Rita looks up at me, nodding. “Exactly,” she says. “The other shoe always drops.” It did when she got to college, when she married an alcoholic, when she had two more chances at love and those went out the window too. It did when her father died and she finally—finally!—started to have a relationship with her mother, only to have her mother diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, after which Rita had to care for this woman who no longer recognized her for twelve long years.
Of course, Rita didn’t have to bring her mother into her apartment during those years—she chose to because somehow her misery served her. At the time it never occurred to her to ask if she had an obligation to take care of her mother when her mother hadn’t taken care of her while she was growing up. She didn’t grapple with that toughest of tough questions: What do I owe my parents, and what do they owe me? She could have gotten outside help for her mother. Rita considers this as we talk, but then she says that if she had to do it over, she’d do it all the same.
“I got what I deserved,” she explains. She deserves this misery for all of her crimes—ruining her kids’ lives, lacking compassion for her second husband’s grief, never getting her own life together. What feels horrible to her are her recent glimmers of happiness. She feels like a fraud, like somebody who won the lottery but stole the ticket. If the people who have come into her life lately really knew her, they would be disgusted. They would run for the hills! She’s disgusted. And even if she were to somehow fool them for a time, a few months, a year, who knows, how can she be happy when her kids are so sad—and because of her? That doesn’t seem fair, does it? How can someone have done something so awful and still be asking for love?
This, she says, is why there’s no hope for her. She balls up a tissue in her hand. Too much has happened. Too many mistakes were made.
I look at Rita and notice how young she appears as she tells me this—her cheeks puffed out, her arms folded across her chest. I picture her as a girl in her childhood home, her red hair pulled back neatly with a headband, wondering if she was at fault for her parents’ distance from her, brooding over it alone in her room. Are they mad at me? Have I done something to upset them, to cause them to take so little interest in me? They’d waited so long to finally have a child; had she not lived up to what they had hoped for?
I think, too, of Rita’s four children. Of their father, the lawyer, who could be so fun one minute and drunk and abusive the next. Of their mother, Rita, removed, making excuses for their father, offering promises on his behalf that they knew were lies. How confusing and harrowing their childhoods must have been. How furious they must be now. How they must not want to deal with their mother coming to them, as she had several times over the years, crying and begging for a relationship. Whatever she wants, they’d likely think, it was for one reason and one reason only: for her sake, always for her sake. My guess was that Rita’s children wouldn’t talk to her because they couldn’t give her the one thing she seemed to want even if she’d never asked for it directly: forgiveness.
Rita and I had talked about why she hadn’t protected her children, why she’d let her husband hit them, why she’d spent her time reading or painting or playing tennis or bridge instead of being present for them. And once we got past the explanations she’d given herself for years, we arrived at something she hadn’t been aware of: Rita envied her children.
Rita wasn’t unusual in this. Take the case of a mother who came from a household with little money and who now admonishes her child every time she gets a new pair of shoes or a new toy by saying, “Don’t you realize how lucky you are?” A gift wrapped in a criticism. Or consider the father who takes his son to visit prospective colleges and spends the entire tour of the college that he himself dreamed of attending but was rejected from making negative comments about the tour guide, the curriculum, the dorms—not only embarrassing his son but possibly hurting his chances of admission.
Why do parents do this? Often, they envy their children’s childhoods—the opportunities they have; the financial or emotional stability that the parents provide; the fact that their children have their whole lives ahead of them, a stretch of time that’s now in the parents’ pasts. They strive to give their children all the things they themselves didn’t have, but they sometimes end up, without even realizing it, resenting the kids for their good fortune.
Rita envied her kids their siblings, their comfortable childhood home with the pool, their opportunities to go to museums and travel. She envied their young, energetic parents. And it was, in part, her unconscious envy—her fury at the unfairness of it all—that kept her from allowing them to have the happy childhood she didn’t, that kept her from saving them in the way she so badly wanted to be saved when she was young.
I’d brought up Rita in my consultation group. Despite her gloomy, Eeyore-like exterior, I told my colleagues, she was warm and interesting, and because I was free of the history her kids shared with her, I could enjoy Rita the way I’d enjoy a friend of a parent. I liked her quite a bit. But could her children really be expected to forgive her?
Did I forgive her? the group asked. I thought of my son and felt sick at the idea of anyone hitting him, of my ever allowing that to happen.
I wasn’t sure.
Forgiveness is a tricky thing, in the way that apologies can be. Are you apologizing because it makes you feel better or because it will make the other person feel better? Are you sorry for what you’ve done or are you simply trying to placate the other person who believes you should be sorry for the thing you feel completely justified in having done? Who is the apology for?
There’s a term we use in therapy: forced forgiveness. Sometimes people feel that in order to get past a trauma, they need to forgive whoever caused the damage—the parent who sexually assaulted them, the burglar who robbed their house, the gang member who killed their son. They’re told by well-meaning people that until they can forgive, they’ll hold on to the anger. Granted, for some, forgiveness can serve as a powerful release—you forgive the person who wronged you, without condoning his actions, and it allows you to move on. But too often people feel pressured to forgive and then end up believing that something’s wrong with them if they can’t quite get there—that they aren’t enlightened enough or strong enough or compassionate enough.
So what I say is this: You can have compassion without forgiving. There are many ways to move on, and pretending to feel a certain way isn’t one of them.
I once had a client named Dave who had a problematic relationship with his father. His father was, by his account, a bully—demeaning, critical, and full of himself. He had alienated both of his sons from a young age and had a distant and contentious relationship with them as adults. When his father was dying, Dave was fifty years old, married with children of his own, and he struggled with what to say at his father’s funeral. What would ring true? And then he told me that as his father lay on his deathbed, he had reached out for his son’s hand and said, out of the blue, “I wish I’d treated you better. I was a prick.”
Dave was livid—did his father expect absolution now, at the eleventh hour? The time to make repairs, he felt, was long before you left this earth, not on the eve of your departure; you don’t automatically get the gift of closure or forgiveness from a deathbed confession.