Today’s story is not about McDonald’s. It’s about forgiveness.

This is her story:

“I was pregnant with my third child and I was miserable. My marriage was a disaster and I didn’t want the baby.

My husband was absent. He gave no support. I felt alone. I felt abandoned. I was lost.

Each day I grew more disconsolate. My husband provided material things but was not emotionally available. I suspected (and was later proven correct) he was having affairs. It was a trainwreck relationship.

I hated my situation and, as odd as it may sound, I hated the baby that was inside me. There were many times when I would cry in the shower and pound my own belly in anger and rage.

My own immature response and lack of ability to cope contributed to the difficulty.

My baby was born, yet I did not feel love.

This feeling- rather, the lack of it- continued well after my baby was born. I didn’t want the child. I loved my two older children, but this was different. As the baby grew, my non-love persisted.

Later I would learn that one of my two daycare providers abused my child. I discovered this from the other daycare person. On at least one occasion, the lady put my young child’s head in the toilet and flushed it over some apparent transgression by my child. She also engaged in fondling with my four-year-old.

Time passed and I grew to love my child.

For many reasons, the baby that I had resented and didn’t love came to be the most cherished and loved son that a mother could want. I showered him with love, and each night when he fell asleep I would whisper in his ear my confessions and apologies for how I had felt.

My love for my son would grow and grow. For reasons I am only beginning to understand, I developed a parenting style with my son that wasn’t a healthy love. More than anything, it was unbalanced. Erich Fromm describes the love we give to our children as ‘mother love’ and ‘father love.’ Mother love is unconditional love. Father love is conditional love, where we attach consequences to behavior from our offspring. Both types of love can be provided by either gender. And both types are necessary for normal development.

I provided bundles of mother love to my son. But I provided no father love. Neither did his own father. This meant my son had a lack of boundaries, a lack of structure, and no consequences for his behavior.

As I am now learning, my parental behavior was informed, or guided by, my fear. I equated any kind of tough love as a symptom or indication that I was reverting back to my earlier behaviors. When attempting to teach or discipline (however lightly) my son, I would become fearful that his resistance and negative reaction to my actions would lead to his rejection of me, his ‘realization’ that I was an un-loving mother, and that I was a bad person. I feared that any kind of boundary-setting by me would lead to the loss of my son’s love.

After all, I felt I deserved it.

Sadly, ironically, this kind of parenting has hurt my son all over again. Without clear boundaries, rules, clear expectations, and all the attendant ‘father love’ conditions, my son has been harmed.  He struggles in school and I am concerned about the choices he makes. He seems to gravitate toward bad friends. While he is a loving kid that I am proud of, I also have a lot of concerns.”

My observations

The mother still feels guilt about her behavior during the child’s early years. A happy ending to this story would be for the mother to forgive herself. Only then can she reach a point where she can feel safe and secure in ‘getting in her sons’ face’ when he exhibits behaviors that are destructive.

Forgiveness is probably the most needed thing in the world today. More specifically, forgiveness of self. In our American culture, there are many people who struggle for years carrying unnecessary burdens that have their genesis in this ‘stuckness’ that comes from not getting to a place where we can forgive ourselves.

The bible makes reference to Jesus’ admonition to forgive our brother ‘seven times seventy.’ In old Hebrew, this means an infinite number of times.

This is a great big, complex, difficult yet wonderful world. I believe it is a place which daily becomes more reliant on a humanity which can find healthy ways to work, interact and live. Six billion plus people bring about a lot of imperfection. And that reality means there will be lots of mistakes. And those mistakes mean we need to forgive- and forget.

And that starts with ourselves.

What do you need to forgive yourself for? Do you need to give yourself a break today? Please do it soon. The world needs that from you.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 31st, 2008 at 9:42 pm and is filed under find a way to forgive yourself. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.