Call Me Daddy

On wanting to be kind without becoming blind...

I have always wanted to give people the benefit of the doubt. I used to think that made me kind-hearted. Lately I am less sure.

Years ago, I had a neighbor I felt sorry for. She had two difficult children, a dog that was always “getting loose,” and the kind of household chaos the whole neighborhood could feel. She screamed at those kids constantly, at the top of her lungs. They were outside without shoes, without coats, wild and unattended in ways that made you uneasy because it did not feel like the occasional mess of family life. The dog was not walked properly, got loose constantly, and seemed to use the neighborhood as its bathroom because no one could be bothered to do the basics. I used to bring him back because I was honestly afraid he was going to get hit by a car. Every time, she would say, “I don’t know how he got out,” which, in hindsight, was almost funny in how predictable it was.

One time, after I brought the dog back again, the little girl asked if she could call me Daddy. It was funny for about half a second, and then it really wasn’t. I had brought that dog back so many times and suddenly I was a father figure? Even then, I knew something in that house was off. Not imperfect. Not going through a rough patch. Off.

At the time, though, I still felt sorry for her. I told myself she was overwhelmed. I told myself marriages break up, people make mistakes, life gets messy, children are hard, some kids need more than others, and maybe she was doing the best she could. I wanted that to be true. I prefer that story. It is easier to live with.

Then I found out those were not her biological children. She was fostering them. What changed for me was the realization that this was not simply a woman flattened by circumstances she never chose. It looked less like a life that happened to her and more like responsibility she had signed up for, while still moving through the world like the greatest victim in it. My sister Kara knew that house was crazy too. When I found out the kids were not hers by birth, she was just as stunned as I was. We both had the same reaction: you chose this?

That was the detail that changed things for me. Not because foster parents should be saints, and not because children who come to you through the system are any less your children. Quite the opposite. If anything, children who come into a home through struggle or state systems often need even more steadiness, not less. What bothered me was the resentment. She did not seem like someone crushed under a life she never saw coming. She seemed angry at the needs of a life she had chosen. The children and dog were the ones living inside the consequences, and she carried herself like the injured party.

That experience made me start rethinking the whole phrase “doing the best they can.”

Because sometimes people are. Sometimes a person really is hanging on by a thread and life is still kicking the shit out of them. I think about the person whose card gets declined in a checkout line while the stranger behind them is already impatient. Maybe that person is irresponsible and disorganized, sure. But maybe their life has just come apart. Maybe they have been betrayed, abandoned, blindsided, or humiliated and are using the last of their strength to stand upright in public. Maybe the cashier is watching a financial inconvenience and the person in line is living through a collapse. We do not know. Not knowing should make us gentler.

But I have also learned that not knowing can make us dishonest if we are not careful. Sometimes people are not doing the best they can. Sometimes they are doing what is easiest, what is most convenient, what benefits them most, and they are counting on the rest of us to tell a kinder story about it.

That may be the part I have had the hardest time learning.

I like to give people the benefit of the doubt, and then, as usual, I end up feeling like an idiot when I find out they did not deserve my sympathy at all. I want there to be more to the story. I want there to be some hidden pain that makes their behavior sad instead of ugly. I want to believe there is something I do not know that would make me soften. And sometimes that instinct is a good one. Sometimes it saves me from becoming cruel. But sometimes it just means my sympathy has been underwriting someone else’s bullshit.

I do not want to become hard either. That is the other danger. It would be easy to take stories like that and decide everyone is selfish, everyone is full of shit, everyone is gaming the system, and anyone struggling in public probably earned it. But honestly, is it that simple?

It probably is not. Both kinds of people exist, and from the outside they can look surprisingly similar. One person is in disarray because life has gutted them and they are barely holding the pieces together. Another person is in disarray because they are careless, exploitative, or fundamentally unwilling to do the hard part of what they signed up for. One person deserves enormous tenderness. The other deserves clarity, boundaries, and a lot less interpretive generosity. The problem is that from the curb, or the checkout line, or the neighboring house, you do not always know which is which.

Maybe that is the real lesson. Not that compassion is foolish, and not that judgment is always right. Just that they are not the same thing. You can acknowledge that someone may be going through something and still refuse to lie to yourself about what their behavior is doing. You can make room for complexity without explaining away harm. You can stay human without becoming blind.

I still want to assume the best. I probably always will. I just do not want grace to turn me into an accomplice to my own stupidity.

We do not always know what someone is carrying. That should make us kinder. But it should not make us blinder.