Forgiving the Monster Within
Christ dying on the cross said in the gospel of Luke, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Sitting here, after the aftermath of yet another inability to handle my emotions like an adult. I wonder how forgiveness works, when I do know what I am doing.
My entire life my dad has told me I am like my mother. My entire life my mother has resented me for being like my father. No where, to this day, can my parents find me. Me as in the child that was stuck in the center of constant emotional and psychological abuse. Me at the center of a household that was incessant in it’s quickness to erupt into flames. No where was there space for me to be seen as anything but a superficial extension of my parents.
Bringing this up at a family dinner would have resulted in an argument started by me and ending with the combustion of my parent’s character. “Yet again, I would think to myself, I have incited chaos.” The child, the teenager, the young adult, the 30 something married with kids is lost and never found. Thank God, my parents got divorced.
Here I am left with the legacy of toxic tendencies, the only part of my personality my parents ever acknowledged, because it was the only part they could see in each other. Like my mom, I have the tendency to center myself in the conversation. It is a tremendous strategy. One that enables you to never…
