Peace Over Pain
Recently, I saw how far my father and I have come when he knocked, needing a favor. Giddy, he handed me the smartphone his 75-year-old-mind was learning to maneuver.
Its screen showed a selfie his oldest friend in Italy had sent him. With a shy smile, he exclaimed how this man, whom he hadn’t seen in over 50 years, looked like a grandfather. Eyes glinting, he eagerly asked me to take a shot and help him send it back across the line that reconnected them.
While he matted down a few grey wisps, preparing for his portrait, I picked up the Android I had no clue how to use and searched for the camera. Then I remembered a shot of him holding my 2-year-old nephew. Loving the spontaneous joy of that one, I suggested we send it instead and went to find it on my brother’s feed.
That’s how I saw it. My father’s fingers must have recently stumbled across one of the friends on my feed, since her name was appearing on his page as someone he’d recently looked at. A memory instantly surfaced of a time, about a year earlier, when I’d seen something similar while helping him get to a different post.
That sight had triggered a wound deeply rooted in a total lack of privacy. Back when I’d been a child in his home, there’d been no boundary my father hadn’t crossed in his need to protect me. With that, his anger would surge whenever I did any small thing that scared him.
The suppressed pain from the lack of those rights back then surged inside of the adult me, and unable to respond calmly, I reacted. The rage I hadn’t been allowed to express as a child boiled up and went off, yelling he was wrong for looking through my stuff. The man who’d let go of all of his anger over the years, and whose fear for my life could no longer exert any control over it, didn’t voice a response. He just let me rant out mine. That afternoon was damaged by pain, but this one wouldn’t be.
Having taken the time to heal those wounds, this time, I was capable of pausing, feeling more secure on the healed foundation I’d created within me. Recognizing he hadn’t done it on purpose, I reflected that it didn’t matter even if he had, and I let it go. Pleased at the progress, our past couldn’t ruin what was truly a beautiful moment. My peace was firmly in place now that the pain of my childhood had been reconciled and released. Moving on, we fired off the shot that captured him as the loving grandfather he’d become, the man, full of so much love, that he always was.
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