LEARNING TO FORGIVE
As people move forward on their own healing journeys, the most incredible, wonderful and unthinkable changes can happen. The hurts that have been carried for so long can be healed. When I reflect on my work as a complementary therapist, I often think that one of the greatest privileges is to hear people’s stories, and to see how seemingly insurmountable obstacles can be overcome. Even when everything else is gone, even after all these years, we still have hope.
One of my clients recently told me an amazing story about her relationship with her late mother. I encouraged her to write down the story, and was blown away by what she wrote. Her words are so beautiful, brave, painfully honest, moving and inspiring, that I asked her if I could share them. Fortunately she agreed, so here is her story:
“Learning to forgive is one of the hardest things that can come into our lives. We all have feelings and if these are hurt by others, it can be hard to get over. We grow up expecting to get approval from our parents and sometimes this does not come, although at the time we probably do not recognise it.
My parents split when I was very young and my mother brought a step-father into our lives. It was clear to me and my brother, when their child was born, that we were in the way. So the growing up and drifting away began. I was into my late forties when I realised that the way things were between me and my mother was never going to be any different, that I could not change how things were and that what was important was my own family.
My step-father left my mother when my first child was born, and after that she became very bitter. She never got over it, and was still the same when she died at 81, seven years ago. It was hard accepting my mother’s passing, as I came to terms, again, that things would never change and were beyond ever putting right.
When someone close passes away we can often find that we really knew nothing about them, what had moulded their lives. So last year I went to see my mother’s sister and asked her about a broken romance I had sort of known about. It turned out that Mum had been dumped on the eve of her wedding: she was 19 and it was Friday 13th June 1941. She met and married my father a year later.
Then a couple of months later I was speaking to a second cousin who told me my mother had been on the brink of being adopted as a young child, by his mother, her aunt. This didn’t happen as the aunt found she was going to have her own child. So Mum stayed with her lovely mother, but with a father who abused her.
So here I am beginning to understand what made my mother the way she was. Yes, pity and sadness, if only I had known, all these things come into my mind. What has come from this is the forgiveness I feel towards her and the cloud that lifts up and away.
We all have a story, each one of us. Every light in a window, there is a story to tell, however large or small, happy or sad. We must all look into the sunlight and leave the troubles of our lives in the shadows behind.”
Wow!
