The Good You Can Do

The phone was buzzing when I woke up.

It was a notification that a friend from across the country had heard the sad story of the Baker Street Irregulars and sent me thirty dollars in the Venmo– nothing like enough to solve the crisis, just enough that the poor woman could buy lunch and perhaps a change of underwear.

I went downstairs for the Thanksgiving holiday. Adrienne and I bantered and laughed as we watched the Macy’s parade. We trimmed the Christmas tree and didn’t bother to fluff out the wire branches that were invisible against the wall, only the ones that faced front. I baked twice as many corn muffins as we were going to eat, so that I could bring a batch to the Baker Street Irregulars for a treat– but when I went out to their door, they weren’t there. I don’t know in which house they were all going to have their Thanksgiving feast: the one where the Lady of LaBelle lives, or the one where some of her children live down the block, or the one where a nephew lives on a different street.

I came home feeling sheepish.

At some point we realized that the rickety dining room table was no longer sound enough to set for dinner– one leg had completely broken. We took apart the table and set the pretty tablecloth on the fold-out card table, arranging our meal on the sideboard to eat like a buffet because the card table is too small. That looked nice and tasteful if you didn’t notice the card table’s metal legs, which are stained with paint from my art projects.

And then I realized I’d mislaid the paper plates that were big enough to use as dinner plates.

I searched high and low and couldn’t see them. I ran into the kitchen to wash three of our regular everyday plates and saw, in horror, that we only had two regular ceramic plates left in the house. We pick up a plate at Dollar Tree now and then because we’re always breaking plates, and the plate I’d broken while baking pies yesterday was one of the three we had left just now. so Michael and Adrienne and I ate our meal on small paper pie plates, two plates each, one for turkey and one for sides. We found the paper plates when it was time for dessert, and laughed, and ate pie on gigantic platters meant for the main course. We’ll go to Dollar Tree to fix our real plate shortage this weekend.

I never did hear from the Baker Street Irregulars that day. I still have the bag of muffins. But I heard from them the next morning. The niece who got into trouble had found a ride home from the hospital, but the other grownup who was staying with the baby desperately needed her overnight bag so she could change clothes for the first time in days.

I was exhausted from the changing weather and from going out of ketosis on the holiday yesterday– I only ever eat normal carbs three or four times a year, because that’s part of how I control my PCOS. I was having a back ache. I had a lot of work to do and I’d promised Adrienne a trip to get a coat. I knew that going all the way into Pittsburgh on their panic-inducing roads would be especially stressful on Black Friday. So I admitted I couldn’t do it myself. I felt horrible for not being able to do it myself. I feel like I’m going to hell for not being able to do it myself. But I’m searching in the Buy Nothing group for someone who can take the bag into Pittsburgh for me. I think I’ve got someone. As I’m writing this, I keep refreshing the tab to see if it works.

I’m not holding myself up as an example for anything. I’m not exemplary. I just have some thoughts I’ve been pondering for the past 24 hours.

Earlier this year, I said that I was trying to learn the difference from being helpful, and even helpful to a fault, and being codependent. I said I thought that one of the differences between a true, healthy religious practice and a cult is that the religion teaches you to be generous to others, but a cult will teach you codependency. And I wanted to know how to be helpful, generous, charitable, even saintly, but not codependent.

Anyone who’s followed my writing longer than a few months knows that I am famous for desperately trying to help people, and being codependent, and being crushed when it all blows up in my face. I’ve made a fool of myself over that. It was genuinely traumatic. I’m not exaggerating by using that term. I was traumatized to the point of panic and nightmares.

All I want, all I’ve ever wanted, is to be part of a happy and generous community of people who care for one another’s needs, loving God and working for each other’s good in God’s name.  I was crushed, as a young woman, that I was too sickly to be a nun. I have been crushed to find out that, much of the time,  being a Catholic looks more like putting on an ostentatious show of piety and being nippy with one another than the vibrant community I had in mind. I hate that, and I want the world to be different. But I don’t ever want to be taken advantage of and abused again. Not wanting to ever be abused again makes me feel guilty, but I’m learning that that guilt is because of my codependency. This is a dance I do in my own mind every day.

How do I manage to still be generous, while not being codependent?

Here’s what I’ve come up with: what if I only focused on what I CAN do?

What if I examined my conscience about once every day to think about whether I was being too precious with myself? What if, in the remainder of the day, I assumed that my worries were just trauma from having been involved in a cult without knowing it for all those years? What if, instead of worrying that I’m not doing enough and being selfish, I only did what I CAN do? How much more energy would I have? How much more would I get done?

No, I cannot make an absolutely perfect Thanksgiving feast for Adrienne. But we can have a good time laughing over setting up the card table and putting out the silly small plates instead of panicking that things aren’t what they should be. If I focus on that, dinner gets made. It wouldn’t get made if I was paralyzed by worry. What if I multiplied that by everything that was happening around me?

No, I can’t kidnap every child in a bad situation and make them safe in a happy place that doesn’t exist, but I can bake a batch of muffins for the family down the block and be kind to the children who come visit the garden. Sometimes, those efforts will go wrong, but I’ll have done my best. No, I can’t stop world hunger or even hunger in my city, but I can share tomatoes. No, I can’t get the overnight bag to a city an hour away in the snow today because I’m a little sick, and that’s horrible. If I felt healthy I’d try it. For now, I’ll try to see what else I can do to get someone some help.

The world is a bleak and terrible place, there is so much that is a mess, and I can’t make that better. But I can be conscious of what’s going on around me, and do my part to make it better when I see a way that I can.

I think that if everybody focused on the little bit they could do, being conscious of when they were getting codependent and were doing too much, the world would be closer to that loving community I described. I think we could all be so much closer to happy. It wouldn’t mean that all of us were selfish. It would mean that all of us were being heroic in ways that it was possible to sustain, and all kinds of little things were being done well for the good of everyone.

That’s what I’ve got for you today. This Advent, and for the rest of the year, focus on what you can do. Consider that you might be doing too little and ought to be more generous, but also consider that you might be codependent. And don’t let worry about things you can’t manage get in the way of the little bit of good you can.

If you forgot where you put your paper plates, look on the top shelf of the pantry by the cereal. The cereal box is so big, it’s hard to see behind it when you’re short.

Have a happy holiday season!