So last weekend I was on my way home from working a My Little Pony Live! show at the arena when I was rear-ended by two high school cheerleaders in a little old Honda Accord.

I’ve been in more than my share of accidents. Most happened when I myself was a teenager. And most of them were my fault. I was, how shall we say, a less-than-totally-attentive driver in my youth. That corrected itself after I totaled a car. But, having been there, I had sympathy for the two girls - who were understandably upset. Until both of them started screaming at me that I was a bitch, and that the accident was all my fault, I shouldn’t have braked (I had hit the brakes to avoid hitting a car who pulled out in front of me), their parents were going to sue my ass, etc. etc. etc.

As I stood in freezing rain listening to the hysterics it occurred to me that when I was a teenager, merely addressing another adult in the manner the two girls were addressing me would have brought some serious consequences from my parents - the car accident would have been a completely separate matter. My parents didn’t raise me to be a doormat but they did raise me with two very clear, and very simple, ethics about interpersonal relations:

- Don’t behave in public in a way that would shame your family.

- Don’t treat adults, or really anyone, with disrespect. Especially in view of other people.

The girls just kept getting more and more abusive and I was being a good sport and trying to calm them down, when one stuck her index finger in my face and said “don’t talk to us like we’re children!” Which is when both my patience and my sense of humor ran out. And when I also realized that I’ve reached a point where a 16-year-old acting like a tantruming toddler is definitely a child in my book. “Fine, we’ll let the police sort this out,” I said, and dialed 911. The screaming escalated as I turned away back to my car.

As I got in my car to await the police I realized that if that had been Kenneth and one of his friends standing out in the rain, cursing a strange adult up one side and down the other, I would be way more upset about that than I would that he’d gotten in an accident. Accidents happen - especially with teenage drivers. But calling a perfect stranger a bitch is no accident. While I wasn’t expecting deference or even an apology that could have been construed as an admission of fault, I certainly wasn’t expecting what I got from the two girls. Although I guess maybe I should have? I don’t know.

In any case, one of my new parenting goals (and it seems I make new ones all the time these days) is to raise Kenneth to treat other people with respect and to develop some ability to handle stressful situations with aplomb. So I don’t turn the corner one day to come upon him cursing a complete stranger who will walk away from the encounter with amazement about what kind of parent that kid must have.

A while ago I had someone, a former student, do something really shitty to me.  My heart actually raced with fury.  I wanted to smack the spoiled little brat until his head spun.  I thought uncharitable things about his mother’s parenting skills, things like “Well, she’s certainly raised the son she deserves.”  They went downhill from there. Then I started to think about compassion.  I’m not Christian.  I don’t have any religious directive to be nice to people and my natural instinct is to say snide, nasty, cutting little things to make people who offend me feel like worms.  All this is to say that compassion doesn’t come easily to me. And this kid, this spoiled, mean, cruel kid is not an easy place to go with the compassion vibe.  But.  But.  He’s desperate for attention.  He’s screaming for someone to care about him and has been since I first met him.  His mother overlooked his bullying, his explosions into anger, his drug use until he ended up curled on his bed in the grip of a nervous breakdown at 17.  She smoothed every path for him until he slipped right down into despondency.  Then, looking at that, I started to feel compassion.  How lonely, to be a teenager searching for some reaction only to get protected from your own folly again and again.  How sad to have to have a breakdown to acknowledge you own pain.   I think of Dante’s line, “I found myself in dark woods, the right road lost” and wonder how he got there so young.  I feel sorry for his mother, struggling with a difficult child, unsure of how to respond to his outbursts.   And I think of a Zen parable about a monk who carried a woman over a stream.  She was rude, hateful, and strode off.  Miles later the younger monk asked how could he, the older monk, just let that woman speak to him like that after he had helped her.  He responded, “I put her down miles ago.  Why are you still carrying her?” So I try to put things down and feel compassion and pretty much suck at it.  Or, rather, I can feel the compassion but find I still have the anger too.