Comparative suffering
Some thoughts
It’s hard to know what to say this week.
It doesn’t help that I’m starting this post at 8:24pm on a Sunday night, after repeatedly nodding off while I read Ava her bedtime stories half an hour ago. There is nothing I want more than to simply crawl into bed early and get some much needed rest.
I’d intended to write on Friday, but as I drove Ava home from the dentist in the morning to leave her with her nanny, she threw up all over herself, and so after getting her cleaned up, I spent the next two and a half hours cleaning her carseat. Only somewhat successfully, I might add. The cover has finally stopped smelling after I hosed it down inch by inch in the driveway, then soaked it in the tub with baking soda for hours, and then put it through two cycles in the washing machine. But if anyone has any hot tips for getting vomit out of the straps of a carseat, which cannot be removed from the base, send ‘em my way, because that is definitely still a situation.
Anyway. It totally sucked to spend virtually all of my personal time for the week cleaning up barf. After a week of essentially solo parenting while Jamie was at an onsite for work. After just getting over a horrible cold/flu. After a month of taking care of not only an increasingly assertive toddler, but also a husband in recovery.
I felt so ripped off and pissed off and just plain sad as I stood in the driveway wiping vomit off my hands and googling how to remove my carseat, feeling any other ambitions I’d had for the day draining away.
But compared to what other people are dealing with right now, losing their homes and their entire communities, or having to evacuate with the fear of losing everything, vomit in a carseat is just about the smallest most nothing problem imaginable.
And that’s always the case. No matter what, there is always, invariably, someone (or a great many someones) somewhere in the world, in vastly more dire circumstances than we are. There are always families losing everything. There are always mothers unable to provide food for their children. There are always grave injustices and horrendous crimes being committed against innocents.
As I write these words, I feel resistance to the word ‘always’, and yet, as wrong as this all is, I have never known it to be different in all of my life. “The world is at least
fifty percent terrible”1, after all. And because of our technology and the 24/7 bombardment of news that has become the norm, we are always acutely aware of that as well.
It makes it hard to simply live some days, knowing that other people are suffering so much. It feels so wrong to be okay, to be happy even, when there is such pain in the world. And so I think a lot of the time we try to pay penance by inundating ourselves with the painful pictures and stories and information, feeling like that vicarious suffering is really the least we could do.
No one deserves to suffer, so maybe we feel that no one deserves to be happy either. The unfairness of it all is too much to take.
I don’t really know what I’m trying to say here, and I’m too tired to edit this into full coherence. I guess all I’m really trying to say is that it’s hard to witness large-scale suffering, to be inundated with the excruciating details of other people’s suffering, and to not feel some guilt that it is happening to them and not to us. It’s hard not to feel that we must atone in some way for the privilege that our homes are not the ones on fire.
The collective weight of this sits with all of us, as do so many other tragedies that continue to play out on the global stage. The unfairness of it all. The uncertainty of it all. The fragility of human life and the life of our beautiful planet.
It’s a lot to have humming in the background of our days, even if we’re not directly impacted in any way.
I guess all of this to say simply be gentle with yourself this week. If you need space from the news, take it. If staying connected feels important, focus on getting information on how to help, like where in your community to donate clothes and household goods and personal items.
Take time outside and, if you’re breathing fresh clean air, take a moment to be grateful for it.
And if you find yourself at the end of your rope, hot tears spilling down your cheeks as you wrestle a stinking car seat out of your backseat and painstakingly scrape bright purple vomit (hello yogurt and berries!) out of every nook and cranny, your precious hours of freedom slipping through your grasp once more, feel your sadness. Let it be there.
Your suffering not the biggest in the room. It’s nowhere even close. But it is yours, and it is real, and it is worthy of your compassion.
Maggie Smith, ‘Good Bones’, Waxwing, Issue 10, June 2016
Spot on.