Member-only story
What was wonderful about my mother
On grappling with forgiveness
I sometimes think I have forgiven my mother.
But that’s just because I don’t know what forgiveness means. What it is, what it does, how it feels.
Kind of like I don’t know how love with a man is, feels, or does. How you know it’s love and not pity, or guilt, or responsibility, or just a kind of general tenderness, the same you’d feel for the mama skunk you glimpse out your living room window, with a line of six or seven baby skunks following her spectacular tail?
Is that love?
I thought sitting at my mother’s bedside for a full 30 days while she did her dying was forgiveness. I mean, it was a kind of forgiveness, I am sure.
But, more, it was an ego trip, a pantomime of forgiveness.
The question I keep coming back to is, how do you forgive someone who won’t acknowledge there was ever anything to forgive? It’s crazy-making, that.
And yet, it’s imperative that I do.
I know this, I’ve always known this. It’s imperative for my happiness, of course. It’s imperative to grow. And it’s imperative to keep from being downright boring. I’m even bored by my self now. I can’t keep griping about growing up in an alcoholic home, as bad as it was.
