“Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.” ~Jean Paul Sartre
Like so many other women, I had a complicated, often fractious relationship with my mother. I had moved thousands of miles away, but an email or a phone call was enough to irritate me.
Visits were tense, nail-biting experiences, where I couldn’t help but analyze each thing that she said to see if it contained a passive-aggressive double meaning, at which point, an argument would brew.
For years, it had not mattered what anyone told me about how to forgive, and they had told me a lot:
- Resentment is the poison you feed yourself, hoping someone else will die.
- Forgiveness is a choice.
- Refusing to forgive is living in the past.
I thought I wanted to forgive her. I knew what it was costing me to carry around the resentment, the replaying of old arguments and the anticipation of future conflict.
Yet—yet—something in me didn’t want to forgive, and this was the truth that I had resisted owning for so very long.http://tinybuddha.com/blog/how-to-forgive-when-you-dont-really-want-to/
