Sans Fig Leaf
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"Knowing or feeling?"
29 December, 2006
Throughout my teens I was acquainted with this quiet guy named Larry whose family attended the same church mine did. One morning while he and his brothers and sisters were getting ready for breakfast, he told his mother that his stomach hurt. She felt his forehead to see if he was feverish. Since it didn't feel like he had a fever, she said, "Don't be a complainer!"
A couple days later he collapsed at school with a burst appendix.
I knew he collapsed and was taken to the hospital, but I didn't learn about the events leading up to the situation until a couple years later.
The first person who told me about this sequence of events was, of all people, Larry's mother. Her point in telling me was to impress upon me just how clueless Larry could be at times. The situation was clearly Larry's fault, in her opinion, because he didn't explain his symptoms properly, and kept quiet about the increasing levels of pain and discomfort for the next few days.
The second person who told me the story was another woman, about the same age as Larry's mother, who had several children about the same age as Larry and his siblings. It was part of a constellation of stories she had about how abusive and neglectful Larry's mother was of her own kids. In this second woman's opinion the situation had clearly been the mother's fault, because an attentive mother would have asked more questions, and would have noticed her son's complexion becoming pale, and so forth.
Both of them were talking to me about Larry because he had been assigned to be my assistant on one of the summer performance tours of the choir of which I was assistant director and stage manager. Larry's mother was trying to impress on me the need to explain things to Larry in multiple ways, to keep an eye on him, to not leave him unsupervised until he had done a job several times.
The other woman hoped that I could be a mentor for Larry, and give him some badly needed love, affirmation, and guidance to becoming a fully-functioning person--since her attempts to offer advice or help to the parents had come to naught.
It left me in an odd situation. I was only a few years older than Larry, attending college and still trying to decide what I wanted to be when I grew up. I didn't feel qualified to be anyone's mentor. On the other hand, I knew what it was like to grow up in an abusive family and feel like no one knew or cared what happened to me.
Fortunately, there was a job to do, and through the long weeks that followed, I tried to be both a good supervisor and friend.
The most interesting aspect of this story to me, looking back many years later, is not what happened between Larry and I. It's the fact that both of the woman who talked to me sincerely about Larry's situation were equally wrong--and equally right.
I have no direct knowledge that Larry's mother was actually abusive. She did seem to be self-involved to a rather frightening degree, and not terrible bright--but that hardly proves either abuse or negligence.
I've been through two situations since where I was working with someone just hours before their appendix burst. In both cases, all of us around them were aware that the person was sick. We had all asked if they shouldn't be at home in bed, or if they had seen a doctor, and so forth. But there wasn't any way just interacting with them in a workplace environment, to tell that they had anything worse than a severe cold, or possibly the flu.
My own direct experience with appendicitis was not that different. Given the doctor's estimate of how long mine had been infected before I went in, I didn't notice anything for days, myself. And when I did experience symptoms, I thought I had a mild stomach flu. It was many hours later before I realized that it was something more serious.
I can understand, therefore, why Larry's mother didn't realize how serious the tummy ache complaint was.
However, an adult in charge of a child, even a teen-aged one, has responsibilities to look after the child. There should have been at least some follow-up questions, like "Did that stomach ache clear up?" Something more than ignoring him completely for days, anyway.
Having lived with an abusive parent, and having done more than a bit of study on the topic subsequently, I know it's common for children in such environments to develop quite a high tolerance to discomfort, dissatisfaction, et cetera. It doesn't pay, in those situations, to complain to the abuser, or request relief. You learn to put up with all sorts of things that "normal" people would never dream of sitting still for.
So I also can see the point of the other woman: the fact that Larry shut up and didn't say anything more as the pain escalated to excrutiating could imply that he'd developed those tolerances and the habit of not speaking up for himself.
However, if she really believed that Larry's mother was guilty of abuse and neglect, she shouldn't have been talking to a young man barely older that one of the children in the abusive family: asking him to be some sort of emotional white knight that would teach Larry to overcome this situation through an improved self-image and friendships. Since she claimed to have made attempts at talking to the parents, the next step should have been talking to child protective services or someone else who could intervene on behalf of all of the children.
Over the course of the tour I spent a lot of time with Larry. He was obviously not comfortable talking about many things, including his family. He liked talking about the sound and light equipment, learning about staging and planning, and troubleshooting the equipment and things like that. He seemed to enjoy the work and seemed to make a couple of new friends among the crew. He seemed more self-confident and gregarious than he had been when we started the tour.
I don't know what ultimately happened to Larry. The next year his dad was transferred somewhere and the family moved away.
Should I have asked him, point blank, about his family situation? Should I have said something to someone else? I don't know. I don't think we can know.
Life is more complicated than we would like it to be. Like the pundits who point to a rising stock market and insist that proves the economy is fine--they forget that the stock market was rising like crazy for months before the crash that led to the great depression. We can't look at only one or two things and have an accurate picture of any situation.
We have to get into it--whatever it is--deeply enough to feel the happiness or pain of our fellow travellers.
--Andre Gide
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