My biggest question

or. how do I stop arguing with people who aren't around?

Yesterday, I was home writing while David took the kids to the park. Here in Toronto, there are public wading pools at many of the playgrounds, staffed by hunched teenagers on lawnchairs. F is walking now and struts around the park like a wobbly prince.

Another dad was at the park with his three kids. The youngest, around two, was having a tough morning. He cried and whined and complained no matter what the dad offered — snacks, a swing, a toy. Eventually, the dad lost it and screamed close to the baby’s face, “BE QUIET! BE QUIET! BE QUIET OR DADA TAKE YOU HOME!!”

K was terrified. David considered how and when to step in. Before he could, he saw a woman approach the dad with her baby. She sat beside him and rubbed his back.

“It’s so hard,” she told him. “I’ve been there. Let me take your older two on the swings.”

And she did. She played with his kids. He took some deep breaths and pulled himself together.

David passed her, alone with her baby, on the way out of the park.

“That was great what you did back there,” he said.

“We’ve all had bad parenting days,” she answered.

I cried in bed last night when he told me the story. Also, today, I feel a little mad. Oh, good, another woman doing the heavy lifting to coddle the dangerous feelings of a fragile and volatile man.

I’ve been stuck in that place a lot lately, sandwiched between judgment and grace. We’ve had a year of strange, expensive, and painful conflict. Landlords who won’t return money we’re owed, contractors doing the same, neighbors who told outrageous lies about us, nannies who mistreated our children.

And you know what they say, if everyone around you is an asshole, maybe you’re the asshole.

But also, sometimes a bunch of people are just assholes.

When I’m in a conflict like this, I run the situation over in my head ad nauseam. What have I missed here? Am I actually wrong? If I conclude that no, I’ve been wronged, then I argue with the other party in my mind. Despite a decade of therapy and a lifetime of learning the opposite, I am convinced that if I can articulate my argument just right, the other person will change.

But people change only sometimes, and it’s never because of my ability to craft the perfect sentence at them.

And then there is the global injustice. Lately, I simply cannot tolerate anyone who hedges about the mass murder and active starvation in Gaza or the way we are treating immigrants here in the US, or those who put trans kids at risk.

I write to my elected officials daily (and politicians who are gearing up to run in 2028), and I tell them that their cowardice is evident. I tell them it’s not too late to do the right thing.

But what am I missing here? Are there actually bad people and good people? Or are there confused people and those with clarity? Are there people who are more and less scared?

There’s a St. Francis of Assisi quote I’ve been reading.

Can true humility and compassion exist in our words and eyes unless we know we, too, are capable of any act?

So is that what I’m left with — find a way to admit to myself that there is not one thing that I could not also do? Is that even true?

Because, right now, I am not the kind of person who would have rubbed that man’s back. I would have gone up to him, shaking, and I would have told him to get his shit together. That his inability to regulate his emotions is not the responsibility of a baby. I would have said that we are all tired of the threat of a man’s violence.

Where does that leave me? Arguing in my bed at night with people who will never listen.

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I loved talking to Emily Ladau on Substack live last week. She is the best, and we wrestled with moral responsibility and limits, so not altogether separate from this post. Watch a recording here!