Maybe She Didn't Have an Arm: Reflecting on Empathy (Tell Your Story Contest: Round 2)

I don’t know if this is how it really happened, but in my mind, my two younger sisters, Maria and Audra, and I are strapped into the old grey van. Or it could have been the newer “champagne” touring van, (we called it pink,) or perhaps even the tan Chevy Celebrity station wagon with the cool flip up seats in the hatchback?

In any case, we were all traveling in one of these vehicles, my mom at the wheel, headed down the main drag toward downtown Beavercreek, just near the curving turnoff to the left leading into the small antiquated neighborhood called Alpha. How old was I? 10? 12? Let’s say I was 12, making Maria about 10, and Audra about 6.

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As my therapist and I discuss the previous weeks laundry list of insecurities, I reflect on empathy and how to get it into children, mine to be specific. But empathy is a concept I struggle with personally every day. Doing empathy right requires us to acknowledge and respect life’s grey zones rather than rigidly adhering to a comfortably strict black/white dichotomy.

I tend to naturally lean toward a more hard-line stance, not only for my students, my family and friends, or perfect strangers, but for myself as well. Especially for myself. I’m a perfectionist. I’m “anal retentive.” I do not like grey zones. What I’ve discovered over the years though, is that my love for the black or the white only makes things harder on everyone, including me. To my horror, I’ve also discovered that almost everything falls into a grey zone. I am, in spite of myself, one continuous rippling grey scale tableau of what ifs, and alsos, always alreadys, but nots, maybes, and sometimes.

If I have a hard time empathizing with others, I find myself faced with a sisyphean task when it comes to cultivating empathy for me.

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Some unthinking driver ahead of us had had the nerve to slow down and turn left without using her turn signal, annoying, and indeed offending my mother no end. As mom cursed the driver and vociferated about the gravity of this crime, my sisters and I began to brainstorm aloud, formulating hypotheses as to why this wrongdoer had not used her turn signal.

Maybe it was broken? Maybe she forgot? Maybe she made up her mind to turn at the last second? Maybe she didn’t have a license and had no idea she was supposed to signal her turn to others? Basically, we were empathizing with this other driver, cutting her some hypothetical slack by trying to imagine the circumstances of her life, and it was driving my mom up the wall. There was no excuse! Well, maybe there was no excuse, but there had to be a reason.

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Why is it so hard for me to give myself a break and simply accept that life is endlessly complicated? That there is rarely only one right answer to anything that really matters? Will I ever learn to let my best be enough? Will I ever let myself be enough? I am naturally anxious and I have a great talent for replaying the most trivial social interaction in my head hundreds of times, trying to determine if I hurt someone’s feelings or said or did something inappropriate. But memory deceives, and the more I replay, the more exaggerated my imagined misdeed becomes and the worse I feel about myself as a human person trying to live this life.

Some people claim that the ability to perform this type of introspection is already a sign that I’m not such a terrible specimen. I wonder why I keep putting my foot in my mouth and doing the wrong thing at the wrong time. Will I ever feel like an adult? Because it seems to me that real adults do not have these kinds of problems. They have grown out of them and achieved mastery of the world at large. They know how to be.

***

Our speculation continued as we barreled down the road, my mother’s exasperation probably growing more apparent to anyone with half a brain, (but not to us.) Somewhere in there, she must have remarked on the fact that the delinquent driver should have signaled with her arm if her signal was broken and one of us, Maria in my memory, piped up with something helpful like, “maybe she doesn’t know it’s broken!”

This put my mother over the edge. She threw up her arms in despair - why keep your hands on the wheel when this is what you have to put up with? Might as well end it all now - and screeched sarcastically, “maybe she didn’t have an arm!” Insert a long string of expletives and most likely an irrevocable prohibition of further conversation during the drive.

How dare we identify with this perfect stranger instead of rallying around my mother in this moment of righteous indignation? Who knows, there are days when I just might have the same reaction myself in a similar situation! In any case, my mom’s frustrated cry inadvertently became a common refrain for my sisters and me in all sorts of situations when one of us was making silly excuses - whispered out of my mom’s hearing of course…We aren’t that dumb!

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I read an article claiming that when children complain for instance, that the food is taking too long at a restaurant, instead of being happy to be at a restaurant at all, parents might ask them what they think might be causing the wait. Perhaps the server is working a double shift and is very tired because they haven’t had a break all day. Maybe there is a problem in the kitchen that is out of their control. A lot of things can happen to make service slower in a restaurant, just as a lot of things can happen in a friendship that have the potential to cause frustration and hard feelings.

When I started writing this essay, I was (and still am) preoccupied with a friendship I had to put on hold about a year ago. I was in a lot of emotional pain over something that wasn’t my friend’s fault. Still, she somehow became emblematic of that pain and I had to distance myself. I haven’t found a way to rekindle our friendship yet, and to be honest, I don’t know if I will. I’ve been trying to channel my empathy and forgiveness and compassion for her and for myself, but I think there’s some foolish pride in there that makes me feel too vulnerable to act. I’m afraid of what will happen. But I’m still working on it and thinking about what I should do. So maybe I shouldn’t beat myself up so much…I’m doing my best.

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Thanks for reading. Does empathy come naturally to you?

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