|
|
|
It matters not By Mary
Jane Holt Somebody hurt me a couple of years ago. Pulled the rug out from under me. Sent me slipping and sliding emotionally. Floundering like I don’t ever remember floundering before. About three weeks ago, I decided it was important for me to go back and confront the folks who did that to me. I made an initial call to lay the groundwork for just such a confrontation. I hung up the phone and got sick. Three days into whatever I caught or whatever caught me, my husband says to me, “Honey, you are making yourself sick. You have to put this thing behind you. Whatever it takes, you have to do it. You cannot let it continue to have this kind of power over you.” This keyboard is not capable of telling you how irritated I was as I listened to his comments. I responded by saying I was doing no such thing. I was not making myself sick, that I had given nobody that much control over me. Last week I started on my second round of antibiotics and finally the upper respiratory thing I had began to release me from its grasp. About 15 days into the whole episode I realized nobody else around me had gotten sick. That maybe my hubby was right. That maybe I was wrong. Maybe the experience of two years ago really did still have that kind of control over me. Have you ever been there? Maybe it was the death of a loved one, a discovery that a spouse or lover had been unfaithful, an accident of sorts, or just plain old cruelty on the part of somebody in a position to get to you. We don’t get though life without those things, do we? People hurt us. We can’t help that. We can’t prevent it. We can’t control what others do and say, can we? But we can control what degree of control they hold over us by their actions or lack of action. We can do that. We can come to terms with the victim mentality that sets in if we choose to. We can decide how long we will be a victim. We can let go. Forgive and forget. Trouble is, I’m in a position now where I want to do just that. I want to forgive and forget, but I don’t want those I want to forgive to ever forget that I’m forgiving. Does that make my forgiveness unreal? Not genuine? Folks, I don’t know. Sometimes we just have to wing it, don’t we? We have to work through things that bother us. Eat at us. Cripple us emotionally. It’s like the upper respiratory illness I’m finally getting over. I felt like I had it the first week, then it had me for the past two weeks. That’s how it is with emotional pain and injury, too. We have it inflicted on us. And sometimes we let go. Sometimes we don’t or can’t, then it has us. I’m wondering now, if the longer it has us, then does it take that much longer for us to become free of its hold? Or can we just decide, that is choose to be free and be free once and for all? I’m not there yet. But I will be. Yesterday, I spotted a dazzling red, fat and fluffy cardinal in a naked tree in my back yard. His brilliance against the sparkling grey and white limbs was breathtaking. Through the binoculars I stared for nearly an hour as he posed and sang for me in the delicate lace framework of the tree’s winter branches. I remembered a poem I wrote one time. IT MATTERS NOT I read not what the world expects and write naught for another’s praise It matters not if my pen’s stroke doth an eyebrow raise I’ll giggle I condescend to no man’s ways and always will follow my heart it matters not if, at times, I do not know where to start I’ll wait I seek not to follow the crowd for following breeds vanity It matters not if only a lonely bird sings for me I’ll listen I trust but the one God I know and hold I tight unto His hand It matters not if others doubt and do not understand I’ll trust I act not on another’s faith Nor can another act on mine It matters much that each must find his own faith in his own time I will find that woman again. I will regain the self-confidence she had when she wrote those words. She’s worth finding. I want to know her again. She’s worth knowing.
|
||