Originally Posted by
Golden
Two specific other moms come to mind. One of them is from a very humanitarian family that has wealth and created a foundation to fund various worthy causes. She's lovely, kind, contained, soft, an excellent parent, and has a quiet but obvious community spirit. She clearly embodies right and wrong. No one could ever imagine her doing a real moral misdeed. I like her sincerely but feel very apart from someone like her. I feel inferior, I feel gauche, I feel ridiculous. In this little world we have shared, she stands for something selfless and good, and I seem to be just plain out of it.
But I also could critique this woman, and mothers like her, because they have a narrow sense of right and wrong and it pisses me way off. For example, there is another mom in our kids' class who is from a very impoverished background and struggles with basic things like not using drugs, having an income, having a place to live, not being abused by her ne'er-do-well husband. To top it off, the woman is not exactly likeable, and her child is a terror. So when the woman was faced with eviction from her apartment after her husband abandoned her (again) last year in favor of a drug bender, who stepped in to help the woman? That's right, me.
And it's not that I relish doing a good deed, nor that I enjoy the woman's company, as she's a major pain in the ass. But the principle of the thing is that she has had a really rotten life and never gotten a fighting chance. And I'll be damned if I'll just sit by while people like the uber-nice right-and-wrong moms cozily ignore someone's real suffering. And it pisses me off that some of those moms seem to think that by merely in assisting (or even saying hello to) someone who is dirty, impoverished, uneducated, and low-class they will somehow be tarnished by direct association.