I ONCE had a friend many years ago who was raising her daughter alone. She had made terrible mistakes in life. But my friend, whom I met at work, had brought her daughter into the world, was working hard to support her without much help from others and despite being surrounded by bad influences.

She always spoke so affectionately of her daughter and with such concern for her welfare. When they were together she showed her great tenderness and affection.

Her daughter was about 11 to 13 years old when I knew them and her life was obviously lonely. She had no siblings, no father at home and her mother worked at nights. Different babysitters came to be with her in those hours.

Despite all the difficulties, there seemed to be a strong bond with her mother, who worked so hard, and the daughter seemed cheerful and happy.

I guess that is why I was shocked years later when I learned she had moved thousands of miles away as an adult and was estranged from her mother because of resentment over her past. How could this be?

America is a country of unprecedented family breakdown. It is unquestionably a failed social experiment, so different from the sentimental images of Norman Rockwell. It didn’t just begin in the 60s. It began after the American Revolution. Divorce, always much more common here than in Europe, grew and family size shrank all through the 19th century. American-style individualism and secularism have had their dire consequences for hundreds of years now, so basic is the human, ontological need for both a mother and a father’s united care throughout childhood and into adulthood. Even a child who receives lots of affection from parents divided has suffered a lasting injury. His very being is divided between those who together gave him life. His home on this earth has been both physically and spiritually taken away. America’s famous individualism has deceived many people on these unchangeable facts and they are truly ignorant.

At this point, the institution of the American family, facing a government and debt-based financial system that offers it relentless antipathy, is beyond human solutions. We await some transforming calamity or miracle. In the meantime, the victims of family dissolution, more to be pitied than those who are economically poor but have intact families, desperately need the grace of forgiveness.

Was my friend’s daughter’s life made better by the inability to forgive her mother? To forgive is not to deny wrongs done.

God did not say, “Honor your father and mother — if they did everything right.” He said, “Honor thy father and mother.” Period.

On this Mother’s Day, may those who have had especially difficult childhoods, may those who have suffered acutely from the sins of their parents — and even the best of childhoods are difficult in some ways, every mother has committed wrongs  — reach deep inside.

May God give them the impossible and miraculous grace to forgive.

May they bear in mind the bad influences that surrounded their mothers. May they show their mothers — whether they seem to deserve it or not — affection and appreciation.

And may their small acts of mercy heal the hearts that were broken to pieces in childhood.

— Comments —

Barbara from NJ writes:

I had to forgive my mother for getting cancer when she was 35, and dying two years later when I was 11 and my brother 9. It took many years, but I finally forgave her, and God who permitted it.

Her date of death was October 11, and it was decades later that I saw a Catholic calendar that listed the traditional feast days. Raised in the Novus Ordo, we were unaware of all the feasts that had been obliterated or downgraded. What a consolation it was, and still is, to discover that my mother’s death occurred on the feast of the Divine Maternity of Mary. Our Lady gave me herself as a mother especially on that day.

In the event I would ever forget this, over forty years later my father died on the same date.

We all have a Mother we will never need to forgive.

Cause of Our Joy, pray for us.

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