Casting a light on yourself
Jansen’s experience of self-forgiveness after forgiving someone else is familiar to Katy Hutchison. While Hutchison isn’t religious, she slips into language that sounds almost biblical when she describes how it happens. “When you shine the light on someone else, you cast some light on yourself as well. As I looked at Ryan’s life and tried to understand why he’d made the choices he had, I also looked at my own life, the way relationships ended, the things that were left unsaid, the choices I’d made.” How could she extend empathy to him if she couldn’t extend it to herself as well, she reasoned.
At the same time, lessons from her experience as a mom deepened her understanding of self-forgiveness. “I’m fiercely proud of my kids when they fall down and then get back up again. We all fail. We’re all imperfect. It’s not the fall that’s the problem — it’s the not getting up afterwards.”
But our own imperfection can be tough to admit. “It’s hard to talk about choices I wish I hadn’t made, decisions I made badly,” says Hutchison. “But when others share that gift with me, share their failings with me, I learn so much. We connect around our brokenness — and grow through the lessons we learn by trying to do better next time.”
Doing penance
“It’s not about saying it was okay,” says Sheila Murphy now. “Ignoring my father wasn’t okay.” As she’s grieved her father’s death, Murphy has struggled with forgiving herself — being tougher on herself, her sister tells her, than their father would be if he were alive. She’s been honest about the hurt she must have caused him, and while she can’t make it up to him now, she does what she calls “my penance” in ways that she knows would please him. His favourite charity, a local soup kitchen, has become her charity of choice. And because “he was a big believer in thank-you notes,” she prepares a thank-you basket each year for the volunteer group that offers a small bursary in her father’s name.
Most important, she says, “I’m trying to have a different relationship with my children than my dad had with us. My father would never have told me he was sorry for anything, and I want my kids to know that I can admit my faults. I don’t want them to waste time being mad at me, thinking they can’t talk to me when I’ve hurt or disappointed them. With my son, when I do something that I know has offended him, when I see that look in his eyes that says I’m not his hero anymore, I tell him I’m sorry.
“I don’t say it unless I mean it. But at least we have the practice, the track record, where we can apologize to each other.”
And maybe, through that example, she’s laying the groundwork for some self-forgiveness as well.
*Names have been changed
This article originally appeared in the November 2008 issue of More
