Over the past year and a half, I’ve struggled immensely with forgiveness. I’ve always thought of forgiveness as a one-time thing, something linear: someone wrongs you, they apologize to you, you forgive them and everyone moves on. I’ve since learned that it’s not that simple. For me in this situation, it really is a process, a continuous loop that widens and contracts, often unpredictably.
Most days, I do feel as if I have forgiven my parents. I don’t agree with what they (especially my mother) did, but I logically know that they did what they thought best based on their experiences. My mother must have been very scared to have lied and kept it a secret for so long. Maybe my dad only saw what he wanted to see, believe what he hoped to be true.
There are other days when I can feel my heart hardening, often out of nowhere. It can bloom from obvious sources, like a question from my daughter about our family tree, when filling out family medical history forms, or when a fictional movie character deals with a family betrayal. It is harder when I am gobsmacked by the unexpected, even a year and a half later. The other day when I was brushing my youngest daughter’s hair, she smiled at me in the mirror, flashing her single dimple and I felt like I was punched in the gut. No one in my husband’s family has dimples, and no one on my mom’s side does either, so it’s like a flash reminder of the unknown, of the betrayal. I feel it settling in and I think that I can never forgive.
Now that time is passing and the wound doesn’t feel so fresh, I think I am spending more days in forgiveness than not. And that has to be good enough for now.