The Walking Dead 18

Gentle Reader, let me expand a bit on what I mean about forgiving the person but not the act. First, I will explain a little bit about the people who were the principal abusers in my life: my immediate family. My father, despite my lingering desire to raise him from the dead just so I could kill him myself, was a particularly pathetic individual, like many working class men of his generation. He narrowly missed military service overseas, since he was just seventeen when the Second World War ended, but he certainly did grew up in a period of intense insecurity and stress, his childhood being marked by the Great Depression and the War, which traumatized an entire generation, whether they fought in Europe or the Pacific, or not. My father was born in Winnipeg and his family moved here to Vancouver when he was just twelve years old, or just after the outbreak of war. They were poor working class, and like many families, very few finished their high school education, and many didn`t even make it through primary school because of the need to work in order to help support their struggling families. I don't know much about my father's family dynamics, he told me little, I think partly because he just didn't like me, and also because of shame. I do know that his father had mental health issues as well as epilepsy and a heart condition, and was likely an alcoholic and abusive. Their mother worked hard in a meat processing plant and other crap jobs in order to put food on the table, but she was also often absent insofar as being a nurturing presence to her family. I think that only my father's two sisters finished high school The four brothers all left school to work, and actually worked together and generally had each other's backs. They were all alcoholics and together they ran and worked in a successful autobody business. My father later also did double duty as a commercial fisherman. My father did not value education, only hard work. He was also a walking case study of toxic masculinity, a misogynist, and a racist and extremely homophobic. This, unfortunately, was nothing unusual for working class white males of his generation. My mother didn't have it much better. She was a farmer's daughter in rural Saskatchewan who left high school early and moved to Vancouver just shy of turning eighteen, where she stayed with siblings and cousins who had come out before her. She didn't tell me much about that time in her life, and given that when she was dying she said that there were secrets she would be taking with her to the grave, who only knows what she had to do in order to get by. It isn't at all nice to insinuate that your mother might have been a prostitute at one time in her life, but who only knows what people have to do at times in order to get by. She was still twenty-one when she married my father (then twenty-four), and my brother was born four months later, and no, Gentle reader, he was not premature. When I consider how unprepared my parents were for children, in many ways, for the world, I have to forgive them. They had major problems, substance abuse and undiagnosed depression with my father and huge anger issues and undiagnosed anxiety for my mother. My brother and I of course absorbed all this, and my brother, being three years older and stronger, would of course be venting his anger on me. I forgive each one of them, because they were so unprepared for life, and so driven by raw necessity to survive and succeed in life, even if they had to sacrifice nearly everything else that makes us human. What I do not forgive is the abuse I received from them. They never once apologized or accepted responsibility for the harm. Except my father, briefly, when as part of his Twelve Step program when he joined Alcoholics Anonymous, sought me out for forgiveness when I was twenty-six. I accepted the apology, but he didn't specify what he was apologizing for, nor what he was prepared to offer as reparation. Neither did I hold his feet over the fire about this, since I just felt at the time that it would have been bad manners. But it was enough to bring some healing into our relationship, and for about fifteen years or so, we did rather well with each other, and for a while, until his mother died and he resumed drinking again, we were friends. nothing was really openly discussed, neither was such discussion welcomed by any of them. I seemed to be the only family member who wanted to openly confront and talk about things. Then my mother died, and we were friends when she went. This didn't reconcile the beatings that she inflicted on me when I was a kid, and I still feel ripped off that she never once came clean with me. Likewise with the other two. I forgive them, and in a way, I love them, but I also understand that there has been too much damage, to much harm for things to be restored. Both my parents are long dead and my brother and I haven't seen each other in twenty years. Of course there is a sense of perpetual loss that I have to live with, but I am safe, secure and well away from their harm, and even if that will mean solitary Christmases for the rest of my life at least they can no longer hurt me.