by Donna Britt
In our public and private lives, those who forgive are dismissed as naive; the forgiven are thought to have gotten away with something. We excoriate officials who utter the racist or sexist beliefs millions of us harbor, and demand resignations from unfortunates caught in sexual situations in which millions more participate. Wives of famous cheats are denounced when their husband’s cheating doesn’t immediately spur them to kick him to the curb.
That’s a lot of unforgiveness for a nation in which 75 percent of citizens say they’re Christians, and whose savior forgave those who shouted for his killing. The truth: We all slip, and badly. Forgiveness is a clear-eyed nod to our shared, inevitable brokenness. What offers more opportunity for it than an institution in which two flawed, unknowable people swear to persevere “for better or for worse”? Do we truly expect to encounter only the better?
Damn right we do.
Forgiving when you’ve been hurt to your marrow is the most arduous of spiritual directives. Considering all that it won’t do, forgiveness hardly seems worth it.
Pardoning a partner doesn’t mean you’ll never again suspect him. It doesn’t mean you won’t catch yourself staring into space as your memory runs high-def replays of his every lie. It won’t save you from wondering if you’re foolish for forgiving, nor make his lover (so familiar to your spouse, so mysterious to you) disappear or share the agony she helped create. Forgiveness doesn’t mean that molten where’s-my-fucking-gun? rage never has you in its grip.
Forgiveness wouldn’t obliterate Kevin’s knowledge of what he’d lost, but couldn’t acknowledge, by leaving his lover: the sex, the sweetness of the forbidden, the delicious illusion of one complexity-free relationship. On some level, he’d known it was a fantasy. But fantasies are fun. Marriage—with its ongoing who-left-on-the-lights, what’s-wrong-with-the-baby, where’s-the-flashlight, why’d-you-look-at-me-like-that, did-you-move-my-gloves, wait-you-said-WHAT?, who-scolded-disrespected-insulted-raised-a-disbelieving-eyebrow-first din—seems anything but.
Marriage is back-and heart-breaking work. Yet some days, the sacredness of what Kevin and I hoped to save inspired a gratitude so boundless that I wished her well, hoped she’d found happiness after threatening mine. Other days, I felt so weary from pulling myself out of my seething cauldron of misery, I envisioned her dead—or at least trapped in some sunless, faraway galaxy.
Forgiveness. Lost in prayer, I longed to welcome it, to absorb it like the only salve offering release. Then my brain would shout, “No!” Forgiveness was the smirking enemy who’d whisper to Kevin, “She’s over it, man. You won.” And I wanted no part of it.
I knew I wasn’t one of those practical women who tolerates a man she despises for the sake of her kids or her budget. Kevin was my husband; I wanted to trust him again, absolutely.
But I’d already given him so much—starting with his life, according to the friend who kept half jokingly reminding me, “You could have shot him.” I’d let him remain in his home with his family. I’d listened as he expressed his frustrations, even when it meant choking on mine. I’d handled this horror with as much grace as I could muster. Would forgiving finally be giving too much?
Or would I finally be offering the only thing that mattered?
The situation seemed simple. I wanted to forgive my husband. To keep my family and my sanity intact, I needed to forgive him. Yet the part of Kevin that had trouble accepting my bottomless grief inflamed the part of me that couldn’t absolve him. We were stuck. To get unstuck, we would have to go deeper. For the tenth, the twentieth, the hundredth hellish time, our therapist had us repeat—with feeling and without judgment—each other’s views about our relationship, however harsh or tender. Weeks of repeating each other’s words, owning each other’s feelings, began to paralyze our defenses. As hard as it had been for me, the “blameless” wife, to acknowledge the unseen wounds I’d inflicted upon my husband, what Kevin had to do was more daunting: own something as cruel and ill-considered as an affair, and the fact that our marriage might never recover from it.
Sometimes, stepping outside one’s basic moral code requires mentally pulling oneself apart. I remember at age six being at a supermarket with Mom, mesmerized by the shiny wrapping of a piece of candy she’d forbidden me. When she turned away, my fingers, seemingly unbidden, floated toward it. Only Mom’s slap on my wrist snapped me out of it. I thought, Was that my hand?
Months before, I’d asked the adulterous stranger in my bed, “Who are you?” because the man I loved, trusted, knew, couldn’t have maintained such a deception. Kevin knew it, too—that at his essence, he wasn’t someone who’d turn his back on his wife, family, and so much he believed in to behave deceitfully. Accepting that he had done those things, and done them for so long, was torturous. It was like taking responsibility for the sins of a stranger.
Accepting the selfish, unthinking part of ourselves as ourselves is tough; few rush to embrace their darkness. But the more he accepted his actions as unforgivable, the more seriously I could consider forgiving them. I had no desire to be free of the man I still knew to be real: The father who’d unhesitatingly raised all my sons as his. The companion whose affability balanced my intensity. The writer whose pride in my talent was unmistakable. The husband whose eyes still followed me hungrily and whose words convinced me he found me ever more beautiful.
If I lost my marriage, I’d lose him. He was worth holding on to. And though I sensed myself inching closer to it, I still couldn’t forgive my husband.
At my wit’s end, I found guidance from two unexpected sources: Mom and the dictionary.
Observing the pain I was in, my mother made an astounding confession: at an especially bleak point in her marriage to Daddy, she’d had an affair. I sat speechless as she described falling in love with a coworker as open and affectionate as Daddy was not. For four years, she shared hidden interludes with him. Not once did she consider leaving my father or us. She was only admitting this now, she said, to help me see “things happen that people don’t plan.” In hopes that I’d forgive Kevin for doing what she had done.
My heart melted at the courage and love that prompted her admission. And though Mom’s words gave context to Kev’s transgression, forgiveness still terrified me. Why was this worthy concept so forbidding? Looking up “forgive” in the American Heritage Dictionary, I found the challenging definition that taunted me: “1. To excuse for a fault or an offense; pardon. 2. To renounce anger or resentment against.” None of which I could do.
More promising was the word’s root: the Latin word perdonare, which means “to give completely, without reservation.” When perdonare was adopted into the Germanic language that gave birth to English, “per” was supplanted by “for,” a prefix in this case meaning “thoroughly,” and donare was replaced by giefan, “to give.” The resulting word—forgiefan—in Old English meant “to give up, allow” and (this seemed ironic) “to give in marriage.”
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “forgive” meant “to give” as late as AD 900. It was centuries before the meaning evolved into pardoning an offense and renouncing resentment. Amazing. In its earliest form, the word “forgive” not only meant to give, but to give thoroughly and unreservedly.
My specialty.
What if that was the meaning intended by mystics who’d exhorted followers to forgive? If, rather than instructing us to get over our disappointment, they were suggesting we offer our transgressors our best, despite their culpability? That was interesting—a forgiveness fueled less by my bitterness than by my behavior. I remembered trying to manipulate Kevin into being more loving by withholding affection—and making him colder. Being generous with my warmth had inspired similar warmth.
Now the warmth I needed to inspire was my own. I couldn’t change or pardon my husband’s actions. But I could govern my own. Forgiving in the form of giving I could try. Hell, I was already giving to Kevin again; his amazed gratitude touched me. Giving-as-forgiving meant I could stop sec
ond-guessing the generosity I couldn’t quite stanch. Such absolution, I was learning, didn’t just serve Kevin. Seeing him through a lens of suspicion and blame was depleting me.
So in the interest of forgiving my husband, I got more comfortable with giving to him, and by extension, to myself: His continued place in the center of our home. Apologies for the many ways I’d hurt him. My slowly unclenching heart. Sometimes I gave, no, hurled at, him stabbing words sharpened by the certainty that they couldn’t hurt him as badly as his disloyalty had hurt me. And at other times, I offered him the grudging admission that every honest soul must acknowledge: even wonderful people do really messed-up things.
For five months, I joined him on that couch. Sometimes we sat shoulder to shoulder, fingers intertwined; other times we sat as stiff as planks on opposite ends. Until the unexpected morning after an unsatisfying session when we stood outside the therapist’s office, inhaled the fresh, spring day, and realized: dredging up old stuff was making our time on that couch the least effective, the least loving, of our week.
Wrapping our arms around each other, we shared a lingering kiss. Kevin drove to work. I headed home. We kept going.
Without drumrolls or fanfare, we had our marriage back. Not the shiny new match we’d first forged, nor one of those cool-eyed take-it-for-the-team arrangements some couples negotiate. We had a marriage, as passionate and connected as the one we’d lost, and in some ways better. Knowing your partner’s real selves is instructive. So is proving all that you can still be together if you do love’s heavy lifting. We lifted.
Smashed in the tub on that ghastly night, I’d envisioned everything but this: that a year and a half later, Kevin’s fingers would still reach for mine when a throng enclosed us, that his lips would find mine before he nestled into the next pillow. I couldn’t have imagined still finding him the sexiest man at any party, or my ironclad certainty that he’s still one of the good guys. That I could see him, and he could see me, and we could love each other more for the seeing.
Maybe we aren’t that unusual. “Some of the best marriages I know of came out of affairs,” author and family therapist Linda Carroll later told me. “An affair is like a death; a couple has to build their marriage from the ground up. So it’s a new structure…. It’s like the landscape after a forest fire; everything’s destroyed and desolate. But give it time, and all these surprising things, flowers you’ve never seen before, can grow there.”
When Kevin asked, “What’s love?” in that moonlit hotel room, I was devastated. Yet I had no idea how little I knew of love’s reach and elasticity.
Love, forgiveness taught me, isn’t all lilt and rosebuds. It’s as raw as meat, and as piercing as a knife wound. But if it lifts and heals you more than it plummets and destroys you, it’s worth it. Worth it even when my mind wanders into the groove two years carved into it, even when I ask God why there wasn’t a less onerous way to learn this:
Two flawed human beings who make a wedding’s impossible promises—and who fight for their marriage after seeing the awful truth about each other—can win.
And at times, almost make it look easy.
Other People’s Kids
Jason, 2004.
Sitting in the small, neat living room, I try not to flinch as recriminations—in Spanish and English—blow like confetti around my ears. The rage isn’t directed at me. But so much bad blood is boiling, so many ancient angers stomping around the room, that I can’t calm anything, even my wildly beating heart. I’d come to Jason’s father’s house to broker a peace: between the fed-up Dominican father who’d turned him out and the embittered, American-born son who was happy to leave. Each man, it’s clear, feels abandoned. Each craves an invitation, a forgiveness, that isn’t forthcoming. Jason’s stepmother has her issues, too. Her tears are like oil, tossing the flames higher.
Classic black-family stuff, I thought. In Spanglish.
Jason was seventeen the first time I resolved to save him. Six years later, never learning my lesson where a black man is concerned, I tried again.
It hurts less when I remember I was only listening to God.
It was 1998, and our family had just returned from one of the out-of-town Hoop It Up basketball tournaments to which Kevin loved taking our boys. Jason was part of Mani’s three-man crew. I’d first noticed him five years earlier, when Jason’s unashamed tears at a grade-school graduation program had amazed me. Saying good-bye to a beloved teacher, Jason—the coolest kid in Mani’s class—stood wet-faced and smiling. Only a really cool twelve-year-old could publicly embrace his tenderness in an era in which only the chilliest brothers were admired.
On this post–Hoop It Up night, I found the handsome teenager on our basement couch, exhausted from competing. Asked how he was, he whispered, “Not great.” Pressed, Jason said he was considering leaving tenth grade. It was too hard, he explained, stocking shelves at his part-time job at CVS while trying to study in the cramped apartment he shared with his cousin, sixteen, her husband, and their two babies. He’d flunked four of his six classes. Neither of his divorced parents wanted him around. Working full-time made sense.
Sometimes, Jason admitted, death seemed better than his life.
I was stunned. Except for his occasional hotheadedness while playing hoops, Jason—the curly-haired son of a Dominican father and a Puerto Rican mother—had always presented an image of self-satisfied affability. In fourth grade, Mani had just gotten into a rare fistfight with his friend Loren when, out of nowhere, Jason had appeared. This small, confident kid Mani barely knew inserted himself between his and Loren’s flailing arms. Putting each boy into a teasing headlock, he said, “C’mon,” his tone suggesting, “You don’t really want to fight.” He pulled the battlers closer; kids hoping to witness a throwdown moved in, too. In the midst of this boy cluster, Mani and Loren discovered they didn’t want to fight.
Soon afterward Jason attended a birthday party for Mani. Strolling up our tree-lined walk, this striking kid paused in front of our unremarkable three-bedroom home and announced, “Hamani, you live in a mansion!” I instantly liked him.
When Kevin and I moved with the kids to an even larger “mansion” (four bedrooms!) nearby, Jason joined Mani’s hoops crew: hulking, Shaq-like Duke; intense Simon; thickset Carey; and tall, talented Robert. Kevin, a former high school basketball star, still lived for the game. Every summer, he and three friends played with fearsome intensity in street tournaments across the Northeast. Mani and Darrell each recruited pals in their age divisions; we transported the boys to Philly, New Jersey, and Delaware to play.
That night in the basement, I stared at a boy I’d known for years and traveled with to five cities. And I’d had no idea what his life was like. Later, I told Kevin, who was equally shocked. Not quite believing I was doing it, I asked Kev how he’d feel about asking Jason to live with us.
I fell even more in love with my husband when he replied, “I think we should.” Because a more practical, less wonderful man would have responded, “As if.”
As if we weren’t already gasping for breath, keeping afloat two careers, a house, bills, parents, siblings, and sons ages fifteen, twelve, and two. As if we could easily afford feeding, housing, and clothing a fourth kid. As if it wasn’t risky, inviting a seventeen-year-old whose peripatetic life had included drinking, drugs, sex, and license-free driving into our family. As if I, who worked at home, wasn’t already smack in the tornado’s eye. But I kept bumping into another “as if.”
As if God—the ultimate Man to whom I wanted to give—wouldn’t want us to try. At times I wondered if my need to give was my soul’s response to God’s biblical directive that we inspire and sustain our fellow man. Whatever the source of my help him, reach out to her, give him a break, tell her something lovely about herself impulse, I knew I would need Divine help on this one.
In some ways, opening our home to Jason made perfect sense. If ever an at-risk youth seemed perfect for rescuing, it was him. His past was complicated, but
his present instincts couldn’t have been more positive: he was bright, sensitive, quick to see and address the needs of others. Add good looks and a sweet disposition, and you had a youth whose potential was unlimited.
I first met with Jason’s thirty-something mother, a pretty, petite woman consumed with raising her adorable brood by her second husband. Her courtesy couldn’t disguise her puzzlement: Why would we take in a child who had given her fits? Thanking me, she agreed Jason should live with us. At the start of the new school year, he moved in.
Kevin’s and my first concern—that our streetwise charge would adversely influence our very suburban boys—proved unfounded. Jason honored our rules despite finding them “excessive.” He stayed home on school nights, went to bed at prescribed hours, and informed us of his whereabouts on weekends. He joined our boys in homework sessions, happily babysat for Skye, and did more housework than either Mani or Darrell. Part of him had yearned for someone to keep tabs on him, to encourage him, to lovingly call him on his mistakes. Every day, Kev and I felt more like we had another son to advise and buy school supplies for, and with whom to discuss the future. Our kids chafed a bit at receiving less attention, but the nuts-and-bolts part of the arrangement was comparatively easy.
School was harder. It didn’t take long to understand why Jason had considered dropping out. He had long ago decided academics were relevant only to natural brainiacs or the privileged; he’d shrugged off school and taken outside jobs. Now he was a full-time student. The first six months he lived with us, I spent more time meeting with his teachers than with Mani’s and Darrell’s combined. In one such meeting three months after Jason moved in, I expressed disappointment over the D+ he had earned in English. “But for Jason, a D-plus is a major improvement,” the teacher explained. “When I told another teacher who’d taught him he’d made that, she couldn’t believe it. It means he’s working. And I’m sure he will do better.” The instant fix I’d secretly hoped for wasn’t forthcoming. But we were committed to giving him what he needed.
