The courage of imperfection - learning to take responsibility for one's actions

Vibrant Life, Sept-Oct, 1995 by Dan Montgomery

The blue sky above the towering brown canyon walls of the Rio Grande gorge was spellbinding to my 6-year-old eyes. Daddy parked the car at the end of the long winding dirt road beside the Rio Grande, a river known for its beauty and treacherous depths. Wagon trains had once made precarious crossings over it on historic journeys through the American Southwest.

Mom carried her red picnic basket to a nearby table, while Daddy unpacked his fishing tackle from the car trunk. I sprang from the car and raced to the river's edge, my dog Blackie barking at my heels.

"Danny," came my Dad's voice from behind me, "don't get so close to the water. It's 10 or 20 feet deep out from the bank. You and Blackie play over by the picnic table."

I kicked a reddish rock off the bank and watched the hungry current devour it. The sheer force of the river excited me. Blackie darted after a yellow butterfly, and I danced after him. A dozen feet downstream the tops of two huge boulders jutted out from a deep pool. They looked like they could support me just fine.

I glanced back at Daddy. His head was turned downward as he tied a trout fly to the end of some fishing line. Mom was spreading out a tablecloth. A naughty feeling shimmied through my belly. "I'm a good jumper," I said to Blackie. "Wanna see?" Up I leaped, coming down solidly on the first big boulder. My heart beat proudly with success. That was easy, I thought.

I sized up the distance to the second boulder--about two or three feet--bent my knees, and leapfrogged once more.

My jump fell short. My feet cut through the icy water like a knife. The blue sky and canyon walls disappeared from view. I saw a blur of green bubbles all around me, and a thunderous silence filled my ears.

I was sinking like a rock when something powerful gripped the floating strands of my hair. A sharp tug reversed my motion, and the colors of sky and canyon burst into my vision. As Daddy hauled me up out of the river, his voice exploded in my ear, "I got 'im, Anna Mae!" I found out later that he had rushed to the boulder where I'd vanished and shot his long muscular arm down into the watery depths. He'd anchored his fingers into my hair, and snatched me back from the icy jaws of death.

I coughed spurts of water out of my nose and mouth. Mom wrapped my shivering body in a blanket from the car. Blackie paced nervously back and forth, his eyes glued on me. Once I got my breath, I cried with all my might.

But the next thing that happened scared me worse than the near drowning. "Danny," my irate father yelled, "why'd you disobey me? Why did you go out on that rock when I told you to stay by your mother?"

At that moment I knew I had blown it. Shame tied my stomach into knots. I felt helpless to give an answer for myself. I knew I had disobeyed. "Blackie pushed me!" I shouted in a moment of guilty inspiration.

My father seemed to buy my story and started calming down. Mom hugged me all the more warmly. Blackie licked me on the nose. I felt glad to be alive, but guilty about telling my first conscious lie.

Why Do We Cover Up? Why is it so hard, when we have really blown it, to take responsibility for our actions; to tell the truth and make a simple apology? As a psychologist, I've helped hundreds of people take responsibility for their choices, and I'm still making progress in owning up to my own mistakes.

Might some of our resistance to telling the truth stem back to our childhood inability to explain ourselves? Does blowing it as an adult tap into our old anxiety of feeling humiliated by a finger-pointing parent? Spilling our milk, ripping the curtains, tracking mud across the carpet, breaking a sister's toy--a thousand different things made us cringe with fear and the dread of being found out and shamed or punished.

The Art of Blaming and Excusing. I remember my brother Ted getting bored to death one morning in church service. Mom was the church pianist, and she had given Ted a pimento cheese sandwich to nibble on during the long sermon. Ted took a few small bites and then, from his perch on the front pew, lobbed the rest at the minister.

The man gracefully dodged the incoming missile and continued his sermon unperturbed. But afterward Mom threw a fit. When she interrogated little Ted about why he had tossed his snack at the preacher, he looked helpless for a moment, and then said, "He was talking too much!"

The most common way we avoid responsibility for our actions is to blame someone else and excuse ourselves. The Bible account in Genesis has God questioning Adam about his disobedience. Adam replies, "The woman made me eat the fruit." Later, when God questions Cain about murdering his brother, Cain retorts, "Am I my brother's keeper?"

We throw up smoke screens because we hate the pain of culpability--that heaviness in the chest and knot in the stomach. A good excuse seems to assuage our guilt and let us off the hook. A client of mine who is an attorney reported yelling at his wife the night before. When I asked him why, he raised his chin and protested, "She made me do it. She hasn't been very responsive lately, and it made me mad!"