Susan Dugan - Extraordinary Ordinary Forgiveness

We had just come home from my daughters first high school basketball game. Her nagging cold had not responded to the vitamin and herbal remedies I kept cajoling her to take. As captain of the team she had a lot invested and felt elated by the victory, despite feeling under the weather. We drove home to the music of her picking every players performance apart, harmony provided by my husband who could rarely resist a good post game critique.

The low-level annoyance simmering at the edge of my conscious mind began to bubble. It had been an especially trying day with Christmas chores added to the usual burgeoning weekend To Do list. I had already talked with my husband who tended to over-identify with our daughters athletic performance about advising her from the sidelines. The coach had cautioned parents against doing so at the first parents meeting of the season, an event my husband failed to attend. What I considered his disregard for rules had been a long-standing source of conflict between us, aggravated, I felt, by our daughters adolescence. It seemed even more important to me now that we provide solid role models for our teenager, even though, in truth, I so often fell short.

By the time I dribbled a path through the landfill of tangled lights and boxes of outdoor Christmas decorations my husband and daughter had strewn about the house that morning and settled into my spot on our sectional sofa with a bowl of stew, I felt shaky. I usually avoid caffeine but had indulged in a cup of coffee with breakfast to rev up for the many tasks at hand. My blood sugar had been zigging and zagging all day along with my mood. When my daughter popped a CD of Christmas Vacationthe 1981 Chevy Chase movie we use to launch the holiday, hoping the slapstick, dysfunctional family disasters will throw our more subtle variety into reliefI already had one foot in the door of my personal house of misery.

When I was three, my mother went back to work as a teacher leaving my younger brother and me in the care of a neighbor with two young boys. I used my role as only girl to ratchet my perceived abandonment up a notchhiding for hours in a ramshackle doghouse in the neighbors backyard. For days I sulked in self-imposed exile after our mother dropped us off, lavishing my Tiny Tears doll with all the tender care my mother seemed to have withdrawn from me. I am sorry to say that all these decades later I still now and then banish myself to the proverbial doghouse whenever those feelings of rejection rear up.

Although this movie generally brings out my inner Tina Fey, on this particular evening not even the cat taking out the Christmas tree like a feline suicide bomber could make me laugh. My husband and daughters mirth shook my doghouse walls. Every scene seemed to mock my isolation. I didnt even remember at first to ask for help from my right mind as the practice of forgiveness has taught me to do; although a part of me did stand detached, watching like a witness at an accident scene. Now and then my daughter would sneak peeks at me, no doubt confused by my reaction to a movie she knew I had always enjoyed. To me, though, it seemed increasingly shrill as it rattled my prison walls.

After the film, I decided to go to bed, hoping to circumvent a showdown, but their voices in the kitchen trailed up the stairs to me.

Everything Mom makes me take for this cold does nothing, my daughter complained. Only the Nyquil you gave me works, Daddy.

I know, he said. None of that stuff works for me, either. Youre just like me.

Their conspiratorial banter continued in this vein as I visualized all the vitamins my daughter had stuffed between cushions or dropped down heating grates over the years; the expensive Chinese herbal concoctions Id stirred up for her only to find them congealing on a windowsill several days later. They went on to articulate other traits they shared apart from me. The door to my doghouse slammed shut behind me. I stood engulfed by my story of exclusion at the hands of my ungrateful family.

After my daughter went to bed, I attempted to let my husband have it, butmuzzled by a fury I did not understandI ended up stomping upstairs and slipping into bed instead. Eventually I dozed off to the soundtrack of their transgressions playing in my head.

The next morning a kind of paralysis had replaced my anger. The walls of my belief in separation closed in on me; my doghouse door remained locked. I spent the next twenty-four hours running mindless errands and replaying the story I had chosen to reenact, while begging for help from my seemingly unavailable right mind. Despite having made A Course in Miracles my spiritual path, I found myself alone, excluded, banished, and yes, cheated by the Course. I didnt believe I could love or be loved again. I didnt even know how to make it through the day. Still, I pleaded with the Holy Spirit to help me want to release this sob story of unfair exclusion that had cost me everything I thought I wanted.

I have suffered from fleeting bouts of depression all my life but I dont think I had ever experienced loneliness this deep, maybe because I had never been willing to truly face it. But now something in me recognized that my doghouse was burning and I could only escape by walking straight through those flames, feeling the heat on my skin and taking responsibility for both building the structure and setting the fire. I realized I would rather die forsaken and alone than give up my story of suffering and, more importantly, my leading role in it. Still, a part of me knew there had to be a better way, and continued to cry out for help.

The following morning the fire had burned itself out. I no longer saw myself abused by my family in any way. Without further, futile analysis, I accepted how often I had acted based on this unconscious story, and thanked my right mind for coaxing me through the flames of illusion to see it as the same old problem: the belief in separation from God. And the same new solution: remembering through the Holy Spirit that it never happened.

I believed I had excluded God and tried to pin that crime on my loved ones. In years past, I might have wallowed for weeks on end without any shift in perception. But now I saw that despite the enormous pain of the last twenty-four hours, practicing forgiveness had allowed me to reclaim my peace of mind relatively fast. Suffering can motivate. It helped me release a tale of abuse I made up in childhood by clueing into my anger and despair and asking for a better way of looking at this.

Downstairs, my husband and daughter had whipped up their signature homemade waffles, cut up fruit and poured orange juice. My daughter stood folding the paper napkins so they made a little pocket for the utensils, the way Id taught her, the way Id learned in Girl Scout camp.

Want to eat breakfast with us, Mom? she said.

She leaned toward me, her back to my husband, and lowered her voice. What is up with him this morning? Oh, my God; he is being such a jerk.