real – Aspirational Adventures

Forgiveness is a dog sitting at the top of the stairs looking cute waiting to be hugged after he has just trashed the couch and put all the cushions on the floor!

In my last writing group I ran only one lady turned up. Her and I have known each other for a while so we got chatting about more than just writing. Slowly it emerged about how forgiveness, of ourselves for being hurt as much as for others who have hurt us is important.

In fact Jesus says in The Lord’s Prayer

Forgive us our wrongs as we forgive those who wrong against us
[paraphrased]

So we are asking to be forgiven as much as we are asking to forgive, I think. There will be follow up post to this in May after we have done these phrases with the youth group because we all know these lovely young people seem to get to the heart of things.

But as we chatted I thought more and more about how can we understand forgiveness. So I set the challenge with the lady, which I am also going to share with my writing group mailing list for making Forgiveness some solid, giving it a personae, a personality, making to tangible. I think too often we try to understand abstract concepts but we need to make them whole and real.

For me forgiveness if a warm friend, but not the sort of friend who agrees with everything you say but who challenges you when you tried to get round things. I have a couple of friends who are like that. I’ll get into moan mode and they’ll got “yes I see where you’re coming from but have you looked at it from this side.” Now to me that is forgiveness. It doesn’t say you’re wrong but it says you have to move on.

This picture I saw on Facebook this morning says it all for me. Forgiveness is the challenging friend who says “let it go, you don’t need to carry this. Get off the track”. I did also discover that as well as forgiving I need to put in something more than to make it move from an empty forgive to a positive space. Perhaps I need to explore whether forgiveness walks alone or has a friend?

Photograph of my sister doing what she loved best, being with horses, probably over 30 years ago!

Today is the 10th anniversary of my sister’s death. She was working as groom at an event, went to the bar that night, had a few drinks, took the wrong exit from the bar. It was pitch dark and she feel into a drainage ditch. Why she went out the wrong way and why no one stopped her going that way are questions I know I have often asked.

But my sister was no saint. She wasn’t one of those people who with all honesty we could say, as you see on too many headlines, was the “salt of the earth”, “made everyone happy” and those other sugary headlines. My sister was hard work. I have memories of her telling me off for rolling cigarettes in a pub on the edge of Virginia Water. I was in a grunge phase at that time. She would tell me I was bring my children up wrong.

When she died she was going through a very public and acrimonious divorce which she was conducting on Facebook accusing her husband of many things. True or not true we will never know. She would also phone me up and scream at me down the phone telling me what an awful wife I was being. She was hard work.

I think observing other women who hit menopause and go suddenly really strange that she was going through some major hormonal imbalance due to menopause which no one ever picked up. Or if they did she never told us. I have other friends, who are no longer friends, who just changed personality in their 40s, totally altered their belief systems and way of living, accused their partners and others close to them of the strangest of things. Something odd goes on.

Again I do believe that with a lot of “women’s issues” that they are dismissed, not looked into closely, or like many things that involved our minds and emotions, are feared and not looked at as they should be.

I do believe we need to start looking at the menopause and the change women go through at this time in more details. There needs to be real help available and we need to talk about it. Though as I know from my daughter it is only now that we really talk about periods and the changes that go on in adolescence.

So we need to get this conversation out in the open. We need stop hiding behind what appears to be some medieval superstition about menstrual blood. These are major changes that go on not just with a woman’s body but with her mind and emotions too. Let’s get this out in the open. And I’m afraid ladies that is going to be up to us to be more open, honest and real about the s**t we go through.