At first, I didn’t realize my personal growth through pain. Then, as my mother used to say, “It just dawned on me!”
Earlier this week, I sat in my chair with my morning coffee, looking out the window where I have watched the birds for the past year.
But this morning, I felt something different.
A door was opening inside of me.
It was as if I was finally feeling everything I had only been observing before. The feeling reminded me of the early morning fog that rose after recent rains. The horrible drought had finally broken, and I found myself rejoicing through a stream of tears.
That was when something specific surfaced.
It centered on my relationship with my mother.
My mother carried many good qualities, but one of her burdens was judgment. She often judged other people quickly, sometimes harshly, and I learned early how painful that could feel.
The first time I remember feeling the sting of her judgment in public was in church when I was in fourth grade. I was sitting beside her when she leaned toward me and whispered, “She’s too fat to wear that.”
She indicated the woman with the smallest nod of her head and a slight lift of her eyebrows.
I was mortified.
What if someone heard her?
Not long after that, I began noticing those same habits taking root in me.
I heard my own judgmental thoughts about the mother of my best friend, Patricia. When my mother dropped me off at Patricia’s small rented house, I noticed the long line of increasingly unkempt yards. I noticed that her mother was overweight, smoked hand-rolled cigarettes, and had open sores on her legs.
I started to think that my friend wasn’t like me.
But that wasn’t the whole truth.
The worn wood planking of their porch was so clean that I never felt a speck of sand on my legs as Patricia and I sat cross-legged playing jacks. Her mother gave us peanut butter sandwiches on homemade white bread. Patricia made me laugh.
Eventually, I stopped seeing Patricia outside the classroom.
I was ashamed, but not of Patricia or her mother.
I was ashamed of myself.
I realized I had been looking down on someone who had been kind to me. After that, I stopped sharing those observations with my mother.
Patricia and her mother eventually moved away, and I found a new friend, Brenda.
Brenda’s mother was a homemaker, like most of the mothers I knew. She smoked. She also chewed tobacco and spit into a worn brass spittoon she kept on the screened back porch.
I had never seen a woman chew tobacco before.
But this time, I was not going to spoil the friendship.
I kept quiet about the spittoon.
Brenda and I remained friends for a long time.
Elementary school was a golden time in my life. I found comfort in its structure. My teachers felt like kindly grandmothers who rewarded my concentration with smiles, check-marked assignments, and report cards sprinkled with S’s and A’s.
Perhaps that is one reason I recently joined a book club at my local library.
Maybe I was looking for that same sense of structure. Maybe I was looking for kindly grandmother energy among the library staff. Or maybe, more simply, I was hoping to find new friends like Brenda.
I’m sure it was the latter.
Once a month, we gather to share the books we’ve read. Unlike most book clubs, we choose from a list of fifty descriptions. For instance, I recently read The Amalfi Curse by Sarah Penner because it qualified as number thirteen: a book with more than one timeline.
I enjoy hearing each person review the book they chose, explain which category it met, and then decide whether I might want to read it too.
Before long, I felt drawn to one or two other readers. Most of us are not native to North Carolina. A few were born in Florida, as I was, or had spent a great deal of time there.
Oddly enough, the woman I have come to know best is Mary Jones, who is originally from New York.
A few weeks ago, Mary and I met for lunch. She was born on Long Island and still has that northeastern twang that is so identifiable to me and so often judged by others.
And I suppose I made a judgment too.
My judgment was that I really liked her.
Mary and I had simply gravitated toward each other.
During lunch, we talked for a long time. She told me more about her life, including things I had not known before. Then she said something that warmed my heart.
“You know what I like about you? You don’t judge me.”
That was the beginning of my realization.
I have changed.
It was a small moment, but a powerful one. Something inside me whispered:
Oh my God, you really have grown.
For years, I carried pain I didn’t fully understand. Some of it came from grief. Some of it came from family patterns. Some of it came from the ways I learned to protect myself.
But pain, when I am willing to listen to it, can become a doorway.
This year, that doorway opened.
And on the other side, I found a softer version of myself.
One who notices.
One who listens.
One who chooses friendship over judgment.
One who is still growing.
