Pickled Thoughts for Tea, II

In the beginning, it was just another funny story that I’d gotten off MCAC, compliments of Chayo aka blackmask, our honorary member from the US of A.

It was the story of scam payback by a guy who’d had vasectomy before getting involved with a woman who later informed him she was pregnant with his child. (Click here for the link to the story.)

I originally thought of the story in the way that I was ’supposed’ to, like the first sentence of the page ‘told’ me to. Saw the woman as fradulent and scheming. Was relieved that the guy wasn’t taken in.

But then a comment by Jasmine changed my whole perspective on it, and I started thinking, how much of what we don’t believe is fueled by prejudice and jadedness, or because we were ‘led’ to think so or ‘conditioned’ to act so?

The guy believed that the woman was knowingly scamming him. His suspicions were valid in the sense that this, pregnancy scams, sadly enough occurs and goes on in real life.

But what if, as Jasmine suggested, the woman was not faking it? What if she’d honestly thought that he was the father of her unborn child, and had been truly in love with him? What if the thing with the band guy was a one-night-stand drunk affair, or happened before she met Mr Vasectomy, or even if the guy was just a friend who decided to shoulder up the ‘birth father’ name to help the woman out?

After knowing that she was having a child when her official partner was sterile… what would she have thought? This evidence of her disloyalty, the knowledge that she would never be able to marry or even stay in contact with her love anymore–wouldn’t it have been crushing to her? The tears could have been of sadness over losing him, not over losing annuity or other worldly goods that she’d been ‘expecting’.

We read, and we assume, and we judge. But what are our assumptions based on, and are our judgements fair and unbiased? Or are they just expressions of personal bias and personal opinion, led on and manipulated by the context of words and introductionary phrases to the issue at hand?

I keep reminding myself to keep multiple viewpoints on things. Not to judge books by their blurb before reading the first chapter, not to make decisions on right and wrong before the facts are all known (because everyone is always right and everyone is always wrong; all there is is to see which shade of gray is more white than gray in terms of the facts and situation and the reasons and the results).

I pride myself on usually being able to do so.

But this story and Jasmine’s comment… it just reminds me that I still need to work on keeping my multiple-viewpoint POV open. It also opens my eyes to something else I haven’t been able to do yet, and what I should aim to do: view things again from not just the narrator’s eyes in a text, but from too the eyes of other characters in the text. To seek and to expotulate, on possibilities and conditions, and perhaps and maybes.

It will be murky, it will be tricky; but maybe, just maybe, next story around I can be less judging and more accepting, and I can really accept that things can not be taken as what we see.