Forgiveness

The awareness starts with the clenching of my jaw, and I realize I’ve been sucked into reacting, that my mood is driving me and not the other way round, anger that gathers as a cloud looking for a target for the lightning strike, but I cannot pretend that the object of my anger inspired the anger. The tightness in my jaw throbs to the rhythmic squeak of the neighbor kids’ trampoline, the undisciplined wisps of hair that refuse to stay tucked into my ponytail, the repeated honking of a Honda Odyssey that makes me think a small child has found my keys and is playing with the remote beeper. I race into the house, ready to pounce and realize the honking comes from a strange van, one across the street at the neighbor’s, and I seethe, slam the door. Return to the back porch, what should be an idyllic setting, peaceful, for finishing morning pages that I couldn’t do in the morning with all of my children’s needs, my husband out of town (again!) and I was up too late even though (angrily!) I know better. The breeze comes up in puffs, lifting at the half-covered page, the weight of my thoughts not enough to hold it down, and recedes, waves of wind, like waves of labor or grief. How do I forgive myself this aching throbbing stabbing ugly imperfection — then there’s the catch in my throat; no catharsis-inducing drama, just a slammed door, but I’ll let myself cry now.

Awful the feeling that I am helpless caught in experiencing events, responding to them, creating new events with the response, and it all colored by mood as if it were reality. I feel like I have spent my career as a parent experiencing an evolution of anger, from helplessness in its grip, to understanding it as a sign that something is out of balance, from taking discomfort of various sorts, channeling it into picking a fight with Raven, getting hypercritical of the kids, acting out in tantrums as if I could somehow restore some homeostasis of powerlessness by being more powerful than the slammed door, to more diffuse, quieter experiences of it — and still, I worry that I am poisoning the atmosphere my kids are breathing in, worse than second-hand smoke, realize I am helpless and need something that is not-anger, not-resentment. That I may be experiencing anger as a messenger that I need to pay attention to something, change something, but that some things are easier to change, like hunger, than others, like hormones and having four kids who can all have all of their demands on a collision course with my peace of mind, arriving at the same time, all urgent, all intense, all too much for me to process.

I struggle with the notion of forgiveness, here. I am thinking it is half of what I need, but I need it as an active thing, and in my head I can only define it in negative space, the place where resentment and frustration are not. True forgiveness, the restoration of full love, seems so rare, so impossible, whether I am trying to forgive someone else or myself. At a point when I felt like what I needed in my life was detachment, I finally settled that I couldn’t really do detachment, the best I could hope for was attachment to something greater or more diffuse, to pass from my need for things to be the way I wanted them to be to trusting that they would be the way they needed to be. Could forgiveness be attaching myself to the things I loved in a person and letting the things that hurt pass away?

I forgive my children fairly effortlessly. Maybe it’s about the intentions, that they so seldom deliberately set about doing something to be — I can’t even say be bad… what I perceive is the obstacles they have to obedience, distractibility, focus on some object that drowns out my voice, or my failure to communicate clearly, or the item broken because they didn’t foresee a consequence of their actions, and these things don’t make me angry. Even their disagreements, when I am calm, I hear as the jostling for respect and attention. I am better, now, I think at seeing these as opportunities for learning and teaching and improving my parenting skills, at least on the days when I am not finding myself clenched up in response to the neighbor’s dog barking.

All week this idea of forgiveness pops up unbidden, and how to make things ok when they aren’t ok, how to tolerate discomfort. Now Søren gently puts his violin in the case, then punches the couch, flops on the floor, head in his hands in frustration that he has FAILED when he doesn’t play a note as he intended. And I can rock him in my arms, truly grateful that I can give him this script, “You are doing such a good job being frustrated, I am so proud of you, this is the hard stuff, and learning how to be frustrated is even more important than learning Minuet! So when you’re ok we’re going to figure out what’s hard and break it into littler pieces that aren’t as hard.” Why can’t I do this for myself?

And what about if you’re struggling with assertiveness? I believe that forgiveness is not the same as being a doormat, that if you are frustrated with unvoiced complaints, what you cannot give voice to is impossible to forgive. And still we live in a culture of umbrage, where the position of rightness falls to the first person to get offended, and I try to imagine what a culture of forgiveness would look like. There are few pains like realizing that you have said something offensive despite your best intentions, and sometimes wish I could be judged for my intentions rather than their poor execution.

These are the questions I wrestle with as forgiveness keeps dominating my morning pages, unresolved. Is forgiving yourself merely analogous to forgiving someone else, in fact a different process altogether, since I am circling around the notion of acceptance, and with someone you love, you accept them, you cannot change them… but you can change yourself, right? a little? Is self-forgiveness a part of “self-soothing” to break out of a mood, out of a cycle of frustration and self-recrimination? Should forgiveness take into account all those differences that our judicial system is predicated on, whether an injury is intentional or not, whether it takes place in the heat of passion or is coldly premeditated? But surely forgiveness taking place in the offended person, often without the knowledge of the offender, at least at the moment of forgiveness, benefits the person not burdened with carrying the injury, the resentment, much more than it benefits the person forgiven? So the greater the offense, the more the forgiver needs that forgiveness, right?