David McElroy

For just a moment, I thought she was going to cry.

She had turned her body and her face away from her husband and their two young children. I don’t think she knew anybody could see her. There was pain in her face. It wasn’t anger. It was the pain of disappointment and resignation. And then she pasted her mask back on and returned to the life which seemed to hurt her so much.

That’s what I saw anyway. Maybe I’m wrong. But for the long moment when I looked into her face and saw something that no human should have to feel, time slowed and I felt as though I could have reached out and touched her soul.

This was Friday night in the Walmart near my house, but I see similar pain on faces all around me, almost every day. I see people who I believe are miserable. It seems as though the pain and hurt and disappointment are etched onto their faces — hidden briefly by masks — and I wonder why nobody else seems to see what I see.

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Men and women are equal, but the two will never be identical.

Are the two 80 percent alike? 90 percent? More? Modern culture seems to want men and women to be interchangeable, but it’s simply not true in my experience.

Is an apple or an orange more valuable? Neither. Each has value. Each is a fruit. Each is wonderful in its own way. But they’re different, just as men and women are different — despite the best efforts of modern philosophy and leftist politics to claim gender differences are a cultural construct.

Men are physically stronger, but women have more power and strength in other respects, at least in heterosexual relationships. That’s the only kind with which I have experience, so that’s my context. Some people believe that men hold the power — in politics, culture, relationships, whatever — but my experience is that it’s a delicate trade-off, at least in healthy relationships.

Italian actress Gina Lollobrigida was popular in the 1950s and ’60s, and she understood this secret.

“Man does not control his own fate,” Lollobrigida said. “The women in his life do that for him.”

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I have trouble forgiving myself for things I did in the past — but they’re things nobody else even remembers. They’re things I shouldn’t remember, either, but they’re still lurking in the back of my mind — like silent fingers pointed toward me in shame.

We all grow up emulating our parents or the other adult figures in our lives. We don’t have much choice, even if we consciously don’t like some of the things they do. We grow up believing that what we experience is normal in some way. We don’t decide to be like them. We just act that way without thinking about it.

I had no idea how dysfunctional my family was. I had a inkling — at times — that we were somehow different, but I vaguely felt proud of that. I thought we were better than other people. Whatever we were, well, that was the way things ought to be. Our way was right.

So I grew up emulating a narcissist. I had never heard of narcissistic personality disorder, of course. But I learned his ways and I acted like him. Every now and then, some tiny incident from the past comes to mind because of a tiny trigger — and I feel shame and embarrassment.

Tonight, the trigger was mashed potatoes.

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