Forgiveness As A Process

On the Tuesday of the first week of classes in September I received a call from my mother. Something was obviously wrong as she found it difficult to speak without sobbing so naturally I asked what happened.

“Your father left me.”

That one statement has shaped the way I have lived the past seven months more profoundly than I could have expected. However, the impact of that statement did not hit me until the following Saturday. Every week, I go home to work part time in retail. After work on Saturday, my dad asked if he could talk to me about something. In the middle of the parking lot before I walked to the Quincy Center T station he broke the news to me. Granted I had known for almost a week but his telling me left me dumbfounded. The great family man who had been working so hard to maintain our family’s financial situation while my mom held down the fort was simply giving up. We talked for an hour, then he talked to my mom and headed on his way. I took the mountain bike I had asked my brother to throw in the car for me and rode to the train station, never looking back.

Over the subsequent months, my life has not changed all that dramatically. I live in an off campus apartment with a routine weekly schedule and the same roommates the entire time. The only time this event truly affects me when I have contact with my family. My mother has progressively gotten better at handling the loss of her husband of 23 years, but she still relapses occasionally. I try to be there for moral support and as a result hear things that I wish I did not. With nobody else to turn to, I am the wall my mom bounces her ideas, wishes, and problems off of. My fourteen-year-old brother just started high school when this happened and as ...

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... I have watched my sister crumble psychologically. I have lost focus in every aspect of my life, harming my performance academically, socially, and personally. The repercussions of this single man’s decision are unfathomable. He thought that the issue was just between him and my mother but that is because he is blind to reality, through ignorance or choice. My family has ties throughout the town we live in and beyond. Not a day goes by that someone asks my mom how her husband is doing, and not a day goes by that she does not cry.

It seems that my mind is made up. Until my father decides to man up and admit that he has made the biggest mistake of his life, I will not even consider forgiving him. It would be impossible to do so when I know in my heart that he is wrong and missed out on the greatest years of his life with me, not as a father, but as a friend.