Etymology of Kind

Often, I tell my daughters to be kind to each other.

Usually, I tell them this when they are screaming into each other’s faces with hot spittle. When they are about to use their hands in violence. When one calls the other a bitch under her breath, a word that I holler is unacceptable.

My parents’ best friend, writer Tim Wynne-Jones, dedicated a book to my parents. The book is called Some of the Kinder Planets. In his dedication, he writes To Margie and Klaus, two of the kinder people you’d ever hope to meet. I tell my girls to be kind and they roll their eyes at me. What does it even mean, to be kind to someone? What am I trying to tell them?

We watch Ted Lasso together, a show about the kindest man on earth, and they hear words like twat and cock and cunt in sharp British accents, often used affectionately between characters, and they hear me cackle and I have to explain that while these words are hilarious on the show, we really can’t say them in public. Why not? they say. They aren’t kind words, I say. Then why are you laughing? they ask, arms crossed.

My friend Morgan tells me she is not a kind person. It isn’t a confession; she feels no raw blistering shame or chaffing guilt. It is just a fact of her personality or character. I try to defend her, and she corrects me. “I’m not a bad person,” she says, calmly. “I don’t feel bad about myself.” Imagine not having the burden of obligatory kindness? Imagine abandoning the idea that we must help others to establish our own worthiness?

What would I do with my free time?

In Old English, of Germanic origin, the word kind is related to kin. One’s relations. Our blood ties. To whom we are akin to. Being a kind person is choosing to do something that helps others, motivated by genuine warm feelings. Putting another person’s needs before your own. I equate kindness with gentleness. I want to be treated with kindness, but really, I want to be held, gently, intentionally, probably because I am very tired.

Kind and nice seem to go hand in hand – these bland, beige words. My friend Jen was always accused of being nice. You’re too nice others would scoff. What they meant was, you put up with too much shit from men, from friends, from bosses, from colleagues, from family and sometimes they meant you’re showing the rest of us up and also, you’re boring, you have no personality.

What I’m trying to say to my daughters is to be kind is to abandon your ego.

Once you begin, the work of being kind is never finished. If anything, it finishes you.

My mum and dad were, by all accounts, the etymology of kind. They were the origin. The meaning.

Kindness can act as a husk you can crawl into, an exoskeleton of denial, to avoid knowing yourself, your own needs and desires. Which for some, like my dad, was a relief. A social worker for over fifty years, the jigsaw puzzle of his demented brain reassembled him into a person who no longer adheres to acts of service. He has been rendered quiet, anxious, unsure of what to do with himself. My mum comfortably cared for her siblings growing up, then her children, then other people’s children, then her mother, and then, she crashed. Hard. My mum birthed her own need to save others. Now, it has become my job to save her. To pull her out of paralyzing anxiety, out of masking, out of her many undiagnosed maladies.

Altruism and kindness are siblings, I suppose. But altruism is a step above. My mum was altruistic to bury anxiety, embracing some burdens to avoid others. My dad turned altruism into his career to keep himself hidden. He didn’t have to explore the trauma of caring for his dying wheelchair-bound father or risk his mother’s love turning conditional. She needed him to be the good son, while she worked at the factory to support her family. She was also very tired.

Maybe telling my kids to be kind is just asking them to be good, which really means wanting them to be easy.

I don’t believe in altruism. I don’t think it truly exists. The idea of it makes me angry. Why would a person choose to help someone at their own expense? To their own detriment? It seems evolutionarily counterintuitive. Am I not meant to survive, too?

What I’m trying to say to my daughters is you will need each other, someday.

Relatives call me kind as I accompany my mum to her doctor appointments to get prescriptions for anti-psychotics and referrals to specialists. They call me kind for helping my dad navigate his cognitive decline. For having them live with me during this fragile stage, one that will only fall further into decay.

Secretly, I do want to be kind. I don’t need to be seen as kind. I want to act out kindness. Not randomly, but with complete purpose, to those I love, especially those who have cared for me. I don’t want to abandon myself, or the life I was reaching for. The life that is now, seemingly, just out of reach.

I want to be kind. But I don’t want this. I don’t want to be a caregiver.

My parents were beloved. Are beloved. I don’t know how to explain what it’s like to grow up in a house, in a community, where your parents perch on pedestals. I am holding them up now. They perch on top of me. My shoulders are shattered. When is kindness finished? Do we have to ward off our own reality, indefinitely? The duplicity coats me like a sticky, oily substance that won’t scrub off. It interferes with my ability to cup kindness in my palms and pour it over myself.

My problem is anger, this cauldron of rage I carry inside that always threatens to bubble over, towards altruism, towards my kin. My problem is just misplaced grief, which is really misplaced despair over what this will cost me.

Morgan says: “I don’t need to be kind. I don’t need that as a defining character trait.”

What I want to say to my daughters is please, just don’t discard each other.

Morgan also says: “I think about myself, first.”

Can I abandon kindness, without abandoning kin?