Gratitude.

I was talking to a friend of mine recently.  She'd been going through some rough times. Has struggled quite a bit for the past few years.  Has struggled quite a bit over many years.  She'd been out of work on disability for about a year as she struggled with some health issues relating to anxiety and depression and was having trouble making ends meet.

Her mother suggested that she come try to contact her father and ask for some help.  J. hadn't spoken to her father in about a decade.  He'd never been around much at all.  Left when she was four or five, I think.

She'd eventually given him a call.  Or he called her.  I forget how it went down, exactly.  Her mother put her in touch with her father.

He asked how she'd been.  When she started telling him, he asked her about her faith in God.  He expressed some surprise that she didn't believe in God and started telling her about the importance of faith.  I think this irked her a bit.  He also expressed some surprise that she'd been dealing with depression and anxiety issues.

"I guess if I'd called at some point," he said...

I think he ended up sending her a check for a hundred dollars.

I'd been talking to her mother about it a few months after.  Her mother thought that she was being most ungracious in accepting his help.  "She has to realise that he's trying," she said.

J. thinks that $100 is a pretty shitty take for 26 years.  I pretty much have to agree with her.

A lot of what people expect others to express gratitude for strikes me as behavior that's so baseline (or even so far below the baseline) that to expect to be thanked for it seems to be kind of nuts. 

Trying? Gratitude?  That's laughable.