Growing in Forgiveness

This post contains nothing about kink. Please be advised it speaks briefly of sexual abuse and neglect of children and suicide. Read at your own risk.

Forgiveness is a funny thing. It’s more than just words spoken, but yet, not a clear act. You can’t measure its force or the weight that is lifted when it’s given or received. It can’t be held or used to nourish anything, but yet, it can change a life. Often when people are looking for forgiveness, they have this vision that once their grievances are excused that life as they know it will continue. That is rarely the case. Forgiveness creates an invisible line. On one side, we find salvation, the other reconciliation. Most never stand with a foot on both.

I was 4 the first time social services apprehended me and put me in foster care. I would like to blame that solely on the sexual abuse at the hands of my step-father, but the truth is, there was neglect, there was hunger and there was a lack of support and protection from my mother.

The next 8 years of my life would consist of moving across Canada, to new cities, being bounced between new foster homes and schools. The abuse at the hands of my step-father and the neglect at the hands of my mother littered in. I was 12 when the courts decided my mother was unfit and couldn’t be trusted to take care of her children. As a child, I was devastated. As a mother, I don’t think it was enough. A little perspective can change many views.

She moved 3200 km away and over the years we spoke less and less. Even though her presence and her influence lessened, I carried the anger of my mother’s lack of mothering like a weapon. It fueled me to find discipline in my life. It pressured me to become a perfectionist, to always do better, and yet to never feel good enough. It carried me more than I carried it, and eventually, it weighed me down. It was a terrible weight, like trying to lift the fabled Thor’s hammer. I came to believe that only the worthy succeed.

My journey through life became hard, and an everyday battle. Depression became my friend and each day led to another year where I hated myself, I hated life and I hated her. How dare she bring people into this world and not take care of them. How dare she not love me the way she should have, and if she didn’t love me, was I even loveable? And after all of this, how could she leave ?I didn’t want her to be part of my life, but I was infuriated that she left me all the same.

At seventeen I tried to take my own life and was administered to the psychiatric unit. As the grade A student I was, I was deemed fine. Too high functioning to be suffering from the things I told them of. A story told to many. This was just a cry for help. Maybe it was, but I knew I didn’t want to continue. Or continue like this. I was tired, I was feeling small and very weak. I went to the therapy prescribed to me, I finished high school. I worked, I met friends. I dated and did all the other normal things a teenage girl does. But I didn’t feel normal. I felt heavy. I felt misunderstood. Broken.

Adolescence turned to adulthood and the anger and depression followed me. I substituted suicide for self-sabotage. I drank heavily, I had promiscuous sex. I took drugs and entered relationships that would eventually become the past reincarnated. But through all this, I kept going to therapy. Treating my sessions like visits to confessional booths. “Forgive me, for I have sinned.”

I knew I was pregnant with my first before the doctors confirmed it. The first three days I cried and screamed and sobbed and asked the universe why I was not allowed to decide my life. Why must other people always decide it for me? I didn’t want to be a mom. I didn’t have what it took and nobody to rely on. I didn’t want to repeat the cycle of abuse. I didn’t have any love to give to another person. I couldn’t even find some for myself. This could not be happening!

The day salvation came I had already spent an hour in my therapist’s office. The room silent except for the sounds of my tears splashing on my lap, the odd sniffle, and the blowing of a red and puffy nose. I must have looked a wreck as I kept grabbing at my hair and pulling it, manifesting the emotional pain into physical.

Our hour was up but his usual words, of “Time’s up, we’ll resume next week,” didn’t come. He just kept sitting there, staring at me. I watched the clock, waiting for his words, the moment of freedom to escape this office where I was asked to disclose parts of me I wanted to keep hidden.

I started to get upset. Why wouldn’t he let me go, why was I still here? I looked him in the eye and just stared back. After a couple of minutes of our staring standoff, I had had enough and I screamed at him, “What do you want from me?”

In the calm voice that all therapists have, he so sweetly said, “I want you to forgive.”

“I have done nothing that needs forgiving,” I replied.

“If you believed that was true, you’d see that you have plenty to give. But forgiveness may not be what you think it is. Think about that, and we’ll continue next week.”

I left his office in a bit of a hissy fit. I’m sure I stomped a foot as I walkout out. But I thought about what he had said. And the more I thought, the more I realized that yes, he did mean to forgive myself, he also meant to forgive others. And with that came something more powerful than anger. With forgiveness came self-love and power. Power to be free from the shame, the guilt, the anger, and especially, the pain.

Six months later, with a huge 8-month pregnant belly a knock came to my door. In the waddle that only largely pregnant woman can create, I opened it to discover my mother, who I hadn’t spoken to in 5 years, physically seen in eight, standing at the threshold. She hadn’t changed much. A few years isn’t enough to change a full-grown woman, but in that time I had gone from a child to a woman who was about to become a mother. At the time I was surprised she recognized me, but now that I am a mother, I understand that their perfect little faces are embedded in your memory.

To say I was dumbfounded is an understatement. Speechless isn’t even close. Years of turmoil and pain, suffering at the hands of her decisions came crashing back. I felt it well up and become a whirlwind. A hurricane waiting to blow. I let it all build and form and come to a pounding crescendo and then I did something I thought I would never do, I hugged her and said, “I forgive you.”

We cried together that day and spoke about where our lives had led. She asked about my pregnancy and if I had any names chosen. I asked when she had left my step-father and what her plans were. She replied that she wasn’t staying and while she appreciated my forgiveness, she didn’t expect me to forget. And she would not make me live with that burden. I realised then that sometimes love doesn’t look like love.

 I haven’t forgotten, but sometimes forgetting isn’t letting something slip from your mind, it’s just not allowing yourself to form the words that create those memories. It’s a lack of reminders. She left a couple of days later and we only talk every few years. We have reached a form of reconciliation. Not the one we had hoped for all those years, but maybe it’s enough.

When my son was born I remembered those days when I cried and said I didn’t want to be a mother, and again I forgave myself. How could anyone not want this perfect little creature? He’s been a lot of work but is the most imaginative person I have ever met. And while he knows how to push my buttons with his quick wit and stop my heart with his love of adventure, I forgive him and hope that when I cause him to question me (which I will, I think all children go through it) he’ll forgive me.

I think it’s important for me not to forget where I came from and the wrongs that occurred, but reminding others of their indiscretions doesn’t look like forgiveness. True forgiveness requires growth and re-invention. It takes introspection and a desire for peace. I gained many great lessons from those moments in life, one being that we are always harder on ourselves than any others can ever be and will create our own self-purgatory. There’s no need to help form others’ levels of hell.

And most importantly, you speak to yourself more than anyone else, choose your words wisely, and be kind.

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