My Best Friends Have Hairy Legs (13 page)

I have also learned that happiness comes from inside—not outside. People can be happy together, but not make each other happy. Sometimes they don’t realize how happy they are because they are so “blinded by the forest” of possessions and material things, and think that their happiness comes from outside. I am happy now because I like who I am. I’m comfortable in my skin. I’m honest—with myself and with others. I respect myself and I can laugh at myself. I know I’m not perfect and I accept that. If I wasn’t happy, I might still believe that I needed to change myself to fit someone else, or that my happiness could be found in things or other people. Now that I realize that I am happy, I’ve also realized that I’m ready to share that with someone else. To be happy with someone—not because of someone.

Mandy has taught me that everyone needs a hug at least once a day, and that it is o.k. to sometimes look at the world from a different perspective—like upside down! He teaches me that life is easier when you have a laid back attitude and that even when someone yells and complains for a long time, they can ultimately forgive you.

Forgiveness. That has been a huge lesson to learn. Believe it or not, it has been Trooper that has helped the most in learning about forgiveness. For him to learn to trust men again means that he has had to forgive the ones that “might” hurt him—he couldn’t hold a grudge and hate all men just based on what two of them did. So for me to learn to trust men again, I have had to forgive the ones that have hurt me. In forgiving, I—we—have also learned to open our hearts up to the potential for love and to trust again by not judging all others on the actions of a few.

I had conversations with friends not too long ago about forgiveness and love. Both of them are in marriages that are ending. Needless to say, they have had a lot of emotional roller coaster rides in the last few months. While their roles in the break-up of their marriages differ—one is filing and the other was on the receiving end of the divorce papers - there is one common thread in what caused the disintegration of their marriages. An inability to forgive past hurts has driven a wedge in their relationships that forced them apart. That to me just seems sad because I know that for the one in the relationship that was unable to forgive; until they learn to forgive—unconditionally—they will be forced to repeat this “lesson” again and again in all their future relationships. I see love and forgiveness as being intricately entwined together, and in a relationship, I don’t think you can’t have one without the other.

I believe that when I was forgiven by my Father, it was because He loved me unconditionally, and He forgave me unconditionally. There wasn’t any small print at the bottom of the cross that said I was forgiven “only if….” I wasn’t forgiven “only if “ I was a specific religious denomination, race, gender, or sexual orientation. When you read this, please don’t rush to your computer to fire off a letter to tell me how wrong I am. I don’t profess to be a religious scholar or knowledgeable in any way about the vast assortment of world faiths. As a novice, it just seems to me that whatever your faith or belief system is, it probably has some basis of unconditional love and unconditional forgiveness. Isn’t that what we all want? How much simpler could our lives be if we just lived on that premise? Of not only being able to forgive and love others unconditionally, but also and probably most importantly, being able to forgive and love ourselves unconditionally?

I have seen my companion animals seem to be able to let things go a lot quicker than humans do. Granted, if you abuse an animal long enough, they will probably snap. Literally and figuratively. But I don’t think that is because they are holding some angry grudge at you. I think that it is because they associate the abuser with pain and fear, so they react on a subconscious level of “fight or flight.” But for the most part, with animals that are humanely disciplined and are not abused, when they are released from being disciplined they can quickly go back to being a happy animal. They will rebound with joy when they see you again and shower you with unconditional love.

Why can’t we do that? Why can’t we let go of things and just move forward with joy? When I look back at events in my life that have caused me pain or anger, I can often see how long I held onto those emotions and how they continued to cloud my thoughts until everything in my life felt like it was poisoned by that event. It is only when I released that pain or anger that I was able to move forward with joy. When I compare events that were caused by others or caused by myself—my own choices or mistakes—I can see that I was always able to forgive others much quicker than I could forgive myself.

I was finally able to forgive Will and move on with my life without carrying the baggage of that hurt anymore. When he called me out of the blue this year to wish me a Happy Birthday, we were able to talk—and laugh—for over an hour. That was the first time we had spoken in almost five years.

For so many years when I was in that abusive marriage I felt that it was always my fault. Aside from the fact that I was constantly told it was my fault by my husband, I told it to myself even more. Looking back even farther I can see how much my childhood influenced my low self-esteem. Always feeling unwanted, unloved, and alone. No wonder I sought out men who would just reinforce those feelings. My Dad was there in my life, but he wasn’t really “there.” He provided for us, put food on the table, a roof over our heads, but my first memory of him telling me he loved me is from when I was an adult and I said it first. I had no memories of him hugging me as a child, taking part in any school activities, or just being involved with us. I remember Volksmarches in Germany where he would set out at his own pace and leave the rest of us behind.

I once researched and wrote a term paper on emotional abandonment and its affects on children for an undergraduate child psychology class. In the course of my research I started to see myself in some of the case studies and I asked my Dad why he was never really “there” for our childhood. He was confused by what I meant and said that he raised us the same way that his father raised him. It dawned on me then that sometimes the emotional dysfunctions are so ingrained that a person never even realizes what they are missing, or what they have lost. They can’t give what they never had.

An editor recently advised me that I needed to work on my “show don’t tell” experiences in this writing process—“actions speak louder than words.” Valuable advice, not just in writing but in life. I’m sure that my father loved me in his own way, but his actions never made me feel like I was loved or wanted and so I sought out that feeling from others using my father as a measure. It wasn’t until I was able to see that the measuring stick I was holding was dysfunctional that I realized I needed to find a new measure. One I created myself.

I still remember the day I picked up his ashes. I placed him on the passenger seat as we drove back to his house where the rest of the family was gathered, and I was overcome with emotion. All the things I had longed to hear from him, I would never hear. As I drove I poured out all the things I had tried to say to him when he was alive, the things he hadn’t wanted to hear—my fears, my hurts, my dreams, my goals—all the things I wished we had talked about. I told him how much he meant to me, and how I wished that we had been able to have a closer friendship the last few years of his life without his last girlfriend’s insecurities and jealousies getting in the way.

Laura hated me from the moment I moved back into town because she couldn’t stand not being the sole focus of all of his attention. I tried everything to become friends with her because she was such an important part of my father’s life, but nothing made any difference.

When I learned of her severe allergies to scents and perfumes, I stopped wearing all scented deodorants and hair products, seldom wore perfumes, and used only unscented laundry detergents and softeners because I never knew when I would get a last minute call inviting me to dinner—which I would jump at as an opportunity to spend time with my father.

Not long before he became to sick to work, he had started to “sneak around” just to have lunch with me—he would call me on his cell phone from a job site and ask if I could get away that day. After he was hospitalized I went to see him every day after work. One day he asked if I would check in with her to see if she needed anything, and so I called her on the way from the hospital to see if I could stop by (I had learned years before that stopping by unannounced was an unforgivable offense). When I got to her house, after we had talked for a few minutes she excused herself from the room and when she came back, there was an unmistakably strong scent in the room. I couldn’t identify what it was, but I panicked. Had I slipped up? Forgotten that the coat I was wearing had been around someone else with perfume that might have rubbed off on me? I no longer even bought scented deodorants or hair styling products, and couldn’t imagine what it was. I immediately made excuses and left her house, sniffing my jacket as soon as I got in the car to figure out what the scent was and where it had come from. By the time I got home, my phone was ringing. It was my father was calling. Yelling at me from his hospital bed about how could I be so insensitive to deliberately wear perfume to her house when I knew she was so allergic. I knew then that she had set me up. Whatever she did when she left the room was what caused the scent, and she was using it as another way to drive a wedge between my father and me.

When he was released from the hospital and began hospice care at her house, she would only allow me to come over to sit with him when he was unconscious from the morphine. I talked to him anyway, knowing that some part of him still heard me. The day he died—the day he was dying—she had known from early morning that it would be his last day. But she didn’t call me until two hours after he had died.

The day after he died, she said that she needed to tell me the truth. I was a bad daughter. I didn’t love my father enough.

I knew even before I had completely digested her words that she was speaking from grief and anger. I also knew that getting into an argument with her would be pointless. She had needed to hurt me one more time to show that she was better than me, and if that was what she needed to get to 129 sleep that night, then good on her. I wanted to yell at her that I had loved him enough to let her win, to not argue when she had lied to him so many times about things that I had said or done that drove a wedge between us. I wanted to scream at her that I loved him enough to want him to be happy and so I stepped back out of his life and settled for whatever time I could get. But I said and did none of that.

I told her I was sorry for her loss, sorry that she was hurting so much, and that I did love him more than she would ever understand, and then I walked away from her.

Talking to my father’s ashes in the car that day, I forgave him for the hurts of my childhood, knowing that he had missed out on knowing love from his father as well and that it had been hard for him to show his emotions because if it. I forgave him for feeling forced to choose between his girlfriend and me, and that he had chosen her. I also forgave her for all the things she had said and done to keep us apart. I felt sorry for her, knowing that her own childhood must have been so lonely and insecure that she had to cling to whatever she could just to feel whole.

Forgiveness. It heals. It lightens your burdens, and casts off that baggage that keeps you from growing and feeling joy. Baggage that is better left at the curb.

C
HAPTER
14

Carry-on Baggage

I started to look at what kind of emotional “baggage” I wanted to carry into my future. Did I want oversized and overweight baggage that was always going to hold me back from experiencing love and joy? Baggage that was going to cost me more than it was worth just to bring it along? I knew that I needed to start to purge the things that I had packed. Try on those emotional clothes and decide what fit, and what could be trashed. Decide what was in style and what was out of style. I needed to decide what was really important, what emotions I could just not live without. I would especially have to forgive the things I still blamed myself for, the self-images that I was never good enough. Hanging onto those thoughts and feelings was only hurting me.