Pity

 

Long ago when my husband and I went for marriage counseling and it was not working, my husband refused to continue. I don't remember what I said to our counselor, but I remember what he said to me. "You don't want people to pity you."

I also remember being surprised. I didn't see anything wrong with being pitied! It meant you worked hard and were loved, right? Growing up in my family we all felt pity for Grandma because she got up at the crack of dawn, no matter what, and worked around the house until she left for her paying job. We especially loved her when she tied a rag covered in Ben-Gay around her head so she could trudge on in spite of her headache. Being sick and vulnerable made you especially lovable in our family. It was expected. My mother often told me, "Nobody feels good in the morning, you just get and go anyway." My sister defined herself by having asthma whenever she was upset (except for the couple of years she had a cat and my mother told her that the cat had to go with the first asthma attack.) One of her nicknames was Pukey, or Pookey, it spoke to how fragile and lovable she was, totally dependent on my mother to survive. If you were small, weak, fragile, sick, you were lovable because you required extraordinary care. One of my brothers was going to die before he was three, or soon thereafter. He did die - at 65.

I have often wondered what his life might have been like if he had had structure and been taught to follow directions instead of being coddled and made excuses for (like he is so brilliant, he just chooses not to follow directions! What an amazing boy, he marches to his own drummer.) He died from excesses and untreated diabetes. He refused to adhere to a diabetic diet and he smoked.

When my mother died I was miserable. I had asthma for nearly five years, especially when I went back home to visit the family. Our way of coping was to be sick. To be pitiful.

Eventually I began to look at myself and how I felt. Pity elicited love, but it also made me angry with the person. Why did they resort to such damaging ways of coping with life? 

Why? Because we were all taught to be pitiful, the way rabbits are taught to freeze and cats to arch up and hiss! If we overdid things, over reacted, over worked, we must be better than everyone else, right? 

Wrong!

Living a joyful life is much better than covering yourself by remaining pitiful. Learning to cope with life's problems, finding creative solutions, and moving along, is a much healthier process than resorting to animal instincts eliciting pity. It's hard to change, but it is certainly possible.