“Aw get over it.” “Hey, let’s just forget this, okay?” “I’ve moved on.” “Forgive and forget.” “Won’t you please forgive me?” “I just want you to know I’ve forgiven you.”
The key to any of the above is that we often crave forgiveness, and that sometimes we have to be the one to forgive. The latter can be hard to do.
As a child, I experienced the need to say, “I’m sorry.” And being raised a Catholic, I experienced Confession, now called Reconciliation. Early on the focus was only…what did you do wrong?
Thus my FIRST SIN. I lied. I told my mother that our neighbor needed kitchen matches. The truth: my friend Greg and I wanted to sit on a tree stump at the back of his yard and LIGHT THEM. Which we did, and luckily we didn’t set the world on fire.
LEARN HOW TO FORGIVE
Current memories, like something I did last week…if normal, are probably a blur. But strong pain can push other good memoires aside. Why is that? The calm of the day to day no longer flows evenly. The pain comes first. It stings and you yearn for peace, and forgiveness is part of this peace. When I did confess my lie about the matches to my mother, she forgave me, along with a lecture about starting a fire, telling the truth. That’s how children learn.
A PAINFUL AND CONFUSING MEMORY
But sometimes it is the adult who needs to say they are sorry…and that doesn’t always happen. The story…My fourth grade teacher handed out forms for us to complete. I tackled mine using my best penmanship until I came to the blank for “father.” I stopped. Everyone else was writing busily, our teacher at the blackboard, her back to me. I raised my hand, kept it up until finally she turned around. She was annoyed asking, “What’s the problem, Beth?”
“I don’t know what to put for father?”
She studied me for a moment, as if she were truly seeing me for the first time.
“Write deceased,” she said curtly, turning back to her work.
What had she said? What was that word? I didn’t even know how to spell it.
DEALING WITH OUR HURTS
Maybe that was minor, but certainly we all have our pain, and often it is a pain we cannot shake. Even the flow of our days can be interrupted by that pain. The issue of the forgiveness question gets bigger and more complicated. Some issues beg for forgiveness, and if that forgiveness is not provided, does not heal the pain, it can weigh you down, create depression, rip dangerous holes in your and my relationships.
Because bottom line, it is hard to forgive someone, espeically when you have no idea what you did wrong, or you don’t believe the thing you did is truly worthy of the treatment you’re receiving. Most of you know that I lost my father when I was just a three-year-old kid. That was me, fatherless.
But because my mother gave us love and security, we didn’t think of him. We said a prayer that my mother had created, said it every night, but truly a prayer rattled off like a jump-rope rhyme. For on some level Daddy was there, the thought of him steadily present in the background of our lives. But we were just kids, and deciding who got to wear the raccoon-tail hat when we played Davy Crockett or who discovered what was for dinner became more important to us than thoughts of our dead parent. That is called living, healing. And so we all grew, accepting the love the four of us shared. And we were happy and prospered despite the lack of our father…it’s called strength, it’s called life.
4 Responses
Whoa. What a disconnect between teacher and student. That was NOT minor, Beth. There’s a reason that memory still bubbles to the top all these years later.
Yes, Pennie, you are so right. What was she thinking? I probably had to ask her how to spell the word,
which got her even more involved when she didn’t want to be. Hugs, Beth
This is a necessary lesson of life that is hard to learn and do more often than not. I’m sorry to learn that you lost your father at such an early age.
Thanks so much, Linda. My mother was amazing, and she did wonderful things raising the three of us.
Happy to see you here, Beth