Judgment November 29, 2008

So, my mom’s family, whom we’re visiting now, is every which kind of crazy. There is a lot of alcoholism and other dysfunction, so when everyone gets together, we’re never sure what to expect. Our branch of the family and one other branch are considered the “hoity toity” ones that “have money.” Jasper and I are not wealthy (I mean, in the American sense), but we are educated and have jobs and bank accounts, which puts us way ahead of some of them.

One of my aunts in particular is using drugs and is nasty to everyone. She has a son who is 25 and barely wants to be associated with her, and she’s very self-conscious about how everyone knows that she has been a pretty bad mother. Anyway, she was at our Thanksgiving dinner tonight and observing Mavis, who was behaving well but squirmily, as a two year will do. She wasn’t noisy or bothering anyone, but my aunt needed to take the opportunity to cut us down to make herself feel better (it’s so obvious that this is what she’s doing, even though it’s really a cliche to say so). So she leaned over to my cousin, who is a nurse, and said, “Do you think she’s so hyper because they don’t let her have any sugar?”

I love the logic on this one. First, we do let her have sugar, but not candy on demand. Secondly, wouldn’t she be hyper if she had sugar? My cousin said, “Well, she doesn’t seem hyper to me–she seems two.” My aunt then baked up some story about how sometimes Ritalin has a reverse affect on children, riling them up more than it focuses them. How this analogy works, even in theory, was so baffling that my cousin and I got a good laugh out of it.

Later, laughing over this story as I retold it to my mom, my mom informed me that my aunt had also criticized me and Jasper for encouraging Mavis to say “please” and “thank you” when gifts were given to her last night. Later she also reacted to Mavis’ good vocabulary by saying, “well, living with two teachers, you know everything is letters and numbers for her,” in a snarky voice that suggested we just drill our toddler endlessly. It couldn’t be, you know, that Mavis is just a smart cookie.

My aunt is a crack addict who was also drinking tonight and has no real authority on anything, so I’m not hurt by these comments, especially based on the approximately two hours that she saw Mavis. But they do remind me of how quick we sometimes are to judgment from minimal facts, how soon we want to draw conclusions about other people’s parenting skills when we’re unsure of our own. I think my aunt is just an extreme example.

Tonight Jasper and I went out to a movie with my cousin and siblings while my mom watched over a sleeping Mavis. After the movie, Jasper and I stopped at a grocery store that is open 24 hours to get some snacks for our return trip tomorrow. On the way out, in 27-degree air and at midnight, was a young mom bringing her sleeping toddler into the store. I felt myself rush to judgment–why isn’t that baby in bed?!–and then stopped myself and felt, instead, some sympathy for whatever it was that made that mother have to haul her child into a grocery store at midnight, by herself.  Whatever the reason was, it had nothing to do with me.