A Forgiveness Question

I’m sixty-six years old.

My mother was a truly evil person.

She whipped me bloody with a thin belt as a young boy, and told me she would while she was doing it.

She never once simply sat with me and held me, for no other reason than for doing that, that I can ever recall.

Her happy place was confrontation with anyone and everyone; she wanted to show the world how “tough” she was. Her favorite line was, “They say ‘Choose your battles. Well, I choose ALL of them.’”

Fast forwarding through all the various bullshits in life, I set a final boundary against her in 2013 for which she heartily jumped over with a bird finger to me, and I never heard from her again. She died in 2021.

On her hospice deathbed, she wrote handwritten notes to all of her family and friends. Four letters arrived at my home; one each addressed to my two daughters, one to my wife, one to me.

Inside my envelope was a neatly folded blank sheet of paper.

My friends have talked to me about forgiveness.

My concept of forgiveness has always been that, by definition, it’s a bilateral situation, whereby a person finds themself realizing their transgression and asks for redemption by the offended person. The forgiveness comes from the reconciling between the two people.

I say this because if I had ever said to my mother, “I forgive you,” she would have absolutely laughed in my face, aghast at what she could ever have done to NEED forgiveness.

I still hold to my thinking about this, but I’m also aware of people who never had the chance for the kind of “bilateral forgiveness” I mentioned, and I would be interested to know of other perspectives about this.

Thank you for indulging my inquiry, you beautiful people 😘💕