On Forgiveness

Neither estrangement nor embrace but a secret third thing. Reflecting on Katy Wix, and Andrea Robin Skinner, Alice Munro's daughter.

At lunchtime, sat in the Seven Dials food court waiting for my buzzer to ring me to my meal, I was listening to today’s episode of Everything is Content. The hosts were discussing author and comedian Katy Wix’s article for the Observer last Sunday on responding to a request for forgiveness from her childhood bully, as well as the response from others online to Katy’s decision. I’ll admit that I’ve only just read the article now because I suspected I would sit closer to James Butler, described simply as ‘a man’ on the podcast but, as a gay guy who went to school during Section 28 in this country, probably isn’t a wholly passive commentator on the topic of adolescent ridicule, than I would to some of the women I saw defending Katy’s right not to forgive.

“I'm obviously in a minority here, but I think if an adult comes to you unbidden with an apology for how they behaved as a child, you should attempt forgiveness. I find the way it's presented in this piece really quite bleak, and not at all something to admire or emulate.”

Therein began a conversation on Butler’s thread about the cultural push away from forgiveness, or acceptance of times and hurts gone by, in favour of the great taking care of oneself. I don’t think it’s just me being contrarian that means I get a bit dismissive of people, particularly women, ruminating on their apparent people pleasing tendencies; it is both me being a little mean about ‘basic’ buzzwords that busy, often shat-upon people use because it chimes with something, even if it can feel reductive to those of us with newsletters and notions — terms like ‘imposter syndrome’ and ‘boundaries’ and ‘being seen’ — but also reveals something of my moral philosophy.

I referenced both the response to Wix’s article and the sad tale of Alice Munro’s daughter, Andrea Robin Skinner, who detailed her lauded Nobel Laureate mother telling her she had waited too long (perhaps 11 years) and she was too in love with her husband to leave the man who had sexually abused her daughter in childhood. That part of the tale is sad, albeit unfortunately not the exception in cases of familial abuse, which I must admit I mainly learnt from watching lots of fictional cold case shows. What felt most moving to me was her siblings’ actions in adulthood to make amends with their estranged sister.

‘Then, in 2014, my sister Jenny reached out. She told me that she and my other siblings, sister Sheila and stepbrother Andrew, had gone to the Gatehouse, in Toronto, an organization that helps survivors of childhood sexual abuse. They went to learn more about my separation from them. They wanted to better understand themselves and each other, and to process their part in the silence around Fremlin’s abuse of me.’

Before I read the article for myself, I noticed that some people were unimpressed by Wix’s friend-turned-tormentor’s adult actions. Sophie Heawood’s point, that ‘asking for forgiveness is [not] a real apology. You apologise, you don’t ask to be forgiven in the same breath’ felt convincing. And indeed I think this is where Butler, whose faith will have had no small part in his response to the book excerpt (and I do not say this as a criticism), misses a step. The apology provided for the laser sharp ridicule and isolation ‘Erin’ meted out at her best friend was beyond glib. “I’m sorry I was such a bitch. Can you forgive me?” is what you say the morning after a night out where you nicked someone else’s tequila shot that a different friend had bought as a round, rather than 15 or so years after no contact. In contrast, Skinner’s siblings, approached her with a sincerity that the term ‘doing the work’ is supposed to encompass but unfortunately has lost. They missed their sister, wanted to understand what had happened to her, and to them, and wanted to make amends without self-flagellation. So I think Butler, amongst others, have been responding less to one personal essay in The Observer, and more to a cultural moment where cutting contact, rather than resolving to repair, is the sign of maturity and self-respect.

But what if you weigh up both and decide on neither? I was not sexually assaulted as a child by a family member as Skinner was, and the bullying behaviour I experienced in childhood was relatively brief and short-lived, and did not coincide with the intense proximity and rivalry being around 14 or so can provide. But I was failed as a child and as a teenager in a couple of ways, most notably in how adult fears of my early puberty and potential sexuality manifested in becoming a kind of medical curio. I mentioned both Alice Munro and Katy Wix in therapy this week; I am coming towards the end of over three years of weekly sessions, mainly centred around EMDR on Zoom. When we first began, the impact of retracing those steps, in childhood, adolescence and adulthood were exhausting, to the bone: winter lockdown took a lot out of all of us, and I would be rendered too fatigued to both go back down the stairs and make myself even pasta. Luckily I had a housemate who I would alternate cooking meals with at the time. The physical response amazed and saddened me. How had I had all of that inside me? Why hadn’t I opened up sooner? I would just lie down, belly first, on top of my small double in my too small room and feel weaker than I had felt in a very long time. Was going back there really worth it, I wondered.

It is so much easier for me now to process memories, and we’re still going through a few intense ones. Before we got evicted from our old flat, I was able to do two back-to-back exercise classes a mere hour after therapy. Unthinkable! One of those classes was yin yoga, but never us mind that. I could handle walking to and from the gym. This week, I went straight from my session recounting a dissociative weekend in my early twenties to the pub to watch the football and didn’t feel a thing. Bonkers. Nevertheless, I could spend a lot of time thinking about my regrets. There are some things that being failed in the way that I was has robbed me of; I’m pretty sure if I’d started acknowledging some of it sooner, there would be romantic and sexual connections that I might not have missed. I’m 32 now — what if this late start means I might not find someone to have children with in time? There are so many things I could think about, but I have a life to live. There is rarely one cause for these things. I feel a twinge, though, reading about the life Skinner has built, of not only a purposeful job, but a family and marriage of her own too.

I say that I have been failed. Have I considered forgiveness to those I feel did me wrong? Well, yes, and I’ve basically reached it, but it’s the post-colonial forgiveness I was raised with, rather than a more liturgically proper Christian one. “I can forgive, but I can never forget” my mother would tell us Kenyatta had once said. Wise, I thought. In my life, that means living with the understanding that sometimes I will be flaky with friends instead of having it out with them when I feel sinned against. This isn’t always mature, but it also means I’m not living with a seething live anger either. I can come back to them when it’s less sore.

In the context of family, I am not capital ‘e’ estranged in the way that might feel fair enough given the circumstances. Frankly, I can’t be arsed. It means I give very little of myself to those trespasses, and I don’t have to think about how a riposte might go, nor have to prepare for another conversation of denials and minimising of the things I remember so vividly, from so long ago. Sometimes the place from which I came is so very alive, and manifests in reunions almost 20-strong from three countries; sometimes I think, mainly in the context of the religious Bank Holidays, that I basically don’t have a family at all. It is a mixed up thing, and so there is no neat final line. It means no triumphant Christmastime reunion to rectify acrimonious holidays past, but no full-time withdrawal either. I can live with this; I think many of us do.