I felt the heat first; it quickly filled my chest and exploded into a wild fire. The fire raged and spread; each cell, tissue, organ, and nerve became consumed by the flame. I wanted to give in completely, to let the fire swallow my being and lavish in the feeling of power and release. My breaths are short and my muscles are tense, my eyes focus on the woman in front of me.
No, I am not really on fire. It is the feeling of anger, the seductive and consuming emotion that spreads like wild fire. A feeling that is so tempting to fall into completely and let control your actions, with each burst of destruction acting its fantasies out through our limbs. I fought the emotion as best I could, but anger is an unforgiving mistress…
Luckily, those around me pick up on the tense air. Pulling from their strength my breaths become longer allowing the cold air to soothe the mighty fire. The struggle begins as the fire attempts to burn each atom of oxygen wanting only to continue in growth but the oxygen is too great. Finally a flood of fresh air is allowed to sweep my body and the flames are diminished to hot embers, spitting out little sparks of heat and exhaling toxic smoke.
This is not an emotion I feel very often, over the years I have become good at keeping calm and practicing my breathing (thanks to my wonderful mother). I find anger to be a frightening and seducing emotion, it has the power the completely override our rational brain and force us to act on vicious instinct. Anger takes hold of the reins and we become forces of destruction and violence. To me, that is something to spend a lot of time and energy on avoiding. I feel anger as a fire, I see it in colors of red and orange, and I feel it in shapes that are sharp and erratic. Normally it comes on slowly, and I can breathe deeply allowing my breaths to calm the flames before they spread. On occasion however, my anger is a wild fire and spreads far too rapidly for any preventive measures.
Now, this is not what I intend my blog to be for. I am not an overly poetic writer who chooses to write in vague prose… but yesterday I was swept away by my anger, and since this is such a rare occurrence I felt the need to write about it.
Onto the topic of the day… I wanted to write about divorce in the world and the morality of marriage and spent the day thinking about what I would say. My family and I went to the next city over that day, and unfortunately my sweet 2-year-old monster princess was not able to take a nap. By the end of the day she was cranky and trying desperately to keep herself awake in the way that many 2-year-olds choose to do so, going nuts. To be honest, she is pretty well behaved even when she is being ornery.
We were at a restaurant and she was bossing me around, yelling, and moving from seat to seat. I wanted her to just sit down and be quiet until the meal was over. I was speaking to her sternly (as I am more often than not a strict mother) and she was fighting it (as is the nature of a toddler). A few times I stepped outside with her so that we could calm down, get some fresh air, and not disturb all of the other patrons. All in all, it was not the worst display of parent/child power struggles. The table next to us was a middle aged woman and she watched my daughter and me carefully. She sat there ever so smugly, and began to make comments on how my child misbehaved and how loud she was. When her little granddaughter began to fuss (as infants often do) she claimed that it was because my daughter was fussing. This woman even went so far as to make a comment to my husband about how we probably wished our infant would behave better than our older daughter. The whole time she was sitting on her high horse, her two older children were running around the restaurant doing as they pleased. Granted they were quiet, but they were not sitting at the table and eating.
I know she is not worth mentioning, but she is what made me so angry. I consider myself to be a very good mother (not perfect) but good. I am strict because I believe that at this age my daughter is testing her boundaries; if I don’t consistently reinforce where they are then she will struggle as she gets older and have to face real life consequences. I love my children dearly, I believe that everything I do is for their benefit and of course it pains me to see the anger, frustration, irritation, or sadness in their faces when I have to deny or correct them. However, I would rather experience these struggles now then see them learn about boundaries in the adult world. I believe that my punishments and corrections are far more compassionate then the ones they will face on their own. So, it angers me to be judged on my parenting, especially when people do not have all of the facts.
This is my point of the whole post, which I learned from my fountain of wisdom (dear mom). We have no idea what is going on in other people’s lives. They could be in pain, having a bad day, extremely tired, confused… Lord knows what, but we don’t. Because there is no way to know what is going on in some one’s life at the time, we should try to withhold judgment.
Would you go and buy a car without having all of the facts? No.
Would you go and buy a house without knowing all about it? No.
Would you go on a trip without knowing the details of your itinerary? No.
So why would you make a decision about a person’s actions without having a pretty good idea of what is going on in their life?
Judging without the facts shows one of the more disgusting faces of humanity. We become smug, self-righteous, racist, sexist, and cruel. It is not in people’s nature to be isolated by such negative feelings; we are a “heard species” meaning we need to be around other likeminded individuals. Humanity has the capacity of accomplish such beautiful and great things, it is through rash judgments and other negative or immature actions that we keep ourselves from growth.
So think to yourself, next time you see child crying and acting like a toddler (especially if they are one) maybe they have a dysfunctional family, maybe they are tired from a long trip, and maybe they are sick. Or how about (this being my mother’s favorite example) the next time you think some gives you a mean look for no reason, maybe they just had some God awful gas…
Think people. Think.
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