Mea Culpa, Mea Maxima Culpa

My fault, my most grievous fault.

In my recent travels through blogland, I'm seeing more than a few instances of mea culpa being expressed. And in some places there has been the laying of blame. I'm now stopping to think a little about it all.

Mea culpa. My fault. More than my responsibility, my FAULT. An invitation to apportion blame? Do they go hand in hand in more ways, to a greater depth, than we sometimes realise?

In one of my past relationships, I was with a man who blamed. He blamed his father, he blamed his mother, he blamed his sisters, he blamed his son. He blamed the world. But most of all he seemed to blame me. For his losses, for his bad decisions, for his weaknesses - all of which occurred before we even got together!

And for too long, I let him think that by blaming me, and me accepting that in some weird way I could have been responsible for events that weren't even in our past, things could somehow make more sense for him. The strange thing was, that the one person who really had been instrumental in his losses and his sadness, survived it all totally blame-free.

Then too, thinking back to my mum and dad and their daily interaction, makes me wonder. I know they weren't particularly happy together. No wait, my dad wasn't particularly happy, but my mum was content with what she had and knew my dad would never leave her. I think that is at the root of the play that developed between them in later life. An example would be: Dad accidentally knocks something off the coffee table. Immediately, he'd look over at her and say something to the effect of "for christ sake woman" even though my mum had absolutely nothing to do with what just happened. We used to laugh about it but in recent years, upon reflection, I have come to see it as probably one of the saddest things I've ever witnessed. How deeply ingrained must the resentment have been, that his first thought when something went wrong was, it must be her fault in some way.

My dad was a good man. No, more than that, he was an exceptional man. Except for that one thing. And I suppose I'm only now realising how unhappy he was, how trapped he felt. And maybe, just maybe my mum's responses to things today are because of how she, too, must have felt for so many years, knowing he was there with her not out of love but out of some sort of obligation.

I don't blame my mother for anything. Likewise, I don't blame some of the people who have been in my life, not for the pain they put me through, nor the demons they deposited into my psyche. I did for a long time, I even allowed professionals to make me think I needed to confront and blame. The reality of it all is that I am the only one who needed to make peace with myself. To understand that bad things can happen through no fault of my own.

Everyone, and everything, I have encountered on my life's path has been there for a reason. Who I have become, the lessons I have learned, these are the reasons. I am where, and who, I have always meant to be.

No mea culpas, no laying of blame.