Accusation
3D Judges Gavel
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I have a lot of crazy stories from my NYC teaching days. I rarely take them out and share them because I could “one up” my colleagues a lot if I did, but sometimes I tell them to my boss and we enjoy them for the war stories they are.
Plain everyday living in New York is hard. New Yorkers get a bad rap for their apparent rudeness, but what most call rude is really just abrupt. There is a need to save time in the city, because no matter the method of commute, most New Yorkers spend at least 2 hours round-tripping back and forth to work, on a good day.. One winter when my car was snowed under, I spent 5 hours a day traveling. It was a nightmare. With this reality, too much “nicety”, too much friendliness actually becomes rude to native New Yorkers or those who have assimilated. I remember being home in Sitka one summer. My mom and I walked down Main Street, which is a 5 minute walk if you stretch it out. Everyone was acting really weird. They didn’t know me, and yet they were SMILING at me. I remember being so frustrated. “Didn’t they realize how rude that was? Didn’t they know how long it took for me to stop and smile back at them?”
In addition to long commutes, the city had a way of making so many things we take for granted in Washington State hard. Including teaching. One year, I had a little girl who was struggling. I did the usual things to support her, but failed to sense how intense her mom would take my every word, writing each syllable down verbatim, and bringing relatives to conferences as witnesses. When Mom asked me to talk with her child’s after-school academic tutoring, I happily called them, until they began a full court marketing press maneuver, at which point, I ended communication with them. Despite school policy which forbade it, Mom would sneak her daughter in a side door late, and then proceed to stand outside my door and watch me teach for up to an hour.
After 2 or 3 amiable conversations concerning her child, never having complained to me, the mom wrote a 5-page complaint against me and sent it to our principal, the district office, and the chancellor’s office. 5 pages! The letter alleged among other things, that “Miss Truitt set out to deliberately destroy my daughter’s self-esteem.” I was very grateful to be fortunate enough to have a student teacher that year who could vouch for my actions. The complaint was never taken seriously. And the letter was so crazy and unlike my character, that it didn’t shake me up too much. I kept the letter for years, as a souvenir of NYC teaching, as a badge of honor, and as a reminder that teaching would never be quite so hard again.
A 5-page letter filled with lies wasn’t hard to shake off. (It might be now, but back then, I lived in a studio the size of a nice bathroom, and considered dental floss a luxury. I had bigger problems.). But what if the letter had contained truth? What if it recorded every thoughtless word I spoke to a child? What if it recorded the times that year I had lost my temper? Or the times I had argued with a colleague (EVERYONE argues in NY. It’s like required or something.). What then? Would it have been so easy to dismiss?
No, it would have devastated me. I would have felt the full weight of my guilt. I think it’s every teacher’s worst nightmare that a parent might show up and yell at them for real transgressions. Luckily, most adults realize we all live in glass houses.
It’s easy for me to sit in judgment of this misguided mom for her criticalness and rock throwing, but honestly, don’t we do the same thing to one another? We think that our brother or sister has a blind spot and if we just tell them, the big light bulb will come on over their head, they will magically change because they were just waiting for our wisdom, and they will forever after live lives of quiet gratitude to us for showing them the way. We don’t see the years they’ve sought the Lord with tears for freedom for the exact thing we think we are revealing to them. We don’t know how far they've already come, or much progress they’ve already made. Or maybe, we have no idea what a struggle it is for them just to have enough money for the month to eat every day.
We confront in friendships, because we feel entitled to be heard. We have heard the adage, “You teach people how to treat you, “and have taken it to heart and want to educate our friends about our hurts, our triggers, our exact Meyer-Briggs personality, and how they should respond to us. They must be fluent in our love language (Never mind that love languages are a man-made construct) and need honest feedback when they've erred.
We believe we should be entitled to give input on every decision of our local church. Why is the stage painted black? No one consulted me. How will that effect depressed people? What? No volleyball this year at the picnic? But the best players moved away, our house church might finally be able to win. Why was church cancelled because of a few snowflakes? Andreson was clear . . . There was church? Someone could have been killed by all the crazies on the road who don’t know how to drive in snow. And on and on.
If you’re at all like me, you’re now thinking of some of the most critical people you know. If you’re like me, you didn’t look in the mirror.
But lately? I’ve hurt people close to me by my judgments and criticism, way more than I would like to face. I’ve handed people invisible scripts, and expected them to follow along. When they can’t keep up, I let them know my disappointment in their performance. Over and over. There’s little worse than facing someone you love realizing the pain you've planted in them is so deep, it can be forgiven but not extracted. That only God can undo the harm you’ve done. And that it will take time.
I’m learning that God doesn’t watch Oprah. He doesn’t read all the friendship quotes on Pinterest which offer really dumb and bitter advice for AFTER you’ve already blown the friendship. He says, “Treat others how you want to be treated.” Not “teach people how to treat you.”
I don’t know about you, but I’ve been getting it backwards for a long time.