Letting the Rock Crumble

 Since I was a little girl, I quietly assigned myself a job.

Keep everyone else happy.

Make things better.

As a teenager, my friends came to me with their problems.

I listened.

I comforted.

I searched for answers.

Helping other people felt as natural as breathing.

Years later, a friend stayed with me for a while.

Most of my life, I positioned myself as the strong one.

The rock.

The dependable one.

The one who carried everyone else’s burdens, even when my own shoulders were already heavy.

When I think about my life, one memory takes my breath away.

The day of my daughter’s funeral.

It was the worst day of my life.

As people came to hug me and offer their condolences, I found myself comforting them.

Even then.

Even in the deepest grief I had ever known.

I instinctively reached for their pain before my own.

That is how deeply this role had become a part of me.

Somewhere along the way, I came to believe that rocks don’t get to fall apart.

They don’t get tired.

But tonight, as I write these words, something feels different.

I can feel that rock beginning to crumble.

I don’t really know what that means.

Part of me wants to gather the pieces and build it back exactly as it was.

Another part wonders if it was never meant to last forever.

Maybe the rock isn’t crumbling because I am becoming weaker.

Maybe it is crumbling because I no longer need to carry a role that was never mine to begin with.

Perhaps beneath the rock is a woman who needs to grieve her own pain.

I don’t know exactly who she is yet.

But for the first time, I don’t feel the need to stop the crumbling.

My Sister’s Keeper

 For most of my life, I gave certain people a free pass.

My parents were among them.

My sister was too.

Looking back, I realize how difficult it was for me to be honest about the relationship we had.

There were moments of kindness.

Moments when she was loving to my face.

But there were also moments that left deep wounds.

Today, we no longer have a relationship.

That was my choice.

It took me more than sixty years to arrive at that decision.

Not because I didn’t see what was happening.

But because I kept explaining it away.

I kept making excuses.

It is confusing when someone can make you feel loved one moment and deeply hurt the next.

As children, I remember not feeling especially close to my sister.

She lied about me.

She stole from me.

Even then, trust was difficult.

As adults, things only got worse.

Instead of listening to my own experience, I found reasons to justify her behaviors.

I questioned myself more than I questioned the behavior.

That was familiar.

It was what I had learned to do.

For years, I believed it was my job to understand everyone else’s pain while setting aside my own.

I became everyone else’s keeper except my own.

The hardest part of healing has not been letting go of the relationship.

The hardest part has been admitting the truth to myself.

That I was hurt.

That some wounds don’t heal simply because we keep forgiving without acknowledging their impact.

Choosing distance was not an act of revenge.

It was an act of honesty.

Perhaps for the first time in my life, I became the keeper of my own heart.

And maybe that is what love sometimes looks like.

Not holding on at all costs.

But having the courage to protect the peace we have worked so hard to find.

Different Standards

 Today I found myself remembering what it was like after my first marriage ended.

I was only nineteen.

Heartbroken.

Traumatized.

Unsure of who I was or where my life was headed.

For a while, I moved back in with my parents.

Instead of finding comfort, I felt shame.

Although they had encouraged—or at least supported—the marriage, they never let me forget that it had been a mistake.

I heard about my failures far more than I heard about my pain.

And because I was a frightened young woman, I believed every word.

I carried those judgments as though they were the truth about who I was.

I didn’t just think I had made a mistake.

I believed I was the mistake.

What has taken me almost a lifetime to see is something I never allowed myself to consider.

My parents made mistakes too.

Some of them were small.

Some of them were significant.

There were choices they made that deeply affected our family.

Yet somehow, I never believed I had the right to feel anything about those choices.

I held myself to one standard.

And I held them to another.

My mistakes became proof that I was flawed.

Theirs became something I quietly carried without giving myself permission to grieve, question, or even acknowledge.

Today, I see that differently.

Seeing my parents’ humanity doesn’t require me to condemn them.

But neither does loving them require me to ignore the impact their choices had on me.

Perhaps healing is giving myself permission to hold both truths at the same time.

I was a young woman who made mistakes.

They were adults who made mistakes.

One does not erase the other.

And neither determines the worth of the people who made them.

For the first time, I am beginning to believe that my younger self deserved the same grace I so freely extended to everyone else.