Journeys with Autism

After reading and digesting everyone’s thoughtful comments on my last post, I came upon a very simple solution to reclaiming the color purple: I can just forgive my mother.

Now, I say that this solution is simple, but that’s only because I’ve been struggling with it for most (all?) of my life. The process has mostly entailed chipping away at all the things that forgiveness does not mean to me:

1. Forgiving my mother does not mean that I believe that my mother did the best she could. I have no idea whether she did the best she could. Maybe, she did. If so, her best was pretty poor, and that thought just generates more anger in me. And maybe, she didn’t do the best she could, and that thought keeps me on the wheel of wondering why not. So I’ve learned to dispense with the question altogether.

2. Forgiving my mother does not mean that I excuse the things she did. I don’t. She did some awful things, they were wrong, and nothing will ever make them right.

3. Forgiving my mother does not mean that I was partly to blame for what happened. I wasn’t. I was a kid.

4. Forgiving my mother does not mean that if she were still alive, I’d want to have any contact with her, let “bygones be bygones,” and dive back into the dysfunctional family cesspool. No way, no how, not in this life or in any other.

So, what does forgiveness mean to me? To explain it, I have to begin from a Jewish perspective. In Judaism, forgiveness is not simply an individual matter of giving up anger or resentment, although doing so is part of the process. It’s not about individual feelings so much as acting to repair the breaks in our relationships. In Jewish tradition, if someone asks my forgiveness, it works a lot like a 12-step program. The person needs to admit what he or she did, acknowledge that it was wrong and caused harm, promise never to repeat the behavior, offer to make amends for the damage done, and then change and act in a different way. In this paradigm, forgiveness is an action word. One obtains forgiveness by making amends and changing one’s ways; one grants forgiveness by discerning that the person is no longer a danger and then inviting the person back into one’s circle with open arms.

Of course, there are some situations that make this paradigm very difficult to put into action. For example, what if the offending party doesn’t think that he or she has done anything wrong? What if the person who has wronged you actually blames you, and expects you to fix everything? What happens when the person dies and there is work left undone?

I have struggled with all of these problems, and so I’ve had to search for a different way to forgive. A few years ago, I had a therapist who said that I’d pretty much figured out that forgiveness is a two-way street, and that it necessitates everyone involved being able to communicate. When that isn’t possible, she said, one has to jump to an entirely differently level and cultivate compassionate understanding.

I loved those words. They felt completely right. Since then, I’ve been defining forgiveness as the process of arriving at compassionate understanding. With my father, I’ve found the road much easier than with my mother. Somehow, I’ve just accepted who he was. I can see that he had no meanness in him, and that he was pretty much lost when it came to appropriate behavior. Perhaps it’s been easier because he was an Aspie, and I could always relate to him better than I could to my mother. Or maybe it’s because he was the one who played baseball with me and who seemed to enjoy having kids. Or perhaps it’s because when he wasn’t around my mother, I never felt that my father was a danger to me. I’m not sure, but I don’t feel that my life is saturated with my father’s bad energy anymore. It’s been a long time since that was true.

But compassionate understanding for my mother? I’ve always said that it would have to wait for a different lifetime, that it was just too difficult. But I don’t feel that way anymore. My feelings about my mother are sapping my enjoyment of life, and given the brevity of human existence on this planet, I can’t be wasting any more time letting that happen. When I wrote in my last post that my mother was cruel, and that it wasn’t her fault, because she was just wired wrong, that was a beginning. I didn’t know that I was going to write those words, and I didn’t realize that I’d been feeling the truth they describe. But I feel it very powerfully now. Something was amiss with my mother, just as something was amiss with my father. I can’t quite define it, but it’s always been there, and I’ve always seen it. The trouble was that my mother was so loud and so dramatic about always being right that I couldn’t hear myself think straight. It’s taken a lot of years to tune out the noise and just recognize who she was.

I’ve spent a lot of time fearing my parents, both when they were alive and after they had passed. I’ve carried the fear that when I die, my parents will be the ones to meet me at the gates of the afterlife, where they’ll obliterate me for the unforgivable sin of breaking contact with them. Recently, I’ve realized that I’ve been walking around feeling guilty for years over the break. This week, I finally understood that I don’t need to ask anyone for forgiveness over what I had to do to protect my life. Quite the contrary: I need to forgive my parents. For everything. Right now. It’s completely up to me. If we should meet at the gates of the afterlife, and they start telling me how horrible, how evil, how worthless I am, all I have to do is to say, “I forgive you.” And then, I’m free. No one can touch me.

But I don’t need to wait until I die. I can forgive them now. I can just say, “It happened. It was terrible. And it’s over. I don’t want to suffer, and I don’t want you to suffer. I forgive you.”

Does it matter to them? Who knows. It matters to me. It matters that I choose life and blessing right here, right now. It’s not just about clearing out the clutter from my soul. It’s about being able to reclaim my enjoyment of simple things: the color purple, classical music, my memories of childhood, and this moment, which is infinitely precious and infinitely fragile.

© 2009 by Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg