Wisdom comes at a price [View All]

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Have you ever found that wisdom gained from experience--and age--makes you realize you can finally understand some antagonist from your younger years? But it is a Pyhrric Victory, as that other person is already gone? Perhaps this is one of the great examples of irony--the pain of knowing you might have been wrong in the first place.


A very long time ago, my birth mother gave me up for adoption, and I was placed with her brother, who was my uncle. She had a very troubled life, had many different lovers in her youth, and had any number of illegitimate babies, all of who (but one) were given up for adoption or monetary gain. My passion for pro-choice stems from this knowledge, knowing that a lot of people in the decades preceding Roe V Wade were faced with only one viable alternative to keeping a child: give up the child.

But lately, I've come to a point where I feel very sorry for her. Who she was, was not me, nor did I have to deal with the circumstances she dealt with. Perhaps she loved me after all, knowing that she wasn't the mothering type, and that according to her religious beliefs, sex without birth control was the norm. This can be said of Irish Catholics--they literally took "God" at his command: "Br fruitful and multiply."

How different a woman in the present is to a woman 55-60 years ago! There are choices now that weren't available then. And so, after endless thinking about the situation, I have begun to forgive her for her lifestyle, insofar as I am personally involved. She wasn't a bad woman--just someone who never truly applied herself to her life. She was the kind of woman who didn't think much of herself unless she was hanging on the arm of a man. She was an alcoholic, who could never see herself as free to do what she wanted to do. What she wanted to do was travel--something I don't think she ever did. She finally ended up in a loveless marriage to a man who was never there for her, either literally or emotionally, leaving her more alone than ever before.

It has taken me forever to get to this point, but it is the kind of event that comes more often as I grow older. Once the bliss of youth is gone, we can look back with some degree of comprehension of the lives of the people around us. It's like that "Eureka!" moment, when suddenly, some things snap into crystal clarity, and the fog of youth vanishes. We've all heard people say "youth is wasted on the young." It is only at a point when the veil of self-importance is lifted, when we know we were wrong, and have to come to grips with our own demons. Wisdom--but with a price. We can never apologize to the person--or persons--we have collided with again, and we then need to forgive the next best thing: ourselves.