Surprised that he was calling, I answered the phone. He sounded really good. He wished me a happy birthday. He doesn’t usually call me even on my birthday. I call him a few times a year like on his birthday, Father’s Day and maybe Christmas or Thanksgiving. I started calling him after I forgave him. That was back when I was close to turning 40. Now at 48, I think it’s ridiculous that I ever thought he needed forgiving for leaving our family.
Back then, he was setting not only himself free, but also us.
And us rejectees all chose freedom but not to the same degree. Our belief systems bent and branched away. Mine branched out the furthest. And maybe thats how my selfish way of forgiving evolved. The degree to which I can understand the why behind someone else’s actions, is the same degree to which I can empathize. And the degree to which I can empathize, is the same degree to which I can forgive. Sometimes, though, the last piece of the forgiveness puzzle comes as an aha moment.
And sometimes, that sudden understanding comes as a tower moment.
One day, my new point of view flooded in like water from a raging dam, whose walls, made of belief systems, suddenly collapsed after years of gradual deterioration. It was my son who gave me that aha moment. His words came after he overheard a phone conversation during which I had verbally unleashed my anger onto my father as I blamed him for my hard life. After I hung up, I was crying. My son heard me and came into my room. “It’s okay, Mom,” he consoled me. “You’re almost forty.”
It’s ironic. The twenty year old looks at the forty year old like they look at the sixty year old. Old.
In that moment, I remembered my own silent voice saying, “I can’t believe you’re sixty and still blaming your father for your failed life.” It was a phrase which I had thought every time I talked to Jane Doe, a regular caller on the crisis line. During each call, she told the same story about how her father had destroyed her life through abandonment. I felt this wave of shame for my judgment of her when I was literally exactly the same.
But let me get back to the aforementioned phone conversation during which I told my father all about himself. He took it with no push-back. He likes conflict even less than I do. He’s a leaver not a fighter. My verbal assault was awkward and choppy like both my immature 12th house Mars and Mercury. I was still the kid and he was the (only) adult in my mind. I made him into my scapegoat because I thought he should be blamed. And I thought he was rejecting me all those years that he rarely reached out to me.
But now I realize he was just accepting his fate.
My dad knew all those years ago that he couldn’t make his kids turn against their mother. And in our religion, the kids had to pick a side. What I’m saying is that he had already trained his five kids to be soldiers for God. He taught us that God hates divorce and so he indoctrinated us to hate divorce too. There is a get out jail free card or loophole, though, within his belief system, in which divorce is justified. But it required my mom to be the sinner, the unrepentant and unsubmissive wife. It had to be all her fault. And us kids knew better.
But during this call, on my birthday, he did his best to right any wrongs. He had tried once before too on a previous call but this time was more direct. I reassured him that I held no grudges and that I had long since come to understand that he would’ve died if he hadn’t followed his heart. The physical ramifications of staying with my mom instead of being with the woman he loved was literally killing him. He vehemently agreed.
After all these years, he had felt free enough to speak about it with me. I gave no consequences. I didn’t give any should’ves or could’ves. It wasn’t even really grace I gave. Because really, I’m the one who needed grace for not understanding that he needed to follow his heart and not allow anyone, including his children, to add any stress to his life. If he would’ve sacrificed himself for us, he wouldn’t be a living example of a man who regained his health by surrendering to the season of selfishness.
To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: He hath made every thing beautiful in his time ~ Ecclesiastes 3:1 & 11a
I never expected that healing conversation to happen in my lifetime, much less on my 48th birthday.
Maybe he called because I had barely called him at all this past year. That was because I didn’t know what I would say when he asked me about my nursing work. Don’t get me wrong, he is more than happy to do much of the talking by giving a full update about his life when I call. But I knew he would also ask about mine. And I didn’t know how to explain to him that I’ve been living off of my savings and credit since I’ve felt myself being pushed out of nursing. So I just didn’t call him.
As we chatted, I told him that his granddaughter and I have been prepping the house for its sale. I told him that we’re planning to go back to the Carolinas. “Oh,” he said before asking, You’ll quit your job then before you move?” And there it was, the topic which I had been avoiding. I tried to explain and he tried to give me some advice of which only the latter part was applicable. “Ultimately, you have to do what you feel is right,” he said.
I said I also want to live in California. He replied by asking me why I would want to live in such a liberal state. I didn’t tell him that I might be the most liberal person he knows. He taught me extremism by bringing me up in extreme fundamentalism much of which occurred while we lived in the extreme cold of Minnesota. And now I have grown to be extremely liberal. Ironically, much of my expansion happened in the extreme heat of Arizona. I also didn’t tell him that my natal 8th house, the house of extremes, hosts my north node, lot of fortune, Pluto and Uranus.
I did tell him, though, about the Tenderloin district of San Francisco.
I told him about how I want to work and serve within that neighborhood. I told him only partly why as I reminded him of my years in nursing spent on the crisis line and in psych facilities and detox centers. “It’s just my thing,” I said. I didn’t say that I had learned the forbidden “science” of astrology, which also confirmed it was my jam. And I didn’t tell him that it was specifically the Tenderloin because I was born remembering a “past” life there. He would say reincarnation doesn’t exist and that Diamond Jessie is just a demonic familiar spirit.
Anyway, he said if God had called me to do it and I had prayed about it, then I should. On that much, we agree. I’m never going to argue the Bible with him or try to make him see my point of view because I understand his. He brought me up from his point of view and I’m glad he did. I wouldn’t have it any other way. And by the way, he would argue that I must have never truly been a born again Christian in the first place.
The Definition of Liberal
I do not exclusively align with either political party, conservative or liberal. Rather, I identify with liberty. The Oxford Languages Dictionary defines liberal as follows: “Middle English: via Old French from Latin liberalis, from liber ‘free (man)’. The original sense was ‘suitable for a free man’, hence ‘suitable for a gentleman’ (one not tied to a trade), surviving in liberal arts.” I find California suitable for a free woman. Diamond Jessie is buried there. And how ironic it is that I am the only one of five kids who was born there under the influence of such liberal energy?
“Give me liberty or give me death!”
Our childhood Christian education curriculum taught us that Patrick Henry said that on March 23,1775. But I was also taught that liberty and freedom came with a lot of restrictions which fell into a category called holiness (without which no man shall see the Lord ~ Hebrews 12:14b.) But now I think radical liberty comes from or is birthed out of radical restrictions. The heavier the tie that once bound, the more boundless the rebel becomes.
I snapped this photo while I was out one day. I am certain only of my interpretation of the intended meaning.
I’ve thought a lot about why I had to get all the way to forty eight years old before I could be free enough to tell the truth about how liberal I really am, how free I really am. I have considered the consequences and I am not without fear. But I was born under the freedom of the western skies and I cannot deny that I am in a season of selfishness. I have to be brave enough to be selfish enough to pursue freedom. It’s me for me, mi 4 me.