult situations sometimes too. Situations that are not so dire, and do not impact others so deeply. Who am I to judge? How am I to know what I would do in the same circumstances, faced with the same choices and situations?

And at the same time, this mother who made what I feel was a very poor choice based on what happened to her daughter – the same mother – also teaches a beautiful and powerful lesson about respecting others and searching for the best in them.

Humans really are complicated things.