My grandmother was a complicated woman.
Born in 1911, she was already 9 years-old before the 19th Amendment was passed in the United States which guaranteed women the right to vote.
People who met my grandmother--on a plane, at a party, in the grocery store--always enjoyed her.
She was smart, well-educated with a Master's Degree (the only one in her family in fact that went to college), well-traveled (Africa, Europe, Ukraine, Cuba), and could carry on great conversation until the wee hours of the morning.
The only problem was: she had no business having or raising children.
And I don't believe she planned to.
She was well into her 30's when she got pregnant by a guy she was seeing from work- my grandfather.
As this was 1940's America, birth control would not be legalized in the United States until the 1965 Supreme Court Case Griswold vs. Connecticut, and Roe vs. Wade wouldn't legalize abortion until 1973.
The consequence of which was, upon hearing that my grandmother was pregnant, her employer promptly fired her.
Of course you know what came next.
Marriage. Housewife. Child. Another child.
All of which I believe were not the plan, and for which my grandmother was completely ill-equipped; the evidence being her style, or there lack of, of parenting and grandparenting of small children.
I was reminded of my grandmother this past summer when I was watching a National Geographic television series called Genius that depicted the life and work of twentieth century physicist Albert Einstein.
It was a 10-part series, and the first few episodes gave rich detail into the thorny relationship between Einstein and his first wife, Mileva Maric.
Einstein met his first wife at Zurich Polytechnic School where she too was studying to be a physicist.
However, when she became pregnant, and then pregnant again, Mileva Maric's potential career as a physicist came to an abrupt end.
What's more, according to the series, it seems that all of the disappointment, resentment and rage that her dream was never realized, manifested and prolonged throughout her entire life- impacting of course her own life and the lives of her two children.
I believe it was the same for my grandmother.
Thinking about stories like that of Albert Einstein and Mileva Maric's, or my grandparents, reminds me of the 2004 Oscar winning film Crash.
If you have never seen the movie, in short, it is dramatic look at the racial and social tensions in modern-day Los Angeles, California as portrayed through the over-lapping and interlocking lives of 11 diverse characters.
And as with many films that have ensemble casts, it is not until midway through the movie that you begin to see how all of these individual narratives interconnect with the others looking something like this:
It's like one individual is happily or unhappily walking their own path, and then CRASH, he or she collides with another life, forever changing the lives of all involved now and in future generations.
Like my own parents' first encounter in a Botany class at college in the 1960's.
My mother had just transferred from a Midwest college. My father had just discharged from the military. And Crash...Never mind that these two never should have created a life together.
So it goes.
There is a famous quote that is attributed to a variety of different sources that goes something like this:
Forgiveness means giving up all hope for a better past.
I like this quote, and think of it often in regards to my ancestors and all of their "crashes."
To me it represents a deep, full body, acceptance of the past, which is a critical step in the process of forgiveness.
Psychologist, Mindfulness teacher and author Elisha Goldstein wrote a blog in the Huffington Post about 7 years ago called "Forgiveness Means Giving Up All Hope of a Better Past," that invoked the quote above.
In the article, he wrote this sentiment on forgiveness of difficult realities:
We keep the past alive by holding tightly to it, so perhaps it is occurring in this present moment. Now, I'm not suggesting we forget the past for the past is our teacher, however, I am suggesting that we loosen our grip on it a bit.
Loosen our grip. That sounds reasonable. And more importantly, possibly do-able.
Release all hope, and you might get a greater sense of peace and equanimity.
Spiritual writer Anne Lamott writes in her book Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace that:
When you do give up hope, a lot can happen. When it's not pinned wriggling onto a shiny image or expectation, it sometimes floats forth and opens like one of those fluted Japanese blossoms, flimsy and spastic, bright and warm.
She also writes in her very matter-of-fact manner: forgiveness means you no longer have to punch back.
Forgiving people doesn't necessarily mean you want to meet them for lunch. It means you try to undo the Velcro hook. Lewis Smedes said it best: 'To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you.'
I like that. To forgive is to set a prisoner free...It reminds me of this sculpture.
It was one of those rare moments that I inexplicably could not seem to take my eyes off of the sculpture, and I unusually felt quite emotional just looking at it.
The name of the sculpture is: Freedom Rider.
I've come to believe that this sculpture may be the embodiment of "releasing all hope" or in other words, forgiveness.
Please let me know what you think, and stay tuned for Forgiving Our Ancestors Part V.
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