Opinion Sur
Message to a Young Couple about Understanding and Forgiving Their ParentsFirst of all, I apologize for bursting, without first-hand knowledge, into such a personal, touchy subject as the differences you feel with your father/father in law. Each family’s situation is singular and, in that sense, unique. A stranger who hardly touches your life cannot grasp the complexity of that relationship, its deepest roots and past and present dynamics. I cannot even know the signification that this controversy acquires to each one of you. However, yesterday –I do not know how it happened– I felt some sensitive tissue beyond the statements of indifference you pronounced.
You are adult woman and man who have set your own life courses. You have certainly waged several existential battles and, like all of us human beings, must have fallen and gone back on your own feet. Pain and sorrow are not alien to you and neither the joys and love that, it shows, bond you. I can mention that parents, who are also imperfect adults such as you are, when offering what they are able to offer, also bring in our own sorrows, pearls and pitfalls; only that, since ours are parents’ voices, they resound as thunderbolt with you, both to reaffirm the value of your own identities as well as to eventually disrupt the path you have chosen. We all mix altruism with mean spirit, true giving with grey rancor; old strange issues which, almost always, we do not realize they exist or where they come from, just like, I’m afraid, it must happen to you.
Yesterday you said (yours is the sense, mine are the words) that older people should have better judgment, exercise prudence, be more fair and careful so that they help rather than hurt you with hard-hitting personal, ungrounded judgments. We wish it was always like that; yet, the imperfection of all human beings is also reflected in our relationships with those we love most, our partners, our parents, children and grandchildren. This does not justify or condones any misgiving, and each one should know how to protect him or herself from aggressions and blunders. Yet, beware, reason is more elusive than one might believe and, although we may always aspire to have it on our side, it is not that way that truths germinate.
Let me share with you a graffiti some genius (a true one, a genius on life) wrote on the bridge spanning across Cordoba Avenue which, with the demolishing simplicity of those questions that make you grow, read, “Do you want to be happy or to be right?” I must confess that such pinch in my pride’s bottom made me reflect deeply, and I can say it very much reduced my willingness to keep fighting for “my” only, superior, unwavering reason, lifted on inexperience, own insecurity and that dangerous arrogance camouflaged as dignity.
I don’t know why I am telling you all this (you figure it out), but there are two more things that come to my mind when I remember our brief encounter: understanding and forgiving. Understanding truly, from the other one’s side, rather than understanding to reinforce the fact that we are right; understanding from the other person’s feeling, motivation, reason and reasons.
Understanding does not imply conceding or to adopt other’s viewpoint. Understanding with our full heart is the anteroom of forgiveness; a forgiveness that does not mean giving oneself away, and much less coming back to the line of fire; forgiving as an act of generosity that transcends our generosity or lack of generosity in our everyday existence. Forgiveness that may also allow you to unburden your own backpack, so that the poisoning resulting from non-forgiveness may not contaminate other feelings of love between you, your children, the entire family. It is clear that it is not the weak one who forgives, but the one who is strong inside.
A hug and my apologies for poking my nose without having been invited.
