“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” -Maya Angelou
“You teach people how to treat you.” -Oprah Winfrey (at least that’s where I heard it)
My mother was a screamer. She was the kindest and most giving woman I know, who subordinated her own emotions and needs for the greater good (meaning me, my sister, and my father). But they would simmer, untended, just below the surface and erupt into shouty tirades often misdirected at whatever straw broke the proverbial dromedary’s back. Whip smart in her own way, she never attended college because girls didn’t so much back then. In midlife, however, she went back to school to pursue her love of educating children, and earned an associate’s degree in early childhood education. The photo of her in cap and gown, holding her diploma, wearing a Groucho Marx-style goofy glasses and moustache, is one of my favorites of her. It also made me immensely proud.
During her studies she would call me to lament, “I was a terrible mother. I did it all wrong.” I would reassure her, completely honestly, that I thought she was the best mother ever. We all have faults. But her screaming didn’t diminish her esteem in my eyes, and the fact that she was working to recognize and change this foible make me respect her even more. She never meddled when I had my two boys, but she would occasionally and gently give me parenting advice. “Pick your battles.” “Focus on D&D behavior (destructive and dangerous, not Dustin and Devon).” “Set clear boundaries and expectations and enforce them with clear consequences.” “Say what you mean and mean what you say.” I wish I had heeded her wise words more often with my sons.
As I have watched the world slowly fall apart over the last four years, accelerate its demise over the last year, and shift into warp speed destruction last Wednesday, I often think of her words. What is wrong with us as a people and a nation that we have let a maliciously narcissistic thug highjack our country and its people repeatedly with nary a consequence? He-who-I-will-not-name famously claimed presciently that he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue in New York and shoot somebody,” and not lose voters. Outraged people have noted that had Obama committed a fraction of the atrocities that our pussy-grabbing president has, he would now wear a prison suit to match 45’s fake tan and be on laundry detail in a penitentiary somewhere. When the Proud Boys and their acolytes violently stormed The People’s House in DC last week, similarly incensed voices noted that peaceful BLM protesters were treated more harshly than this mob.
Now, with nine days left, our lawmakers are finally looking to sanction and possibly remove him. Not a moment too soon, but four years too late. We all shook our heads, took angrily to the same social media that he used (until recently) to spew his mendacious vitriol, and tsk-tsked every time he outraged us with another violation. Each time we naively asked “what else could he possibly do?” And then he did.
I fully recognize that this is a complex issue not easily solved by pre-school principles. But the fact is, if Miss Barabara’s tenets had been applied firmly to he-who-I-hope-really-doesn’t-show-up-on-January-20, I suspect our country would not be as deeply riven as it is by false rhetoric and a rampant virus.
(Photo from the NYT)