“There are people in your life who’ve come and gone,
They let you down, you know they hurt your pride.
You better put it all behind you; life goes on
You keep carrying that anger; it’ll eat you up inside.”
Don Henley, “The Heart of the Matter”
One of the hardest parts of life, I believe, is learning to forgive. But it is also one of the greatest gifts that you can give -- to yourself.
There’s that friend from high school who turned out not to be the best friend you thought she was, who when it came down to it, was more interested in her own well-being than in yours. There’s your mother who didn’t treat you the way you thought you deserved to be treated, who didn’t give you the respect you thought you had coming to you, whether or not you had earned it. There’s the uncle-in-law who looked down his nose at you, as if you were poor white trash, who diminished you with his contempt. There’s the husband who decided he didn’t want to share his life with you anymore, and the son who blamed you for all the things that are wrong in his world. If you just hadn’t moved him around so much he would be a better person.
Lying in bed at night, letting these things simmer, keeping you from sleep, wishing you could have those moments back. Oh, the things you could say to all these people, now that you have had the time to think it over, formulate the great comeback, the tear-down, the thing that would make them see how wrong they are to have done the things they have done to you, or said about you, or assumed about you, or attributed to you.
But then maybe there comes a time when you are able to take a step back, to look more deeply into the resentment, or just plain anger, that you feel, when you are able to see into another person, and realize that your mother wasn’t able to love you like you thought she should, that it just wasn’t in her to, that she did the best she could with what she had. Or you see that the friendship was only in your eyes not the other person’s, that it was your misconception of the relationship between you, and that people are fallible, often dishonest, and most of the time, self-serving. It’s easier for most people to shift blame away from themselves, but shifting that blame sometimes leaves a nasty void.
For me there came a time, a restless, sleepless night, when I was pouring back over the disappointments in my life, the trust I gave away, trust I felt had been betrayed. I was lamenting over the loss of so many years in a marriage that had fallen apart. It was oh woe is me, and how could he do that to me, and I gave him everything, and I didn’t deserve this. And maybe all of that was partly true, but there were also some deeper truths that I was having a hard time digging down to. I was focused on his shortcomings, trying to reason the whole thing along, how he had always been selfish, had given up on our life, had taken away the security I thought I had earned. And maybe it was that word “security” that finally opened a door.
I do believe that security, that feeling of rightness it gives us, is a fine thing, but it isn’t everything. While I working through all the things that had happened to get me to where I was at that moment, trying to find reason in the insanity that seemed to be my life right then, it struck me that, yes, he was weak. He had given in to his own desires, had fallen in love with someone else. And maybe he couldn’t help that those things had happened to him, that maybe he’d had a hard time working through the guilt of jerking the rug out from under us. But even while these things were crystallizing in my mind, it came to me that he was not the only one with weaknesses, and that the kernel that had spelled our doom might have been planted in our beginnings. Because I knew, had always known, that I married him for all the wrong reasons. That I had never been able to love him the way he needed for me to, just like my own mother had failed me with her inability to give me the love I thought I deserved.
And so the peace that comes from forgiveness of someone else is magnified tenfold by the peace that comes if we can forgive ourselves. We so often do all the wrong things for all the right reasons. I think it must be some deep-seated part of being human. That night, lying in the dark room reliving my past, I began to make sense of things, what had happened, and why.
I had a child when I was still a child myself. Yet the first time I held that child in my arms, a feeling of such utter responsibility for him swept over me. No matter what happened to me after that moment, I had this child to raise and I harbored a lot of self-doubt that I could do it. And when my first, rushed marriage failed, so predictably, I set aside my grief, didn’t even take a good hard look at it, or what it all meant for my own life. I was more determined to do the right thing by this child. I am not trying to rewrite history, this is simply the truth. And this determination coupled with self-doubt caused me to make some bad decisions. I married the first man who came along, the first one whom I thought would, and could, take care of me and my child. I thought he would save us. I liked him a lot; he had a good heart. I didn’t really understand him, or even try to. I was looking out for my own interests. I needed a daddy for my baby, and he seemed as good a fit as any.
If there was ever a recipe for disaster, there it was. I can look back more honestly and clearly at the scared little girl that I was then. I was more afraid to fail as a mother than I was to cast my own desires aside. The real surprise is that we were able to keep this tenuous life together for 34 years. We were never right for each other. He needed things I couldn’t give him, and I settled for less than I really wanted. We had no common interests. We lied to ourselves and to the rest of the people in our world that we were happy, until finally the security blanket I had wrapped around myself began to come unraveled.
As I laid there in that dark bedroom, I knew I had to forgive him for not being able to sustain the lie any longer. I had to do that so I could let go of the anger and betrayal I had been feeling with such intensity. I had to forgive him for me, for my sake, so I could move on with my life. But more importantly, and with even more difficulty, I had to forgive myself for the part I had played by settling for less.
Maybe this is on my mind now because of an article I’m writing for a gardening magazine. Or maybe it’s because of the company we owned together so recently closing down -- which has become almost a metaphor for the final ending to that part of my life, the last root pulled up. I’m eager to see what happens next, still scared, but eager.
There is much more self-forgiveness that I have yet to work through, some things that are even more complicated than others. We want to hold ourselves to a higher standard, and well we should. But we should also be kind to ourselves. Do the right thing, for the right reasons, and recognize what those reasons are. We need to do this to allow ourselves to find that path to wisdom and self-awareness. I can’t speak for others, but for me, these are lessons that I keep having to learn. And relearn
Onward ....
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