When I learned that my grandmother’s mother died when she was eight and her first-born son died as an infant, my heart began to feel compassion toward her.
But I never thought about how her anger and unhappiness impacted my father as a child. I knew from experience as a child, for example, that my paternal grandmother Lillie was an unhappy and often angry woman. The change in my heart toward my parents began when I learned over time bits and pieces of their stories. Years later God showed me that being left out of the in-crowd was actually a protection from harmful activities those kids were involved in. Nor did I have eyes to see that God could be using my perceived losses and weaknesses for my good. That I might be responsible in some way never occurred to me. My lack of confidence in relationships, my weakness in resisting the influence of friends, and my inability to be comfortable and confident in who I was … it all seemed to be their fault. I found them guilty for my shyness, insecurity, fears, and for not teaching me to know God as a child. In my late twenties and early thirties, I blamed my parents as the source of all that troubled me. I understood because I felt the same way when I was in her season of life. Like many of us when we become adults, get married, and begin raising our own families, she sees clearly as a mom of two all the mistakes her parents made. A sweet friend has been struggling with her childhood and what she experienced from her parents.
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