Family seemed perfectly typical, but I felt envious of their lives

By David McElroy · January 8, 2020

They were just another random family having dinner together at a fast food restaurant. But I couldn’t stop listening to their interaction with each other — and feeling envious.

I don’t know these people. I’ll probably never see them again. They have no idea anybody was paying attention to them. But there were some things about them that made me want to be like them.

There were two little girls and a boy, along with their parents. Everybody got along and seemed completely relaxed with one another. The children were well-behaved for their age, but they weren’t perfect. The parents gently corrected when they got a bit out of line, but they were relaxed about it.

The parents seemed as though they liked each other. They were trying to figure something out about an online order that they were about to pick up, so they were collaborating in the midst of dealing with the kids. Nobody was snapping or being short. They were polite and helpful to each other.

It sounds completely unremarkable, but what I saw was completely different from what I typically see and hear.

They didn’t laugh at each other or make fun of one another. Everybody seemed gentle and loving.

“We came here tomorrow,” the little boy said at one point. He meant to say, “We came here yesterday,” but nobody made fun of him. The dad gently asked him whether it was really “tomorrow” when they came. It took him a couple of minutes, but the boy finally laughed and understood what he had said.

Nobody was stressed out about anything. Nobody was upset. Everybody seemed to feel relaxed and loving and normal.

One of the little girls had ordered a cheeseburger, but she decided she wanted to take the meat and cheese off and just eat the bun with ketchup. The mother explained why this was an expensive thing to do and why she didn’t need to do that in the future if that’s what she wanted to eat, but it was relaxed. Nobody was angry with her. They just explained and then moved on.

Almost all of the families I see are tense and unhappy in some way or other. The parents are frequently ignoring the children — at least until the kids get too loud and then they angrily threaten the kids. With most families I observe, most of them seem bored or tense or angry or disconnected. These people weren’t like any of that.

They weren’t special. The children weren’t performing amazing feats for their ages. They got a little too loud at times. They were completely normal children.

But none of this bothered the parents. They never let things get out of hand. They were constantly interacting gently and lovingly with the children and with each other. They seemed like a perfectly normal and emotionally healthy family — and that made them seem remarkable to me.

I’m sure there are times when they’re not a happy and healthy family. They surely have flare-ups. But those are normal. What I saw tonight was too relaxed and natural to have been an act. This seemed to be what they are.

I don’t want something that’s wildly unattainable. I don’t want the perfect wife or the perfect children. I just want a family where everybody is loving and kind to one another. A family where people like each other and treat each other with respect.

What I saw was unremarkable — but I couldn’t help wishing that I were part of a family just like this perfectly normal group of people.

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The better I know myself, the more I realize that my core fault — and the source of many other failings in me — is that of believing on a deep level that everyone and everything in my world must be perfect, especially me. If I had seen any of this in myself as recently as 10 years ago, I would have dismissed it as a small failing that showed up only every now and then, but I now see it as the wellspring from which my other sins are born. It’s such an insidious belief — and one that can look on the surface like a reasonable desire to be good and right — that it’s hard to acknowledge it as the inner cancer it is. But until I understood this, it was always going to be impossible for me to get over my deep shame about my imperfection or to accept the love of another person, because she is bound to be flawed, too.

If it’s not yet spring where you are, you can at least enjoy 60 seconds of spring in the South with me. This was just outside my office late Thursday afternoon. Don’t you need a relaxing break today? See it on YouTube by clicking here.

It pays to be nice to the employees at Walmart — and everywhere else, for that matter. I was just in Walmart to buy some kitty litter when one of the employees called me over with a conspiratorial tone: “Hey, David, do you need some toilet paper?” she almost whispered. She had found a giant package hidden somewhere and she said she had been saving it for someone she really liked. So I’m the proud new owner of 24 additional mega rolls of toilet paper, which are worth something like $748 on the black market. On a more serious note, be good to people when you have a chance, as this employee was for me. And remember that people remember the way you treat them. I wouldn’t have treated this woman and her co-workers a bit differently in the past if I’d known she would someday do me this small favor, but there are benefits to treating people well, even if that’s not your purpose. Be good to each other.

My neighbor Cora — a retired teacher — called me while I was driving to the office earlier today to remind me that she wants to take me out to dinner sometime. We’ve talked about going out together, but we’ve never gotten around to coordinating a time. As she was about to get off the phone, she said, “I love you. You’re such a good neighbor!” And I told her that I loved her, too. I wonder how upset the racists of the unquestioned Jim Crow world — only about six decades ago — would have been that a white man and his elderly black neighbor care abut each other in such a way. There’s still a lot wrong with racial attitudes in the world today, but small things such as this remind me that we’ve come a long way.

If you have children, it’s important to deal with how they might be feeling as they react to the fears of COVID-19 as the danger grows. There’s a lot of fear among adults right now, but children are even less equipped to handle fears they sense from adults around them. My friend Josh Whitman has experience doing a lot of things and one of them is school administration. Josh and his wife are raising two young sons of their own in a Birmingham suburb, and he’s been thinking a lot for the last few weeks about how this societal fear affects children. He’s written a short article giving some wise and insightful tips with concrete steps you can take to help your children during this time of crisis — things which might not have occurred to me — so I highly recommend it.

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