Isn’t it funny (well, not funny “haha”, but funny “odd and not really very funny at ALL”) how one incident in your life can kind of knock you for a loop but in the process awaken twinges of pain from old emotional injuries, or even reopen serious “wounds” that hadn’t quite healed yet? As if it isn’t bad enough to have this current-day crisis, you also suddenly have to deal with ghosts and memories and hurts from your past.

In a way though, I’m glad that this happens. Obviously, if the old wound were healed, this wouldn’t be a problem in the first place. It’s plain that the old pain needs to be dealt with, but it’s so hard to do that when you’re surfing the wave of current pain.

Something truly awful happened to some people I love last week. I have tried not to say too much about it here, simply out of respect to the folks involved, plus it’s really not my story to tell. I’ve spoken directly to several of my friends about it, but blogging to the world would be inappropriate. Thank goddess, things seem to be leveling out for them, and no permanent physical injury was done. The other injuries will heal in time, and hopefully some of them will be even stronger in the broken places when the healing is done. It scared us all badly, though. It scared me badly, and when all was said and done, I found that it had uncovered several of my own bad wounds from the past. Some of them were obvious ones – mother/daughter abandonment stuff and a lot of other mother/child issues, and some of them were surprise elements, like having to face the fact that the majority of my family simply does not accept me as I am and love me unconditionally; or the fact that some of the people that I have loved and admired the most were not at all the people I thought they were, and at least one – one that I loved most dearly - was in fact a cruel and shallow-hearted person, capable of mistreating and punishing an innocent child for the alleged sins of their parent.

Luckily, I am back in therapy a little. I am not able to go as regularly as I did with my former therapist, but it’s nice to have someone to talk to. I don’t feel like I will be able to make as much headway as I’d like to, simply because of time and money constraints, but just some direction might help. I find myself getting angry in these sessions sometimes, something that rarely, if ever happened with Lynda. I think this is due to my therapists’ way of getting answers to her questions, or maybe it’s her assumptions about certain situations. She’s good, and she’s helping, but some injuries need a gentle touch, and that ain’t this lady’s gig, for sure. If nothing else, I think she can help me with the current stuff, the day to day and discipline issues that I have, and that will make a big difference everywhere else, but I think as far as the deep stuff goes, I’m on my own. Nothing new there. I think I need to dust off my notebooks from Riveroaks* and return to some of the skills I learned there.

One of the things that came up this week is a question about forgiveness. I am reading a book called “The Four Things That Matter Most”. I’m not usually one to read ‘self help’ books, but the hospice director asked if I would, and if I’d consider taking part in a discussion on the book at some point. I think hospice is a wonderful organization, and I was flattered to be asked, so I said yes. It turned out to be a good thing.

The book is written by a doctor who often handles hospice related cases and practices a lot of palliative medicine. He created this ‘theory’ to help his patients and their families face and deal with the grief and their relationships. He encourages them to say the “Four Things” to one another while they can, even if it is in the very last minutes, and this book goes on to encourage healthy people to do it as soon as possible, even every day.

The four things are: “I forgive you”, “Please forgive me”, “Thank you”, and “I love you”.

Those really are the four most important things, aren’t they?

I’ve been thinking a lot about this, and I realize that only one of them is really hard for me. It’s “I forgive you”. It’s not that I have a hard time forgiving, it’s that I feel as if I can’t say what I am forgiving them FOR. If I could say it without hurting them, or without them saying that I made it up, then I think it would be ok.

A couple of years ago, I was talking to a family member, one that I’ve been pretty close to in the past, despite our slight age/generation difference. For years, I’d wanted to confront her about something in our shared past, and so in a relaxed, private moment, I did. Her initial reaction was complete denial. It simply never happened, and that was honestly what I’d expected. I pursued it though, and brought up some details that made it impossible to deny. When she confessed that she remembered, I was so relieved, and when she saw that this was not going to be a Spanish Inquisition**, but just that I needed to have that memory validated so that I could go on with the process of processing, she relaxed, and we talked, and my love and respect for her deepened immensely. Forgiveness was mine, and it felt good, I think, to both of us.

But how could I say this to my mother, to whom my entire childhood and adolescence is a lie I created, apparently to hurt her? Or to my Aunt Sue, who is steeped in the righteousness of her age and experience and in the knowledge that she is our most respected elder? Or worse, to the ones who have gone on, like the person I mentioned earlier, who hurt an innocent child? Is it still possible to forgive them?

In my heart, I want to. I crave it. But I made a choice long ago, out of necessity, to not accept any lies about things when I KNOW otherwise. I don’t want to hurt my mother, but I won’t let her hurt me either. My family has asked me again and again to let it go, and just forget the past. If it were something small, one incident, a few incidents, or even a lot of the normal kinds of incidents that families and mothers and daughters face, then it honestly wouldn’t be an issue. I can forgive her for all the things she did. I can even understand them, maybe even better than she does sometimes, it seems. But I cannot forgive, or at least accept, her continued insistence that I made it all up. Even after my brother said, to the whole clan, that I was not lying, that he was there and he remembers it all, too. She still maintains that I am delusional or just mean, I guess. I’m not sure how she handles it, because she absolutely refuses to talk to me about it. If something were to happen to either one of us, this will have all gone unsaid, and there will be even more of a chasm in at least one of us, but I suspect both.

And she's not the only one with whom I have these kinds of issues...

So I guess it has to be done by me, alone, and go unheard. But I’ll know. I can say these things to my mother, and to the others who need to hear these things but possibly never will. I can say them here, so it’s out loud, and in my heart, so that I can hold on to it. Maybe it's a start, or if nothing else, it will raise these questions in your own minds, readers.

Here are some of my most important things:

Please forgive me for being so stubborn, for refusing to settle for just “letting it go”, for refusing to accept what I feel are incorrect opinions of me and of my past. Forgive me for being unable - so far - to find another way to deal with all this pain, mine AND yours.

I forgive you for needing to comfort yourself with denial. I forgive you for being unable to love me as I am, and for being unable to love yourself as you are. And I certainly forgive you for the million small incidents (and many big ones) that caused me to feel this way in the first place.

Thank you for giving me life and good attributes and strange comforts and stories to tell. Thank you for the moments when I am proud of who I am because of you.

I love you.

-to be continued,

-s

*that’s my old Alumni Looneybin

**’cause you know, NO ONE expects the Spanish Inquisition.