From outside the box

What is true forgiveness? How do you forgive somebody when the emotional scars linger on? Maybe the scars never heal per say. Maybe we just wear them like old soldiers wear their battle scars. Maybe the best we can hope for is to get far enough beyond the pain so that we no longer react to the pain. Maybe the important thing is that the wound heals and the scars left behind are nothing more than bad memories, or just another notch on our belt of experience.

I grew up with an angry, highly emotional and explosive father who swung first and asked questions later. As a result of the beatings I took from my father, I experienced a lot of anger in my youth. As I age and that anger dissipates, I have looked for a way to forgive my father, not necessarily because he deserves it, but because I know that it is important for my own evolution.

I think that most forgiveness comes natural with the passing of time, like the healing of wounds. As the abusive parent grows old and their own inner demons begin to subside, your anger towards them slowly turns to compassion. You just kind of let things go and move on with your life. But still, there often remains this touch of anger, this part of you that keeps asking, "How can a grown man be so mean to a helpless child?" And I always questioned that because I have always put myself above that kind of behavior. I have always prided myself on the ability to learn from the mistakes my parents made with me so as not to repeat, and on the other hand, emulate the good things they did. Or at least I liked to think I was that kind of person. But now I'm not so sure I was.

Recently I was watching a home video I made back in the early nineties. I hadn't seen this video since I made it. In this video I am tapping a bunch of kids playing at the house, a party or something, but there was this one boy who didn't want to be tapped. On the video you can see this child is very irritated that I was tapping him and kept whining about it, trying to get away from me. So what did I do? I chased him with the camera tapping him as he was crying and trying to run away from me! And I'm laughing about this! What a jerk! Now if you were to ask me before I watched this tape last week if I had ever done anything like that in my life, I would have sworn that I never did. But video doesn't lie.

Later that day I was standing in my back yard, just tripping out on the afterglow of the sunset and the evening twilight (always a meditaive time of day for me), and I'm thinking really hard about that video I made and wondering how I could be so insensitive to a small child. My only comfort was knowing that I am no longer that person. Since having a baby in my mid forties, and seeing him thru most of his childhood, I have become very sensitive to children, all children. If I saw a grown man chase a child with a video camera the way I did 16 years ago, I can tell you that man would need a proctologist to get his camera removed. So as I'm standing there thinking about that, I realized that I was no different from my own father. Maybe I never beat a child, but isn't it the same issue? Isn't life about learning from our mistakes? Maybe my father did things when he was younger that he never would have done later in life. We can't change what we have done, but we can change who we are and what we choose to do now.

I like to think that later in life, my father might have realized that he made a lot of mistakes. I'll never know for sure because he was not the kind of man to talk about emotional issues or lessons learned. That was the one flaw with "The Greatest Generation", they weren't very good at saying "I love you", or dealing with emotional issues. They weren't raised that way. Neither was my generation, but thank God, most of us figured those things out on our own.

So maybe true forgiveness has something to do with realizing that you are not that different from the person you need to forgive. You come into this world with little or no baggage and then thru the good experiences in life you develop the necessary tools go out on your own and survive and thru the bad experiences you get your baggage which in return gives you the personal challenges you will need to grow even more. I'm sure one day my children will (the grown ones probably already have) wonder how I could have been so blind in certain areas, how I could have made some of the mistakes I have. That's ok though. If they can take the love and all the good stuff I gave them and make it a part of who they are and also commit to avoiding my mistakes so as not to pass them onto their children, then I will know that, considering who I was and what I had to work with, I did the best job I could do as a parent....just like my Father did.

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