My Turn: Forgiveness of Parents

I have recently escaped from the concentration camp, the tyranny of a warped world view from an abusive childhood. I am learning the truth, and the truth is setting me free.

I was conditioned to believe that my mother was always right, that I could trust her opinion on anything. She was the worst of tyrants, conditioning me to run everything by her. She infused in me her unending suspicion about everybody, deceiving me to believe that everyone is bad, mad, or just plain out to get you. I endured her abusive manipulations and verbal abuse, convinced it was normal. She contradicted my intuition, ridiculed my insight.  I was never good enough, convinced that I was always wrong, unless she approved.

When I was fourteen, my mother took  my sister and me away from my father in a bitter separation. Forced from stability to instability was too much for me, an adolescent who was still trying to make sense of the world.

My mother never hit me, but she stole my savings, accused me of things that I did not do. She found fault with everything that I did. When she wasn’t bad-mouthing my father for every grievance in her life, she would rail against her own rotten mother.

I lived in fear or depression around her, although I never connected my discontent with her caustic raving. Looking back, I recognize now that I was under intense pressure to try and be good, an enslaving habit of mind which crippled me.

I felt so alone in the world. One night, I got down on my knees and begged God for help. He answered my prayer most unexpectedly. When I told my mother that I was still depressed, she began screaming and yelling at me, simply unwilling to deal with me. Labeling me “spiritually sick”  and beyond help, she kicked me out, sent me back home to my father, the man whom she had denigrated for so long.

I cried myself to sleep that night. For the next two days, I just wandered the city to forget my shame. Then a miracle happened – my mood improved. I was happy for the first time in months. I was finally living without fear, but at the time I did not connect that my mother’s absence precipitated my improved outlook.

After Mom and Dad got back together, I still stung from her abuse, always fearful of that terrible, overwhelming sense of loneliness, inadequacy and fear overtaking me at any time. I learned to do what I was told, never standing up for myself, and taking personally everything that others said or did.

When my mother reminisced nostalgically about her separation from her husband, she gloated that she did the right thing by kicking me out. Because she was my Mom and therefore “could not be wrong”, I would descend into a terrible pit of shame and condemnation that rarely abated. I grew up believing that I was an incompetent who had to look over his shoulder all the time, that every time something bad happened, or that someone got mad at me, it must be my fault.

This past year, I have learned to define myself by a Higher Authority, better than by the favor or failings of others. “When my parents forsake me, then the Lord will take me up,” (Psalm 27: 10) empowered me to confront my wizened mother, forgive her, then let her go.

After renewing my mind to the truth, I know and believe in what I was meant to be, no longer in bondage, free to be me.