Muchness and Light

We two have run about the hills and pulled the daisies fine. But we've wandered manys the weary foot since long, long ago.

What a year 2017 has been. Whether personally or politically, I wasn’t expecting the dramatic changes this year brought. I’m not quite sure what to expect for 2018, but I don’t imagine that it’ll be quiet.

After 27 years, I finally finished my bachelor’s degree. After more than ten years of pain, I had three levels of my cervical spine replaced and rebuilt. After three years, I ended my relationship with Rango. I had 182 Détente Days with DH—and I’m thankful for every single one.

The greatest lesson for me this year was that almost nothing will come according to my time frame. No matter how hard I work, how thoroughly I plan for any and every contingency, things occur at their own pace. The best-laid plans and all that jazz. It helps when I’m working with a goal in mind, but sometimes I still need the reminder to slow down and at least acknowledge the journey, regardless of the destination. Life is most pleasurable when I can enjoy the trek, but sometimes my path has been littered with difficult obstacles that were, at best, life lessons waiting to happen.

Because there was so much to deal with this year—which was really just a culmination of all the previous years—I went back into therapy. I’ve written a good bit about the Internal Family Systems model and how I’ve used it to deal with decades-old trauma that continues to impact my day-to-day. Part of the process includes understanding the role each subpersonality plays, the burden each carries, and the job each performs to keep the whole manageable and safe.

So, what happens when I know all of that? If the burden is lifted from the subpart, what the hell is she supposed to do now?

As I began the slow process of unburdening, I found different parts—Cissie and Stephie, Harley and Quinn, Pearl and Buttercup—who were lighter of load but who also couldn’t stay trapped in their compartments inside my head. Their work was done, and it did no one any good to keep them trapped in a dusty house, struggling to feel the light of day through an old, dirty window.

I imagined a garden for them. In my mind, it sits off to my left and back just a bit. I can hear the birds and see each blade of grass or petal of flower ripple in breezy sunlight. I can smell the earth and the life. It looks much like the yard in front of my actual house. As each subpart is unburdened, I invite them to go to the garden to play. I invite them to join Cissie on the trampoline, jumping until they’re breathless with laughter, hair mussed and clinging to their sweaty, warm necks. Sometimes Buttercup sits at the edge, bare legs dangling from the porch, dirty feet bouncing against the cool brick, and she sings. Her songs are sometimes little more than she or I can hear, but there is a hum of love whose confidence waxes and wanes but which never really fades away.

Sassafras still struggles. Sometimes I feel her very close to me, close on my immediately left and in need of reassurance when she feels overwhelmed by longing and nostalgia and confusion. But I remind her that we are still working, that I am still working. Although love may not come in the ways in which her heart has desperately imagined, it is always with her. I am always with her. But she is always free to put her burden down, just next to me, and join the others in the garden, even if just for a little while.

There are nameless, numerous others, only some of whom I’ve been fortunate enough to engage yet.

I am still working.

But if I am carrying each of them, and they are each carrying their burdens, then I am also carrying those burdens.

So tonight, as I close one year symbolically and open another, I am inviting those burdens to go into the garden, as well. Whether they be ghosts of Christmases past, unhealthy choices of present, or fears of what the future may or may not hold, I am opening the door for each of them to be free—and to be free myself of those weights.

I am offering one last toast to disappointment, to broken promises, and to unfulfilled dreams. I will drink once more to each and every lost love, all of whom mattered and will always matter, but who cannot continue to keep me mired in the past. I have accepted my fault, and I have accepted theirs, but I cannot continue to define expectations for my future based on the past actions of people I will never see or speak to again. They had opportunity not to be ghosts; I am cutting their chains loose and setting them free.

I wish each of them well as I sweep their dust out the door into the garden.

I’m going into 2018 with few expectations. I expect to continue doing my work and making myself healthy and whole. I expect to attempt new things. I expect to discover new things about myself.

I am superstitious about a few things, and New Year’s Eve is at the top of that list. How I spend that night is often indicative of the entirety of the following year. I can regale with tales of New Year’s Eve Omens for almost as many years as the Valentine’s Curse.

This year, I specifically chose to be at home with my babies. We cooked dinner together and piled up on the couch to watch The Little Prince. I rolled my eyes at the short-sighted, closed-minded grown-ups. I cried when he found his rose too late, overcome by baobabs. I gasped at the sudden lurch of my heart when the he met the snake in the desert one last time.

And I hugged my babies and told them I loved them for the millionth time, because I never want them to know what it feels like to question my love and my support. And I never want to know what it feels like not to give that love and support unconditionally.

So, I don’t know what’s coming. It will be what it is, when it is. But for now, for tonight, I am peacefully in my happiest of places, surrounded in love and comfort, quietly bidding farewell to the past.

I wish you all a peaceful, loving new year.

 

 

Some dance to remember, some dance to forget.

Last week, I had this awkward moment of running into an ex (read: very brief fling) in an unexpected public place. We didn’t speak—just eye contact and awkward silence. The next morning, Facebook Memories reminded me that it was three years ago that day that the fling had happened. The next day (and for the next two) Facebook reminded me that it was a major milestone anniversary with a different ex, tossing pictures of Vodka-soaked memories at me like Molotov cocktails. Somewhere in the midst of that, yet another ex made his presence known.

The Parade of Ghosts has begun.

This time of year marks the beginning of a couple of months of incredibly difficult anniversaries, from multiple relationships. Some days are reminders of more than one relationship—sometimes more than two—and the memories are not always kind. Yes, it is reminders of the hurt from other people, but it is also riddled with reminders of the choices I made and their lasting impact.

But I’m also riddled with reminders of who I was, of the transformation that occurred over the course of two years. I am plagued by pictures of myself from those times, and then I see myself now.

And I weep.

I know. In the last three years, I finalized my divorced, worked three part-time jobs (and then no part-time job) while going to school full time, while finishing one degree and continuing to finish another, while now working full-time and schooling part-time, while winning a huge award, while establishing a new relationship, and while raising two sons with very little help from their absentee father.

And it turned out my body was revolting but I didn’t know it, hence the extreme fatigue and hormonal issues and weight gain. Followed by an injury that has kept me out of the gym since October and that culminated in surgery last week.

Reasons not excuses.

In my heart, I feel like a fucking fraud.

None of the other stuff matters, because I got fat again. Because I regained part of the weight I spent three hours a day, for fifteen months, fighting off. When I was a stay-at-home mom who had to rely on a distant and emotionally-inconsistent husband for everything.

So right now, I’m fighting not just the ghosts of my exes and my former life, I’m battling the ghosts of myself, and they are bitches.

They are snarky and blond, with thinner thighs and less sag and a tighter ass. They are unapologetic for their choices, even now when it’s me who has to face their implications. They remind me that they warned me, that I wrote openly about how I couldn’t relinquish control of my food and weight for the rest of my life, how exactly this would happen. (I told you so!)

How maybe if I hadn’t made some of those choices along the way, I wouldn’t be in this emotional predicament.

So for all of my talk then—hell, even this talk now!—who the hell am I to tell myself or anyone else anything??

In so many ways, it feels like I’m back in the summer of 2010, in chronic pain and uncomfortable in my own skin, struggling to keep the house and the kids together and still give Stephanie time to breathe and enjoy the things that make her soul feel not dead. Not even alive. Just not dead.

I have come to accept that things are often outside my control. Really, I’m good with that. This doesn’t even feel unmanageable, just unmanaged.

So I take a deep breath—I don’t have the luxury to get real high—and try to make the mental list of what needs to be done. I tally projects and plans and intentions and expectations in an ongoing psychic To Do list, and then I am overwhelmed by it all and I just want to crawl in my bed and go to sleep.

But I can’t. There’s too damn much to do.

And even if I could sleep, my goddamn ghosts are there, just waiting.

It’s like my own production of No Exit starring Stephanie as Garcin, Inez, and Estelle simultaneously.

Existential crisis, indeed.

Today, I have no swarthy internet wisdom. I have no words of encouragement or really anything else. I can’t find the out, not yet. I know I will eventually scratch my way through the dark, along the dank wall, and claw my way out if that’s what it takes. But there’s no door opening today.

Those most I’m getting today is dirty fingernails.

 

I'm sorry to interrupt. It's just I'm constantly on the cusp of trying to kiss you.

Two evenings ago, I went to the grocery store, as I so often do during the course of Mom Duty.  I stopped to put gas in my car (which I hate to do more than anything in the world).  Just as I switched off my ignition, my phone dinged with a message from an ex and another one drove by.  Simultaneously.

Oh hell!

Over the last year, I've been out with a couple dozen men.  Most did not get a second chance.  I currently have a listed of 18 blocked numbers in my phone.  (FYI, on an iPhone, texts from blocked numbers are lost in the ether with no response to the sender.  Phone calls will go straight to voicemail.  Anything recorded stays hidden unless you unblock the number, at which point they show up in a special voicemail directory.) 

I didn't shoot them all down immediately.  I'm still casual friends with a couple of the guys I met.  (At least four of you are Facebook friends.) 

But there were a select few who drew my heart into theirs.  We moved past the point of casual chat to an actual relationship.

I've talked at length about my super ability to attract Fragile Cats.  I swear some days it's like my front door is wide open, and they just saunter across my threshold and demand to be fed and pet, twisting their long tails around my legs and tripping me up before I even realize they're there.  Ultimately they are skittish and unavailable, whether emotionally or logistically, though they'll almost always declare that's not the case.  One even swore he wasn't a cat at all—that he was, in fact, a coyote. 

When I realize they're skittish and about to run, I always offer them time and space.  Always.  They never take the chance.  Inevitably, they freak out and bail and let me down in some ludicrously soul-wrenching way.  I toss them out in my anger but always relent a few days later, letting them stew in the sun on my front porch.  Where I leave them a saucer of cream.  And the key to my back door. 

(There are a lot of always in that paragraph.  Note the pattern here.)

I am impossibly accommodating with these men.  I am equally forgiving and supplicating, because I completely understand how they work; I get why they're so easily spooked, and somehow I continue to hope that they will see something special enough in me to be worth their effort to at least try to correct their behavior.  For themselves and for me.  I care about them—hell, I even loved two of them—so of course I would do everything possible to make it work, to give them reason to meet me halfway.  Or at least a quarter of the way.  (I'm a long-legged resourceful girl; I can close the gap myself.)   

I'm unable to just cut someone like that out of my life at the slightest provocation.  It feels inherently wrong to me, to disregard someone you care about so much.  Because of my history and expectations, I have an unusually (annoyingly) high tolerance for douchebaggery.  I'm incapable of writing them off right away, though God knows the Castration Committee wishes I would learn how. 

But when they fuck it up again, that's when I'm done.  Usually.  Or I try to be.  (Again, my issues with boundaries.)

What pisses me off, though, is the text or email or phone call a few months later, telling me how much they miss me, how they think about me and wish things had gone differently.

You miss me?  Fuck you!

Every single one of them had the chance at something extraordinary.  They knew it at the time and while they were letting it go.  They would profess their care for me while throwing up their hands, apologizing for hurting me while they slapped me across the face.  (Figuratively, not literally.  The Castration Committee would harm me if I let that shit happen.  Again.)

I'm not a toy to be discarded and brought back out months later, when you realize you'd forgotten how much fun it was to play with me.  I am a really spectacular woman who cared deeply for you, and you dismissed me with a multitude of reasons and excuses.  You told me to my face that I mattered while you crossed your fingers behind your back. 

Fuck you.

And with all of them but one I am able to comfortably and happily live in a healthily detached state.  It is still a struggle, every goddamn day, to keep that one in perspective, to actively remind myself of the bad that came with him and how it almost sucked the good out of me. 

That's the one who appears when I least expect it but when I am least surprised.  That's the one who lives the closest, who I sometimes pass on the road... the one who reads my blog regularly because he misses my voice and this is the closest he can bring himself to hearing me.  The one who got away but it is never far away at all—even at 3 a.m. when we're both lying in bed missing the other.  The one who altered everything, for whom I altered everything, but who can't get his big, beautiful head out of his ass long enough to admit that he fucked it up and shouldn't have given up so goddamn quickly. 

He will read this.  He'll know it's directed at him.  He will likely continue to lurk, waiting for the time he sees that I've moved on with someone else and am in a safe enough space that he can be my friend again. 

But he's also the one I can never be friends with, even though I miss him like mad.  He's the one I loved so deeply and so passionately that the wounds of losing him are still sensitive and raw.  They'll heal eventually, but I'll be left with more scars that leave numb, faded spots on my surface. 

Maybe those are the mars I'll finally tattoo with chains, turning something ugly into something beautiful.

The rest of them can go to Hell.  He's the only one I'd follow into those depths to bring out or join, whatever it took to keep him safe. 

Some of the others will read this, too.  They'll start to think it's about them and then feel the pang! when they realize they're mistaken.  Again. 

But to every single one of you, you had your chance.  You can miss me all you want.  It doesn't change a thing. 

Unless you're that one. 

 

Yes, I promise, you are loved so don't give up.

A couple of months ago, I met a guy online.  We hit it off and agreed to a first date, which turned out to be fantastic.  Schedules were a little tough to sync at first, but we did manage to eek in a couple more great dates.  He was cute and smart and funny.  We had long, engaged conversations and fantastic chemistry.  Even though he was clearly into me, I knew pretty quickly that I didn't have substantial romantic interest in him.  (I never even got around to giving him a nickname.)

I was mulling how best to go about ending it when the court date came up for my divorce.  I was so caught up in that week that I didn't think much about it when I didn't hear from him. 

Eventually I did get a text, though, asking how court had gone, how I was, etc.  I caught him up quickly, while I was in the middle of working one of my three part-time jobs, and then asked how he was.  He finally admitted that he hadn't checked on me because he'd gone on a week-long bender. 

Red flags flapped ominously in my breeze.  He knew my history of falling for alcoholics, and I knew his history—what he'd been very adamant was an ancient history of non-alcoholic addiction that had been long-ago dealt with.  I knew I was ready to end the romantic relationship, but I liked the guy and wanted to be able to be his friend through the hard time he was having.  I offered to be a sounding board.

Another week went by with no word from him.  I was both busy and not unhappy about having a little distance from it.  Then came the voicemail, telling me he had gone on another black-out binge and was hospitalized in a detox unit.  He asked me to call him.  He texted me the next day, asking if I'd gotten his voicemail. 

I replied that I had but that I had to distance myself from the situation and from him. 

"You know my history," I texted.  "I am clearly an enabler.  This is more than I'm willing to deal with right now.  It's unhealthy for me and unhealthy for my children, given the energy shift it will create in me.  I feel like a cad for not being your friend through this, but I just can't be around this right now.  I wish you well."

Alcoholics aren't always, or even usually, the people who drink all day, every day and can't hold down a job.  I've never dated a man who sat on the street corner, sipping anything out of a bag.  (At least not more than a couple of social times.)  My history, however, is peppered with functional alcoholics—those who lead productive lives filled with work and family and friends, who seem perfectly normal to anyone outside the closest inner circle.  It wasn't just that they were alcoholic abusers, they were alcohol dependent. 

When an addict of any kind begins the process of recovery, there are several paths they can take.  Going it alone, private counseling, community-based therapy and support groups.  Each has to find their own path. 

In my personal experience and through my research for Persona Non Grata, there are two main thoughts about recovery.  On one side, the addict needs to give all of their time and energy to recovery, at least initially and for some indeterminate amount of time, in order to stabilize and come to terms with themselves and the immediate consequences of ceasing substance.  Different substances—whether alcoholic, heroin, cocaine, food, etc.—will have different effects on biochemistry, and withdrawal can be a bitch no matter your poison.  Some addicts choose to immerse themselves in the process of recovery, sometimes to the point that the unavailability they showed their loved ones is just as prevalent even though it's in the name of meetings and sessions and getting better.

There's a second line of thinking, in which the addict has been a selfish bastard for so long that they need to immediately begin rectifying that damage to the people who've paid the highest price for it thus far.  It's time to step up and show those people that you really do love them; it's time to start making amends for your asshole behavior of the previous weeks and months and years, balancing them with your own needs and therapy. 

Often on the other side of an addiction is an enabler, someone who excuses and justifies and cleans-up and forgives the selfish, destructive behavior in the name of loving the addict.  Someone like me.  I've been known to give so deeply of myself to maintain the status quo that I would find myself frazzled and exhausted, a shell of who I was supposed to be. 

If recovery for the addict includes stopping being a selfish asshole, recovery for the enabler is the time when they have to learn to be a little bit selfish, to take care of themselves before they care for the addict. 

It feels completely unnatural.

When you are structured around this idea that "care" means self-sacrifice, you'll do anything for the people you love.  Every detail of your life becomes about how you can help this person you adore, how you can make things easier so that they can accomplish their goals, even after recovery begins in earnest.  It's all too easy to find yourself still in that pattern of compensating for the addict who has floundered for years. 

But isn't that what you do for the people that you love?

If they're young children, absolutely.  But even adults who were badly parented or never learned the life-skill of self-care are still adults; they have to be responsible for themselves. 

It is hard as hell to turn away from someone you care about, leaving them to deal with the process of recovery without you.  You, who has taken care of everything for so long, who has loved them like no other and for reasons and in ways maybe no one else would ever understand... you are abandoning them in their greatest moment of need. 

You're a fucking heartless bitch. 

As the enabler, you have to heal from this process of addiction, as well.  You have to learn to care for yourself and how to devote time and energy to those who really need it, not just those who refuse to do it for themselves. 

Given my history, my telling Bender (okay, so I named him just now) that I couldn't be a part of his process not only took my support away and forced him to stand with one less crutch, it allowed me to drop that fucking crutch, too.  My hands are free to hold something else.  Something more important—myself. 

Even though that romantic relationship wasn't hugely impactful on my life, it came at just the right time to remind me that I am important in a relationship.  My needs, my care, my wants are just as important as the other side's, even and especially when that other side is addicted. 

Being cognizant of this, being fully aware of how necessary it is for me to make those healthy decisions means I have to follow through.  To continue the behaviors and patterns when I absolutely know better makes me no better, but also no worse, than the addicts I have loved. 

Even after Bender, there is another friend who is maybe in that process of sobriety and recovery.  It's likely, though I don't know for sure because I had to make the decision to cut this person out of my life.  And it is hard.  Every single day, I want to know how they are, to hold them and listen while they talk through what I know is coming.  Some days that connection still feels as strong as it did when we met so many moons ago. 

I want desperately to reach out, to ask how they're doing.  I can't, and it sucks.  Some days, it hurts like hell. 

They're no more irredeemable than I am.  We've both always known that change would have to come from within them, no matter how much support I offered or shoved or emotionally blackmailed them into taking.  But taking is not accepting, and I had to stop bashing my head against that beautiful brick wall.

As much as I hope they are taking the time to really face this and heal, I hope I am able to turn and face my own role in my life, my own choices to excuse and justify and encourage—all in the name of love.  This time, I have to love me, in the same active way I have tried so fucking hard to love them. 

Keeping them out of my life is supposedly the best thing for me.  Supposedly it's also the best thing for them, but it smacks of abandonment and dismissal in the ways that feel most brutal to me.  I hope to God, every day, that there's a healthy way forward for us, together or not, in each other's lives or not.  I hope to hear that they're okay, that they're doing their work and dealing with what has been so long neglected.  I hope I do the same. 

Above all else, I hope we both can one day see that we are loved, not because of our roles in that dysfunction—not in spite of them—but for the people we are on the other side of the addiction and the history and the hurt.

 

The person you'd take a bullet for is behind the trigger.

 

In the midst of my hormone-guided tour of my emotional landscape, I started to think (read: cry) about how people can hurt the ones they love. 

Look, everyone does it sometime, of course.  Whether intentional or accidental, we have all acted upon our inherent ability to hurt others.  Sometimes it's an overly-harsh word or a complete dismissal of someone and their feelings.  Sometimes it's even an overtly vindictive act of physical or emotional retaliation. 

Whether or not something is hurtful can depend entirely on your perspective.  What may seem detrimental to one person can be protective for the other.  Circumstances can dictate whether or not an action needs to be performed at a certain time, and the consequences of that action may create a Win-Lose situation for the involved parties. 

There has to be a limit to the amount of self-sacrifice any person is willing or able to make, even if it sometimes means you end up hurting someone you care about.  It seems noble (or something) to be willing to give up anything for someone you love, but the reality of life is that it can't really work that way.  To relinquish every bit of your own power as a human being in deference to another, no matter how much you love them, is to weaken yourself to the point of exhaustion and ultimate self-destruction—physical, emotional, metaphysical, or any combination thereof. 

When you're on the receiving end of the smite, it just feels damaging and cruel.  Knowing that you're the one inflicting that damage can also be incredibly painful.  It's that ripple of equal and opposite reaction and how the energy of your own actions bounces back toward you. 

Given so much of who and what I've lived this year (especially as it trailed the preceding years), it would be easier if I could find some finality, some crux in time, when I could close my heart to certain people and disregard them completely.  My head understands the benefit in being able to close a chapter and box it away, making the people who helped to write those pages mean nothing more than the historical compartment they reside in.  To have the deep emotions we shared be inconsequential as I move forward seems superficially like it would make managing my future much easier. 

To be able to be distant and calculating, allowing me to feel nothing when I inflict hurt on someone else, could indeed be beneficial as I move forward to rebuild my life. 

But I honest to God don't understand how anyone could be so wantonly callous with another person by choice.  It baffles every fiber of my being that anyone could so easily disregard another person they have cared about, especially on such an intimate level.  I both envy and fear that ability to slam up a wall in your heart between yourself and anything that might have been able to reach you, even for a glimmer of a moment.  And how that can justify the hurt it inflicts, I truly don't understand. 

Everything in me shakes its head in confusion at the thought of living like that for a second, and it makes me hurt to imagine it.  It's reprehensible and baffling to me, both because of what it would say about me and about how I attempt to honor what those people meant to me, even when it was in some other time and place.  Maybe that's little girl naive of me.

Hot Pocket says I'm not like most people when it comes to this, but it's the only way I know how to be.  I will forever give anyone the benefit of the doubt and hope that my expectations are somehow proven wrong.  I will likely be forever disappointed and remain just as confused as ever, even and especially when I can logically see the fallacy of what my heart intuits so very clearly.  Where this aspect of my heart previously seemed wistful and charming, now sometimes it seems detrimental and foolish. 

I make mistakes.  I hurt the people I love.  I try very hard not to do that intentionally, sometimes taking the full brunt of the pain myself just to keep the people who've mattered to me from feeling it.  When I do inflict damage, I try to apologize and learn the lesson to avoid repeating it.  I try to make amends when and where I can. 

But I can't be like most of the people I know, who can just cut off their emotions and live as if they're inconsequential.  To close off a part of my heart will undoubtedly damage other parts of it, as well, and the long-term consequences of that are far more frightening to me than the short-term abating of emotion would be relieving.  Numbing it only delays the inevitable and may actually damage everything else that butts up against the numb. 

Somewhere maybe there's a middle ground for me.  I'm not a girl who's happy (or comfortable) in the medium.  When this journey comes to its end, I want to know that I lived this adventure as fully and completely as I could, no matter the circumstances, even if it means having to feel the agony just so I can appreciate the ecstasy.

 

 

You leave my heart in debt.

I hurt my son's feelings.  Badly.

It wasn't today, though it was a recent event.  There was a silly prank gone wrong.  I didn't perform the actual prank, though I did know about and good-naturedly encourage it.  I was absolutely a party to the offense.

At first, I thought he was okay.  Then, as we got into the car to leave the park where it happened, he growled at me from the back seat and told me never to talk to him again. 

I have never seen or heard him so damn angry in his 11-year-old life. 

I felt awful.  In my heart, I felt like he was overreacting melodramatically, but he was absolutely hurt that I could let something embarrassing happen to him like that, in front of friends and strangers alike. 

"I'm so sorry," I said, turning in the seat to face him directly.  "I should have known better.  I should've known that it would hurt your feelings.  I apologize, and I hope one day you will forgive me for that."

He glared at me and looked away.

As I started to back from the parking space, I said, "And I hope you know I wasn't trying to hurt your feelings.  It was just a prank—you normally like such things, and we thought you would just laugh it off.  But I wasn't trying to upset you."

"Yeah," he spat, "but you weren't trying not to, either."

Wham!  Right in the face!

He was right.  And he was mimicking something I say to my boys all the time. 

One of the boys will whack the other one, even unintentionally, and say, "But I didn't mean to do it!"

"But you didn't mean not to do it, either," I'll often respond. 

Sometimes it's not enough that we're passively careful with each other, no matter how aware we may be of the potential impact of our actions.  While another person's response and feelings are in no way our responsibility, there are times when we must be proactive in our concern and be intensely cognizant of how what we do will affect them. 

That doesn't mean we choose what's best for them, just to keep them from being hurt.  Sometimes the right choice is not ideal for everyone involved.  Sometimes we find ourselves in situations where one person will win and one will lose.  Sometimes there just is no compromise. 

When we are careless with each other, that's when we are most at fault.  Unkind words and injuries can hurt, but the real damage comes from the lack of concern, especially when we should have known better. 

As a parent, I struggle with these things all the time.  I know these are lessons that my boys have to learn—how to be thoughtful, how to apologize even when you don't want to, how not to hold onto something grudgefully—but they are the same lessons I find myself relearning all the time. 

Within a few hours, he'd forgiven me completely, but I know he won't have forgotten about it.  (He's just like that.  He gets it from me.)  I hope he knows that I won't have forgotten, either, and that I will absolutely do my best to try not to let it happen again.