Getting It Wrong

It can be truly amazing when you discover you’ve been wrong about a circumstance, an event, or a person. We can be so sure of our capable judgment when we’ve no idea that our view has been obscured, sometimes by filling in the blanks with assumed facts, or sometimes by faulty input that others have given us. And how easy it is for us to defend our perfect perspective until we discover how terribly wrong someone else’s perspective about US has been. When you, yourself are misjudged it can be so surprising that you wonder if the universe has suddenly flipped!

A very simple illustration occurred in my childhood, something that made my mother laugh out loud. One day, a little girl my age, whom Mother did not know, came knocking on our door and asked her, “Can Prissy come out and play?”

Mother could not imagine who “Prissy” was and told her that there was no one here by that name. But when I appeared in the room in view of the little girl, she gleefully shouted out, “Prissy!”

Mother often referred to me as “Pigpen” (as in the comic strip, Peanuts). She knew me as her youngest child who wore her older brother’s hand-me-down T-shirts and pants (because we were both skinny and my big sister’s clothes were too chubby for me).  I was the child who was one with the Earth, playing with the little boys across the street, perpetually and happily covered in mud, dirt, and clay, the child who had the best rock collection in all of Alexandria, who came home daily with pockets so full of rocks her pants were being dragged down around her knees and required both hands to hold them up. I was the child who got bathed, shampooed, and spiffed up every Saturday night whether she needed it or not because on Sunday morning she was clothed in crinolines, lacy socks, patent leather shoes, white gloves, and a frilly bonnet for Church.

The strange little girl at the door did not actually know my name and had ascribed “Prissy” to me. Just as she always called me Prissy, I never could remember her name, either and I just referred to her as “The Girl Who Calls Me Prissy.”

What was the difference? She lived around the corner, half-way up the block. If I was five years old at the time, there was no school or school bus for us to share. If I was six or seven, although I walked past her house to the bus stop, she must have gone to a private school. But, we’d met on a Sunday, maybe even Easter, after we’d come home from Church and I was still prancing around the block in my new Easter dress and she’d seen me as some sort of a magical, prissy, princess.

As children do, we’d struck up an immediate friendship and I’d told her where I lived. But, because our parents didn’t know each other, our sporadic play time together was always happenstance, out on the sidewalk in front of her house. I had pretty much free range for playing outside, as long as I did not cross the street or go into anyone’s house. This meant I could walk all the way around the block in pursuit of fun and adventure.

On that one day, the little girl’s mother had given her permission to walk to my house and invite me over.

So, who was right, the little girl, or Mother? Both were, but both perspectives were only partial. It was two sides of the same coin. I was equally comfortable being the dirty little urchin as I was being the Sunday Princess. Mother should have known better, but third children are easier to ignore than first-borns.

You know, that kind of limited knowledge and judgment has persisted. Well into my 50s, my own brother and sister were still treating me like an ignorant little sister. I had to confront them in no uncertain terms to correct that. People just fall into those patterns and unless PUSHED out of them will continue down the established rut.

And so it is with one-sided memories, with perspectives of local and global history, with political figures, with current events. We get comfortable with our limited perspective and defend the heck out of it, even when better information is out there that could change our minds.

Life is complex and so are the answers. Failing to dig deeper and pursue more questions is laziness, and laziness can hurt us. It can certainly limit us.