Why? Because this person, my daughter, is amazing, and certainly not because of me. She is compassionate and caring and nice.
While I try to set a good example most of the time, the truth is, I am not that nice. I laugh at things I shouldn’t, like people with bad teeth or dogs squatted and hunched, relieving themselves. I sometimes don’t let people merge on a busy highway, just because I don’t like their car or the way they drive or their stupid bumper stickers. When I am in line with a full cart at the grocery store and the person behind me has one or two items, I think fuck you. So whatever kind of nice she is, she became that way on her own.
Nice has somehow become a bad thing to be. When someone is unattractive, he or she is described as “having a nice personality.” Women gravitate away from nice guys, favoring the bad boys that eventually break their hearts or batter their faces or whatever it is that bad boys do. Single men know that to be described as “nice” is the kiss of death to any hopes of getting laid, which isn’t a nice thing to say, but true.
My daughter, however, is nice, and she makes it a good thing to be. She's bringing nice back.
On the second day of school, S was behind another girl on her way out of the art room. S didn’t know this girl and wasn’t friends with her; she was just another kid in class. S noticed as the girl walked that she had gotten her period in class, as she had a blood stain on the back of her shorts, obvious enough to anyone to whom such things like a big bloody Rorschach blotch would be.
She scooted up to the girl and whispered to her that she had a blood stain on her pants. She told the girl it wasn’t so bad, but she might want to go to the bathroom before it gets worse. S was discreet and quiet about it so as not to arouse unwanted attention. The girl thanked her, and the two of them, along with the rest of the art class, left to go to their lockers.
S told me she saw the girl later that same day, and that she was wearing a different pair of pants. She was happy for that girl, that she didn’t have to walk around all day in blood stained shorts for the rest of the school to see.
So, yes, that single act of kindness, that compassion for
another girl going through a potentially emotionally scarring middle school
experience, brought me to tears. How many teenagers would think about how
someone else would feel?
When I was in college, I had the opportunity to do something
nice for someone else, but I took a pass. I was walking to the cafeteria one
day, and in front of me was another girl walking by herself. She had a nine foot
train of toilet paper trailing behind her. It wasn’t stuck to her shoe; it was
tucked into her pants. Her paper train floated along like an elegant reminder
of some unusual hygienic behavior on her part. To this day I still don’t
understand how a piece of toilet paper longer than my car can originate from
someone’s pants, but still, this girl was walking along unaware of her own
shadow. I felt I was in the presence of bathroom royalty. Rather than disturb
her paper trail, or alert her to its existence, I merely held the door as she
walked through it, making sure a heavy swinging door did not come between her
and her Charmin.
Okay, it probably
wasn’t Charmin. After all, it was college. That toilet paper was industrial and one-ply and
probably could have survived the door, but still. I didn’t want to be the one
to stop that train. My daughter, being nice, would have told her about the toilet paper streamer. Me? I didn’t want to be the only one to witness that papery spectacle, even if it meant that poor girl discovered it later and felt deep embarrassment and humiliation and maybe even anger at those of us who saw it and said nothing.
That wasn't the only time I bypassed an opportunity to be a nice person. I also laughed at the person who tripped up the stairs and couldn’t get her hands out of her pockets in time. And the woman who walked across the hotel lobby with her skirt tucked into her pantyhose, under which she opted against panties. I snickered at the person with a static cling panty broach on the back of her shoulder at the grocery store. And at countless men, including my husband, with their flies down, or, worse yet, evidence of a dribble, a few damp spots on the crotch that couldn’t always be caused by a spraying faucet.
I have felt badly about some of those times, when I could
have been nice, but chose to be amused instead. At least most of them happened before I had a
cell phone, and honestly, I am not quick enough on the draw even if they did.
In the car, on the
way home, sitting next to my daughter, I felt a pride like none other, knowing
that this child of mine, this amazing, nice person, she didn’t learn how to be nice from
me, but developed it on her own. She made a good
choice, better than one I would make, and all I could think was, to paraphrase
Jack Nicholson, she makes me want to be a better person. Except I will still laugh when someone falls up the stairs, because, seriously, that shit is funny.
