Sharing

“Tell me about your life,” he said. “Tell me the stuff you've never told me before. The stuff you thought would freak me out when I was young.”

Was this my 16-year-old talking? The kid whose attention span lasts as long as an instagram?

It was just the two of us, cooking and eating a meal together on the half-varnished deck. The conversation kicked up, like a waterspout. He was wrung out and famished after 90 minutes of lacrosse in the blazing sun; grateful to me for bringing him to practice and taking him home. Simply, grateful.

And it got him to thinking: about the kind of childhood he has had and the kind I didn't. I've shared bits and pieces with him and R., over the years. Mostly stories about my mother and her struggles and the fall-out that made it impossible for me to forgive her, even in these 20 years since her death.

But I decided to share a little more. I grabbed a photo album and talked him through my family tree, including the father I never knew. I detailed the events that undid my mother, long before she’d had me. I narrated the pages of her life, from beautiful newlywed to stoic widow to second-time bride to battered woman to batterer.

“Did she every say she was sorry?” he asked, suddenly reminding me of the gentle, tow-headed toddler he used to be.  

“Never,” I said.

“I know you, and you’re a very forgiving person,” he said, trying to see me as someone with a closed heart, someone he has never had to experience.“It must have been pretty bad, whatever she did.”

Of the many lessons I have taught my children, the importance of forgiveness has been paramount.

"Life is short," I have always told them. "Staying angry is a waste of time."

When he was young, he held these pieces of parental teaching like treasure and me, as an idol. I was infallible. I held my mother similarly, before her pain grew out of control and she turned it on me.

Life's disappointments grow us up, revealing the pedestal for what it is.

E. looked at me closely. There was no hiding my frailty, my hypocrisy, my flawed humanity.

“If she’d just said ‘sorry,’ I bet you would have forgiven her,” he said. “I know you.”

We cleaned up dinner and he shifted: fresh clothes, cologne. At the front door, he pulled me in for a hug. "I love you,” he said, before heading into the night.