There was one other thing about Saturday night at that clubhouse: one person actually DID see me.
A young mom with two very small children, one of them barely old enough to walk. They were doing the charming wobbly meandering exploring of the great outside world that people of that size love to do, and she was keeping a bored but careful eye on them while letting them roam a bit. The little boys stayed together, pretty much. I’m sure she was making sure they didn’t get too near that pool back there.
Which meant she was standing in the walkway between the gate I was stuck behind and across from that open door I was so fervently wanting to reach. She was in. I was out. She saw me, then carefully turned and did the I’m-not-seeing-you pretense, glancing my way occasionally without quite making eye contact again.
If that gate was locked in my face it was obviously because I didn’t belong there. Well then.
Now picture it, a potluck party going on in that clubhouse, and me, dressed in a skirt and silk blouse and what I think is one of the most elegant shawls I’ve knit, a chocolate torte held up in one hand and my artsy hand-carved sassafras wood cane in the other hand, justifying my wavering balance. The Birkenstocks.
Quite the scary stranger stereotype.
I called out Evet’s name as Evet walked past that doorway. Waved that torte. The cane.
I wonder if, feeling guilty later, the young woman perhaps ventured to check whose name the clubhouse was reserved in for the evening.
All I needed her to have done was to step five steps sideways to poke a head in the door and ask, Is there an Evet here? Someone’s trying to get your attention.
To be fair, yes, small children change direction and speed fast and unexpectedly; she would have had to shepherd them in the same direction to keep them in her direct line of sight.
It was easier to just keep to her own business and pretend she didn’t know I was there. And I, openly dissed, could not make myself ask her to do for me what she did not want to do for me. Because if she refused even that–I’m a mom too. I would not want one of my children to feel so much worse the way that making that choice would cause her to feel later.
I have often thought how true the words are of one of Rachel Remen’s cancer patients, who told Dr. Remen, I have found there are two kinds of people: those who love. And those who fear.
When we close down and deny the humanity in those we don’t know, we deny our own.
I’m looking at this from the standpoint of middle age, remembering the boredom and the hassles and the interrupted-sleep nights of when my children were little. Of some of the things I might have done differently had I had enough rest and some time to myself to just sit and think. Which, come to think of it, is why I took up handicrafts–sewing, then smocking, then went back to my love of knitting–when my children were small. It stayed done. It gave me a sense of creative accomplishment.
And it gave me time to center myself and think.
I like to think I left that woman with a life lesson she won’t forget. I like to think she’ll choose differently next time, never again wanting to feel the sting of that regret. Opening the gate for me, or asking the others first to make sure and then letting someone else there take the responsibility of doing so–it would have been so easy. I would have been so very grateful. Hey, she’d have been invited in with her little boys for celebratory chocolate torte with the rest of us, first piece!
There are many ways to learn not to choose fear.
There’s still some leftover torte.