I’m WrongI am wrong all the time now. Well, maybe not ALL the...

I’m Wrong

I am wrong all the time now.  Well, maybe not ALL the time, but a lot.  According to my daughter.  

Yesterday she had school off for that wonderful holiday “Anniversary Day.”  You know, *Anniversary Day!*  Or maybe you know it as “Brooklyn-Queens Day?” No?  Well perhaps you don’t celebrate Anniversary Day where you live because it is A MADE UP HOLIDAY.  

But I digress.  Yesterday we were sitting around outside on a lovely Anniversary Day and a woman across the street was yelling.  As the woman walked down the street, she continued to yell and I told my daughter that she was “crazy.”  

My daughter said, “How do you *know* she’s crazy?”
“Well, she’s yelling to herself for no reason.”
“But I could yell to myself too and I’m not crazy.  You shouldn’t judge a book by its cover,” she concluded.

Look, before you start jumping all over me - I understand that “crazy” is an unkind and imprecise diagnosis.  But without getting too touchy-feely about it, “crazy” is still a useful New York City shorthand.  If I am trying to figure out whether there is immediate danger, or if someone is in distress, “crazy” works.  There’s all sorts of ways in which you have to navigate interactions with strangers in New York.  A different woman had come up to us minutes before to ask us where a pizza place was.  I could quickly tell that she was not “crazy.”  The night before a man approached me on a somewhat dimly-lit street and asked me for a dollar.  Nope.  Not crazy, just a panhandler.  It’s all quick judgment, not a thought-out process.  It’s not a diagnosis that has to hold up in court.  It’s a way of being street-smart.  I want my daughter to be good at that, be able to suss out a situation quickly so that her kind heart doesn’t get her in trouble.

I tried to explain this to my daughter.  And I guess I was trying to be “right.”  She wasn’t buying it.  She said that I was bullying.  I said that I hadn’t called the woman “crazy” to her face, so I wasn’t bullying anyone.  My daughter judged that to be “gossiping” then.  Perhaps so.  In any case, I didn’t see an opportunity to be “right” anytime soon, so I dropped it.

We’re in the beginning of the teen years, after all.  I have a feeling I am going to be “wrong” a lot.