Forgiveness is a dangerous concept. Ubiquitous like fire, which can warm, light, open up entirely new culinary possibilities, it can also consume. We throw the idea of forgiveness around rather haphazardly, whether encouraging or dismissing the idea that there’s a need to embrace it.
I wish there was a fitting synonym so that I could completely avoid the trap. Sure, there are elements of understanding, pardon, mercy invoked by forgiveness, but isolated, those words tell skewed stories, of enlightenment, judgment, and bigger-personhood. Alas, forgiveness is its own thing – which, coincidentally, seems to be the point.
My arrival at a non-definition of forgiveness mirrors, it seems to me, the very process of the act of forgiveness. The subject of our forgiveness, comprised of various over-simplified elements that may be less threatening if reduced to them - abuser, predator, narcissist, is too his or her own thing. And, to quote the classic Isley Brothers song, “I can’t tell you who to sock it to.”
I had a moment while washing dishes the other day (one of the greatest sacrifices I make), reflecting on life - the good, the bad, and I thought to myself, “I’d do it all again if it meant he’d exist.” He, here, meaning my son.
That thought sat me down in a corner where I cried, because - and this will sound ridiculous to anyone who hasn’t made something beautiful, but luckily, my readers are mostly artists, parents, or both - I knew I was tapping into a vast field of human feeling that connects many across time and space, including my own parents and theirs and theirs.
I don’t know this thought to be explicit for every parent, maybe just a subtle undercurrent. I’ll rephrase it, and you tell me: no one could pay me to wish my child away, not even if the payment came in the form of corrected faults and a subsequent freedom from the guilt and shame their memory once inspired (and in some cases, still does).
Now, I’m not so quick to accept my own thoughts as true just because they are accompanied by emotion or a sense of connection. Intense shared feeling is responsible for every massacre in human history. But I want to follow it here, for the sake of curiosity, and see where it gets me.
If indeed I would do it all again, how could I hold anyone responsible for the unpleasant experiences that I’m admitting I’d choose again, insofar as they were necessary in the creation of this present experience?
And if I accept this line of thought as the shared inheritance of all parents (whether they claim it or not is another question), including my own, how can I expect them to admit the inadequacies of their parenting while knowing that, had I such authority, I’d have them make the same choices all over?
I was flooded by a feeling of forgiveness on that ugly beige linoleum floor (including for my parent-landlords not having replaced this ugly beige linoleum flooring). Not the letting go, moving on, getting over it kind of forgiveness. But the kind that had me saying to myself, “I don’t need to understand. Nay, what a blessing it is that I don’t, that I will never have to – that I won’t have the experiences that demand that I – understand how my parents and their parents and their parents (all the way back) came to their decisions, what they had to have seen, heard, smelled, tasted, touched to justify them, why they would do that and that and THAT.”
I don’t need to know the alternative to know that the reality made possible by the sacrifices of my forefathers and foremothers is the best-case scenario for me.
Like the vast majority of, if not all, humans who have ever lived, I am a composite of parts that, by some estimations, should have never met, let alone copulated. The most culturally resonant and useful for the point I’m making here (though hardly, I feel, the most significant aspect of my being): I am a descendant of both slaves and enslavers.
It is not easy for me to apply this idea that parents would not wish away their children in exchange for personal victory or personal absolution to either set of ancestors so categorized, which is why I have to try. I am of the belief that any generative endeavor carries a higher probability of failure than of success.