Bless Her Heart

Recently Macaroni's exemplary personal care attendant and I were having a discussion, in which in my enthusiastic attempt to offer praise and enjoyment for her actions, I used the phrase "bless your heart".  There was a bit of a pause before she offered the response that what I'd said was really considered an insult by those in the South.  Since she's lived there, she definitely has the dialectic and cultural knowledge of Southern idioms.  It was not only an instance of mortification to have unwittingly offended The Divine Miss M, but to think back on a lifetime of my husband's Southern relatives offering their Bless Your Hearts to us over the decades.

The phrase to us northerners is simply a benediction of sorts, to assure us of our actions being worthy of praise, comfort, or as a phrase acknowledgeing a trying experience.

To utter bless your heart can range from a mild rebuke of thinking, well aren't you foolish, to the outright insult suitable to the moment, as in, well aren't you just a waste of oxygen.  It's a passive aggressive method of getting your point across, but it works best if delivered so subtly that the recipient isn't exactly sure what you meant.  And of course if it is offered by a person of deep faith, it might really be just a blessing from the heart.

A decade ago when the Spousal Unit's father passed away, we were in the corner of Missouri that shares a border with Tennessee and Arkansas.  The aunts hosting us were worried that I wasn't answering my cell phone during the long drive to bring our son to the airport at Memphis. When I finally returned back after the 3 hour round trip, Aunt Polly queried my silence.  I couldn't answer while I was driving I responded - Aunt Polly gave me a slap that was not quite violent, but much more than a love tap.  Well bless your heart she said, don't do that again.

To use it effectively you have to be well trained in the art of the insult, and knowing how and when to deploy it in conversation.  I think most Northerners are just more upfront about insults, subtlety is just too, well, subtle for most of us.  My departed mother in law was the ultimate practitioner of the insult.

After her husband passed away, she gave in to her son's request that she choose to relocate so that her declining health could be managed in person rather than a 4 hour plane ride away.  She choose to locate here, and it was, to paraphrase Bette Davis, a bumpy night.  We had to fasten our seat belts.  It was our custom to host her for Sunday dinner where I would pull out all the stops to create her favorites, sweet tea, ham, scalloped potatoes, rolls.  Jello.  Lamb.  Roast beef and all the trimmings.  She had a phenomenal sweet tooth, and we worked our way through all her favorite desserts.  I always made enough that she had homemade dinners to last through the week, since she was dissatisfied with the dining room food at her apartment building.

One memorable evening I had crafted a meal Julia Child would have gushed over, and this was after the grocery shopping, the cleaning to satisfy her OCD standard of clean, the cooking, the serving and the eventual cleanup of dinner dishes. (Don't think I am giving the Spousal Unit a pass, he had the unenviable job of fetching her, her oxygen tanks, helping her dress, getting her into the car, and the reverse process to return her to the assisted living apartment, and getting her ready for bed).  I must have been fishing for compliments, because I was foolish enough to ask how she enjoyed her meal that night.

Well, she said, it was nourishment.

Bless her heart.