Go Ahead. Disagree With Me.

               One of my daughters tended to get into unnecessary, interminable arguments with her childhood best friend. Both bright, opinionated and stubborn, they loved each other but would occasionally butt heads with vigor. Once, my daughter came home from school furious, absolutely fuming, because they'd argued about vacations. "She won't admit that our vacation was better than hers!" my angry child informed me.

                "It's a good thing that she loved her vacation. Hers was best for her family, and ours was best for our family," I told her. My offspring did not agree; she practically snorted with derision.

                "But ours was so much better than hers! Hers was lame! She just won't admit it!"

                In spite of my repeated attempts to explain that everyone has different tastes, and that everyone should be happy with their own lives instead of being envious of others, they were both so angry that they didn't speak to each other for a couple of days, each convinced that their trip was best (and that the other girl was the stubborn one).

                Two or three years later, they got into an argument about religion. Again, my daughter came home from school fuming and angry. Both our families attended Christian churches, but, of course, there are differences in doctrine. The girls had been arguing about one of those differences.

                "A lot of churches believe that," I told her when she explained her friend's position.

                "But that's wrong!"

                "Yeah, but they think we're the ones who are wrong."

                We went around and around. I tried, repeatedly, to explain that everyone believes different things, that that's OK. Everyone needs to be polite and respectful to others whose opinions are different.

                "But I explained to her how it is, and she just kept repeating!"

                "And you kept repeating."

                "I was explaining! She wouldn't listen!"

                "And she was explaining what she believed. She listened and she understood you; she just didn't change her mind. After you each said it once, you need to stop. After once, it's not explaining any more. It's arguing. Arguing will not change people's minds. It will just make them angry. She's too good a friend to lose over a difference of opinion."

                I was frustrating my daughter almost as much as her friend was. Finally, she snapped at me, "So I'm just supposed to let people think things that are wrong?" She was apparently unprepared for my answer:

                "YES!"

                 I become more and more convinced that parents must have stopped telling their kids this at some point. So many people seem totally unclear on the fact that people have a moral, and in the U. S., a legal, right to think and say things that others find silly, superstitious, prejudiced, immoral, inaccurate and in any other way just plain wrong.

                I watch in amazement as people who consider themselves freethinking libertarians comment on something in the media by saying, "I can't even believe they're allowed to say that!" without a hint of irony.

                Quite often, the people who profess to be the most open minded will be the most scathing toward anyone who disagrees with them. Sometimes I'll have ludicrous conversations with people. They'll be going all existential, insisting things like, "There is no universal right or wrong. Everyone's path is just as valid as anyone else's," and I'll be unable to resist saying, "So, my path of choosing to follow a fairly strict, religious course is just as valid as your path." Almost invariably, that will be met by, "Well, no, because in your path, you tell other people that their course is wrong. That's not OK." So much for the concept that there is no wrong choice.

                "So you think I'm wrong."

                "Yes! And I think if you try to tell other people what to do, that's hurtful and dictatorial."

                "So it's wrong to tell people that what they're doing is wrong."

                "Yes! Exactly!"

                "So then, is it wrong of you to tell me that I'm doing things wrong? You just did. Are you being hurtful and dictatorial by telling me that I should do things differently?"

                "No! I'm trying to get you to see that everyone else should choose their own path!"

                "But you think the path I've chosen is wrong."

                "You didn't choose it! You're doing what someone else tells you to do!"

                At that point, I can either go with, "But if you tell me to do something, and I do it, that's OK," or "So an opinion is only valid if no one else agrees with it? No one ever introduced you to the things that you believe?" Either one will make the other person angry.

                Usually, it will boil down to something that looks like, "It's OK for me to do certain things because my opinion is right. It's wrong for you to do those same things because your opinion is wrong."

                So exhausting. So annoying. So erroneous.

                Frequently, it's best to just stop the discussion, because nothing productive will come of it.

                It's not just the biggies – religion, politics, child rearing – that get folks up in arms. I once had someone badger me for months because I like a particular chain restaurant's chili. ("They use the burgers that have cooked too long to sell! You're OK with paying to eat overcooked beef that they couldn't sell as burgers?" Answer: "YES. And it's a heck of a lot less wasteful than throwing it out!") When my daughter was getting married, I listened to more than one person criticize her choice to have matching attendants' dresses by saying, "Doesn't she know that matchy-matchy went out of style?" YES. Yes, she knew. She just didn't care, and it was HER wedding. Say that to certain people, and you'll get quite the reaction. Apparently, in some circles, it's more shocking to be willfully unfashionable than it is to disagree on whether or not there's a God.

                I always thought that people shared ideas so that they'd understand one another. I am never offended if you don't agree with me. I am offended if you question my intelligence or if you browbeat me with the intent to change my mind. So often, with people I know personally and people I read about or see on TV, I see shades of those two girls whose age was barely into double digits; people get increasingly angry if they can't change your mind. They've explained the error of your ways to you. If you persist in holding your opinion instead of changing to theirs, well, that's obviously a sign of low intelligence and almost criminal stubbornness. That attitude makes me angry. It always will.

                I notice, too, that many people attempt to avoid the unpleasantness of being adult enough to disagree peacefully by caving in. Faced with a loved one who is doing something that they always believed to be wrong, this type of person will think, "My loved one is intelligent, well intentioned and well informed. Therefore, if they disagree with me, I must be wrong." That's ridiculous. It is totally possible to be intelligent, well intentioned, well informed and wrong. Do you know anyone – ANYONE – with whom you haven't the slightest disagreement on ANY subject?

                We, collectively, seem to have lost the knowledge that you can truly, deeply care about someone, even love them, and consider them to be wrong at the same time.

                Sometimes, someone will attempt to show me the error of my ways by saying, ever so gently, "You know that most people disagree with you, right?" as though 1. I didn't know, and 2. I will now immediately conform to the majority simply because there are more of them. Really, folks? What's that about?

                It also ticks me off when people ask, "Aren't you aware that your opinion causes other people pain?" Yes. Yes, I am aware. Do you know what my first clue was? The fact that the opinions of other people often cause ME pain. I understand this to be a normal part of the human condition, not a reason for forced conformity.

                Think about it: according to many religious teachings, including those of my religion, certain behaviors will not necessarily cause pain in this life, but will cause eternal separation from loved ones in the next life. If you're in my life, I want you to continue to be there. It's an act of amazing restraint on my part that I don't burst into tears every time I see someone doing something that I believe to be wrong.  If I flung myself, sobbing, at the feet of every person who, say, drank alcohol in my presence, wailing, "I don't want to lose you!" people would think I was a loon, and the relationship wouldn't last long.

NOT flinging myself down sobbing doesn't mean that I agree with you. It means that certain aspects of your life are none of my business, so I stay out of them. I expect you to return the favor.

I see frequent complaints on Facebook that, "Someone un-friended me because of something I said!" Just as frequently, I see status posts that say, "If I ever offend you, or if you want to talk about (insert topic), please unfriend me!" While anyone in my life is certainly free to dump me at any time, and I will never try to keep someone in my life who doesn't want to be there, I find the idea that we can only be friends with people we agree with to be sad – and juvenile.

Someone tried to explain that to me once by saying, "I just can't be friends with someone who has opinions that I find to be morally wrong." I wonder if they thought about the fact that their opinions were offensive to me, and yet I didn't feel the need to jettison the relationship.

If they didn't, they should have.

All the Japanese People Were Wearing Pants

"All the Japanese people were wearing pants!"

The outrage in my oldest daughter's voice carried all the way over the line, clear as a bell despite the hundreds of miles inbetween us. She was a newlywed, unpacking in her first home with her husband. She'd finally taken most of the stuff from her room at our house (even though she hadn't lived there for 5 years), and was looking through her photos. She'd come across one from Sea Life Park in Hawaii.

We'd taken the trip to Oahu when she was 11, Terry was 10 and Alex was three. We'd tried to sign up for a dolphin encounter at the park; the highlight was getting into the dolphin pool. There was only one opening, so we signed Lana up. She's always loved the ocean and dolphins in particular, so it was obvious which of us would enjoy the encounter the most.

Aside from mainlanders, Japanese vacationers made up most of the tourists we saw. Every other member of her dolphin encounter was Japanese, and most were adults.

Lana wore her swimming suit under her clothes all day. When the time came for the dolphin program and they were ushered into the briefing room, Lana started taking her clothes off. "Honey, we don't get into the pool until the end," one of the dolphin trainers said. "You can change then."

"No, I'm OK," she said, neatly folding her shirt and shorts.

Before they got into the pool, a group photo was taken. Since Lana was one of the shortest ones, she was in front. The other participants hadn't changed yet; no one thought anything of it at the time. She'd been in her suit for half an hour or so at that point.

Each participant also got a photo of themselves and a dolphin while they were in the pool - that's one of my favorite photos from that trip.

Now, years later, Lana was beyond scandalized by the group picture. "I'm wearing a swim suit, socks and sneakers! I look ridiculous! Everybody else has pants on! Why didn't you make me wear pants?" Neither her dad or I could see anything to get worked up about, which made her even more upset. "My husband laughed! He says he's going to send it in to awkwardfamilyphotos.com!"

For the last few years, she's brought the subject of what I should, and should not, have let her wear up several times - "How could you let me wear that?" The thing is, we're not talking about photos of her as a toddler in a tutu and cowboy boots (which, admittedly, would have been fine with me). Most of the time, her age is well into double digits, and the clothes in question were favorites of hers. Sure, they might be out of style years later, but they weren't then. I point out that she has never liked my taste in clothes - she spent most of her life trying to dress me. I remind her that she would have argued bitterly. "Did you want me to spend every day hitting my head against a brick wall? We would have both been miserable." She still insists, "You should have!"

Until she hit puberty and realized that jeans were fashionable, she hated them. "They're stiff, they're hot and they make me sweat." Even at camp, she wore knit stretch pants. In her late teens, this just mortified her. "WHY didn't you take away all my stretch pants and only buy me jeans?"

"Because. You. Hated. Them!"

When I did very rarely put my foot down, she'd had meltdowns. In junior high, she'd tried to wear dirty pants to school. You'd think someone meticulous about appearances would never consider such a thing, but in her mind, it was better than wearing what was still in her closet. After I insisted that she change, she hauled another pair of jeans out of the hamper and I had to be very specific - "You will not just change, you will put on something clean."

"But all my pants are dirty!"

"Then wear a skirt or dress."

"To school?" She loved her dresses, and she owned - I am not making this up, 26 of them at the time - but not to wear to school.

I insisted. She complained. I dropped off a very angry girl in a dress just before the bell rang.

When I picked her up after school, she flumped onto the seat and slouched down, announcing, "I knew it. Everyone said I looked ridiculous."

Sigh. "Lana," I said, "I know you. You walked into class this morning, and the first thing out of your mouth was, 'I feel ridiculous. I didn't want to wear this, but my mother made me.' " She stared at me with that deer-in-the-headlights look. "Honey, I know what you're hoping when you say things like that is that your friends will say, 'Oh, no, you look great! I love that outfit!' but what they're actually going to say is, 'You're right. You look awful. I can't believe you left the house looking like that.' You cannot get angry with people for agreeing with you." She said nothing on the ride home.

At 16, she'd once had to stay home from a dance after having a shrieking fit and throwing her shoes across the living room. (We had guests, too; great.) She always arranged her clothes into Outfits, deciding that a particular top ONLY went with particular bottoms. In this case, it was a denim skirt, white top and white canvas shoes. When the shoes were new, they looked great. They were now far from new; she'd actually used them for creek walking at camp the previous summer, and it was now December. Her teacher at church had actually requested that she not wear them to church any more. After she wore them to church again, her teacher was deeply puzzled - "I mean, I know she has nice shoes. I've seen her wear them." But, in her mind, ONLY those shoes went with the denim skirt. One night, she tried to wear them to a dance, and I'd had the audacity to tell her to put on another pair of shoes. She owned quite a few. After the shoes sailed across the room, accompanied by angry yelling, her dad and I had simultaneously said, "OK, you can stay home," and she burst into tears, wailing, "Dances are the only thing in my life I have to look forward to!"

And now I was getting lectures on how I should have argued with her MORE often? To what end?

The thing is, I naively believed that at some point, my kids would appreciate a mom who hadn't micromanaged their wardrobes. I've actually had to reshoot a senior portrait session, because the girl showed up to the shoot alone and her mother hated what she was wearing in the photos. She wasn't dressed scantily, or in anything dirty or controversial, but she was (gasp) wearing pants, and her mother wanted her photographed in a dress. "And she didn't even DO anything with her hair!" the mother told me in outrage, intimating that I should have refused to photograph a girl who showed up looking the way she did every day. I never put my kids through that.

The thing is, my oldest still hates my taste. Not six months before the conversation about the Japanese people and their pants, she had literally been in tears over the shirt we bought her. We took a family trip, and on one day we all planned to wear matching shirts, so we bought all of us one. She hated hers, convinced it was too big and too baggy and she "looked ridiculous." All five of us assured her that she looked fine, but she only consented to wear it under a jacket that she kept zipped up. And this is an adult! How in the world would it make sense to have had those conversations every day?

(I wrote this in 2003. We will obviously never be on the same page about this.

My daughter loves me anyway.

But, I do fear that she'll destroy childhood photos.)

Maybe, Sometimes, It's You

Apologies. Truly.

I am going to gripe. I am undoubtedly going to employ a great many words to do so - it is the nature of the beast.

I am not a particularly negative person. I have been accused, frequently, of being a Pollyanna. Once I snapped at a confidant, after dealing with someone who was determined to treat me as though I had the cognitive abilities of stuffed cabbage, "WHY do people treat me like I'm an idiot?" She sighed and said, "It's because you're always so happy. People figure you can't possibly have a clue about what's going on. Happy people generally aren't very bright."

I beg to differ. Any idiot can, and usually does, find fault, complain, bicker and just generally exude negativity. Being cheerful takes hard, teeth gritting, exhaustive effort.

Yet, by some fluke of nature or nurture, I am most eloquent, and most likely to communicate, when I'm angry.

Right now, try as I might to avoid it, I am ticked off.

As much as I dislike, and in general, avoid, new technologies, I am loving Facebook. I get to see, sometimes on a daily basis, what's going on with friends who are sometimes halfway across the world. A friend had a baby today, and I saw photos while his age was still measured in hours. I don't carry a cellular phone, I have never experienced Twitter, but Facebook, I enjoy.

I have found and renewed contact with so many people from high school, college theater and other endeavors in my past. It's delightful.

Except when it isn't.

I renewed contact with one particular high school friend, and talked - OK, typed - almost daily about kids, spouses, current events and nothing in particular. I remembered this friend as quick witted and funny, but I think they've gotten quicker and funnier over the years. I would laugh out loud frequently. I remarked often to my husband that it was such a delight to be back in touch.

Sometimes, this friend would comment on my blog. Blogging is still brand new to me. Letting people "hear" what's inside my head in such an impersonal forum takes some getting used to, and it's nice to find out what my friends think. I think it's made easier by the fact that I am just generally a Too Much Information person, so I'm not fretting about privacy.

My husband often frets about privacy. He's always tried NOT to let people know what he's thinking, because if people know what you're thinking, someone will disagree with you, and might even think less of you. He worries, sometimes, when he reads my stuff - "Do you really want to let people know that?"

Me? I remember growing up terrified that people would dislike me or disapprove of something about me. I was painfully, don't-look-at-me-don't-talk-to-me-don't-acknowledge-my-existence shy in elementary school. Having two friends at once felt like a party. As I got older, I cared less about what people in general thought of me, but still worried deeply about what my friends thought. Adulthood brought so many things - kids, at the top of the list - that truly mattered into my life, and I had less time to worry about stuff that didn't matter. Since I've been a parent for far more than half my life, well, the adolescent, overwrought worries are long gone.

Now, for better or worse, I truly don't care who agrees with me or what they think of my choices. This is good, because I think pettiness of any kind is juvenile and because so few of my friends live a life that looks anything like mine. I do not have to agree with people to love them. I can't imagine that they feel compelled to agree with me.

I'm also - and this can't be entirely good, born as it is out of ugly experiences - willing to just cut a relationship loose. If it's not working for one or both of us, if it doesn't enrich life somehow, goodbye. Generally, I'm a friend for life. I'm not going to sever contact over any little (or even big) difference, but I will if you make me (or my family) consistently miserable. Life's too short.

So. Back to this newfound old friend.

After conversing almost daily, the conversation stopped, dead in its tracks, the day after a blog post - the post that mentioned my lack of a college degree.

I've been through this before. The post even mentioned one such instance. People suddenly wonder what's wrong with them that they would find me interesting. They wonder how badly they're "slipping" that they found what I have to say relevent or funny. Or, they become convinced that I'm an egotist putting on a show, pretending to be funny and interesting, sitting here with a thesaurus next to me so I can use big, impressive words. Or they begin to fret about what a waste it is, because I used to have so much potential.

It's exhausting. It's annoying.

Don't even think about telling me that, "You can't blame people, yada yada yada." I'm in no mood. I've heard that before, too.

Of course, I could be making faulty assumptions. Maybe I said something offensive - I have very little filter on my thoughts. Maybe my friend is suddenly, incredibly busy. Maybe when I continue to respond to status updates and such, their kids are bleeding or something.

But probably not.

I can't help but think, "Really? This again?"

I don't think I've suffered the 21st century equivalent of shunning, being "un-friended" on Facebook. But I miss my friend already.