Just Moms

Think about your favorite ice-cream flavor. Now, imagine that a friend hands you a bowl of your favorite ice-cream… and even provides you with a spoon to eat it with! Ok… as you are getting ready to take a bite, another person comes over and dumps a jar of cheese sauce all over it. Doesn’t seem to appetizing does it? So you scrape off the cheese sauce and try to “salvage” the ice-cream underneath that didn’t get “ruined”. You get ready to eat another bite and another friend comes and dumps spaghetti sauce all over it. Again, not real pleasant, right? You try to “rescue” some of the ice-cream, but you can’t. In fact, it doesn’t even look like the ice-cream that your good friend brought you to begin with. It’s ruined.

This is what we often do with our own friends. We see/hear how someone does something kind for a mutual friend. And instead of us being happy that our friend is being ‘served’ with her favorite ice-cream, we feel that we have to get involved and add something to it. And it keeps happening until eventually the friend doesn’t even recognize the help that she was given by the first person.

Is it fair to the friend who is being “served” the ice-cream?
Is it fair to the one who was “serving” the ice-cream to begin with?

We live in a world when we want to “one-up” everyone. It bothers us to see credit being given to someone else when they are doing what we “think” we can do (and think we can do it even better!). But instead of us spending so much time “one-upping”, shouldn’t we find a situation where no one is even helping to begin with?? Instead of trying to put our own 2 cents in and get involved (when it’s clearly being taken care of), we should be finding a person who doesn’t have anyone serving them “ice-cream”.

Cheese sauce and ice-cream doesn’t “go” together. And neither does spaghetti sauce and ice-cream. The same is true with “one-upping”. The original friend knew the situation first hand. She knew what her friend needed/liked and offered it to her (the favorite ice-cream). She even gave her the tool (the spoon) to enjoy it! But when others start to get involved without knowing the full situation at hand, they start adding things that aren’t necessary or applicable (the cheese sauce & spaghetti sauce). And ultimately it makes things worse.

Stop putting toppings on someone else’s gift of ice-cream. And start scooping some yourself!