The following is an excerpt from my book manuscript titled Soul Stories: Voices from the Margins (under review). I’m sharing it here—and now—because I know of at least one young woman and several older women out there in the world who probably need to hear these words. (“Past Forgiveness: Part I” was posted on August 3, 2016 and linked here.)
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I have spent my entire life—or at least my entire life from when I first became fully aware of myself—trying to find a way to forgive my dysfunctional family. Mainly my father, the charismatic narcissist minister who liked to grope my budding breasts and then pretend he had only been trying to show me fatherly affection. Or, that he was only sponging my chest when I was ill in bed with a high fever from Red Measles when I was fourteen. “What kind of Freudian psychological hang-ups do you have about your father?” he asked, when I grew old enough to confront him on his groping behavior. As if.
And my mother, my strikingly artistically gifted and intelligent mother who preferred to live in a surrealistic, made-up world of her own, trying to be my friend instead of my mother. She chose to believe my father and not me. As if. She told me that my panic attacks, which developed in the immediate aftermath of my father’s first groping episode, were really sent by God as a dark night of the soul, and meant I just needed to pray harder. As if.
And even my three older siblings, and especially my oldest sister who had been like a second mother to me, who believed my father even after his death as he partially disinherited me. My siblings who continue to admonish me to get over my anger, to forgive and forget, to leave it all in the past. As if.
As if anger is a bad thing. As if anger isn’t protective, propelling, and proper in unjust situations.
As if I was right all along: I had been adopted. I firmly believed this as a child. I was born long after my siblings. My two childhood best friends were both adopted and their parents didn’t tell them this fact until they were older. I held a deep conviction that I was not of this family.
As if I was right all along: in order to survive, to heal, to thrive, I needed to sever ties, become un-homed, move far away to the Western frontier of Wallace Stegner’s “native home of hope” and make my own way, my own family, my own home. What does it mean to be homeless when home was never a safe place? In such cases, it is not possible for young people to runaway from home; they can only run towards home.
As if family secrets were legitimate heirlooms to pass down to future generations, squirreled away in cedar chests along with crocheted bedspreads and starched baby clothes.
My father never acknowledged his wrongdoing, never confessed his sins of groping me, of groping my maternal aunt when she was young, of groping at least one of his granddaughters. How can I begin to forgive him?
As if.
I spent many years of my adult life swinging wildly between minimizing the trauma, “it could have been worse,” to full-body catastrophizing, drowning in the role of victim, “I am scarred and damaged beyond repair,” before realizing that is how our psyches cope with such trauma, and that the window of opportunity—of strength and hope and healing—lies in the space between those two extremes. It requires embracing the white-hot contradiction of the two truths. As if that were possible.
Until it is possible. Through a combination of fatigue, fortitude, and sheer inexplicable grace, it becomes possible.