Problems with that

Self-centeredness…

April is a coworker. She’s a single mom, two children aged 2 and 3 years. She is blonde, about an inch taller than I, and curvatious. She has a big butt — this is her own admission, her own description! Its also one of her reasons for dating black men. She says as a caucasian woman, she intimidates caucasian men. Not so black men. Plus they like her big butt.

April is on that thin line between ghetto and not ghetto. With two young children, working a secretary job, she has too little money. Her family is broken; her mother and her sister are the only one’s who help, but her mother constantly berates her as being a terrible mother and wasting her money while asking her for $20 in the next breath. Her sister is 18 and trying to finish school. She’s simply not very helpful because she’s 18.

The children’s father is not involved, except to call April and threaten her once in awhile. Her friends are mostly ghetto, meaning most of them are trying to use her for something even when they are pretending to help her. She is suspicious of the other secretaries at work. Legal trouble pops up everywhere around her. She is in a constant cycle of being past due on some bill with SOMEONE all the time.

Right now, her car has been repossessed. Since this is not the first time, they are demanding the full past due amount of $700+. Between rent, child care, insurance, food, and gas, plus continuing to make car payments, and a Rent-a-Center payment so she has a little furniture in her duplex, it seems to be taking forever for her to save up the money she needs to get her car back.

To earn a little extra money, she took a job in the afternoon as assistant volleyball coach at one of the City’s highschools. To pull this off, she has to come to our office at 7am and work til 3pm with no lunch break. Then she leaves for the coaching job. It keeps her longer in the day, so she’s had to find a daycare for her children which keeps evening hours. The highschool which hired her is on the opposite end of town from where she lives.

Every morning at 6am, I roll out of bed and into my truck. I drive to her home (8 miles), pick her and her children up, drop them at daycare, drop her at our office, then drive back home by just after 7am. I go back to bed.

I get up at 7:50, dress, and go to work around 8am. My boss lets me flex schedule as long as I put in my 8 hours a day.

At 3pm, I drive her across town to the highschool (15 minute drive), drop her off, and come right back to work. This has been going on for probably 3 or 4 weeks now.

This week, I will probably end up picking her up after coaching and taking her home. Next week she gets paid, and is skeptical she has enough to get her car out of hock.

Why do I do this?

Because its Love. Its what Jesus would do. Is she using me? Surely. But, she is still a single mom who needs a ride whether she is using me or not. A need exists, and for a time at least, I am able to meet that need.

But she’s beautiful too.

She talks constantly. She is very much an extrovert. So I have bonded much through her constant self-revelation, plus my consistent exposure to her kids and special runs (today, her daughter was ill, so I picked her up at home at noon, had her drop me at my house [where I took a shower, blessed be] and she drove my truck to the doctor.) has made me feel very close to her.

But I’m not even a blip on her radar.

She is constantly talking to me about this constant stream of men in her life. Yesterday she told me that one of the coaches asked her out on a date. “Oh, joy!” slipped somewhat unenthusiastically from my mouth before I could redirect to a new topic.

I’ve tried getting on radar. Last Friday, her mom had her kids, and before I could suggest otherwise, she planned to “go out” (to a bar) with her brother who just turned 21. She was talking on her cell phone to her latest crush in Phoenix (the City is not in the same state as Phoenix, FYI) about how she had nothing to do and would just go out with him because. Meanwhile, she asks me if I’d go (help) pick up a washing machine that another coworker was giving her.

She can use me for manual labor, but doesn’t even think of asking me out.

I was pissed. I told her about it that evening when I picked her up to go get the washer. She told me that she had been thinking about asking me to go to the football game with her that night, because some of her volleyball girls were also cheerleading. We ended up spending the night at her house waiting for her brother to call. He never did. Instead, I saw all of her scrapbooks from highschool and gradeschool and cheerleading videos and her favorite albums and…

*sigh*

By Saturday evening, I was coming home from getting more things out of storage at my folks (including my desktop computer) and was feeling quite ill. Some sort of stomach flu or something. She called to see if I was coming over. She joked that she was bored, hungry… and that I should also buy her a BMW, and a diamond tennis bracelet, and get her a maid. I mean, if she was wishing, she might as well wish big, yes?

Feeling as bad as I did, I went to Lowe’s, bought her some washing machine hoses, then swung by Carlos O’Kellys and got her a chicken chimichanga (dinner). I had brought some DVD’s with me for her to entertain herself with, including “Walk In the Clouds” which I had hoped to watch with her.

She eats while I hook up the hoses. While I’m in the bathroom, after turning the water on, my body follows suit and I take a leak. She comes in shortly thereafter to see what I’ve done. I show her how the valves work and that the water is running. She turns, freezes, and starts making evil eyes at me.

She is upset that I left the toilet seat up.

For those of you who have spent considerable time with me, you know its a standard operating policy to put things like toilet seats back how I found them (and gates, and light switches, etc). I have a very high average at this, well over 90%. I chalk up my not putting it back down this time to the fact that I am not feeling well, and that I was “working” at the moment. Distracted.

Anyway, she makes a major production out of it.

I’m insulted. I just brought her a meal and hooked up her hoses and brought her movies when I have a splitting dizzying headache and nausea…and she picks on the seat??!

After the explainations, I go out to gather my things to leave. She rags on my choices about the DVDs I brought. “I thought you were going to bring something for my kids!!” “They can watch Bill & Ted!”… Anyway, I’m leaving. I’ve had enough.

At the door, she runs off with, “Thank you for dinner. Thanks for hooking up the washer”.

“Yeah, about that. When someone whose not feeling well goes out of their way to come over and hook up your washer for you, you probably shouldn’t be critical of their toilet habits”.

She responds instantly with, “Just put it down like you’re supposed to, and you won’t have any problems with that.”

Insult, to injury.

My roommate thinks I’m being petty. He thinks we’re both being juvenile, and that I should be the bigger person in all of this.

But I say, No.

What she communicated in that moment, is that my sacrifice and my generosity are both way below the importance of her toilet

seat.

That single act, those few words, went a long way to break the glamour she had bound me in. I am much myself again these days. And I am still driving her to work.