Acceptance Versus Resignation

 by Lucy S. 

I woke up this morning thinking about the difference between resignation and acceptance.  What constitutes defeatism or resignation and what constitutes wise acceptance – knowing our limits and the limits of others?  It seems to me that so many times something in this society urges us to resign ourselves to what we should never accept while spurring us on to battle the wrong things. 

I’ve recently begun asking some of the people in my very large extended family if they will each pitch in $20 to help get Nicole, the daughter of one of my cousins, into a place to live.  She didn’t ask me to do this, and the more I think about it, the more I wonder if it will just be another of my misguided efforts that ends in failure.  I don’t believe the problem is that Nicole is just too messed up (as one of my aunts said), but that she needs more sustained material and emotional help than I can manage to provide from this distance. She lives in California and I am 2,000 plus miles away.

Nicole’s youngest two kids (around ages 6 and 8) were put into foster care by social services some months back because her partner (the father of the kids) was using meth. I don’t know the whole story of how it happened that the kids were taken. Nicole left him at that time and has since been sleeping on her cousin’s couch. 

It’s been two months since Nicole said the judge gave her an extra six months to get a place in order to get her kids back. I asked if he means to sever her custody of her kids if she doesn’t get a place in six months. She said yes. I wrote about this.  http://labor2beardown.blogspot.com/2013/04/welfare-part-2.html  I then told her about my idea of asking others in the family to pitch in. The last thing I wanted was to humiliate her.  I said that I think this is what all of us should do for one another and that I would like to think that if anyone else in our extended family was at risk for losing their kids because of not having a place, others would help. I asked how much she needed. She said $500 would make a big difference.  Will this be enough? Will Nicole be able to pay the rent every month if she gets a place?

I delayed taking up the collection because I was in school. But the semester is over. There is still more garden work to be done here, but if I am going to make this push to collect this money for Nicole, I have to get on with it. I’m asking for small amounts because I know that many of them spend $20 or more just going out to eat. Maybe if the amount is small, they won’t feel entitled to demand a report on Nicole’s whole life and they won’t feel that I need to prove that their small donation will utterly transform her. Maybe I won’t have to prove that she of all possible needy people is worth it.

I begin with my dad. I explain, and he is all for it. I even get an email from my mom saying that they are each sending $20.  I ask him to ask my brother. I know that it’s easy for me to say that it’s only $20, but many people know others who might likewise need help badly.  But I am asking people who in some way know Nicole. I am asking her family.

The point has been made that reliance on notions of fidelity to family is quite conservative. Well, I am all for the government providing some help here, but so far, they don’t seem to have much to offer Nicole and her kids, other than the permanent termination of their relationships with one another. I am also up for any huge reforms or revolutionary changes that would allow us all to be able to count on decent places to live and work that matters and time to care for ourselves, our kids, and everyone else. But in the meantime, our lives are going by. If Nicole and her kids don’t matter as specific, particular people, why does anyone else?  Doesn’t each person have to matter? 

So, between me and my parents, we are up to $60. Only $440 more to go.  I call my Aunt Valerie, who I haven’t talked with since my uncle (her brother; my dad’s identical twin) died in late 2011. We didn’t have much chance to talk around the time of the funeral.  I am not only calling her for fundraising purposes.  I’ve gone and visited her in the past, and I’ve called.

But she’s been living with my fairly affluent great-aunt and great-uncle (my grandfather’s brother) for about five years, taking care of them, and she hasn’t had much time. They never had children. They will leave her their paid-for, rather expensive home in Santa Maria when they die. And earlier this year, Gordon did die. Now only Fay, in her mid-90s, remains. I’ve never liked Fay, and my feelings haven’t changed just because she’s really old now.  When my kids were little, the year after I’d returned from Germany, she used to tell me at various family functions that I should leave “the kids” with my spouse (my kids as well as Valerie’s) and go with Valerie to visit them.  Long ago, Fay decided she could no longer bear having children in her home. They might scratch the lacquer on her collections or in some other way damage her treasures.  She also would have greatly preferred not having anyone in their town but white people, but that she has had to bear. Fay would get angry if people didn’t visit them.  The inheritance was dangled out as a disgusting bribery. Not for my generation, but for my dad and his siblings. Because my dad’s twin didn’t ever drive up to visit them (swamped as he was by work and caring for so many), she began over a decade ago telling others in the family that she might remove him from the will. He told me he’d probably die before them anyway, and he was sadly right.  I’d never make the mistake of asking Fay to donate anything for Nicole, though Fay can blow through large sums pretty quickly for trinkets that catch her eye.  Fay stopped working when she and Gordon married in the 1940s. She says her job was to “manage [their] money.”

Valerie and I catch up during our phone call. Then I bring up Nicole, but I don’t ask for money.  I tell Valerie that Nicole might lose her kids permanently if she doesn’t get a place. Valerie says that would probably be the best thing for them all. She says Nicole can’t handle those kids, that some years ago, Valerie stopped by and the kids were running through the apartment, even banging their heads against the walls. They’re autistic, she tells me, and I know; Nicole has posted things about ‘autistic awareness’ and how proud she is of her kids and their efforts in school in connection with this. Valerie tells me that they just thrashed the carpet in the apartment with their juice stains everywhere. I flash back in my mind to Valerie’s two-year-old walking over a light-color area rug my grandmother bought, cup of soda in hand as it sloshed over the edges. 

I tell Valerie that the kids were removed because of Nicole’s husband’s meth use, and Valerie tells me that he’s her boyfriend, not her husband. She says that Nicole does drugs, too, that Nicole freely admitted that she smoked pot during Valerie’s visit years ago. And “she bragged about having gay friends.”  I don’t bother to respond to this. I do know that Nicole used to smoke weed sometimes; she said it helped with the post-traumatic stress. That ended, however, because social services tests her for all drugs as a condition to her getting her kids back.

The sound of two-liter bottles of soda opening several times a day comes to me – the soda Valerie’s kids consumed for any thirst during their childhood. And there were the masses of junk food in their home and continual fast-food and restaurant meals. Her older son weighed over 400 pounds by the time he was 18; her younger son was closer to 300 pounds. Which substances are more harmful? Which addictions are okay?

I think of the complaints from others in the family for years that her kids were so wild.  But Valerie was also good with her kids and with my grandmother; she would take them all on camping trips and attempt various adventures.  And she’d left her violently abusive husband. People do the best they can, I thought. She was trying.  Can’t she remember her own struggles?

On the phone, Valerie tells me that the one she feels sorry for is Zach. Zachary is Nicole’s other son, her 13 year old who she lost custody of long ago. When Nicole was 15, she was raped. Her mother, my cousin Chris, was furious at Nicole for going across the street to talk with the kids when Chris had told her to stay in the house after school until Chris got home. It was a friend or acquaintance of theirs. I only know he was older (over 18 according to the family story as it made its way along), and that Chris wanted no further dealings with him or those neighbors at all – no charges pressed, nothing said. But Nicole got pregnant, and they moved. I remember that Chris was angry at Nicole for ‘dressing the wrong way’ and ‘acting the wrong way.’ Nicole had her baby; Chris later couldn’t handle them and they moved to another state to live with Chris’s sister. Then Chris remarried and decided she wanted that grandson to raise. She began to talk with Nicole again (who was desperate for a relationship with her mother), and she asked Nicole to sign over custody. Nicole did. Ultimately, this didn’t work out. He now lives in foster care. I am not sure why Zach is “the one” who Valerie feels sorry for, but he certainly deserves sympathy, this kid who has been yanked all over, unable to count on an ongoing primary caregiver. Is there enough sympathy for Nicole, too?  Are we rationing it?  Ten years from now, after this broken childhood, will Zach no longer deserve sympathy because he will be ‘an adult’? Will we then all rant and rave about how he does have choices, after all?

Nicole and I started communicating because she sent me a message one night that simply said, “why won’t my mom talk to me?” Neither her mother nor her father will speak to her. They were both violent toward each other when they were married, and violent toward her. Nicole posted a photo of her mom dancing in their place back in the 1996 and wrote fondly of her mom ‘getting down back in the day.’

Valerie tells me that it’s sad but there’s just no solution. She says that they’ve all got “the bipolar.” She says that Chris has it, and her dad has it (my other aunt’s ex – another violent spouse-beater). And Nicole has it, and so do Nicole’s kids.  I hate listening to this pop-psychiatric babble from people – their summations of themselves and others based on the experts’ latest diagnoses, all of which happen to also rake in profit for those experts and the pharmaceutical industry whose drugs they dole out. Nicole was on Ritalin during some of her childhood and teens, back when she “had ADHD.”  The experts used to believe in eugenics, too, and racism and colonialism and the inferiority of women.

***

My own ethics are torn as I think about and try to write about this.  Am I casting Nicole as a victim? Am I trying to be a rescuer?  (I am always somewhat unclear about these labels and their implications beyond current pop-psychology circular reasoning.)  Am I casting Chris or Nicole’s father or Valerie as villains? (Or Fay? Yes, I think so, with Fay.)  Am I self-righteous about this? Is this a displacement of working for larger systemic change or of solving my own problems?  Is Nicole ‘deserving’ enough of this help?

It would have been far easier to just let this go by while silently ‘wishing’ Nicole and her kids ‘the best.’ I don’t know if that would constitute wise acceptance, but for me, it feels more like defeatism, resignation, and not holding myself accountable to do what I can when I recognize a need that I might be able to help meet. It feels like resigning myself to destruction.

Alain Badiou, in his book Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (2002), says there is only a particular ethics and that it connects to a particular person maintaining fidelity to what he calls “the event,” that which “compels us to decide a new way of being” (41).  The process of truth comes from the decision to be “faithful to an event … by thinking … the situation ‘according to’ the event” (41). This is fidelity for Badiou. This kind of truth is an “immanent break … because a truth proceeds in the situation, and nowhere else” (42-43). In contrast, an abstract, general ethics (legalism, moralism), what he calls the “reign of ethics” is a “symptom of a universe ruled by … resignation in the face of necessity together with a purely negative, if not destructive, will.” This is nihilism (30). We “tear ourselves away from nihilism” by “affirming truths against the desire for nothingness” and through “the possibility of the impossible … every loving encounter, every scientific re-foundation, every artistic invention and every sequence of emancipatory politics” (39).

For Badiou, a particular ethics bound to the truths discovered in ‘the event' means we will be “faithful to [the] situation”; being faithful would mean “to treat it right to the limit of the possible” (15). He gives the example of a doctor presented with a patient who has no medical insurance. A general ‘ethics’ might mean refusing treatment under the cloak of bureaucratic rules. But the ethics of the particular will mean doing all that is possible.  There are limits, but those limits are real, not manufactured in resignations regarding other people’s lives.

I am trying to understand how this applies right now in this particular situation at hand. When Valerie left her violent spouse, she had immediate help. Her mother as well as her brother welcomed her into their homes, not once, but over and over, even after she’d returned to him and then fled again. And finally, something changed. She didn’t go back. My grandmother (her mom) took her in while she waited for a low-income apartment that was only months rather than years in coming (as it is now).  Should this be Valerie’s ‘event’ – this second chance she had to rebuild her life and the lives of her kids?  I have wondered what my ‘event’ is, and I am not sure. It seems to be every relationship in which people care enough to accept me as I am, and we form a relationship that I can truly count on.  As my lifelong friend Gloria says, we all need to be loved and to love others. And that love can’t just be silently felt; it has to be manifested in particular words and actions to particular people. 

Doesn’t acceptance in the best sense mean accepting people with their flaws and still caring for them and loving them? 

***

So there is no solution in Valerie’s opinion. What are we to do with them all? Wait for them to live out their sad lives? Put them all to sleep forever as kindly as possible? What does it mean to decide there is no solution?

I decide not to ask Valerie for $20 or tell her about my efforts for this situation.

Nicole doesn’t know that there is no solution to or for her and her kids. She is working, trying to find out how to become a pastry chef, trying to get her kids back, posting positive thinking messages each day on her Facebook status that pain me at times to read. She writes: “I am blessed!” She writes that she knows she is beautiful and that she’s on an awesome journey and is grateful because whatever she has gone through has made her stronger. She writes me to say that me going back to school has “inspired” her.

It seems to me that there are so many solutions for Nicole and her kids. Having what she needs and being able to count on that seem pretty crucial. Why are she and her kids not allowed that? And why is this lack considered their own fault rather than the system’s?