Stop helping people

"Promise me you'll stop helping people," she called from across the road. I laughed and leaned out the window of my car.

"Do you realize how absurd that sounds?"

"I know, but..." she floundered for an explanation. "It's killing you."

I laughed. I denied death by kindness but I didn't have much of a scarred leg to stand on. I feared that my tender, swelling nose would spread into a black eye by morning. By the end of the weekend, my right arm would hang limp and useless at my side, aching under the weight of a sprain or strain or just plain overuse.

"I'm not dying. I'll be fine."

"You give too much."

Earlier in the evening, over coffee and dessert, she told me the same. I looked up in bewilderment.

"Do you ever feel that maybe you just go too far?" she asked. "You do too much to help people and you end up getting hurt in the process."

I shook my head and smiled in confusion.

"You thought this was book club," laughed a friend. "It's actually an intervention."

"I'm not going to stop helping people." Just because I took a fist to the nose. Twice.

I grew up in a religious family. I don't know the reference, but I know that there's something in the good book about not discussing charitable acts. One wouldn't want to be seen as bragging. It invalidates the good in the deed to take pride in it. So I don't talk about it, for the most part.

Talking is poor form. Doing, required.

I worried about my nose, though. The swelling. I didn't know how to explain the bruising and the black eye that I knew would follow. I thought about saying I walked into a wall. I thought about blaming my brother, my boyfriend, my pimp.

Strangely enough, I hesitated to mention volunteering but had no problem blaming a non-existent boyfriend or joking about prostitution. I just knew that nobody would buy it. The easiest explanation, as always, was the truth.

"I got backhanded while volunteering this morning."

An over-enthusiastic 12-year-old boy, a young man taller than me with the mental faculties of a small child, accidentally slapped me in his excitement. Then, he slapped me again to see my reaction.

"Are you OK?" asked the new girls.

"It hurts," I replied, tears burning and mingling with the chlorinated water. I pressed my hand to my nose and pulled it away wet. I didn't know if I would find pool water, snot or blood but my fingers were clean.

Over the next hour, I struggled to keep him afloat and guard my nose. The man who was supposed to help me preferred the smaller, splashing kids to our tall, almost-a-man child in a mellow mood who just wanted to float, spin and apparently slap.

I pulled my arm when he jumped from the stairs into the water. I didn't want him to hit his head. To hurt himself. He was, after all, just a child. I should have known better.

"Are you OK?" the girls asked again later, in the locker room.

"I'll be fine; it just hurt."

"We could hear it from across the pool when he hit you."

I cringed. What could I say?

Maybe it was the beatitudes: Blessed are the poor, the meek, those who mourn. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice, the merciful and clean of heart. Blessed are the peacemakers. Blessed are they that suffer persecution for justice' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Maybe it was first Corinthians, drilled into my head at every wedding I had attended for years.

Love is patient, Love is kind,
It does not envy, it does not boast,
It is not proud,
It is not rude,
It is not self-seeking,
It is not easily angered,
It keeps no record of wrongs.

Maybe it was just good, common sense.

"Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds."
- George Eliot

Whatever it was, I wouldn't stop volunteering. Helping others. That would be absurd.

Tag: Volunteering