Waiting for my own Easter

There was a point in the past when I stayed away from my parents for a very long time. When I finally came home, they had already aged quite a lot. If I were not their child, I probably would not recognize the two old strangers that cried upon seeing me at the door. But I knew immediately it was them. A son just knows his parents.

For a good part of my life, these two people had been the object of my anger. There were many things they either did to me or did not do for me, which had caused me great pain. But I kept it all to myself. Except for an occasional curt statement or my keeping distance from them for many years, there was hardly any sign of what was going on inside me.

It is always nice to hear of someone trying to correct the mistakes of his past, to mend a broken relationship, to heal hurt feelings. We all love stories of repentance and forgiveness, when someone decides to put his emotional baggage behind him and say, "I’m sorry" or "I forgive you."

But oftentimes those words are never said. Oftentimes the ones who hurt us don’t even know that we’ve been carrying resentment, that we’ve been wounded by their attitude or words or actions. Oftentimes, after having made up our mind to put an end to our self-crucifixion, we don’t want to talk about it anymore.

Maybe if I told them my pain, my parents would have said, "If we only knew that those little lapses were hurting you so badly, we would have done all we could to make up for them." Their failure to give me moral support in all my youthful endeavors might probably be given justification, as well. "Not that we weren’t proud of your achievements at such a young age," they would surely say. "It was just our way of telling you that you could do better, so you would try even harder on your own."

It might sound like an exaggeration, but – really – had I been told in my child-hood, "You’re a wonderful little boy," I would have turned out to be the youngest president of the Philippines or Supreme Court justice. I believe that even if parents are so busy, there is no excuse for failing to say those simple words to their child; such few words will not take so much time to be said. I never heard those words said to me.

But, of course, parental love is not something parents tell their children about. The best way to express it is by loving actions. Yet I, for lack of a better option, would have relished even empty lip service. The reason for the cold attitude of my parents was something I could never grasp. Not that I was too young then to understand—but there was just no reason for it.

It’s very hard for a child who had not been shown parental love to show love for his parents, in return. I know, for a fact, how very difficult it is to forgive parents who let you down. But I also know that the difficulty is not only because of the parents’ lack of care and support for their child; these sins are not beyond forgiveness. The bigger reason for the aggrieved child’s hardness is often because he has not forgiven himself.

When we are immersed in our resentment towards people close to us, we subconsciously feel self-contempt for our negative feelings. Our instinct tells us that we should be loving towards our parents, our family, our friends. When we feel bad towards the people we’re supposed to love, no matter how justifiable it may be, we also feel bad about ourselves.

It saddles our life journey so much to be carrying an emotional baggage. We need to put it behind us, and be healed. Self-healing is never easy, though. It requires self-reconciliation first, to settle out matters within ourselves. This is quite a feat to do, but a very necessary first step for moving on.

We need to integrate within us all the positives and negatives about ourselves, to own up all the good and all the bad that comprise our personality. We need to accept the truth about ourselves and let there be no self-denial anymore. Being hurt doesn’t always mean that we’ve been intentionally wronged. We can be wounded, too, by way of our own unrealistic expectations.

Revenge was a very tempting idea for me, because my hurt was so deep. Revenge is sweet, it is said. But sweet, I realized, is not necessarily good. It can, in fact, interfere with our wellbeing, as we know of many health conditions arising from excessive indulgence with sweets.

I thought that as a grown-up I should deal with and not dwell on the past. True, I was treated with indifference as a child, but I am not a child anymore and need not abuse myself any further by burning up in my own hate. I’d been gasping in the fumes of my grievances and had to seek relief from the distress. Instead of simply being aggrieved, I chose to become fully aggressive—to actively initiate repairs in my broken relationship with my parents.

To deal with our lives means we have to try to get out of the hateful sphere we find ourselves in. If we are successful, we will be able to have healthier, more loving relationships in both our personal and general worlds. Once we let go of past hurts, we can get on with our lives. But if, after all our best attempts to put matters behind us, it is clear that there is not going to be a healthy, loving relationship with our parents or other loved ones because they just aren’t up to it—then all we can do is let it be. In that case, "putting it behind us" means we stop trying to draw blood from rock.

On the other hand, the passive search for love in our lives creates an enormous void within us. So many of us need to be held and hugged physically before we can know that we’re okay as individuals. Such need makes us become emotionally dependent on others, our parents included, to our great disadvantage. I had to get up from that bottomless pit towards a stronger position that would allow me to first give, and then hopefully get, genuine love.

I have decided to reconcile my feelings towards my parents, on my own terms. In the first place, they probably didn’t know what was going on. I now try to show them none of the attitude I so much resented from them. No more indifference for indifference.

Even truly loving parents may fall short of the bar of perfection. But that does not necessarily make them bad persons. We must always remember that. Like us, they might have been products of their own parents’ lack of parental wisdom, and are only passing on to us unknowingly what they themselves were given. If we demand perfection from others, our insistence will consume us and hinder our personal growth. We will waste away our life waiting for something that can never be.

It is written: "Honor your father and your mother." It is not mere proposition, but a divine commandment. We may not have to waive off our brains, our serenity, and our lives in our parents’ favor, but we are obligated to honor them. To do this, we don’t need to put up a big act or to aspire for a dramatic response. I do not; that’s not the way I was raised. But if our intention is earnest enough, our efforts will all feel so good to us, no matter the actual outcome. That’s what ultimately matters, a truly liberating, healing, spiritual thing.

For me, honoring my parents is as much about me as it is about them. If I will have done my best and can uphold the sincerity of my intentions, even if my attempt will not be able to produce the response I hope for—simply trying is victory enough.

Manifest parental love is surely something we all need. But we can still be complete without it. In fact all our relationships, any relationships we have with our fellow mortals, are mere accessories to our life experience. Of course, the love of family and friends can provide special warmth, and makes us forget our instinctive loneliness. But the truth is that we are solitary beings—we were born alone, our experience of life is uniquely and individually ours alone, and we will each leave this world in exactly the same way.

It’s hard to say if I’ve fully redeemed my relationship with my parents. The bruised feelings from the past still lurk around somewhere. I simply rejoice in being able, at least, to push my anger and hate farther and farther away every day. It takes time for wounds to heal, much more emotional wounds. Healing, like repentance, does not come quickly.

For now, I can only hope to experience my own personal Easter someday. To be able to wholly get out of the dungeon of bitterness. To see my light at the end of the tunnel. To attain total emotional and spiritual enlightenment. To have my true chance, at last, to fully embrace life.

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