I’m with Lefty and Fiver. You don’t know what you don’t know till you know it. You might think you know it, but you really don’t know it.
Mad props to Rumsfeld!
Anyone who says ‘in order to understand X, you must have experienced X first hand’ speak for yourself. It is not beyond the realms of possibility that other people are simply more imaginative or more compassionate than you are. Stop projecting your own shortcomings on to others.
Seconded. I swear, it feels like becoming a parent alters your brain chemistry.
Yes, that’s exactly what we’re doing.
One part of what makes this so odd and upsetting to non-parents is how the person lashed out at Anamikaa unprovoked. It wasn’t like OP had said anything to try to minimize, or claim to empathize with, the woman’s feelings. The woman just decided that moment was a good time to try to make Anaamika feel bad about not being a parent. WTF is it about some parents that makes them feel they have to do this? It’s happened to me before, too.
And in this situation, I do think anyone who has been a child can relate somewhat, especially if they care a lot about their parent. I can empathize with how much it hurts my mother to hear when something bad happens to me because it hurts me to have to tell her, partly because of the special relationship I have with her, and partly because I see the depths of her heartbreak, which makes me feel even worse in turn.
Many non-parents also have people with whom they have a quasi-parental relationship. For example, I have a relationship with my younger sisters that is something of a “second mom”-type role. So I have experienced similar feelings for someone I am deeply connected to, and responsible for.
I can take my own experiences, and extrapolate from there how much worse it must be for a parent.
My mom and I are going through this right now because I have been very seriously ill. I don’t have kids, but I absolutely get how the worry and hurt preys on her every day. I have never been a parent, but I definitely get how bad it is for her. We have had conversations in which she acknowledges that she feels I do get it, and that knowing that I know how bad it is for her, makes it even worse, because she feels bad that I feel bad for/guilty about her feelings. (And that is a special kind of awful, shitty feeling in and of itself that some people may never experience…but I would not claim no one could possibly comprehend if they haven’t been through it.)
Thank you QN Jones.
Like I said, she apologized, genuinely. And I feel similarly to what you say. Even when my mom and I were battling it out and when we could barely talk to each other I knew somewhere in there she still worried. She was my mom. And when I really needed her, I called her - because I knew it gratified her to help me and take care of me, and because I knew she worried.
It was a little bit of a swerve. I mean, I almost had tears in my own eyes, listening to the tale of this poor doggy, and then suddenly I get swiped at for not having kids? But…I never said that I could either totally get how you feel, nor did I say that being sad or wanting to cry when your kid cries is abnormal.
When my dad called me to tell me my mom was dying he was crying. I instantly broke down into tears, too. He told me not to cry, and I said, “Dad, if you are crying, how can I not cry?” I get it, parental units. Whether you think I am capable of that kind of empathy or not, I actually am.
Now I have tears in my eyes again, remembering my dad’s tears that day.
I wasn’t there to hear the tone of the mother in the OP but her apology would indicate that it wasn’t meant to be cruel. I think it’s probably a realization she has come to herself and she has been surprised by it. She didn’t expect before she was a mother how affecting the pain, fears and disappointments of her child would be and thinks others are the same.
True (I’m a parent as well), but realistically this woman had a bit of “mommy martyr” going on, I think. She chastised Anaamika out of the clear blue for no good reason. She totally got on her parental high horse and confronted someone in an unprovoked fashion. Totally uncalled for.
I mean, how would you feel if your combat vet friends specifically singled you out and pointed out that YOU don’t know, even if you hadn’t said a word, ever, about that kind of thing? They know you don’t know what it’s like, and you know you don’t know what it’s like, and unless you’re spouting some nonsense, the only purpose of saying that kind of thing is to belittle you and make you feel bad.
I suspect that for some reason or other, the woman in the OP probably resents or is envious of Anaamika.
Can anyone really know what an experience is like if they haven’t had it? And can feelings be measured?
I have a friend whose mom died when she was 16 and her sister was 14. (Car accident, so a definite before-and-after.) I’ve heard a great deal about her mother, and about the adjustment period afterwards. I’ve always listened and not made many comments, because what did I have to contribute? But it seems that she had sixteen years of a great life with two kind and loving parents until the accident happened.
Then one night when we were a bit tipsy, I started telling about my very dysfunctional family. And I could barely complete a thought without her piping up with “Well, maybe they…Well, some people…Well, maybe he…” I let it go. Because, and I didn’t say this to her, but it seemed that she couldn’t grasp the idea that some people are just nasty. No, there had to be an excuse for everything, even if some of the excuses contradicted each other. Afterwards, discussing it with Mr. Rilch, he said, “Well, she’s probably thinking that she’d love to have her mom alive, even at the price of what you’ve dealt with from your family.”
“True, I don’t know what it’s like to have a parent die. But she doesn’t know what it’s like to cower in a basement, listening to screaming and crashing and cursing from overhead, wondering if someone’s going to be dead by morning.”
“Well, don’t call her on it.”
“I won’t.”
Ah! There’s a great example. I had abusive parents, too. Not like yours, but pretty bad still. There were beatings but mostly emotional abuse. Anyway, when I started dating my current SO, one of the reasons I fell in love with him was because when I started telling him tentatively about my mom, he was one of the very few people - at the time, the ONLY person - who didn’t say “Oh, she meant well”, or “She’s just your mom, you should listen to her,” or “She just wants the best for you.” Instead, he listened sympathetically and empathized with me.
No, he doesn’t know what it’s like to live under the same roof as my mom. But I wouldn’t tell him that because he has never claimed to! But I certainly know he can empathize and he can feel MY pain, because he cares for me.
Fergodsake, do I need to have had that exact experience, down to the clothes, hairstyles and voices, and what was playing on the TV in the background, in order to be capable of an adequately sympathetic understanding?
Or is it enough to have had similar experiences? If I’ve had to put a pet cat to sleep, do you think my life experience has prepared me to sympathize with your experience of having to put your pet dog to sleep? I’m not a parent, but I do have a spouse, siblings and parents whom I love and whose well-being I care about, and I sometimes shed tears in sympathy with theirs. Has that experience adequately prepared me to understand and sympathize with parents who care/worry about their children, or is parental love/concern completely beyond my understanding?
Hell, I’m going to be going through menopause within the next ten years. I have had a clue or two that perimenopause has already started. What a fucking asshole I would be if I told my loving SO, while he’s empathizing with me, that he could never understand how it felt because he’s not a woman. Of course he can’t! He knows this! But he can still feel and understand my pain!
It’s just stupid. We’re all human. I have a niece and a nephew. I love them dearly. If they cry or they are upset it hurts me. I can extrapolate from there how much more it must hurt for a parent to see their child hurting.
I was agreeing with you. Like I said, how can you measure these things?
I like to think that we should describe grief by personal levels of grief and not by the things/situations we grieve for.
I can say that the worst thing that has happened in my life is when my dog died. Someone else can say it’s when their kid died. I would not compare those two things by who/what died but by the level of pain and sorrow felt individually. Not saying that the kid is the same as a dog but to someone who doesn’t have a kid, just a dog, that is their deepest darkest grief. Losing a child will never be my deepest darkest grief but that doesn’t mean I won’t ever hit my personal low. It just comes in the form of something else.
I have a friend who is recuperating from hip surgery and is in a lot of pain still. She commiserates with another friend who has had several kidney transplants and suffers from arthritis and some other maladies. The woman who has all the maladies doesn’t try to put down the one with the hip surgery because she realizes that the hip surgery is the longest, most painful and most frustrating illness the person has ever been through. That’s the level they connect on - not who’s pain is worse or will last longer.
Anyway, we all have people and things we care most deeply for, and our highest and lowest and most intense emotions get felt through these people and things. Just because one person’s thing is a child or children doesn’t mean they have a monopoly on highs and lows.
I hear ya, Anaamika. As someone who is also childless, I can gather what that would feel like. I’ve never personally been there, but there’s lots of other things in my life (severe mental illness, caregiving a non-compliant loved one) that make me have that disconnect with others. For example, someone will be relating to me about their case of the Mondays or how unfun it was to babysit a sick relative for a week. And although they seem to want to make the situations analogous, I never go; “No, being agoraphobic for years is not the same as being occasionally sad and not wanting to get out of bed.” or “Just because great aunt Ethel was annoying with the constant stepping and fetching, it ain’t the same as watching your spouse die because they won’t take care of their damn selves no matter what you do!” It’s just odd that some folks don’t appear to have that filter in place that makes them realize certain things shouldn’t be said or presumed. I’m sorry.
I am not a dad.
Maybe this is one of the reasons I do not understand my parents or any parents at all.
Oh, and Anaamika:
That’s a keeper!
A lot of the emotions you feel as a parent make no sense. Irrational fears, irrational joys. Something about what those little monsters/angels do sets us off in ways we can’t understand ourselves. There’s no reason at all to cry over a kid walking on a balance beam in gymnastics class, but sure enough, there’s some parent in the stands crying.
I’m as logical and rational as anyone, but I’ve done this too. I can’t claim to understand it, and if I were to say something like that(not that I ever remember having done so) it would be more of an apology for my irrational behavior than an indictment of someone else’s ability to emphathize. Frankly it’s embarassing sometimes to overreact to a kid’s behavior in these ways. Pleading parenthood as a way to explain otherwise irrational behavior puts the onus for the social awkwardness back on the parent instead of the non-parent. Which is as it should be I believe.
Enjoy,
Steven
“I’m sorry about your dog. I had a family member facing a serious, life-threatening illness and the pain involved - well, you probably wouldn’t understand because your situation involves a pet.” :dubious:
Yep.
Because parents, before they were parents, thought they did understand. And then they became parents. And then you discover that, no, you didn’t. Maybe intellectually you had a clue, but its not the same thing at all.
But I agree, its a little rude to tell people they don’t understand.