Forgiving your parents

For children of addicts alcoholics and abusers

This is raw, and it can be utterly so hard to grasp the way when the caretakers who to most people provide them a safe start, violated those assignments and brutalized the realities of children.  We are children that have been beaten with words and weapons, ignored, neglected, manipulated, uneducated, children who were not given a firm foundation, children in whose hearts eco words of curses and shame.

Some of us know something was, is wrong, but it is ever so hard not to repeat what we have been given.  To have the fortitude and grace to lift ourselves out and away and break the patterns that allowed our caretakers to become who they were are.

They do not deserve our forgiveness but we do.  We are better, stronger than the madness they left us in and to fall through.  We are better than the dark nights alone, the unanswered asks for help or even worse the ones whose response was to beat us for having any single need at all.

The caretakers who valued outlives for so little they would trade us in a heart beat should it better their dark path.  The ones who left us to ourselves, alone, scared, and utterly unprepared.  Some of us never had a mother who taught us even the simple things like how to wash our hair.

Probably, to the horror of the other people on the road with me, I taught myself how to drive.  Grinding gears, driving off roads, stalling out.  My mother had a Shelby Cobra one year, Maseratis other years.

Forgiving her became a pattern these last years.  Memory, hug myself and consciously choose to let it go.  Forgiveness is brave.  God is another caretaker who we wildly hope he will carry us through and somehow he seems to make good on his promises, even if it can be close to impossible to trust sometimes.

So how can we help ourselves?  We take ownership and responsibility back.  We cease to be a victim.  No matter what they said or what they did it is our ability to own it and remake it and rewrite the evil they intended into something good.  Your abuser may never change, they may never be a safe place for you, a safe friend, mother father, uncle, aunt but what they can be is behind you and today is a new day.

Life with out a family can feel hollow but that is only because we stack our wishes in preconceived realities and small glimpse into other peoples lives.  I remember being in my 30s and just wanting to hand out with people that had families, I wanted some where someplace to belong.  Then I had no words to express my heart and many many many groups of friends I walked away from. Then I met myself, God introduced me to me.

Forgiveness is the art of letting go, trusting God with the recompense for all the wrongs you lived through.  Forgiveness is meeting yourself and allowing yourself to let go the concept that you are not enough or are bad or guiltly or any other crappy thing they felt about themselves that they through at you.

Forgiveness is shaking off their death wishes and hugging yourself we because we do not need to suicide, we are valuable and adopted by God we do not need to follow or be their plans anymore.  Forgiveness is a new life.  So 1,000 times in one day or once a year when those very real feelings come up - give them space, acknowledge the wrong, you can cry, be angry, you have permission to feel.  Then give it to God and ask for his help, hug yourself and put one foot infant of the other becouse after these tears there are good days ahead of you.

With love, Sarah