The Full Suburban: None of us has everything figured out

A few months after my youngest child, Hyrum, was born, I brought him to a meeting with me. After a while, he became a little fussy, so I laid him on my lap, quickly swaddled him up tight and gently shushed him to sleep in my arms. When the meeting ended, a woman approached me.

“You have got this baby thing down,” she said. “Just by the way you hold him and got him right to sleep, I can tell that you know what you’re doing.” I was flattered to hear her praise, and as I drove away from the meeting, I couldn’t help but think back over her words and pat myself on the back.

“I am a good mom,” I thought proudly. “Only a handful of years of being a mother, and look at me! I’ve learned so much and gotten so good at it; it really is amazing!”

Pat, pat, pat, brag, brag, brag. Minutes passed as I drove in silence, reveling in my excellent mom-ness. And then a sound coming from somewhere in the rear of the car interrupted my reverie: a strange, purring sound, with a squeak thrown in here and there.

“What is that back there?” I wondered. “Did a squirrel sneak its way into the car or something?”

And then it dawned on me: It was my baby in his car seat, he of the blessed parentage, born to a woman so good at being a mother that she completely forgot he was there. It was so ridiculous that I couldn’t help but laugh. Mother of the Year, indeed.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned as I’ve barreled through mid-life, it’s that just when I think I have things figured out, I really don’t. Not in the slightest.

In our country, it seems like there’s a lot of things we think we know all about these days. People who don’t wear masks are ignorant and selfish. Those insisting that everyone wear masks are fear-mongering zealots.

The neighbor who wants to send his kids back to school in person is reckless. The neighbor thinking about exclusively home-schooling her children is naïve. Someone wearing a Black Lives Matter shirt is an anarchist who hates America. And the guy in the MAGA hat is a white supremacist with weapons stored in every drawer.

Maybe we should all take a step back from where we have so firmly planted ourselves in the months since the world tilted out of control and look at where we stand. Regardless of how infallibly correct we believe our position to be, could there be a side to the story that we might be myopically missing?

Is it possible that there is more than what meets the eye? Could the person who we’re judging from first glance, Facebook post, wardrobe choice or rally sign possibly have more to them than just the stereotype we see before us?

There’s a popular story about a married couple who moves into a new neighborhood. One morning, the wife looks out her window and notices her neighbor hanging up laundry to dry.

“Her laundry is filthy!” the wife exclaims to her husband. “She clearly doesn’t know how to wash clothes.”

The same scene replays itself over and over for weeks until one day when the couple is eating breakfast and the neighbor is hanging up her daily laundry, for the first time, it looks fresh and clean.

“She finally figured out what she was doing,” the wife says smugly.

Her husband looks up from his breakfast. “Actually, I woke up early this morning and washed our windows.”

Religious leader and author Thomas Monson said this: “Charity is having patience with someone who has let us down. It is resisting the impulse to become offended easily. It is accepting weaknesses and shortcomings.

“It is accepting people as they truly are. It is looking beyond physical appearances to attributes that will not dim through time. It is resisting the impulse to categorize others.”

I can’t think of a time we need this kind of charity more than now. None of us has everything all figured out; let’s be patient with each other along the way.

Julia Ditto shares her life with her husband, six children and a random menagerie of farm animals in Spokane Valley. She can be reached at dittojulia@gmail.com.