This is a story about forgiveness.
Not very long at all after finding out about my husband’s affair I must have uttered the words “…but I will never forgive you” for the first time. I can’t recall if I said it out loud but I definitely thought it, and have thought it again hundreds or even thousands of times.
It’s not that I’ve locked the box on forgiveness and thrown away the key. Imagine that you’ve decided god can’t possibly exist but you read the Bible anyway, again and again, trying to understand. This is me with forgiveness.
By the way, it isn’t a punishment to not forgive. I’m not even angry or bitter. Even in the moment, that traumatic and nightmarish moment, I held both my empathy for how he’d lost his way with the pain of having been absolutely decimated by what he’d done. (The beginning of the both.) It’s not about deserving.
I just cannot put together this “forgiveness”. I don’t know what it is. I can’t wrap my mind or my heart around it. I can’t apply it to what happened to me like a balm. I can’t wrap it around my now ex-husband like a blanket after the storm. I can’t rewind the tape to before he kissed her a couple of miles from our home while our baby slept in her crib. Or before that, when he chose not to tell me he was keeping score against me in our marriage. Or before that, to the morning of our wedding day when I snuck out of the hotel to take a quiet walk and get a coffee, and I had a profound exchange with a homeless person. I thought to myself “I can’t tell him about this; he wouldn’t understand.” And then I married this man who wouldn’t understand something that felt so deeply raw and human and like a prism of light in my heart.
Forgiveness doesn’t rewind the tape to before then. So what’s the point?