HOLLY DAYS

I’ve been a student, parent, teacher, or board member at 6 coop preschools. A coop can be a godsend for young moms, isolated with their kids and unsure of their parenting. Less today where dads and grandads have thankfully become common as caregivers, but when my kids were little, a couple of the coops we attended still had a very gender-segregated structure, with the mom’s doing the teacher workdays and the dads coming in on the weekends to do the maintenance of the school’s infrastructure. When I was a single dad, I was a member of both the moms’ and the dads’ communities. It has always been sad to me how these, and most gendered groups in general, can fall into social gripe sessions about the opposite sex. It’s a safe topic, a bit like the weather or sports, with a comments like “can’t live with ‘em, can’t live without ‘em”, sure to get nods and be uncontroversial. For the moms it often fell into specific complaints about their husbands. The community of the school was an important and powerful support network for the them, where the hard-working moms, learning how to deal with being a new parent, found vital emotional support.

When folks complain about their relationships, be it a partner, a boss, or a parent, they often tend to cast themselves as victims. To some extent this may be a narrative device to make for a better storytelling, but it is also a natural self-protective bias to be in denial about our own contributions to a conflict and protect our egos by focusing instead on our grievances. Often, when folks get support from their networks or communities, especially gender segregated ones, there is often a feedback loop where this exaggeration of the grievance and one-sided narrative gets confirmed. Your friends are naturally going to validate the claims, and offer support such as, “That bastard!… You deserve so much better… How dare they!” Even when the complainer may actually sense that the condemnation they have elicited is exaggerated, this corroboration may strengthen the victimization as folks are drawn together by the sympathy. Each gripe session can become a bonding experience with folks feeling solidarity against a common adversary, even when that adversary is a key member of one’s own family. It may be comforting to cast oneself as a victim who by common parlance can therefore not be blamed, but it also makes it pretty impossible to preserve any possible union, especially since both sides generally cast themselves as the blameless victim of the other. It was sad and tragic to watch this process lead to a cascade of divorces in a couple of these coops.

Most folks want to maintain a healthy and functional family, especially for their kids, but these retreats to victimization can doom a union. What actually works to heal a marriage is not to dig in and cast blame, but to realize that it takes two to tango, and that even if one partner in the dance has committed the bulk of errors, there is always a path the other can take to help heal the relationship, always some blame, that by accepting and working to heal, can lead to a mutually reinforcing cycle of effort with the other party also taking responsibility for what part they have played.

Sometimes the anger we may face from our partners was born in their hurt feelings, and rather than claiming to be a victim of their abusive anger, we can try to mend the hurt, and find ways to avoid hurting each other in the future. It’s sad that this simple grown-up way of dealing with conflict has become so lost and reviled in our cultural contexts. When we stand and hurl insults across the divide, when we focus on how we have been aggrieved rather than how we can help, we lose any chance of unity.

We are at a crucial nexus. I think most of us now understand how the self-filtering of diverse media, their algorithms and our cognitive biases as social apes has lowered us into reality wells where our understanding of our fellow citizens’ reality are blocked from our view. The rancor this leads to threatens to smash most of the unions we have formed. Not only that, various forces benefit from this disunity, allowing them to consolidate power in discreet populations by stoking anger and then using it to motivate activism on their behalf.

I am hoping today, as I contemplate Unity, that we can find a way to focus on what we can do to help heal our unions rather than pointing to the faults of the other. For, even if we may only be to blame for 1% of the conflict, that 1% is the part that we have 100% control over.

HAPPY HOLLY DAYS!