Forgivness is Hard

Greeting, brothers and sisters in Christ.
 

Someone who reads this blog said something to me that makes me think I might be giving the impression that I have it all together. No, no, no, never think that! I’m an emotional mess!

I’m a forgiving person. Probably too forgiving. I had to learn to be less forgiving, because it made me gullible. But I have a terrible struggle in my Christian life. I know we’re supposed to honor our parents, and we’re suppose to forgive those who trespass against us, but I have a hard time not resenting my mother, and an even harder time forgiving step-father Charles. My childhood was one long trauma because of them, and it has carried over into my adult life.

Mother Dear

In some ways she was a wonderful mother. For example, she was decades ahead of her time. Back in the 1960’s, she did not believe children should be shoved into gender specific roles. She allowed me and my brothers to play with each other’s toys, and if we asked for a toy intended for the opposite sex, we got it. My brothers and I played together with girly dolls (we even had fashion shows), had wars with toy soldiers, made mud roads for trucks, you name it. We all turned out straight, and my brothers both turned out to be the most wonderful fathers, and then grandfathers, and romantic husbands- the men that women drool over, and masculine without being macho.

My mother also invented clever games designed to make us smarter. Nowadays people can buy all kinds of STEM toys and electronic learning games. But my mother found ways to accomplish the same goals without spending money at it. We kids knew colors and shapes, could count and recite the alphabet by the time we could barely talk. I wasn’t great at math in school, so she invented mental games to strengthen my math skills.

But in other ways, she wasn’t a good mother at all. Much of this emanated from being mentally and emotionally crushed from two sides – her mother on one side, and Charles and his family from the other. She would lapse into bouts of major depression, become short tempered with us kids (especially with me), and periodically have psychotic episodes (someday maybe I’ll tell about some of those).

She was raised in an extremely strict fundamentalist, almost cultish, church environment, and although she was able to shake much of that off when she left home, it still affected her deeply to the end of her life. Don’t get me wrong; she absolutely was born again and Spirit-filled, but her self esteem was non-existent, and she would have periods of thinking she was a horrible sinful person. She was determined that we children wouldn’t fall into sinful traps, and that resolution could be manifested in some unreasonable ways, especially with me.

I’ve tried to understand why she made such a big difference between me and my brothers. Maybe I was in my 40s when somehow the subject came up. She said you have to treat girls and boys different. I don’t know what she meant by that.

She was very lenient with my brothers. They and their friends would visit each other’s houses all the time, and run around all over the countryside on their bicycles, or going fishing for hours on end, or camping in each other’s back yards. They were never questioned.

I seldom had real friends as a child. I was reasonably comfortable playing outdoor games with the boys (older than my brothers’ friends, as I was older), but found few girls I could connect with, since most of them weren’t interested in rugged outdoor adventures. But on the rare occasion I tried to make friends with a girl, I was not allowed to go to their house. My mother was so afraid I would do something I wasn’t supposed to do. Girls would almost never come to my house more than once, because my mother wouldn’t leave us alone. She would hover close the whole time they were there, and question them relentlessly about their parents and family life. I now understand she was trying to make sure they were suitable as a friend, and not from a “bad” family. But after one visit, they would tell me my mother was weird, and they wouldn’t come back.

Once, while we were living in Sugar Land, I almost had some real girl friends. A new family moved into the neighborhood. They had three girls. When we met, we hit it off well. They were so nice, and their parents were so nice, and they loved playing outside. One day, they asked me if I wanted to play some card games. They had Go Fish and Old Maid. I said I didn’t know how to play. They said they would teach me. So they did, and I had the most fun for a couple hours learning how to play those games. When I got home, I excitedly told my mother I learned to play Go Fish and Old Maid. She went ballistic!

She started ranting and raving about how cards are of the devil, and I was strictly forbidden to ever play with those girls again. Of course I couldn’t tell them why I couldn’t play with them again, so I just withdrew from contact with them. It was always like that; always some excuse to keep me from having real friends.

I finally got one friend I could visit. Elaine lived on the other street. She wasn’t the outdoorsy type like me; she stayed in her room all the time reading and engaging in creative projects. We must have met on the school bus, but we hit it off and found lots to talk about. Her mother was overprotective like mine. After her mother and my mother gave each other the third degree, apparently they mutually decided that it was ok for me to visit Elaine at her house.

It wasn’t just attempted friendships that my mother sabotaged.

I was 12 years old, in Jr. High in the big school. I had a choice of several electives, and I chose art class. I had loved to draw since I could hold a pencil, and I was drawing all the time. But now I was exposed to new media; oil paints, pastels, charcoal pencils and more. I especially loved painting dogs and horses.

One day, my art teacher came to me and said a big art show was coming up. She wanted me to enter. I balked because I didn’t think I was good enough. But after much resistance on my part, she made me sit down, and gave me a sheet of art paper, along with pen and ink. She probably picked pen and ink because it would dry quick, and wouldn’t be time consuming to complete a drawing. She told me to draw a horse, so I drew a prancing horse.

I don’t know how long after that – a week? Two weeks? I got the word. I was the youngest entrant, and to my astonishment, I had won first place.

I got my picture in the paper with a write-up. My mother went into an exuberant frenzy. She took me to an art store to load me up on supplies. She didn’t know anything about art supplies, but a sales lady went into personal shopper mode, and I walked out with bags full of stuff.

For the next few years, when I wasn’t outside, I was in my room reading, or painting, or working on the book I started writing in the 9th grade (the book I told about in This Post).

Then one day, when I was 16, I came home from school to discover that my mother had thrown all my art supplies, paintings, and my book into the burn barrel and destroyed them. I was beyond devastated. I never tried to create art again, and after all these decades, I probably have no talent left. I also never again tried to write a book. Teachers had been telling me since 3rd or 4th grade that someday I would be a published author. Well, things didn’t turn out as they had predicted.

Not Your Father

What I went through with my mother was nothing compared to what I endured with Charles.

He hated me because I was another man’s daughter. He was constantly telling me I was stupid and retarded and I would never amount to anything. He was angry at the world, and took much of that anger out on me.

One day, I was walking up the steps to go in the house. He was standing in the door and told me I wasn’t welcome in his house. He kicked me as hard as he could in the face. He was wearing cowboy boots, and I went flying backwards. It’s incredible that my neck wasn’t broken, but my face was a bloody mess.

Many times, he beat me so hard with his belt, that my back and legs would be a mass of welts and blood. My mother would keep me home from school until I healed because she was afraid the school would turn it in. Why wouldn’t she stand up to him?

Periodically, he would go into a rage and stomp into my room and start throwing away my stuff.

Since I got almost no affection or positive attention from my mother and most other adults in my life (and nothing but abuse from Charles), I poured out all my attention on my pets. If I’d had the maturity of an adult, I would have quit accumulating pets. But I was a desperately lonely child. He would get in one of his rages, and either carry my animals off somewhere (I never knew where), or he would force me to watch while he brutally murdered them.

The worst of all of it was the sexual abuse, which led to me having a hysterectomy in my early 20s. Because of him, I never had a chance to have children of my own.

I don’t know if he was outright an atheist, but he hated God, he hated everything to do with church, and he forbade my mother to give any money to whatever church she was taking us kids to at the time. She would secretly pay tithes out of any money she made, but she never gave any money out of his pay. The ministers of some of the churches we went to were wonderful men of God, dedicated to serving the community: visiting the sick, feeding hungry families, doing whatever was needed. But Charles couldn’t find enough horrible, bad things to say about them.

Aftermath

It’s no wonder I was never able to hang on to friends even as an adult. Something would trigger one of my bad memories, and I would have a meltdown, and nobody would understand. I would indicate I had bad childhood memories, but I was never able to bring myself to give any details. So people didn’t have a clue, and they would just say things like, that was years ago, you need to get over it. Or, you need to pull yourself up by the bootstraps. But what gets hard-wired into a child is not so easy to dismiss.

Of course I had no ability to find “the right guy”. I had no judgement where men was concerned. I was married and divorced twice, then gave up any hope of finding a life companion.

The Struggle Continues

It was 1994. God-hating Charles was with a group of people. One of those people was a Prayer Warrior. She prayed and an extraordinary miracle occurred that shook him to the core. I’m not giving the details here, because it’s part of a larger story that I’m going to write a separate post about, but suffice it to say, for the next several days, Charles was in a daze. He alternated between quiet, contemplative moods and volubly talking about what had happened. I’d never seen him like that before.

Several days after that, he got saved. Several more days passed, and he was dead.

My struggle is with the unfairness of it all. Why couldn’t he have been saved when he and my mother married, or gotten saved shortly after? I think how he might have grown spiritually, and my life would be completely different. My mother would have been different also if she’d had a supportive companion rather than a cruel oppressor.

Instead, he ruined my life and at the last minute, made it into Heaven.

I’m reminded of the parable of the vineyard (Matthew 20:1-16). The owner paid everyone the same, whether they worked an hour, or half a day, or a full day.

I’m not saying I want to see him in Hell. The thought of anyone going to Hell is horrifying to me, even someone like Hitler.

I normally rejoice when someone gets saved, and although I’m glad he did, I don’t feel enthusiastic about it. That thought makes me feel like a reprehensible person. God, forgive me for bad thoughts.

A common phrase says, “Forgive and Forget”. Forgetting isn’t going to happen. Another phrase says, “Forgive but Never Forget”. How does one forgive in my situation?

Sometimes I can put it more or less behind me for a time, but something triggers a memory and it all comes crashing back and it can take hours or days for me to calm down again.

Forgiving is hard

For I, the LORD your God, hold your right hand; it is I who say to you, “Fear not, I will help you. (Isaiah 41:13)

 
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