Forgiveness

I have a feeling this is going to be a long journal. I am going to try to keep it as short as possible, but there is so much I want to talk about...

Forgiveness...I know that holding on to past wrongs hurts no one except me. The people that have hurt me, for the most part, really don't care that I bear hatred and resentment towards them...but I know holding on to those emotions hurt me. It's hard to forgive some things and I don't think it's as simple as saying I forgive you and all is forgotten and well. I think it's a process...I think you make the decision to forgive, yet the old feelings creep back up and you have to choose to forgive again, and again, until, hopefully, one day it sticks and you are free.

This week I sent a message to my stepmother to tell her that I forgave her for everything...see, I believe that the way she treated me for most of my life, from the time that she married my father, created a lot of unfavorable character defects in me. She was the queen of passive-aggressive behavior, and could make me feel really badly about myself without uttering a word. She made me feel stupid, ugly, worthless, unworthy to be in "her" family and unwanted. It damaged me, created a lack of self-worth that I carried into adulthood. Children believe what they are told. Because I was not the best person that I had the potential to be I believe I was not the mother that I should have been and could have been. She was born to an unwed mother in the 1950's, and I believe she carried the stigma of that, because of her generation, and greatly resented me and my older sister for having a father, even though he and our mother divorced and we had already been through a very difficult time with that. Once she had a child with my father things got much worse as she had her family unit and my sister and I were unwelcome intruders in her life. My father allowed it, and when we would complain to him he would tell us that she was jealous of us but that he loved us so much it should make up for her mistreatment.

The pattern repeated itself when I had my child and my daughter was not considered a "real" grandchild. The "real" grandchildren were the 3 children that my little sister bore. Again, my father never confronted her about her behavior, and allowed her to manipulate him into not having a relationship with my child, only the "real" grandchildren. She made life difficult for him when she didn't get her way and he took the path of least resistance and sacrificed his two older children and his first grandchild.

When my daughter died, she disagreed with the way I had her dressed in her casket. They didn't even attend the funeral.

Through all this, she denied any wrongdoing and never apologized for anything. Even in my worst moment in time, she couldn't bear my father giving any attention to me or my child, the lifeless body of my child, so she created a controversy to keep him away from us...and he allowed it.

So I made the decision to forgive her, even though she would never admit to hurting me, and certainly would never apologize or ask for that forgiveness. I chose to forgive her for myself, to try to free myself from too much emotional baggage I carried. In my short message to her I told her that I was forgiving her, but for myself. I didn't receive a response but I didn't expect one. In her eyes, she had done no wrong therefore I had nothing to forgive, and I wasn't worthy of a response.

I put a lot of thought into my decision, because I held onto my hatred of her like a shield. I felt like hating her would protect me from being hurt more by her. I decided to put down the shield, yet cut her out of my life. She has my father, their daughter and grandchildren. They don't want me, and I have to learn to not want them, not their love or approval, but not out of hate or resentment, out of survival. 

I don't know the whole story, I don't know when it started...the circumstances that led to the tragedy of the loss of my child. My stepmother was obviously a flawed and damaged person when she entered our lives. I don't know what made her the person she is. I don't know why her mother conceived a child out of wedlock in the 50's. It must have been very hard for her and I don't know what made her the person she was. So, it can go on and on...Only God knows the whole story, which explains how He is so forgiving. We are all products of the way we were raised, and the most cruel part is that as adults we make mistakes that our children have to pay for. Yes, I know, I KNOW, that we have to take responsibility for our own decisions and mistakes and I have and I do. I loved my Cassi with a love that was more than love, but I was not the mother I wish I could have been. Deep in my psyche I was very damaged and limited...I had not been given the tools I needed. By the same token, my step-mother was damaged and did not have the tools she needed to create  a successful family with the children of her husband, although she was an excellent mother to my little sister and grandmother to her children. 

It puts things into perspective when you take the time to consider than everyone has a story. When you think about it from only your own perspective, life can seem very unfair. But from a larger perspective things start to make sense...it's still not fair, and I don't understand why I had to lose my baby...but maybe, just maybe, with enough forgiveness I might yet find some peace in this life.