The Miracle Of Forgiveness

My mind tricked me and I thought I’d known. I thought I’d predicted it. If I had, it wouldn’t be so bad. If I had known before, I could deal with it. When you wallow in denial, dealing becomes truth’s estranged brother who refuses to come home.

It doesn’t seem like such a big thing in comparison to war, poverty and disease. But it is. It was. It will always be. The day I was told I lost part of my voice and part of myself. I ran outside and choked the words into the night’s abyss.

I only came to realise how much I had lost several months after D-Day. Tears became a past time. Always alone, always. My friends drew back from the silent torment in my eyes. Most of them didn’t even know - they could just sense it. It repulsed them. At a time when everyone was throwing their hats into the sky, I kept mine in my hand and watched as hugs passed around.

Oh there were lights in those black seas. My boyfriend, my mother, my brother and the best friend. Yet it’s one thing to have lights and it’s another to embrace them. It took me a year to realise that. A year to embrace life. A year to become me.

Seeing a father embrace another life, another child, another wife – it’s not easy. It’s not easy seeing him spend more time with another family than he ever did with his own. But I don’t think my story is entirely about that. The hardest thing to deal with was losing my innocence. I no longer saw adults in a lime light. A year from becoming an adult I realised that they’re human. Humans make mistakes.

Forgiveness and family are concepts you’d expect to see riding a tandem bike down Never Ending Lane together. Siblings make mistakes, mothers make mistakes and fathers make mistakes. Big mistakes come with bigger consequences. I was just a leaf bobbing in the rainwater, streaming through suburban gutters. I was just caught in the recoil of a big mistake. It didn’t make my father the devil himself. It just made him human.

So I began to forgive.