Holding on...

As previously mentioned, my kids had the stomach flu over the weekend. Claire has had an abnormal amount of experiences with throw up in her life. (Do you use the term throw up like a noun, or is it just us?) She's had the flu a few times more than her unscientifically polled contemporaries. She has encountered vomit at McDonalds, at a church nursery, and once in a swimming pool. When I was pregnant with Kyle I threw up constantly. And then when Kyle was born he threw up constantly. She even has a Fancy Nancy book where Nancy throws up. She has an odd obsession and strong aversion.

Once when she was three she threw up in my dad's car (sorry again, Dad!). They stopped at a Carl's Jr to clean up. She got a cup to catch any further problems. That cup was glued to her chin for almost five days. She lived and breathed with that thing. We joked that we needed to attach a strap to hang around her neck.

Fast forward almost two years, and here we are again. I gave her a bowl after the first episode, and it stayed under her chin for three days. Here she is napping (yes, napping---she was really sick) with it tucked under her chin; hand holding tight even while sleeping.

No matter what, that thing was with her 24/7 for three days. Sadly, she only needed it for about 24 hours. The remaining 48 were just in case. She let it go after constant pleading and maybe an outright demand from me.

But it got me thinking. What do I hold onto for way past the time necessary?

Grudges? Yes. It takes a lot to make me mad, and I usually require a long series of grievances before I get annoyed, but I've been known to carry a few grudges. Some for well past their socially acceptable expiration date. Sometimes I've held onto a grudge so tightly that it is my almost constant companion. Sometimes I think I've gotten past a grudge only to find it bubbling through my thoughts and right out my mouth and into conversations where the past is really better left alone. I have two big grudges in my life; okay, three now that I'm thinking about it! If you know me well, you probably know what/who they are. One is resolved. Completely. I put the bowl down and left it somewhere far away. With the other two I'm trying to not dwell on them because the past can't be changed. As far as these two are concerned, I can still see one bowl in the distance (I'll just name this one: the bad parts associated with my year as Miss Utah), but I still manage to occasionally visit, pick up, and dust off the other bowl (namely everything with  my eye and the surgeon who messed up and lied to us).

One other thing that came to mind when I thought of what I held onto forever was mistakes I've made. I don't know if I'm hard on myself, or just appropriately regretful. Either way, sometimes I lay (lie? I never did get those worked out in editing school) awake in bed at night with my stomach in knots over past mistakes and misgivings. Things that happened 10, 12, 15 years ago still haunt me. Things I said, things I did, judgments made, ways I behaved that certainly had better solutions. I play them over and over in my mind coming up with better ways that I could have handled the situation. To me it seems easier to let go of a grudge against someone else than to forgive myself for mistakes. Why is that?

Remember a couple years ago when James E Faust talked about the Amish school experience and forgiveness? He quoted Dr. Sidney Simon who said:

“Forgiveness is freeing up and putting to better use the energy once consumed by holding grudges, harboring resentments, and nursing unhealed wounds. It is rediscovering the strengths we always had and relocating our limitless capacity to understand and accept other people and ourselves.”

I like that---that when we forgive others we increase our ability to forgive ourselves. Also, I think "accept" is the key term. One thing I struggled with my eye problems was that if I chose to forgive the surgeon, then I felt like I was saying what he did was okay; that how I looked was okay. And it wasn't okay. But I am learning to accept it. And it doesn't eat at me day-after-day. It's not strapped to my chin or around my heart.

I don't know how this forgiving myself stuff will turn out. But I do know that it feels SO good to let go of grudges. To set them down and walk away and never return. Too bad it isn't that easy for throw up bowls, we'll always be revisiting them!