Should we forgive someone actively doing the same thing over and over? Does forgiveness mean you still have them in your life if they keep doing what they’re doing? Do you believe that family is always a priority no matter their behavior and their effect on you? These are all questions on my mind. I believe you can definitely forgive someone and still let them go. I don’t believe there’s a priority to have someone hurting you in your life. I also believe if someone apologizes for their behavior and then they keep doing that behavior, depending on what the behavior is, it’s hard to forgive. You’d just have to wake up each day “Lord I forgive her/him today.” Right? Maybe I’m wrong. These are just my thoughts. Life is so, so complicated to me. I took Psychology and Social Work to learn about human behavior and honestly, that education confused me more. I understand life’s supposed to be about making mistakes, that nobody is perfect, that you ought to forgive. Maybe my way of forgiving with friends have always been easy..I can forgive you but “Bye, Felicia.” I’ve been hurt by a lot of friends and it’s been somewhat easy to cut them off as they were just using me or had lied to me, etc. No one’s ever apologized out of the friends. Some have tried, I guess, to apologize, years later and their messages have been left in the request zone. The person lives in a different state and I’ll never see her again. Sure…I have no friends that I see in reality or any I’m close with. But to open that message… I just want to go on the rest of my life not knowing what she had to say. I do know it’s an apology of some sort. She told me “Your Mom’s a meth addict…get over it!” And she also lived with me and my boyfriend at the time and used my car and didn’t bring it back on time and just basically just used me as somewhere to stay when she wasn’t with her boyfriend. She also made out with a highschool sweetheart of mine after we broke up and somehow I erased that from my mind…until a few years ago, I was looking at notes from highschool and found notes of her apologizing for kissing him. It is truly funny how you can forget seemingly huge things like that. Since I’ve brought up my Mom, I’ll just tell you that this whole pondering is brought to you with the help of my grandmother. She thinks if I don’t want to visit my Mom in prison, that I may go to hell for not forgiving her. Her actual words were “The Bible says if you don’t forgive, you won’t go to heaven.” But then she later changed her meaning to “if you hate her”. I don’t think I hate my Mom. I just have expectations that have never been met. And I think they’re reasonable. And I have bottom lines. My grandmother has never believed me about bottom lines in addiction treatment, even though I studied a lot about that. I always tried to work out how to implement my education on addiction when it comes to “interventioning” my Mom. My grandmother wouldn’t do it, my Uncle wouldn’t do it. I tried. I have actually tried to educate my grandmother about bottom lines and that enabling isn’t love…. I guess I my pondering here, I’ve already learned that maybe I shouldn’t say “isn’t love”. I’m not sure if I have quite said it that way to her but I certainly see how I can be more aware of my wording and how it can be altered to say “Enabling is not the only way to show love.” But honestly, I just don’t believe that statement. My opinion is enabling is not love. It’s comfort…I guess… temporarily to the person you’re enabling. You’re hurting yourself by enabling them (paying their bills, raising their kids, helping them fight a court case, blah blah blah). You’re hurting the addict by not doing everything in your power to help them want and feel the need to quit their substances, therefore they continue to use (which hey, if it doesn’t hurt you, ok, but it will eventually and it was hurting my Mom). And lastly, and I think most importantly, it hurts the addict’s children. I can say this from personal experience. I can’t blame my Moms drug addiction on my grandmother. I wish no one had to be blamed for anything. But she certainly didn’t put her foot down and my grandmother continued to pay bills, do all the grown up things like get Mom’s car tag for her every year, pay her insurance, etc. Which, in turn, meant we never got to grow up with a Mom. I did, a little, and that was no prize either but she also wasn’t a sober Mom. She was for three years except pot. And I never cared about her doing that. But when she lost her job, she was already on meth and hasn’t worked since. She is a handyman, a jack of all trades, now. She cuts grass, will clean houses, tried to do carpet shampooing, and will paint inside of house. You name it. She was always so talented in so many things. But her lifestyle of hoarding, being a dead beat Mom, not coming over Christmas day until 8pm, sleeping all day, saying off the wall shit, etc. was not okay. The way she kept her house, my grandmother’s rental house…wow. I can’t even step in the house. My grandmother stopped repairing it, maybe never did keep it up as a landlord, after my Mom stopped paying rent. Sure, she’d cut her Mom’s grass. That’s still cheap rent, $400 a month. Does anyone have that as rent now? I see cardboard boxes online renting for $1,000 now, it’s so ridiculous.
My grandmother said she did a lot for me, people don’t realize what she did for me. What I don’t think my grandmother realizes that by Mom being who she was to her and good enough for her Mom, it meant she wouldn’t be good enough for her kids as a Mom. We missed out on a good mother. A smart, used to be attractive, common sense lady. She did always have anger issues. My grandmother loves to point out that we all do. I just express myself through crying and yeah I cry when I’m mad also. But I get hurt deeply when I hurt. Other people’s pain… I just want everyone else to be safe, happy, healthy and everything. I do want myself to be as well. As long as nothing hurts others, only hurts ourselves, ok. I hurt myself more than help myself with my own actions. So long as they don’t affect anyone else, in my opinion, who cares? But as a mother, you should be there for your kids. You should care enough and if you can’t care enough to admit you even do drugs, then you don’t care to change. You care more about your friends than your kids. You didn’t try to raise your kids. At least I have good memories. I don’t know if my brother does. How he feels is how he feels as he’s welcome to feel however he wishes.
All this to say: it’s hard to forgive someone who keeps doing it or hasn’t admitted they do it. The way I look at it, there’s two main ways to forgive: 1) They apologize, you forgive and move on 2) They don’t apologize and you move on, alone. So it’s been hard to know where my Mom fits in. I wish she was sober. I’m angry at her for letting my brother grow up with a grandparent, for starting drama, for making weird crackhead friends (some who have stolen), for living like a pack rat, for not being a normal citizen and for wanting to spend thousands of dollars to fight cases that she knows she’s guilty of.
But also do you forgive people that aren’t neglecting you physically? A friend or a lover? What if that person keeps neglecting your needs? Do you forgive over and over again? Even if it’s not lies or cheating? When finally becomes enough? Do you forgive everyday and start anew? I guess so. It isn’t easy. Why wouldn’t people care about pleasing the ones they love? And if someone doesn’t please you how you ask them, at what point should you be frustrated? Is it forgiveness that we do for ourselves, as everyone says, or is it for the other person? Is it both? I guess it depends on the situation. Most people give up nowadays. I’m a quitter of most things. Some people never start caring. Maybe we all just live in our own worlds.
❤️