På min väns begäran... ;)

OK, fröken H.R, jag lägger ut den... Men mina älskade familjemedlemmar som läser, ni vet att det här är gammalt gammalt GAMMALT och inget som längre grämer mig. Jag älskar er!

Det här är alltså Creative Non-Fiction, en sann händelse som ska resultera i ett större resonemang om ett mer allmängiltigt "problem"...

I remember my childhood and also my early adolescence as very happy. I, my two little sisters and my little brother, although in an age span of eight years, chased each other around the neighborhood on bikes and on foot. We shot our bee bee guns, climbed trees, built LEGO cities and threw the SEGA controllers against the walls of my brother’s room when one of us lost a life on Alex the Kidd in Miracle World. Some of my friends in school, mostly the ones that didn’t have any siblings, used to comment me and my family by saying: “You are so lucky, you don’t ever have to be alone and you always have someone to talk to”. In the long run, excluding all the times of great irritation caused by siblings intruding on my most cherished private time, I couldn’t help but to agree with my friends.

My recollection of my father from this period of my life is vague. He was always there, sometimes playing football and sometimes making supper when mom was working late. He talked to us in the only way he knew how, keeping the conversations on a practical level, but I never thought that he didn’t love me or my siblings. I can’t say he was like a shadow, because he was there, in flesh and blood, but he moved in the shadows of my reality, almost becoming a blur. My mother on the other hand was the one I came to for advice, money, comfort and support. The most vivid memory I have of her is from the kitchen, in the light of our ridiculous lamp with a spring that made it go up and down. She’s all curled up on a wooden chair with a cigarette glowing in her hand and a book in front of her. As an adult, I detest the smell of old cigarettes, but as a child I loved burying my face in mom’s dressing gown to fill my nose with old smoke and musk perfume. When she started working late more and more often, I brought one of her dressing gowns down to my room. At night I sometimes lay awake, with the worn pink fabric in my hands, my fingers following the outlines of the Asian pattern on the back.

Looking back, I can’t remember what I really thought about mom working late. I guess I just got used to it, although I know that all of us tried to stay up until she came home. Some of the time it wasn’t so hard but sometimes it was utterly pointless. I was in my early teens when she started coming home late, so I was probably more occupied with the kind of problems you encounter at that age, what to wear, if He saw me in the cafeteria and what to do that weekend. At first, I didn’t pay attention to the reoccurring phone calls from her boss either; it’s not all that uncommon that an employer calls his employees. But something, impossible for me to recall, got stuck in my mind and led me to the discovery that curved the road of my life in a totally different direction.

It was the note that did it. Dad and my siblings had left for Småland and our cottage there, me and mom stayed at home. She told me she was going out with a co-worker, to get some beer and talk, and she probably would spend the night in Helsingborg. She left the note, with the artistically curved digits that made me get the phone book, go to the register and look them up. The name hit me in the way a lightning bolt lights up the night sky. It was him.

Betrayal and forgiveness are closely linked together. Some things that happen to us are easy to forgive and even to forget. Some events push our lives in directions that you never thought of before and end up enriching our lives. And some dealings cut deep wounds in us, impossible to ignore, forgive and certainly to forget. I have met a few persons that seem to have an everlasting supply of forgiveness, something that is both admirable and detestable. There is a point in forgiving those who treat us wrong, but there is also a saying that goes “an eye for an eye”. It is difficult to say if revenge is worth it or not or if it just spirals out of control. For good or bad, I’m the type of person that needs closure on everything, to the point of total exhaustion. The internal need for honesty and truth whips me on and to let it go requires a real effort from me. So, night after night, I asked my mother why, over and over again. My frustration increased as her speaking decreased. The questions grew more intense, angrier, more and more as the minute hand with its technical intensity worked its way around the red square shaped kitchen clock. Tears of anger welled up in my eyes, the waters of despair in hers.

A period of confusion and anger followed. Marriage counseling, an apartment for separation, strained family dinners and endless questions. I spent less and less time at home, not having the energy or the will to face my mother. My siblings, as well as my father, seemed to live in the illusion that mom was trying to keep the marriage and the family together, but I knew that the divorce was an inevitable fact. My main goal in life at this time was to take care of my siblings and shelter them from the falling apart of our world. I’m not sure if my efforts paid off, but it was what kept me going.

It was sort of relieving when the divorce was final, even more so when mom decided to move from the little town we lived in. My dad had lost both his parents during the course of the divorce and he was in really bad shape, not being able to handle the fact of starting over. He expressed thoughts of suicide from time to time and of fear of finding him dead, I didn’t visit him. Something inside me told me that his threat had a degree of certainty in it and that I couldn’t handle. My mother didn’t get many visits from me either, I couldn’t bear it. The person on the note was with her, at first in the house my father had built and then in another town, a fact that made the betrayal ever at hand in my mother’s presence.

As time went on, things returned to the closest form of normality it could under the circumstances. But more secrets and betrayals lurked in the shadows. The pot that seemed to have slowed down to a simmer suddenly boiled over and left burnt stains on the white kitchen stove that was my life. My parents took turns in turning up the heat, by revealing each other’s secrets and betrayals. To know what was truth and was fiction became impossible and the only way out was to stop listening to them.
People have their reasons for hiding things and keeping secrets. We all do it. All of us on a regular basis. But when should you come clean? When is it time to open the locked doors of secrecy? There inevitably comes times in our lives when the truth, although hurtful and everlastingly scaring, is the only way to move forward. People get hurt by the truth and the secrets we keep inside sometimes and we can only pray for their forgiveness. But on the other hand, aren’t there some things that are better left unsaid? There are truths you wish you never heard. As a child, you tend to idolize your parents. You, as I, live in a glass bubble of happiness and love and nothing at all seems wrong with that bubble. Many times that actually is the case, there’s nothing wrong. But at times the truths start surfacing and cracks appear in the glass bubble until it no longer holds together.

How, then, do you decide which truths that are possible to forgive and which are not?