A few years ago I watched a life coach named Rhonda Britten describe black and white and it was a big “Ah Ha” moment for me. She showed that if you believe that everything is all black or all white, you can never see the whole truth. If you allow a little grey in, you can see the truth more clearly. That day I realized that I wanted to live life that way. I wanted to be able to allow the truth into my life even if it meant that I was wrong. I had to be willing to accept that nothing is always the way I see it, sometimes I would have to look through someone else’s eyes and see it their way.
As I have been writing this blog over the last few months, I have started to see my Mom through her own eyes. As I wrote yesterday about that difficult time in our lives, I realized how human my Mom was during that time. I cannot imagine how she made the choices that she made during that time. I do not believe I would make the same choices if I was faced with what she had to face, but I do understand how she was desperate to be there for her sister. There is no black and white in the choices that she had to make; however, I think that for me my child would have been my first priority.
I do not want to spend my life indicting my Mom for every perceived mistake. We are two different people in many ways, yet in other ways I am very much like my Mom. That in its self is a shade of grey. If I condemn her I would have to condemn myself for poor choices I have made. I do hope that as I continue to write over the next few months, I begin to see the grey blossom out of all the black and white between my Mom and me. Somewhere in our story together we created a positive legacy that I would like to think I am passing along to my own children. I hope that at the end of this year I will have written out all the hurt and disappointment and packed it away. All the black and white will finally be gone and all that will be left is a lovely, truthful shade of grey.
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