This month, my momma celebrates her 76th birthday. Hubs and I were able to make the three hour trip to visit her. We didn’t do our usual flea market and Mercado haunts, but we did treat her out to lunch at a place she hadn’t been before and then another time to a favorite of all of ours. While there, we stayed with one of my younger sisters and I got to see two more sisters and visit with a brother and a nephew. Why am I telling you all this when my topic is on forgiveness? Because to keep relationships alive and together, one must forgive again and again.

My momma and I didn’t always have the best of relationships. In fact, there were years when we didn’t speak or write to each other. A good part of it, I have to admit, was my own doing. Being only 15 years apart in age, and the oldest of eight, I used to always feel like I was her assistant, helping her with my siblings and doing chores – mine and theirs just to keep the peace. I felt like I was being groomed to be forever the keeper of the family like my aunt – her older sister – was to their family.

The thing is, and you don’t know this when you’re young, is you shouldn’t listen to the grumblings of other people, hearsay, gossip, bits and pieces of overheard conversations which may not be what was really being said. Even if it was, it really was no one’s business to share and work up someone so young just starting to search for one’s true identity. And so, I let things I was told get the best of me. I let those little snippets of maybe this and maybe that affect me. Before I knew it, I had worked myself into a decision that would follow me for the rest of my life. I left home just before my 16th birthday.

I can’t even imagine what this decision of mine did to my momma and my siblings. Because we went to the same church at the time, my family and the family I went to live with, I would hear all the sad tales of disappointment, anger, and betrayal which I had created when I did what I did. Despite feeling like no one really understood everything that went into my decision, I stayed the path and eventually found my way to a better life and away from all the hearsay.

Through it all, my momma and I had our ups and downs. The important thing is I knew she loved me and forgave me for leaving. At the age of eighteen, I knew this for sure when she showed up at my graduation ceremony and presented me with most beautiful set of luggage. I still have the makeup case after all these years. After all of these years, I somehow think that perhaps part of the initial resentment my mother had was that I did something she had always wanted to do herself when she was young but never could.

Once I became a mother myself, I was able to see my Momma so much more clearly. I would look into my baby son’s eyes and know so many truths I’d never seen or understood before. I could understand why she stayed with my daddy even though she didn’t love him. I could see how important each one of her children were, and although we always talked about and wondered which one of us was her favorite, she really didn’t have one. When she said she loved each one of us for who we uniquely were, she was telling the truth.

And yet, despite this, there would be years when the hurdles we had to jump between us were taller than I wondered if we could reach together or apart. It would have been so easy to keep blaming her for things she could not help anymore than I could. Sometimes, we just have to accept what we cannot change and learn to change what we can, whatever that might mean for any relationship. The past is the past, and although there are things that can haunt us, we have to learn to move on and embrace each other in love, especially if we want a salvageable relationship and loving future together.

The one thing I’m grateful for in my 60 plus years is that Momma and I have somehow, someway always seemed to work our way back to each other. Notice I did not say, work our way through things. We haven’t been able to see eye-to-eye on everything. Our disagreements have remained disagreements, dissolving themselves into the past, and I’m okay with that. One day, I realized it was more important to have a relationship with my momma than it was to be right or to get her to understand my version of events. In the scheme of things, those things mattered to me, but they weren’t going to keep me from loving my momma or having a relationship with her. I admired her. I was in awe of what she went through as a child and young mother, and I appreciated how she stuck with us kids through thick and thin, despite being in a relationship she felt trapped in and could not or would not allow herself to walk away from. I wasn’t going to condemn her for things she had no control over. I wanted to be grateful for the good in her, just as she was grateful for the good in me.

Sadly, not all my siblings feel the same way. One, I believe, still – after all these years, wants to nail her to the cross and make her beg for forgiveness for all she put us through as kids. I finally had to stop trying to “fix” the situation and let the chips fall where they may. Today, they are not speaking. The one wants to hold tight to what was wrong and, in their mind, can never be rectified unless Momma admits being wrong and changes her ways. And, my momma would be happy and welcoming if this wayward child, a grown adult now, would let go of the past and see that it’s okay to disagree, just not at the extent of holding onto blame. Most of the time, Momma doesn’t even know what the upset is about, the sibling in question always expecting her the read minds.

If I wrote our story in full, it would probably take several books to relay my relationship with my momma. But the important thing to me is that love and forgiveness go and hand in hand. One cannot really have one without the other. If we truly love someone, we will find a way to forgive them or have a relationship with them that expresses that love and forgiveness even if it cannot always be said. And if we are willing to forgive someone, even if they are a perfect stranger, then we must, deep down, have some concept of love for humanity and compassion for those outside ourselves. Thus, we will also be able to forgive those we grew up with and the one who nurtured us when we could not nurture ourselves.

What have you done lately that shows you how loving and forgiving you are? Are you where you want to be in the forgiveness department? Do you have inner work to do before you can forgive someone close to you or who did you wrong? These are important questions. The one thing I learned a long time ago that truly helped me understand the importance of forgiveness is that we all have feelings. No one has feelings more important than me or less important than mine. Everyone is experiencing some type of love angst in the past, now, or in the future. As long as we put things in perspective and remember that we are not the only ones on the journey of life, we can help others find their way back to love and to being comfortable with the act of forgiveness.

I recently read or heard something that made me think how confused some of us in this world can be. The thinking goes like so, We are always going to be haunted by things we did wrong in our past. The truth is these things don’t have to haunt us. Yes, I have let things in the past haunt me. Leaving home at such an early age when my family needed me was a BIG one, for sure. But when we change our focus, and accept forgiveness as forgiveness, we can move forward and let those things go.

Forgiveness is always the key. If you can bring yourself to do it, forgiving others, yourself, and the past will set you free. Your time, energy, and thoughts can then be spent on other more important things – like loving others and spreading kindness into and around the world.

Next month, I’ll be writing about forgiving our hauntings. Those things which haunt our minds and hearts to no end. Those things which, no matter how much we try to forgive the deed, keep popping up over and over and over again, giving us the grief we think we may never ever be rid of.

In the meantime, keep smiling, keep loving, and keep doing your best to forgive the past (and your mom, if you need to).

Love & hugs, Virg

Thank you for reading this post. If you’d like to read more of what I write about, you can find my book, HONOR ONE ANOTHER: The ABCs of Embracing Our Spirit Within, on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Bookshop.org. Just search my full name, Virginia Alice Crawford. It’s a short book with very short inspiring reflections that can be read in one sitting or over the course of about a month’s time.

You can also follow me on Instagram at @virginia.alice.crawford.