the tears of a clown

i saw a field of robots in an athletic club today. it looked like a field of robots, rather than what it was- an astonishing number of rows of treadmill bodies with television heads. i would feel much more comfortable if words like "athletic" and "club" could be removed entirely from the human language. human language. there. i said it again. once again, humanity has been thrust in my reluctant face. i see the outer shell, the human hull, and i judge. i spent the day with a women that i was sure was loud, obnoxious and utterly unhuman. i saw her as a pushy sales machine. i dreaded spending the day with her, riding in her car, listening to her talk. but she is my mother and she is beautiful. how can i keep misjudging people and yet continue to form opinions and hold to them so staunchly?
her name is parivash. her initials are p.e. if we want to continue the athletic theme. in fact, i suggest that you stop reading this now and engage yourself in a rousing bout of calisthenics.
p.e. moved to the united states from iran when she was 17 years old and has a cute iranian accent. she's a stockily built 40 or 50 something sales machine. a cannonball with a cute accent and a strong personality. so strong, in fact, that i dismissed her like a cheap perfume- an irritating presence that would eventually clear out of the air. my air.
today was a day of interminable rain and i spent the whole thing in a car and in an office, in a car and in an office, in a car and in an office, with parivash. i listened to her talk about religion and growing up in a third world country, about her daughters and her casual, motherly disappointment in their limited passions and interests. even the things that seemed so stereotypically motherly- the sort of things they depict mothers feeling and saying in movies that infuriates their newly "self" realized(not in a buddha-hood kind of way) daughters- seemed like the beautiful feelings of a woman who had lived her life. HER life. why is it so hard to see the big picture of other people's lives? sometimes it seems like such a revelation that other people have feelings. i KNOW they do, but that knowledge rarely makes me think of them as a human, like me, that was born and grew up and got married and had children and loved them. a person that goes to sleep every night with a host of memories that i know nothing about. we took a break for lunch and she put it on her corporate card. instead of thinking about our lunch going on a "corporate card", i watched her from across the table as we talked. i felt like i caught a glimpse of her soul. not long after she moved here, she found herself with a family. one day she went to the grocery store with her two daughters and got angry because there were so many varieties of cereal. i guess they don't have cocoa puffs or lucky charms in iran. she told her children they could only have one kind and that was it. after a time, she said she looked in her pantry and saw five different cereal boxes. i guess that was it. a story of reluctant acclimation.
i don't think i could take it if i saw every person i met as a human the way i saw p.e. as one, today. how would things be different? i happened to see my ex-husband walking into his apartment building later this afternoon. due to religious differences, he declines communication with me. he's a human, too- with thoughts and feelings he'll take to his grave that i'll never fully understand from his perspective because i don't go to bed at night with his brain in my cranium. but he has a heart and i have a heart and i wish i could never hurt anyone again.