I thought my mother needed to apologize before we could fix our relationship. It took me years to understand that I was giving her control over something I could change myself.
Do You Need an Apology to Forgive Someone? | Jon-David
For approximately eight years, my mother and I were engaged in a cold war.
There were occasional periods of peace.
Christmas.
Birthdays.
Weddings.
Family dinners.
But underneath everything was a list.
She had hers.
I had mine.
And I was quite certain my list was better.
My mother had rejected my first boyfriend.
She had sent me to a psychologist after discovering I was gay.
She had kicked me out.
She had criticized my weight.
My ambitions.
My ego.
My success.
She could insert one sentence into an otherwise perfectly pleasant afternoon that would leave me emotionally bleeding in the parking lot.
And I wanted her to know it.
More specifically:
I wanted her to admit it.
That distinction nearly cost us years we eventually got to have together.
I Had Become an Adult. My Mother Hadn’t Gotten the Memo.
By my mid-twenties, my life had changed enormously.
I owned a successful salon.
I had employees.
I was writing.
I was appearing in the media.
I had become active in my community.
My father was proud of me.
I was becoming proud of myself.
And somehow, when I was around my mother, I could still become seventeen years old in approximately eleven seconds.
She’d say something.
I’d react.
She’d react to my reaction.
And suddenly we weren’t two adults having a disagreement.
We were Mother and Bad Son again.
That’s one of the strangest things about families.
You can become enormously successful in the outside world and still be twelve years old when somebody passes the potatoes.
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Buttonwillow
The breaking point happened during a seven-hour drive through California.
My parents and I had attended a cousin’s wedding in Northern California and were driving back south.
We had actually had a wonderful time.
Then my mother started.
A little jab.
Another.
Something about me acting high and mighty because I had mentioned knowing some movie stars.
Something about me not giving her enough credit for what she’d contributed to my salon.
I could feel myself becoming furious.
At a gas stop in Buttonwillow, I practically launched myself out of the back seat.
“I HAVE TO PEE!”
I didn’t particularly have to pee.
I had to get away from my mother.
My dad followed me into the men’s room.
And I started crying.
I told him I couldn’t do this anymore.
Dad looked genuinely confused.
He hadn’t even noticed what had been happening.
That made me angrier.
How could he not see it?
Then I realized something.
Everyone in my family had become accustomed to my mother and me being “that way.”
Including me.
I didn’t want to be that way anymore.
So when I got back into the car, I announced that I wasn’t coming to holidays, birthdays or family gatherings anymore unless we went to family counseling.
My father agreed.
My mother refused.
Well.
That certainly wasn’t how I’d written the scene in my head.
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I Wanted a Witness for the Prosecution
Dad and I went without her.
At first, I spent a great deal of time talking about my mother.
So did Dad.
Apparently, he had his own list.
For several weeks, we unpacked decades of resentment.
And I loved it.
I had an audience.
Better yet, I had a professional audience.
Finally, someone was going to understand exactly how terrible my mother had been.
There was only one problem.
Mom wasn’t there.
How was she supposed to find out she was wrong if she wasn’t there to hear all the evidence?
Eventually our counselor asked Dad and me a very simple question:
Why had we wanted my mother there in the first place?
My answer was essentially:
So she could hear everything she did wrong.
Dad’s answer was gentler.
He wanted Mom to learn to communicate better and understand the ways she hurt him.
Different packaging.
Same gift.
We wanted to drag Marie into a room and rub her nose in her mistakes.
That was when I was asked a much harder question.
Suppose she came.
Suppose she listened.
Suppose she apologized for everything.
Then what?
I didn’t have an answer ready.
What Did I Actually Want?
My father did.
He said:
“I would like to love my wife again.”
That stopped me.
Because Dad wasn’t talking about winning.
He wasn’t talking about being vindicated.
He wasn’t talking about getting an apology.
He was talking about the relationship he wanted.
So I had to answer the same question.
What did I actually want from my mother?
And the answer was embarrassingly simple.
I wanted my mom back.
I wanted us to be close.
I wanted to enjoy being around her.
I wanted her to stop hurting my feelings.
I wanted to stop hurting hers.
I wanted a mother.
She wanted a son.
Everything else was evidence from a trial neither of us actually needed to win.
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So I Did Something Completely Unfair
I changed.
Without making her change first.
That seemed profoundly unfair to me.
Why should I have to change?
She was the one who owed me the apology.
She was the one who had done all those things.
She was the one who—
Blah, blah, blah.
I had spent years waiting for my mother to do something before I would allow myself to have what I wanted.
So I tried something different.
I started behaving as though we already had the relationship I wanted us to have.
I hugged her when I arrived.
I hugged her when I left.
I invited her to dinner.
I took her to movies.
I helped her in the garden.
Naturally, my mother was suspicious.
Once she said something like:
“I wonder what you’re up to.”
I told her:
“You better get used to it.”
I Stopped Collecting Evidence
The bigger change wasn’t the dinners.
It wasn’t the hugs.
It was what I stopped doing.
I stopped saving everything for later.
If my mother said something that hurt my feelings, I didn’t add it to The List.
I told her.
Right then.
“Mom, when you say that, it hurts my feelings.”
No screaming.
No historical presentation.
No:
“And another thing you did in 1979…”
Just:
That hurt.
Please don’t do it.
And something remarkable happened.
She began changing too.
Not overnight.
Not because I had finally defeated her with superior communication.
Our relationship changed because the dance changed when one of the dancers changed the steps.
Eventually we became friends.
Real friends.
My mother became the person I called when something wonderful happened.
She became the person I called when something terrible happened.
She became my touchstone.
Exactly what I’d wanted.
And Then She Apologized
Years later, Mom brought up the past.
The psychologist.
My coming out.
Chuck.
Those terrible years.
And she apologized.
She said:
“I’m sorry, honey. I don’t know what that was about.”
Do you know what I felt?
Almost nothing.
Not because I didn’t care.
Because I had already forgiven her.
The apology I had once desperately wanted arrived after I no longer needed it.
It didn’t repair our relationship.
We had already repaired it.
It didn’t release me from the past.
I had already let it go.
Her apology simply became one more loving thing my mother gave me.
And suddenly I understood something I wish I’d understood years earlier.
An Apology Is Wonderful. Needing One Can Be a Prison.
There are people who absolutely should apologize.
There are things people should be held accountable for.
There are relationships that should end.
There are people you should never invite back into your life.
I’m not suggesting otherwise.
I’m talking about something much narrower.
Sometimes we know we want a relationship with someone.
We love them.
They love us.
But we’ve decided they must first perform a specific emotional task before we will move forward.
Admit it.
Explain it.
Understand exactly how much they hurt us.
Say the words.
Then we’ll love them again.
The problem is that you’ve just given somebody else the key to your future.
I did that with my mother.
For years.
Then I took the key back.
I Didn’t Need My Mother to Understand the Past
This may be the most surprising thing I’ve learned while writing How I Killed My Mother.
For most of my life, I thought healing meant finally understanding everything that happened.
Now I’m not sure it does.
My mother had reasons for what she did.
I had reasons for what I did.
Some were good.
Some were terrible.
Some probably made perfect sense to us at the time.
Some were simply wrong.
But Mom and I eventually stopped conducting archaeological digs into every emotional crime scene.
We built something new on top of it.
And it worked.
The uploaded memoir chapter ends this part of our story with something I couldn’t have understood when I was twenty-five: my mother and I walked through the rest of her life as friends. I changed without requiring her to change first—and then she changed too.
There is, however, one person whose forgiveness took much longer.
Mine.
I forgave my mother.
My mother forgave me.
But it took writing this memoir for me to realize that there was still one person I hadn’t completely forgiven for those eight terrible years.
Jon-David.
That’s another story.
And apparently another blog.
More From How I Killed My Mother
How I Killed My Mother is my memoir podcast about family, forgiveness, identity, humor, grief, caregiving, spirituality and the uncomfortable discovery that our parents sometimes make more sense after we begin repeating their mistakes.
Listen to the podcast and join my mailing list at HowIKilledMyMother.com for new stories, bonus material and updates about the upcoming memoir.
And ask yourself:
What did you once hate about your parents—only to hear yourself saying or doing the exact same thing years later?
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