In the Beginning: Part 3 - Getting Through It

(The following is a continuation from "In the Beginning: Part 2 - Revelations)

Getting through it has been no easy task. In fact, although I'm made considerable progress, I can't say I'm done - just that I'm farther along the path.

It started out with hatred. Without any proof, I had an intense hatred toward my grandfather and an almost worse hatred toward my grandmother. It's like I held her responsible for enabling my grandfather's alcoholic behavior. When he was sober, she harped at him about his drinking. But when he got drunk, she babied him, nursing him until he was sober. What could you expect? To me it seems like the drunken state got him more sympathy.

Add that to the fact that my grandmother was extremely manipulative and I guess I can understand my feelings. But what I couldn't understand is why I had such feelings against my grandparents when all my cousins adored them. To say the least, it just made me feel more broken - and obviously wrong.

So what changed to help me get through it? The one thing I've learned is that hating only hurts one person: me. By nature, I am a person that can't hold a grudge. I know - doesn't sound much like an incest survivor. But think about it. Usually we blame ourselves for everything - not anyone else, so it makes a perverse kind of sense. But mainly it is because I really believe in God as our Heavenly Father and in all humanity as my brothers and sisters. And no matter what else has happened in my life, I have been blessed with a mother and father and brother and sisters that love and support me: not knowing the private hell I was going through, and more recently, discovering the depth of my darkness. Still they love me and accept me and stand by me in my struggle. So holding a grudge doesn't come to me naturally. Well, that and the fact my memory is SO bad, I can't remember to hold a grudge.

But the one grudge I held was against my grandparents. I've often said that I believe in the death penalty for child molesters. I didn't exempt my grandfather from that statement. They murder the spirits of children - they deserve as harsh a penalty as someone who kills the body.

It has only been in the last year that my healing has begun. And it started with the realization that these grandparents raised my father and my uncles and my aunt. That was a startling blow to me. You have to understand, although my father is gone now, a victim of cancer, he was one of the most gentle, loving men I have ever known. I may never be able to have a normal relationship, but it will not have been because of his example. He and my mother were lovers throughout their lives. He died 31 years before my mother and, though she lived a happy life and took joy in her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, she missed my father for all those years. And when we lost her recently, our sadness was countered by the joy of knowing that she was reunited with my father, who loved her so much.

Daddy believed in helping people. He was often awakened in the middle of the night to help someone with a broken washing machine, to give a blessing to a quadriplegic, to care for the sick. And he never complained. Don't get me wrong. Sometimes as a child, I felt he expected too much from me, like going to school every day, even when I didn't feel like it. (Mean old dad!) But when a shattered glass accidentally cut a vein in my hand, it was my dad who rode with me in the ambulance, telling me jokes to keep me from going into shock and sat with me as they sewed up my hand.

And my alcoholic grandfather and manipulative grandmother were responsible for raising that man. And my uncles and aunt were like my dad. Suddenly I had to admit that there was something good within my grandparents - something for which I owed them a great debt - something that actually brought tears to my eyes. And I thought about my father, who had died so many years before, and how sad he would be if my grandfather were punished eternally for something I'm still not even sure happened.

That realization shattered me. Even more, I realized that I didn't want my grandfather to suffer. That one shocked me. Perhaps through the addiction recovery program that I was attending, I was beginning to realize the fight my grandfather had suffered. Perhaps I was finally, after half a century, ready to forgive.

I think that was what my therapists over the years had been trying to prepare me for: not the horror of finally remembering, but the shock of finally forgiving.

(Continued in "In the Beginning: Part 4 - Addiction Recovery Program")