Take care. When I worked at a food pantry in Pittsburgh there was a young couple that came in, a white boy with limited intelligence and his caramel-skinned girlfriend whose cognitive abilities were sharply limited. We had a dialogue model of intake, so over the months I got to know them. At first I thought they were simply another young couple, both with limited intellectual resources, struggling to take care of each other. But as the months went by, and they had more and more difficulty finding jobs, something changed. The boy developed a quiet yet calloused attitude and wouldn’t look me in the eye. He had stopped holding her hand when we came in for food. The girl sat staring into spacing, saying nothing, responding to questions with only shrugs, arms folded across her chest. I decided to drive out to their apartment and visit, unannounced, but when I got there it was apparent by the guys loitering in the hallway what was going on. The next time the couple showed up at the food pantry I took the guy aside. “You don’t want to be pimping her out man,” I said to him. “You’re better than that. You don’t want to be the kind of guy who does that.” He wouldn’t look at me when he said, “I’m just taking care of us.” “Taking care of you,” I accused. They never came back. And when they didn’t, I wondered if my words, my action, had been the best way to take care of them. It’s an odd phrase – take care. Take care of your love. Take care of your children. Take care driving in the rain. Take care he/she doesn’t hurt you. Take care of yourself. It means minister to another, right? It also means, be cautious? It can mean, protect others, yourself. You can’t enact all of them, not always at the same time. When my kids were young their mother was sick and there were times I had to neglect them, their needs, to take care of hers. I still feel guilty about that. I had to set aside my own writing, my training workshops I’d been doing nationally, to take care of all of them – I don’t regret that for minute. Other choices to ‘take care’ of another, I’m not so certain about. I am still haunted by having to say ‘remove the ventilator’ for my mother, and ‘give my dog the needle’ even as I know both were necessary. And of course, although I know there was nothing, really, I could’ve done differently, I feel somehow I failed to take care of my friends who committed suicide. In taking care of others, you can’t always take care of yourself. And sometimes taking care doesn’t feel like seeing to anyone’s needs. Am I my brothers/sisters keeper? Am I my own? How do you decide?
Posted on: Sun, 30 Mar 2014 11:54:40 +0000
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