How to Forgive — and Why You Should

By Mark Matousek

I grew up hating my father. He had disappeared when I was 4 — just abandoned my mother, my sisters and me — and never paid a dime of child support. Since I was the only son, it was up to me to be the man of the house, and my childhood was spent in a confused rage at the father who had deserted us.

It was because of him that we were on welfare for a year. My mother called him the son of a bitch, and when I asked her what my Dad was like, she'd just shake her head and tell me that he wasn't the kind of father I would have wanted. "Just forget him," she said.

I filed the subject of my dad in my mind under "Unsolved Mysteries." Then shortly before my 40th birthday, a chance remark by a trouble-making friend ripped this cold case open. "You mean, you never even looked for him?" this friend asked.

I told him that I had stopped caring a long time ago but this friend of mine didn't buy it. He implied that I was brainwashed and buying a load of family malarkey. This really pissed me off. The following day, I hired a private detective to look for my father once and for all.

It was a hair-raising experience. For a year, I waited for the detective (who had seen too many Humphrey Bogart movies) to turn up something more than "strong leads" and "back alley sources" who promised to sniff my father out. Between cold- calling men with my father's name off of computer lists ("Hello, I was wondering if you might be ..."), I had a lot of time to mull over what I really knew about my father. The detective asked me to press the family for details, which was like pulling teeth with my mother. At first, she refused to answer my questions. Then one day, my mother spilled the beans. "I was in love with someone else," she said. Her voice was filled with anger and shame. "Your father found out. It was terrible."

Why hadn't she told me this before?
    
"What would it have changed?" asked my well-meaning mother, not realizing that the answer was everything. Suddenly, this man I'd been raise to hate became a jilted lover in my eyes. No longer Guilty (with a capital G), he morphed into an actual person with a motivation for saving himself. An aunt spoke to me about his playfulness. My older sister remembered his generosity. Gradually, in the course of that year, with this new information to fill in the blanks, my father ceased to be a monster.

In the end, the detective never found him — but that was not the important point. What mattered is that I had found him. I'd located a place for him in my heart, a corner of forgiveness. The anger at him was finally gone. So was my mother's guilt. Before she died, two years later, she thanked me for opening (and closing) this door. It brought the family closer together.