Just Like My Mother

Posted on | September 3, 2013 | 2 Comments

I have never been able to really hold a grudge against anyone.  Even people who hurt me terribly get forgiven, usually within a few days, weeks, months, or sometimes years.  So it was always really difficult for me when I would confide in my mother about some horrible thing someone had done or said because while I would get over the hurt… she would bury it deep and never forget it.

Ever.

I couldn’t understand it.  If I was okay with the person I couldn’t understand why she shouldn’t be.

And then I became a mother.

The first time J got his feelings hurt by a little girl in his class, I wanted to rip her hair out by the roots.  They were friends again a few days later but I still find myself giving her the evil eye in my mind because she hurt my child.  She hurt MY child.

When J was born, I realized for the first time, what it feels like to really and truly have your heart on your sleeve. Only it’s not on YOUR sleeve, it’s resting in the hands and eyes and hair of your freshly born child.  And when he cries, you cry. When he screams, every inch of your soul screams with him and when he is broken you are buried, mind and soul, beneath the weight of your angst for him.  Every hurt he feels, you feel twice… twice the horror and hurt and sadness and fear because your one purpose in life is to protect him from just that thing… just that hurt… and you failed.

I can forgive almost anything that anyone does to me because I just don’t carry that around with me.

But this morning, when we pulled up to school and J sighed a big four year old sigh and looked at me with his sweet gray eyes and said “(insert child’s name) said he wouldn’t be my friend anymore and he really meant it. Now I can’t play with him anymore,” I realized that I can, in fact, carry a grudge on behalf of someone else.  And though he will grow and change and forgive and forget, I now realize that I never will. Because when you hurt my child, you hurt me twice… and double the hurt can never be forgotten.  When you hurt my child, you are forever wrong to me.

So in some ways, I must admit, I am just like my mother.

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