I pulled my jacket tighter as I neared the reservoir. The sky was a brilliant Colorado blue, and the sun shone brightly, but it didn’t take much wind to slice through my clothing. As uncomfortable as I was, I preferred this to being in my own home. I thought maybe some physical activity would wash away the tension that had been building for days.
The home I’d once considered a haven now felt like a place of conflict. Almost a war zone. Mean spirits tossed about in the air and threatened to erupt into words and actions that could never be taken back. A place of peace and love had morphed into an intensely negative, cold space. Out of control. Hopeless.
How had I gotten to this point? How had I come to prefer biting wind to warm shelter?
(This is hard. But I think maybe I’m not alone with this experience, so this could also be important to someone else. Deep breath.)
A critical situation had forced a family member to move in with us. A family member who could be difficult enough to be around in good times, but with the particular situation he was facing, his sometimes narcissistic personality had grown exponentially. He had turned surly and rude and angry. Yes, he’d also been through a terrible experience. Still,I thought, it wasn’t my fault and I was only trying to help him. I’d sucked it up for weeks and months, but I’d about come to the end of my rope.
We’re supposed to love all of our family, right? And I did love him. I just didn’t like him enough to stand being around him at such an intense level. One-on-one. Much of his care depended on me. And, I’m ashamed to admit, a good deal of the mean spiritedness in my home was directly traceable to me.
I don’t remember what happened that made me need to get away so badly that I sought fifteen minutes of solitude, even in the cold—but I do remember the cold.
And I remember something else.
I remember the wind suddenly stopping. I remember saying a prayer for help. I’m not evangelical in any way, so please accept that this was my prayer to my God. I asked first to simply love my family member more. To accept all of his thorns and difficult personality pieces. To make this place in all of our lives more manageable. And then it occurred to me that I needed to pray for the kind of love God had for me. Completely pure. Completely unconditional. Loving all of me all of the time. Overflowing. Even when I was mean-spirited. Even when I was snarky. Even when I was foolish and wrong. Even when I was a b**ch. Suddenly, I was overflowing with nothing but love for this family member. It wasn’t really mine (at least at first)—it was God’s. But by the time I got back to my front door, I owned it.
The bottom line is that he is well worth loving. That loving him unconditionally makes my life better. Sometimes I have to remind myself of all of this. I’m about as far from perfect as a person can get.
Love is a choice. Of that, I have no doubt.
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About Peg Brantley
A Colorado native, Peg Brantley is a member of Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers and Sisters In Crime. She and her husband make their home southeast of Denver, and have shared it with the occasional pair of mallard ducks and their babies, snapping turtles, peacocks, assorted other birds, foxes, a deer named Cedric and a bichon named McKenzie. Peg's newest novel, THE MISSINGS, is a police procedural.
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