I have a good memory. Almost twenty years after my family’s trip to Florida I can still summon the taste of the hotel’s blueberry-stuffed French toast and feel the gentle Gulf of Mexico swelling and ebbing underneath my pink blow-up raft. I can tell you the names of the six wives of Henry VIII, in order, and recall the exact wording of clever lines from favorite TV shows. I know exactly where and when my maid of honor told me about her crush on a guy she’d met the first day of high school. They’re married now. It’s a nice memory.
I remember how my dad and I were sitting side-by-side, watching TV, when he told me why he and my mom were having “problems,” as they’d euphemistically put it in an earlier conversation. “Your mom had a hard time this year,” he said gently. “I know she’s been crying a lot and you’re worried. But she’s just depressed and I will be there for her and we will get through this. Nothing will happen to our family.”
I can still feel the surge of relief I experienced at those words. I thought the world of my dad, trusted him as I trusted no one else (including, and perhaps especially, my sometimes-mercurial mother).
But that relief slips away when I remember what came next. A month later, my dad flew out to see me at college and told me he was leaving my mom for someone else. My mother’s depression hadn’t been a mysterious attack of mental illness. She was upset because she found out he’d been having an affair.
The memory of my dad’s first broken promise still makes my heart hurt, eight years later. Other broken promises followed it, other lies, but this is the memory that still burns, that brings a sour taste to my mouth, that fills me with a pitiful, impotent sort of anger. How could he lie like that? How could I have believed him, been so ready to place the blame on my mom?
The last time I told this story I admitted that remembering this conversation still makes me mad. Then in the next breath I claimed I’ve forgiven my father. He and I talk now, and we didn’t for a long time; I ask him for advice and share my successes and failures with him; I can even spend reasonably pleasant evenings with him and my now-stepmother. Could I do those things if I hadn’t forgiven him?
But … if I’ve forgiven him, why does the memory still feel this raw?
Does a good memory make me bad at forgiveness?
Apologies for using my blog as free therapy. I will now return you to your regularly scheduled wine reviews.
I felt the pangs of pain as I READ that, so I can imagine it would still be a painful memory for you.
I think that forgiveness is not a specific moment, flick of a switch sort of thing. I think that you can choose to move beyond and forgive, but that you’ll always need to re-make that choice when the pain comes up again. It would be unreasonable to assume that we could heal the pain of what someone has done to us by deciding “I forgive them.” But the very fact that it still hurts you now and you still choose to stay in touch, build a father/daughter relationship- that’s real forgiveness.
In the course of planning our wedding, a particular family member did something really mean and really hurtful to me, and also to another member of the family. Our relationship normalized again, but I will always view this family member differently and while I can move past the incident to be able to be pleasant and social, I would not say I have forgiven them.
I think that forgiveness, like pretty much anything else, is an evolving process. Like Liz says, it’s not a switch. It’s one of those things where every day, as you walk towards the future and away from the past, you walk closer to forgiveness, but there is a reason they say it is easier to forgive than to forget.
My husband cheated on me a couple of weeks ago.
We have had many discussion on this. It wasn’t a long drawn out affair. Neither was it physical. It was an emotional affair with someone at his office. Someone I speak with and consider a friend. He had text-sex with her. Twice. I found the second set of messages. The memory of the messages seared in my mind. A Practical Wedding yesterday had a post on a wife who cheated and left her emotionally abusive husband for her lover. I read it and though I understood her reasoning, waves of anger and sadness and emptiness roll across me in waves. I nearly had a panic attack and threw up in my waste paper basket.
I have to forgive him everyday. I have to. In order to save my, our marriage. What you are talking about is more than just lies. Its a betrayal. Not just to you or just to your mother but really a almost like a betrayal of the type of person you thought he was or who he is. All that to say, I understand. I feel your pain.
Oh Jesselyn. I’m so sorry you’re going through this. The APW post was what prompted this post, in large part — I also understood the choices the writer made but it’s still so hard for me to think rationally about infidelity, and I wasn’t even the betrayed partner. I will be thinking about you.
Your story makes my heart ache. All of the individual stories about how infidelity just make me so sad. I wish there was a way I could help to make the memory fade faster and to speed you to an emotional recovery but all I have to offer is to say that I’m sorry. I cannot imagine how hard this must be for you to deal with right now.
I’m so sorry that you are going through this! This sounds so, so hard. I really hope you have somebody to talk to IRL and that you are seeking counseling for both yourself and your partner and for both of you and that you make it past this whatever way you need to, whatever that means for you.
I meant to reply here, instead of writing below. But just in case you’re only subscribed to replies, see below! :)
Jesselyn, I am so sorry you are going through this. Big, big hugs.
Jesselyn, first of all, big hugs. I am so, deeply sorry you are going through this. And yes, it’s not just a moment, or a series of moments of betrayal. The worst part is that they are betraying the idea that you had of them-your husband is no longer the person you thought he was, your understanding of him has been challenged and changed. I admire your courage in choosing to work on overcoming this with your husband.
I had a hard time with yesterday’s post, but I think also because it made me realize how differently I view married v. unmarried relationships. If she had realized all those things while unmarried, I would have felt differently. Because before you have a commitment, you have love. And if you don’t love–or feel love anymore, it’s time to move on. But when you marry, you’ve made a commitment to work through the issues that test your love, to trust that there will be happy years following the difficult ones, that, you are a life partner–sickness, health, rich, poor–and not only a lover.
Finally, I just want to ask that you please do not construe this as pressure to forgive him. I have never been in your shoes, and I think a betrayal can void a commitment if it shows that the person you thought you committed to is not really the person you married. Again, big hugs to you, hun. And I hope things get better for you soon.
Petite Chablis, although my parents’ divorce was not triggered by infidelity, I felt that the lies I was told in the process hurt me more than anything else. Even as an adult, married woman and years removed, it still hurts to know that one of my parents manipulated the truth (or was grossly misinformed, and then was just irresponsible with information) to justify the humongous decision of suddenly (and I mean the suddenly part) ending a decades-long marriage.
I didn’t say more than a handful of words to either of my parents for 4 years after they split, which probably says as much about me as it does about them. I think when a parent betrays you it’s doubly hard because that is the person who is supposed to protect you. As a young adult it really messed with my ability to trust people. Even now, nearly 20 years later (!) thinking about it makes me sad. I don’t think that has anything to do with forgiveness (or I really suck at it too). It’s just your heart and your brain acknowledging a disappointment.
Should I submit my side of the story to A Practical Wedding? ;-) I feel like I need to wait till I have a nice clean “we went to therapy and now we live happily ever after” ending :-P
Thank you everyone for your kind words and thoughts. Sorry petite, I hijacked your post and I didn’t mean to do that at all!
You didn’t hijack it at all! And I think if you’re up to writing one, a post about what it feels like in the middle of repairing a relationship after infidelity would be really smart and powerful.
I realize I’m days late here, but my thought while reading this just now was that forgiveness is not the same as a clean slate. Making the decision to move past it doesn’t mean you never think about it or won’t allow it to inform your feelings in the future. It just means you’ve dealt with it to your satisfaction and aren’t working on it anymore. That’s my definition, anyway.
Ooof. Other people have said essentially the same thing, but I believe you can forgive without having to forget. I believe, too, that you don’t have to forgive, at least not on anybody else’s timeline but your own — I have a friend whose father abandoned her family at age 6, and then incredibly got back together with her mother a couple of years ago, and she’s still so angry at him that she can’t even talk to him, but she feels horribly guilty about the anger all the same.
Family can be so, so hard.
I have a slightly different take on this. I grew up with very difficult parents (4 parental marriages total!) and none of them were good at insulating me from their emotional wreckage, and in fact I was used as a pawn sometimes in fights–literally, I would be a child standing in the middle of a parental brawl trying to stop it. So, you can imagine the bad memories.
What I’ve come to think is not that you have to forgive and forget, nor even that you can/should forgive and not forget.
Actually, what I think is that it is possible to forgive the person (the complicated, crazy, contradictory, part-good, part-evil whole), WITHOUT forgiving the act or the wrong that they committed against you. The memory smarts–and may always hurt–because what they did was wrong.
The wrong (or sin, if you will) will always be wrong. The fact that your father lied will always be wrong. My parents mistreating me–even if it was unintentional–was wrong. Will always be bad and wrong. That’s all there is to it. I do not forgive the ACT of mistreatment, and in your case, you need not forgive the ACT of lying.
But I do forgive my parents for being imperfect. I can embrace them for the good parts of them, and try to deal with them as complex individuals. And it sounds like that’s what you’ve done with your father. That’s enough, and you should not expect yourself to be some kind of all-forgetting angel–that’s boring and you are a complex, multi-faceted person too. :)
And, I think that your active attempts to build a positive relationship with him IS forgiveness itself. Because forgiveness is not compulsory; it is a choice, and you’ve made the choice to rebuild. So go easy on yourself for remembering past hurt.