Forgiveness

My mother suggested the other day that things with Dear Husband could be hunky dory if I would just soften my hard heart a little.

'You're not very good at forgiving,' my mother chided from her perch atop her extremely dysfunctional yet intact second marriage.

But it's not forgiving that I'm not good at - it's forgetting.

I think I may have already forgiven DH for his betrayal. The tenderness I felt for him when he was crying on Sunset Boulevard the other day makes me believe I've managed to let go of most of my anger.

OK, that's not entirely true. I occasionally fantasize about beating him like a birthday pinata. But as my old therapist used to say, thoughts that remain inside your head can't result in criminal charges.

I used to be pretty good at forgiving and forgetting. Actually, what I was good at was self-medicating until I could overlook the way people treated me. I quit drowning my sorrows at 26, but my crap threshhold remained remarkably high until I was about 30.

That's when I discovered boundaries. I developed pretty reasonable standards about how I expected to be treated. When people in my life violated those boundaries more than once, I made sure they wouldn't have many opportunities to treat me that way again.

Not coincidentally, that's when my mother decided I wasn't very forgiving. But I hope she's wrong. I have a lot of compassion for human frailty, and I think anger and bitterness are loads that are too heavy to carry around in my daily life. I'm capable of forgiving. But forgetting would mean that I would subject myself to the same crap over and over again. And that I won't do.