When You Don’t Know How To Forgive Yourself

The phone rang through the sizzle of the searing meat on the stove.

Taco Monday. Not nearly as clever as Taco Tuesday, as my girl pointed out, but it’s Cinco de Mayo. A day to celebrate our Mexican heritage – thought it’s only a fraction for this six pack of ours. A grandmother of a great-grandfather. Born and raised in a border town in the blazing Texas heat… a very long time ago.

I had a few conversations with this grandfather of my warrior. A brilliant man whose heart bloomed beautifully as his mind aged. I remember the stories that brought a twinkle to his eyes. The time he ran away when his parents adopted a little sister. He was ten-years-old and found this new sister an imposition. He laughed as a 95-year-old man recalling his childhood antics. His life stretched a full 98 years. Though my children had prayed for a full one hundred. Who gets to live that long? They wanted him to wear the badge of honor.

I wonder if his mother ever dreamed her boy would live to be on old man with grandchildren upon grandchildren. A man who touched the cheeks of his great-grandchildren.

I wonder if his mother thought that far ahead? It’s almost too far to look down the road. Besides, we are supposed to live right now, aren’t we?

The sound of the phone drilled through my thoughts of tacos and dinners and heritage and old age and mothers.

I scooped the phone to my ear,

Happy Cinco de Mayo!

Her voice trembled through the line,

Hi Karin, how are you?

We can just tell, can’t we? We can hear in the tremor of one small syllable of a dear friend’s voice when the flood of salt is close to the rims of blurring eyes,

What’s wrong? Why do you sound so sad?

The barrier broke as she poured her aching mama worries through the line. The ebb and flow of her voice washed over us both as she described every fear, every worry, and every heartache her sinking soul couldn’t hold. We all end up here sometimes. Paddling upstream. Clamoring for air, and relief, and any reed we can hold on the shoreline. We all end up here – grasping at straws.

We talked like two oarsmen trying to find a rhythm we could both understand. Trying to make sense of the choppy waters we find ourselves paddling through furiously. And sometimes the rowing is so much easier with two. Sometimes we need to know someone is holding the other oar – praying to God we don’t sink under the weight of ourselves.

The words flowed on about motherhood and mess-ups and maternal mayhem, until she asked the question,

Karin, how do you forgive yourself?

How do you forgive yourself when you mess up?

There it was. The place our river turns to white water rapids. Guilt.

And we just drown under it.

Guilt. How do we forgive ourselves when we make the same mistakes over and over again?

How do we forgive ourselves when we lose tempers or sanity?

How do we forgive ourselves when we turn out to be less than the mothers we expected to be? When our ideas become vapor? When our plans wash down the stream far from view?

How do we forgive ourselves when who we are turns out to be less than whom we can accept?

I stammered over my reply. It’s not easy to explain the demon you battle yourself. It’s not easy to describe the end of the rapids when you are stuck in the middle of the water yourself,

Well, I guess, we have to remember that when we don’t forgive ourselves – we are sort of calling God a liar. He forgives us, but we are telling Him – He must be wrong.

She sighed,

I know. And that makes me feel even more guilty.

Yea, me too.

And I’m tired of this wasted emotion. I’m tired of it when I hear my son sink under the weight of the same snarling beast. Guilt. And I wonder if he learned it from me.

I’m tired of it. I’m tired of the emotion that lies to us and tells us we won’t get it right, and even when we do – it won’t let us forget the times we didn’t. The blade cuts to the soft white underbelly of a sinking soul.

So, my friend, this is the way I see it. Guilt is the part of the ride where the river forks.

You can keeping riding that dangerous wave as the current pulls you toward the cliff plummeting into the spray of murky depths. Or you can grab the oar and steer and paddle like hell – until you find yourself on smooth waters on the other side of that fork.

But, you are going to have to believe the One who forgave you first. And you are going to have to throw your sisters – the rest of us moms – an oar so we can help you steer. Because see, we were never supposed to raft down this journey alone.

And in this ever-changing current of motherhood… a river runs right through it.

 

John 7:37-38

On the last and greatest day of the Feast, Jesus stood and said in a loud voice, “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him.”