STUCK IN TIME: FORGIVENESS & FORGETTING

 Is it really possible to forgive and forget?

The Tree of Forgiveness Edward Coley Burne-Jones, 1885

Greek legends tell how Phyllis, queen of Thrace, fell in love with Demophoön, king of Melos, who visits her court en route for Athens after the Trojan War, where he had hidden inside the legendary Trojan Horse. He left the court, but when he failed to keep his promise to return within a month, she committed suicide, whereupon Athena, taking pity on her, turned her into an almond tree. Eventually, Demophoön returned to Thrace and, discovering what had happened, embraced the tree, which immediately burst into blossom.

Between you, me, and the almond tree, in the painting above, Demophoön looks as if he doesn't expect to be forgiven.

Memory is very important to me, but I've learned not to hold grudges. Grudges are all about keeping your pain, fear and anger alive. By doing this, you allow the grudge to control you. Your memory is not just a recollection, it's a reenactment. It initializes all your emotions just as if it were happening again, a recording in constant rotation shooting you back in time. In reality there is no time jump, but you are stuck in time.

Forgiving means that the memory no longer has the power to control you, to make you suffer in quite the same way. The blade of memory may make you wince, but you no longer bleed so profusely. You've taken the pain and anger and sorrow into you, but you've released the vilest portion of it, the part that made you feel less than, lowly, vulnerable.

©s. obriant

A lot of bad people did bad things around me and to me and to people I loved when I was a kid, so how did I manage to survive, much less forgive? Forgiveness wasn't this huge benediction bestowed on the evildoers in my life. It was the sure knowledge that I wasn't like those people and didn't want to be like them. This gave me hope.

Lack of forgiveness, grudges, and revenge arise from a lack of hope, a core belief that nothing changes. Change is my mantra.

I never forget, but I have discovered the capacity to forgive by letting go of my fear. Fear makes me sad and my childhood was overlain with fear and sadness which in my teens I camouflaged with anger. Fiery anger can be tinged with righteous purity, masking any true knowledge.

My camouflage worked so well that it took me years to realize that I was still letting fear rule me. Drat! I still had to deal with those memories and how stuck I was in the past. Writing helped me ferret out many of those emotions, examine them in detail, endow my characters with all the depth and nuance of being simultaneously good and bad.

This happened when I had a solid sense of who I am, and knew that the essential Sandra would persevere. The joy I feel in the world starts inside of me and radiates out.

I'm not a Pollyanna, a foolishly optimistic nutcase. I have felt both despair and hope. The memories of both states are not just in my brain. The feelings they generated are buried deep within the muscle tissue, sinews, veins and capillaries of my body. I can activate them. I know where they live.

All the Things Wrong with the World are Made Right With You

My son usually introduces me to new music on road trips. This time he navigated hwy 22 to Memphis and we talked about the future of the planet. Gerald has done quite a bit of research on global warming and said we have reached the point of no return: life as we've known it will not be the same for future generations of humans.

We were commuting from his law school in Tuscaloosa to Memphis, where my husband's family will gather for simultaneous celebrations of birthdays and Mother's Day.  I leaned toward him, hanging on every word, while at the same time admiring the vibrant green trees and pasture land we passed.  There had been frequent showers in the area and his dire warnings ran counter to the verdant zone through which we drove. 

"People take all this for granted," he said. "We abuse it." 

He's living in an area of fervent unbelievers . . . in global warming. They do believe in hell fire, though, so maybe a convincing argument could be made from the pulpit.  If preachers got on the side of science they'd just have to get creative, convince people that the Lord Almighty wanted them to choose to live now.  Emphasis being their choice not the Lord's.  Gerald said it would never happen, and that's why he felt hopeless about our future.

The earth underlined his words with a blinding downpour and punctuated his hopelessness with thunder. Cars flashed emergency lights or pulled over to the side of the road. We kept moving, and talking, the Honda a tiny world of its own. Long haul trucks sped past us, fearless and mighty above our puny vehicles.  Seizing the opportunity to gain time in their individual and corporate pursuits-the American way-they pounded us with highway surf. 

I love you, honey. Your ideas are good. Now let's see if we can change the world.

The Road Taken: Marriage

In her New York Times article, Married (happily) With Issues , Elizabeth Weil wrote about her marriage and the journey she and her husband took through various forms of marital counseling.  Ms. Weil was thorough and revealing about her experience, and I felt like I was in group therapy again.  Only in group therapy can one participate as the lowest common denominator of lurker, and still come away with a sense of well-being, consoling oneself that at least you're not as crazy as those other people.  I read Ms. Weil’s piece with a growing sense of her frustration with her spouse, smug relief that my husband wasn’t such a nut, and the sure knowledge that my marriage would never survive such close working conditions as she described.

The article hit all the major pulse points of marriage, including the thrombosis-ridden, blocked arterial passageway of Passion and Intimacy.   In Mating in Captivity by Esther Perel, the author says that passion lives at the crossroads of stability and adventure, “Every person and every couple needs to find that balance."  I imagine an algebraic equation wherein two individuals, each with their own personal intimacy lexicon are juxtaposed (divided? integrated?) with the entity they agree upon to arrive at Couple:

  i+ i   = C
E   

Oh hell, I’m not a mathematician.  I’m an independent and solitary person who never expected much from marriage, certainly not that it would last as long as it has.  Perel says that intimacy doesn’t always lead to good sex.  Then is the opposite true?  My sex life with my husband seems to prove the point that good sex is possible without feeling especially close or in alignment with your mate.  We're going for more these days, bang or bust.  Allowing intimacy into my life in the form of my husband has been and will always be an ongoing experiment: we've never quite worked out the definitions of being a couple.  He said recently that he was committed to our marriage.  I'm not sure that's the same as being committed to me.

Intimacy at this point in our marriage is like coming out of heavy fog and seeing the true lay of the land. I’ve stayed on the road, but can’t help narrowing my eyes and trying to see what might have been at the end of the other path through the woods.

 Currently I like being married, but that hasn't always been the case.  Divorce seemed like the easy out in so many ways, but I like doing things the hard way sometimes.  I stayed in part because I was raised by a single mother and didn't want to follow her path.  What were the other parts?  The kids, good sex, autonomy.  Also, I married a decent man.

I hoped that someday the layers of resentment and defensive posturing would fall away, and that we could just love each other for the real people that we are.  That means the individual, not the couple, I think.

He says he doesn't like change. I'm more open to it. My openness had led to some risky adventures in my past. I treasure the memory of some, others not so much. He had a terrible case of kidney stones a few years ago, and all our intimate routines came to a halt. The "routine" aspect had been the cause of a bit of chagrin on my part, but with its total absence I reconsidered. I don't want to lose him or his sometimes perverse intractability. Rather than rail against that part of his personality, I now find it amusing and do what I want anyway.  I'd done this before in our marriage, but did it ferociously, justifying my actions with bitter anger.  Which took some of the fun away. Fun and laughter are important to me and I like a belly-laugh. He never engages in deep laughter, I'm not sure he knows how. There have been some changes: he seems to laugh more - with me, at me, I don't care.  

Change is in his nature no matter what he says. We're both the eldest child in our natal families, and we both fled our hometowns. We arrived in L.A. within a few years of each other, met and bedded, and the biggest adventure began: marriage.