I heard a marvelous retelling today at church. The gentleman who was speaking told of a time in his life when he was struggling to start a business and living on a shoestring. He had no money to buy his family Christmas presents, so he thought to tape his grand mother as he interviewed her, and pass the copies on to family. This was thirty years ago. Grandma has long ago passed away.

When his own mother was dying of cancer, he looked for a way to ease her emotional pain as she came to terms with her impending end of life. She would bemoan never having been close to her own mother because she saw her as too distant, busy with house and finances.

Well the speaker said he had an epiphany –remembering the long ago recording of his grandmother. He called his sister; great effort was undertaken to find the tape and an old boom box with tape player in the garage.

He rushed to play the tape for his mother. Pressing the button, they both sat back in their chairs as the voice of his grandmother, unheard for twenty five years, filled the room.

At first his mother was bitter and judgmental of what her mother was saying on the recording, disagreeing with facts, dates/places mentioned. As the recording went on and she heard her mother respond to the speaker, her (grand)son, she began to soften–to really ‘hear’ what her mother was saying. Her mother and she were now placed as contemporaries, both the same age at the listening. Her mother asked her grandson if he wanted something to eat, “maybe some potato salad” as the clink of dishes could be heard in the background.

“Are you afraid to die?” he asked grandma.

“Yes, I suppose I am because then there will be no more grandma for you.”

The speaker’s mother heard her mother being a loving grandmother– a real flesh and blood woman like herself. She, for the first time, felt a deep connection and compassion for this woman she had for years so harshly judged. She heard herself in her mother.

“Thank you so much for this, son. I feel really free to love my mom again.” She forgave her mother and herself for all the years of misjudgments, assumptions and reliance on ‘the facts’. “The black spot in my heart when I think of my mom is gone.”

Memory is a funny thing. Each of us see things and remembers things through our own life filter when, if we could disavow all the ‘facts’ we think we remember and listen/remember the emotional content, we might truly ‘hear’ and feel the love that was there.

I am trying to apply this wisdom as I rewrite my own history, now inserting the facts of my UH’s unfaithfulness through two thirds of our marriage. Yes, the facts are cruel, unwarranted, unbearable, even. But what of my memories WAS real? That is the task at hand.

To be able to ‘hear’ and see in my mind’s eye what really transpired when we were alone, when we were with the kids as a family–when he was living his reality with his family ‘book’ open and being written. (Of course he was writing a mistress book for a fraction of the time he spent with family. That book remained closed when he was with us, as the family book must surely have been closed while he was with her.)

He was loving us in the only way he knew how–keeping secrets he knew would hurt us so he could feed the hole in his soul by using her to feed his bottomless need for adoration.

My task is to be able to hear and see him through the lens of love– a broken imperfect, warped love, but love, nonetheless.

Were his actions when his mistress book was open unloving toward me and the kids? Yes. Should there ever have been a second book? Of course not. But that second book does not completely negated the existence or realities of the much larger first book of family.

Hard to wrap my head around this. Maybe, just maybe, as I learn to do so, I can once again see and feel his love echoing through the years of his co-existing infidelity.

And learn to forgive.