And now for a moment of immaturity...
A friend
stopped by today to drop off my kids and her daughter. She had been watching them while I did a mad dash of grocery shopping (with kids it takes 2.5x longer) and her daughter is staying the night tonight at my house while she goes out. Totally normal thing, a swap "this" for "that" arrangement, always is going on with mothers of young to middle age range children, the other half of the swap sometimes happening simutaneously or weeks later, all of it coming out in the wash eventually. I was feeling totally fine until my daughter ran up to me with a huge cookie cake, all smiles, exclaiming that I needed to look at it. I was puzzled (it's no one's birthday) so I looked at it and it just had a huge "thank you" to me on it. I pasted on a smile, intentionally not huge, talked my way through the drop-off, went inside, put the 3 kids outside with bathing suits and the sprinkler, and proceeded to grumble my way through putting away the groceries. I don't like cookie cakes. I didn't want a cookie cake. Why do I now have a cookie cake. If you want to spend money on me, my purse needs replacing.
Let me explain myself at the risk of being ungrateful. This is a friend who is extremely vocal about being health conscious, frugal, and knowing what everyone individually wants. Keep this in mind and add that she brought me a greasy, chocolate chip cookie cake that runs about $28 (I know because I footed the bill for two of them birthday season) and I don't even like sweets (dark chocolate yes but 80%; Hubby is the cookie cake nut). We as a family ARE very health conscious, on an EXTREMELY tight budget, and have to watch our sweet intake because we have certain other family members who feed us and don't care about that one bit, thus sweets get offered LOTS.
Gifts like this causes two reactions in me, neither of which I'm proud of:
1)...the odd Monty Python-like skit in my mind where John Cleese is my dad, me saying "But Fahhhtha, I don't WAHHHNT it" and him jumping around me saying, "Yes you do. Yes you do" and me just smiling on the outside hoping I'm fooling everyone...
...OR...
2)me telling the person "You know I don't like this."
I have done both. The first one makes me feel like a doormat/liar and the second, I suspect, makes everyone else think I'm a b*tch. So where do we draw the line? Where does this get solved? There are all those self help people who say "Be true to yourself" and all those feel good conventions that have lovely stories about how wonderful people are when they are grateful for what they have. How do we solve this, people?
This brought to mind an episode where the Bee received something and she became upset because it wasn't what she wanted. Hubby and I consoled her like most parents would, telling her the person didn't know and be grateful for what she receives because she doesn't have to get anything. I told myself that, but it didn't make me feel any better. There is still a stinky cookie cake on my counter that I'm going to have to (ack) eat or (frown) give away, regretfully contributing to someone's weight problem, hurting my witness of healthy eating and care. There is also the issue of me facing her daughter at supper tonight, knowing that she will report everything to her mother on what was done with the cookie cake (kids are great like that; cookie cakes are their dream so isn't it every adult's? And adults can buy them anytime they want, too!). So I wasn't reaching much balance in this problem. Throwing it away is also an option but that seems wasteful and would definitely get reported back.
I thought about what the friend would want me to do. She would
say that she would want me to tell the truth but I don't think she would receive it well and would feel like a failure in not making me happy. I don't really want to deal with her constantly reminding me by trying to make it up ("oh, sorry, I brought a cookie cake for your husband so I brought a completely different dessert for you"), or making excuses ("sorry, I know you don't like this but it's all I had"), or trying to accommodate my tastes (my tastes are definitely not everyone else's and really, now that I think of it, it's not that big a deal).
Throughout putting groceries away and all this running through my mind I remembered something I have said several times: I love working with kids because they actually try to do what we teach them, unlike the parents who don't, WON'T, and should know better. I realized that even though I might not get THE ANSWER for this problem, I should follow my own parenting advice and be grateful (even when I don't want it), don't pin my happiness on someone else's actions, and work with what I get, whether it's to keep or to give away. Do I understand it completely? No, but I don't want to be one of those parents who fusses at their kids to be responsible and then won't do it themselves. I'd rather be a good example and strive for the answer than the b*tch with only my interests in mind, not considering the other person's mind state, gift habits, and/or personal guilt.
Dear God, please grant me the grace to accept people for themselves, not what I think they should be. Please help me be happy through me, not others actions. And most importantly, help me BE the person I tell my children they should be. No lip service, please.
Thank you for your time. I feel better now.
