We Can Do Hard Things with Glennon Doyle - 52. FORGIVING & FINDING PEACE with ASHLEY C. FORD

Episode Date: December 14, 2021

1. How to find a way to live in peace: to actually love complicated parents without compromising our love for ourselves. 2. How we can’t change our past—and why Ashley says that forgiveness is accepting the fact that the past is never going to be different. 3. The importance of being able to hold two truths at the same time: that, for some of us, our parents did the best they could—and it wasn’t close to good enough. 4. Why Ashley says she struggles, even in adulthood, to accept love and care from people who are not obligated to love and care for her. 5. Why anger often reveals our passion points—and for Ashley, why that leads her to show up for children. About Ashley:  Ashley C. Ford’s New York Times best-selling memoir, Somebody’s Daughter, was published by Flatiron Books in June 2021. Ford is the former host of The Chronicles of Now podcast, co-host of The HBO companion podcast Lovecraft Country Radio. She currently lives in Indianapolis, Indiana with her husband, poet and fiction writer Kelly Stacy, and their chocolate lab Astro Renegade Ford-Stacy. Ford has written or guest-edited for ELLE Magazine, Slate, Teen Vogue, New York Magazine, The New York Times, Domino, Cup of Jo, and various other web and print publications. Book: Somebody’s Daughter Instagram: @smashfizzle Twitter: @iSmashFizzle 

I came out the other side. Welcome back to We Can Do Hard Things. We are delighted and so excited that you keep coming back. We always talk about how we want this show to really be about service. Okay. So every show we are thinking about what you all need and want and what conversations you're asking for. that might just make life a little bit easier. I'm not fixing anything here.

We're just trying to make things just a smidge easier. And one of the things we've noticed is that people are always asking about family of origin stuff. Just please talk about the folks we come from who for better or worse make us who we are. Questions like, what do we take from them and leave with them? How do we forgive? What does forgiveness even mean?

What about when they did the best they could? And it was not even close to good enough. What does it look like to love your family, but also break free and live your own wild and precious life? What the hell are healthy boundaries? What do we owe our families? And what do they owe to us? And what does it look like to be held and free?

So to help us explore these easy, peasy questions, I, which for sure we're going to nail by the end of this hour, I invited one of my favorite people on Earth. And her name is Ashley C. Ford. I'm sure you know her. I fell in love with Ashley through her social media long, long, long ago. And then through her articles that she wrote about other women. I feel like you can tell so much about a person by how they write about other people. And then we went on tour together and Abby's laughing because this crazy thing happened where everybody fought to sit next to Ashley on the couch.

And I don't even know if she knows this. It was like a game of musical chairs to try to get to sit next to Ashley. And Abby won a lot. She does. She usually does. Yeah. There's just like a literal twinkle in this woman's eyes that makes you want to know what she knows. She's the best. Yeah. And then her freaking blockbuster insanely beautiful memoir, somebody's daughter came out. Oh. I know. And just the unbelievable, very original idea she has in this book and through living her life about boundaries and forgiveness and self-love. She's just.

been through some shit and she has dealt with it all head on and she has no secrets, no shame, no denial. She's done the work. And it just shows she's joyful, deeply kind, brilliant. And you just feel safe with her because she's a woman who knows what it is to be human and has forgiven herself completely and even her people for being human. So you just kind of have this idea that she'll forgive you for being human too. Yes. And so we just want to know everything. she knows. So please welcome Ashley C. Ford. She is the New York Times bestselling memoirist. She wrote somebody's daughter, which was published by Flatiron Books in June 2021. She's the former host of the Chronicles of Now podcast, co-host of the HBO companion podcast, Lovecraft Country Radio.

And she currently lives in Indianapolis, Indiana with her husband, a poet and fiction writer Kelly Stacey. And of course, their chocolate lab Astro Renegade Ford's God, I love a hyphenated dog. It says ARFs when you look at all the first letters. Oh, yes, it does. God, you got to wake up early to understand Ashley. Yes, you do. Ashley, thank you for joining us and we can do hard things.

I just want to jump in right away and talk about family. Okay. So you were raised by your dad was gone for much of, for all of your childhood, actually. And then you were raised by a complicated mother. Yes. And there was abuse in your home. It was a volatile home.

And we have a lot, many, many listeners who grew up in very volatile homes. And I want to start with this passage that you wrote about when you were young. You said the next morning I awoke to the mother I knew. And we both went about our day like nothing significant had. happened the night before. I did not blame the mother for hurting me. It didn't feel like it wasn't my fault. Sometimes I was bad and sometimes people were bad to me. Either way, the badness belonged where it landed. I wanted to believe this was true that it was all in my control somehow or in someone's control. All my fault, all my choice, all mine to have or hide or heal. I decided to pretend to

be good, the kind of good that seemed to be best, the silent kind. For the whole day through school, after school care, and most of the time home with my family, I did not speak unless spoken to. It worked. My mother said, you're being such a good girl today. I smiled and said nothing. Ashley, talk to us about how you freed yourself from those two ideas you had when you were young, that the abuse was your fault and that good girls stay quiet. Well, you know, first I want to say that the beginning of the first of the first of the first of the first. of my healing journey, I guess, was not identified to me as a healing journey. It was just me in a place

of searching for something, trying to feel better, trying to feel good, trying to feel peaceful, and realizing that all of the things I'd been told to try didn't work. And I am just not the kind of person who has to do the same thing over and over to figure out that it's not working. I'm I'm a Capricorn. I'm very efficient. I think I try to find some sense of reality and I try to hold on to it for dear life. So from a very young age, I realized that the adults around me did a lot of things that they said were the right thing to do and none of them seemed to ever get the results they wanted or be happy, ever. And so it was clear to me that something was not working and that not trying new things wasn't working. So I just wanted to try something new. If I had been taught my entire life that talking about how I feel, telling people how I feel, letting them see who I am was putting myself in danger and was exposing myself or was seeking attention because, those were the only two ways this was going. Either your feelings are real and because they are real,

you need to hide them because people will use them to hurt you, or your feelings are not real and you are just saying that because you want someone to look at you. But I also knew what was going on inside me. And it was undeniable. I couldn't deny me. I could try. I could keep trying. to deny myself. But it hurt. It hurt to keep denying myself. And so I just thought, I'm going to try something different. I'm going to do things that my mom has told me not to do. I'm going to do things that my grandma told me to be scared of. I'm going to do things that I've never seen anybody like me do. I'm going to give them a try because the worst thing that could happen is that it doesn't work, just like everything else hasn't worked.

Oh, okay. So speaking of ideas that your family proposed to you, that perhaps you rethought later, at one point you went to live with your grandmother when you were young. And your grandmother's house was a relatively peaceful place for you. Yes. You got to read and explore and be a kid. And you were treated well. And one day you asked if you could stay at your grandmother. instead of returning to your very volatile house. And your grandmother took you outside and showed you something. Yeah. And I will never for the rest of my days forget this scene. Okay, so she took you outside. You had just asked if you could go, if you could stay with her.

I leaned over the hole and saw a garden snake. No, two, three, four, a lot of garden snakes. They were in some sort of a knot. though not stuck together. They were not fighting and they did not seem to be trying to get away from us or anything else. What are they doing, Grandma? They're loving each other, baby. She reached into the bag, poured lighter fluid into the hole, then lit a match.

The grass in and around the hole burned and then so did the snakes. My first instinct was to reach in and throw them as far as I could to safety, but I hesitated when I remembered their bite. I waited too long to do them any good. The snakes did not slither away or thrash around as they burned. They held each other tighter. Their green lengths blackened and bubbled. Causing the flesh that simmered underneath is each individual metallic hood to ooze. They did not panic.

They did not run. I started to cry. You will have to go back. We'll both go back home. Your mama misses you. My grandmother reached over and grabbed my hand. Both of us still staring into the hole. These things catch fire without letting each other go.

We don't give up on our people. We don't stop loving them. She looked into my face, her eyes watering at the bottoms, not even when we're burning alive. Okay, Ashley. So that is a picture of one model of family. Right? I have gone the opposite. Okay, so when I read that, I thought of what I wrote and untamed about, build your island, let nobody on it, like moats, crocodiles.

Like, we, so if the snakes holding each other till they die is on one end, it's one way. And my way of letting no one in ever or near me, there is a third way, right? And I think you, one of the things that people adore so much about you is you have found a third way. of how to like hold and forgive your people. But do you still tell me about that model of what I think is a pretty good example of codependency? Oh, it's a great example of codependency. You know, I come from a family that is very protective. My family teaches you a lot about protecting yourself and protecting your body.

the couple of years of elementary school where I was bullied or beginning to be bullied, you know, my mother's reaction to that was not like, well, talk to me about that. Let's go talk to the teachers at the school or something like that. My mom's reaction was, you better kick their ass. You better kick their ass. And I was like, what if I get kicked out? What if I get in trouble? And my mom, then I will come pick you up after you kick their ass.

And I was taught to be very protective of myself, that I would fight and hurt and maim to protect my body. But I was not taught that loving my body was part of that. And I was not taught that loving myself would actually motivate and encourage me to protect myself more than just like the idea that my body was mine. It was my value. It was all my value. and I had to protect my property that way, right? So, yeah, it was very protective in that sense, and that extended to every member of your biological family.

And we ran deep, okay? The Fords and the descendants of the Hollands, we were everywhere in my town. And all of the cousins, everybody, you could not mess with one of us without having to mess with all of us. That was the rule. It didn't matter if I was beefing with my cousin.

Me and my cousin could have gotten into a fight yesterday. But if you said something to my cousin today, you had to meet every member of our family on the playground to deal with it. And I'm not saying that's always the right way to deal with things. But that's how I grew up. Very, very physically protective of each other. And that turned into very protective of the image of each other.

And being protective of the image of each other meant that as these things were happening in our family, as people were being harmed and hurt and dealing with shame, it was our duty as people who protected and loved each other and were obligated to each other by blood, that you don't let people outside of this circle know about that. you don't ever, ever talk about what's going on in this house. Because in the house, we can deal with it with love, but out there people will shame us and hurt us and they will reject us. And the problem was we never dealt with them in the house. We never talked about it in the house.

So it was sort of like everybody burning alive but holding on to each other. And I could not make that feel right in my body. I tried and I tried and I tried to make that feel correct. I felt so guilty about the fact that it didn't feel correct to me. And I had been taught to distrust myself so much that all I could do with those feelings of discomfort or that inkling that something about this isn't right is turn it into a reason to dislike myself. myself, to hate myself, to mistrust myself. So I had to find something that was different than what I'd been taught because I could not survive within what I'd been taught. I was not surviving in that frame of mind. I needed something new. I didn't want to lose my family,

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And like we know that a worm can survive, you know, the top of it if it regenerates, but the tail doesn't. And I just was like, okay, that that's actually in this whole, this whole story. You have the part of you that, you know, that knew the things, but the part of you that couldn't repeat the things and the part of you that, that you'll never know because you're dad's away and the girl you thought you were and the girl you had to be like, what is that earthworm metaphor you? And did you consciously know at some point that you had to pick one side to survive? And what did that cost you? Well, I'll say this. First of all, I'm terrified

of earthworms, right? It's like I'm not scared of snakes or lizards or anything else. But for some reason, earthworms are like, I'll cross the street. I'll cross the street. I'll cross the street. to have friends. And my best friend is the same way. It's something that we've shared since we were 14 years old. It's how we became friends. It was like, oh, you're scared of earthworms true. Let's never leave each other.

But that moment, yeah, I mean, that moment for me was this conscious splitting, this like conscious understanding from a very young age I began to dissociate and learned that I could be in one. place in my body and I could move to another place in my mind. And being able to have that was my safe place. Like that was the sense of safety that I had with memory. We're not really supposed to remember a whole lot about our childhood. Some people think that that's because, you know, did something happen and that's why I don't remember? No, you're really like not supposed to remember most of what happens before like 11, you know?

What happens for a lot of us is like our senses come online in a very hypervigilant way because we don't feel safe. I remember so far back because I didn't feel safe. I don't have memories of feeling safe. And so there was always this feeling that I would have to split myself eventually. I felt like I had watched my mother split herself, that she was one person in front of a other people and sometimes with us. And then in her dark place, she was a completely other person. And I thought that was adulthood, that that was what everybody became, was two people. And so I practiced it early, very, very early. And I knew when I left Missouri and I came back to my mom's house.

And I was with my brother again and my new baby sister. I knew that the life. I knew that the life, I had had in Missouri, this life that I had, you know, treasured and been so proud of and so happy with that my goat and my dog and my snakes in the field and the wild pigs and all of that, I knew that I was never going to get that again, that I was never going to be able to go back there and have that sense of peace ever again. But that maybe there was something ahead of me that could be even better than that. And that little bit of hope, I think, is what allowed me to remain open when every other part of me was like, you really need to shut down. You really just need to shut down and find a track and get on a track and let the momentum of that track push you forward. There was always something,

like this little kernel of something that I can't explain that was like, but maybe it could be better than that. Maybe you could be happier than that. Maybe you could get what you want. And that was like, even as I felt it, it terrified me. It still sometimes terrifies me. Wow. And is that little spark, in my mind, it's because of all the books. It's because she found books early. It's so she had this idea of like this forward motion of what a story can be. And so, she had this idea. And, what a story can be. Like that, I love the parts in the book about how reading was like church to you, basically.

Yes. And you found a library and they let you read. It was too good to be true. The library was too good to be true. It's just that line. I was like, oh, it is. It still is. It still is.

I still, you know, I live, I'm not kidding, right now, probably about 300 feet from a library. Oh. I love a library. I love, I have so many books. I'm never going to get out of all my books. I have so many. I love them. I want them all the time. Stories were where I figured out that there were all kinds of voices and that I could be one of them that got to tell the story and got to decide what happened next. And that sense of narrative power, of narrative control, realizing the power of narrative of narrative in culture, in community, I could never, ever, ever pretend that I hadn't found that. You know, there are so many things you can deny in yourself. You can deny that you saw that. You could deny that you felt it, that it meant anything.

But there is something about the stories in books to me that are undeniable proof about the power of storytelling and of narrative. And that undeniable proof just felt like something that I could latch on to, something that I could use. And I also, for the most part, come from a pretty intense storytelling family. My family doesn't think of themselves that way. But there's a reason why my family kind of has this positive image in my hometown. It's because everybody's a good time. Everybody's a good time to hang out with and be around. And that's great, except for the fact that that has to exist in the place where you can still talk about what's hard and what hurts.

And my family struggles with that part. So it's a lot of performance. And it's a lot of image maintenance. And yeah, we can throw a banging party, okay? Don't get me wrong. We will have fun. But when it's time to talk about what's real, people get angry and people get defensive and people disappear.

And I live in that place. My brain has always lived in that place. I've always been an observer. I've always wanted to say, well, why is that? Well, why did we make that decision? Why did we move to this place? Where is my dad? Why is he gone?

I've always had a lot of questions. And, you know, I sometimes still hate how intensely I was taught to cut that part of me out of me to make other people comfortable. So how did you, so the power of the hope made you think that maybe there was a third way and that third way was forward and not backwards. Oh, yeah. And this idea of family is who we stick with no matter what. We just die on fire with each other. Yes. Right. You know, over and over again, we hear that from people in a million different ways. Like, I want the forward way, but my family. You know, this blood is thicker than water thing, which is just something we say, which you blew my mind about. Can you tell them what you taught me about the blood is thicker than water? Oh yeah, the whole quote is actually the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb. And it essentially says that what we choose to be to each other is so much more important than the circumstances we were born into or even the people that we were born to. I struggle to this day to accept love and care from people who are not obligated to me because I was taught growing up that that would be setting myself up for heartbreak.

Yep. That the only people you could count on are the people who are obligated to you by blood. Yep. And I see, I have seen up close over the years how that has warped. the relationships of my family members and how it has kept them from truly seeing each other and knowing each other. And I don't want that for me. I don't want that for anybody. I don't want that for anybody because it's so much better. It's so much better to be loved and known by any person who has the capacity to do that for you and who you feel comfortable

reciprocating that with. Like that is such a beautiful thing. So we were, Abby is just like really relating to what your family of origin stuff right now. I'm not sure she wants to talk about it, but I'm just telling you that she's basically like her head's going to fall off her neck by agreeing. I think probably with the ideas of we don't talk about hard things. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I come from the Irish Catholic family where, you know, all of our stuff just got brushed under the rug and still does to this day. And it's what I've learned in my maturity and quite frankly being married to Glennon and having sister in my corner, Amanda in my corner, I've learned that if you don't talk about the hard things and actually deal with them, they just become future problems. Yes. And my family, for whatever reason, I think that they're trying their best.

It's just, it's hard to turn to the sun and look at and get blinded, right? And I think, you know, for me, Ashley, I just think it's so moving to be able to step away from your blood family and to create something new for yourself because it's uncharted, right? What you're doing is uncharted. I just think that you're fucking fantastic. I think you're fucking fantastic. And Abby, I want you like, you know, one of the things that I talk about to people sometimes with my family is I'm like, you got to understand that like even if they want to change, even if they want to do it differently, right now what they're best at is what they practiced. The only thing they've ever practiced is doing it the way they do it. Asking them to do it differently is like it would be like asking you, Abby, like, Abby, like, Abby, I really need you.

to get into basketball. And I need you to be good as LeBron in like two years so that we can do it, you know? Yeah. And it's like, why can't LeBron get good at soccer? Like, you know what I mean? And then like that's the back and forth, you know? And I think that like you kind of have to understand it. Like everything we're doing is practice all the time.

So if I've practiced doing something one way for 18 years, 20 years, 30 years, 40 years, I can convince myself today that there is another way to do it, and I still won't be as good at doing it that way as I am at doing it the old way. That's right. No matter how much I want to be as good. That's right. And you want to be good at something. And so people just cling on to their old patterns just so that they can feel like they're good at it, even if it's bad at them. Yes.

Yes. It's like, but that's what I'm good at. That's what I practiced. You practice something one way your whole life and then somebody. says, actually, you did it wrong. And you're like, what do you mean? This is what everybody told me to do. This is how everybody was practicing. Or, you know, like maybe nobody even ever told me how to practice. Nobody told me what I was practicing. I just did what I saw everybody around me do because I learned from their example. And this is the only example I had. This show is brought to you by Alma. When I first first,

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slash we can to schedule a free consultation today. That's hello a l-m-a.com slash W-E-C-A-N. It's what so many of my friends are dealing with right now. It's like in your 30s or your 40s, you start to, maybe if you are opening yourself up to other ways, you start to look at your family of origin and say, wait, that's not, wait, why did we do it that way? What? Oh, wait, is this why I'm like that? Like, what? And then, and then we turn towards our family of origin and say, what the fuck? Like, why did we do it that way the whole time?

What's wrong with you? And they're like, but we've been playing basketball. Like, so my question to you is how you have, for real you have, not like the expert. Like, you have for real found a piece with, you know who you are. you have found a way to love your family and love yourself and not compromise who you are. How do we do that? What's the third way? How do you deal with them still playing basketball while you're over here playing soccer? I don't know. I've lost the sports metaphor. But you know what I mean. I think you just have to let it all be true at the same time. You have to let it all be true at the same time. It's the thing that nobody ever really talks to us about or shows us how. to do, which is processing complex emotions. You know, like, we can't just have the movie inside

out talking to us about complex emotions. Like, there has to be a deeper conversation that happens because the truth of the matter is not that, like, oh, I feel so good about my upbringing now. And I feel so good about my parents now. It's just that I have accepted who my parents are. I have accepted who they are. And that doesn't mean that I condone all. of their behaviors or beliefs or previous actions or future actions. That's not at all what that means. It just means that today, I know that my mom is a person who did her best and who didn't do a great job. Both of those things are true. She did her best and she didn't do a great job. She loves me so much and she didn't show it very well.

Wow. And so this is the relationship we have today. Wow. So what are we going to do with that? Well, I know what I'm going to do about that. I'm going to work on me. I'm going to work on myself. I'm going to make sure that the things that I need and want that I didn't get,

that I still seek those things out in my life. because even if I get them and find that, man, they're not as good as I thought they were going to be, at least I gave myself the chance to find out. And I'm happy about that. Can I ask you a question about that? I just want to keep digging here because I think it's really, I think a lot of people listening, myself included, I need to know in terms of that forgiveness, I struggle with the loyalty versus forgiveness complex. It was like to stay loyal to the familial tie and bond that I was born into.

Right. And this idea that I know I want to feel loyal, but I feel disloyal if I feel like any of the things that you just said that my mom did the best she could, but it just wasn't good enough. Whatever those words or phrases are, how do you feel about the word loyalty? because that is something that runs very strongly through my bones. Right. And that's hard for me to get right with in terms of doing some of this really hard familial work. Because it makes you feel disloyal to say that was not right or that wasn't good enough. Yes.

Yeah. Well, first of all, I believe loyalty is a thing that has to go both ways. I don't think I owe my parents more loyalty than they owe me. And I don't think that just because they kept me or my. My mother kept me alive for 18 years. That means I owe her my undying loyalty for the rest of my life. I got a whole big long life going on. And like I love her.

Do I love her? Yes, absolutely. But in order to engage in a relationship, a friendship, a mother-daughter relationship that includes loyalty, I have to know that we have the same definition of love and we have the same definition of loyalty. those things are very, very important to me. And to be honest, the thing that I'm always having to think about when I start to feel guilty or I start to have those feelings that I was conditioned to have because it serves my mother for me to have those feelings.

That's right. When I start having those come up, I ask myself, okay, if my mother asked me to hide, the ways that she hurt me because if I talk about it, it hurts her. Is she making a loving request of me? Is that a loving and loyal request to make of somebody who you love? To ask them to suffer in silence with the harm that you caused them so that you will not be potentially harmed by the damage to your image? Damn.

Does that even sound like somebody who's sorry for what they did? Are they sorry or do they not want other people to know what they did? Are they sorry or do they not want other people to see them the way they are? Because you're not making something up when you tell the truth. That's right. You're not lying on them. You're not even really exposing them. They expose themselves when they treat them.

you that way. All you're doing is saying what happened. And somebody who would ask you to temper your healing, somebody who would ask you to alter your story, somebody who would ask you to suffer in silence is not making a loving request of you. That's not love. So they may love you. And they may think the world of you. And they may want to hold on to you for you. for dear life, but in that moment, they're not doing a loving thing. The action is just not matching up with the intention. And it is okay for you to say, the action is not matching the intention here, Mom. I know that you love me. And I know that part of this is that you think you're protecting me. You think you're protecting me from having this story out in the world where I have the kind of

mom who would do something or say something like this. Part of you does think that. But there is a bigger part of you that is just worried about being called a bad mom. And the world can't actually tell you if you're a bad mom. That's right. That's your job. That's your work. And Ashley, you don't need her. I think that one of the things that people struggle with so much with this and forgiveness is you're not asking her to admit anything or to agree with you.

Nope. to, you're not trying to get you both on the same page. I think that's where people struggle. They say, I can't let go until she admits or until we all agree. Need to see eye to eye here. Yeah. Right. But that's not what you're saying. One of the things I'm so obsessed with about you is you trust yourself enough to know what you know, regardless of whether there's gaslighting or whatever from the other side. Well, I mean, yeah, but that, that required me figuring out that boundaries can exist in a, relationship with people you love. I didn't know that before. All of the protective instincts that I had been taught were about protecting my body or protecting people who I love and care about. I had not been taught that sometimes, yes, you have to protect yourself with people that love you.

And if they feel bad about the fact that you have to protect yourself with them, that's a them thing. You can't fix that. You can't be so silent and so giving and so wanting of them all at the same time that you soothe the part of them, that insecurity that is worried about being seen. You can't protect them from it. You can't protect them from you seeing them. And you're only responsible for the boundary you set, not for the reaction to it. Yes. Managing people's reactions to the boundaries is what ruins us.

It is. When you try to manage the reactions of other people, when you try to manage other people's reactions to your boundaries, you're doing their work for them. It's like your kid who really needs to learn their ABCs. And so they need to, you know, sit down and copy those ABCs on paper. And you're like, actually, I can help with that. I know my ABCs. Let me just fill that out. That's not going to help them.

They're not going to learn from that. They've got to sit and do their ABCs. I love my mom so much that I trust her to be able to do her own work. I love her that much. I am so, so deeply, deeply in love with who, my mother wants to be and who she is at the same time. Wow. I am in love with both of those people, but I know that those people need work. And she knows that those people need work. And I know I can't do that work for her. It's not my responsibility to do that work for her. All I can do is

like, hey, I believe that you are totally capable of it. I hope you do it. And I'm right here. I'm right here. And that's the first. That's, that's, Forgiveness for you. Like, is that how you would define forgiveness? How would you define forgiveness? For me, forgiveness is giving up on the idea that it was going to be different. Oh. That's forgiveness for me.

It's just giving up on the version of my life where it was different because it's not different. It's not ever going to be different. It is the way the past is the past. I can't change anything about the past. Not one. None of us can. None of us can.

unless some stuff is going on I don't know about, in which case I want to know about it, that's too big for me. Let me be a human on this plane, figuring out this before you start jumping in with time travel. But yes. But yes, like, I mean, I can't do anything about the past. And so forgiveness for me is just not sitting here dreaming about some version of a conversation my mother and I are going to have where we embrace each other and everything is different for the rest of forever. That's not going to happen. I'm never going to get the chance to be a 14-year-old

who's close with her mother. I'm never going to get the chance to be a person whose parent dropped them off at college with smiles and well wishes. That's just never going to be my reality. So in this reality, every day that I am still in contact, that I'm still in contact, that I'm still in connection with my mother. I know that that's my choice. I know that that's my, that every day I wake up and I choose to have faith in her ability to grow, to love, and to show up. Every day I choose to have faith in that, but I don't expect anything.

I don't expect it at all. Is forgiveness an active recurring thing? Because when you were describing how. You know, they've been practicing this one way, and it might be that much harder for you because you were practicing a different way for so many years. And now you're on an uphill battle, right, to do what you mean to do. I resonate with that. Sometimes, like, my tendencies to act a certain way, I get so angry because I attribute those to bad practice for a long time. So is it, Do you find that you have to like let go of the fact that like the hand your doubt is that and that's just?

Yeah. All the time. All the time. I was just talking to my therapist this week. And I told him, I told him I am so angry because all of the ways that I feel special now that I have allowed myself to feel kind of, you know, special and good about myself. Those things were always true about me. They were always there. And they were always evident.

And the way people, some people reacted to me, had nothing to do with who I was and everything to do with their fear. And I'm pissed off for the younger version of me who could have done and seen and experience so many things with the full embodiment of herself actually inside of her body, except for the fact that by the time she was a teenager, she was already terrified to be inside of her body. And she was already terrified of how the world would react to her because of how the world had already reacted to her. And because she didn't have a safe place to fully, fully be herself and not be judged for it.

And every kid should have that. Every kid should have that. And it pisses me off. It pisses me off. If you want to see me pissed off today, like people are always like, Ashley, you stay so calm and cool in situations. And I'm like, mistreat a child. Talk about mistreating children. And you'll find out. You'll see me. You will see me. You will see that part of me. You will see the part of me that takes no prisoners when we start talking about children because somebody has to stand up for them. Somebody has to be there. Somebody has to be the adult who's on their side. They need somebody to be on their side. That's what I needed most of my life. And that's what I got in certain.

places. And the friends of mine who I grew up with who are not doing well, who are struggling with addiction, who are struggling with codependency, some of whom who have died in different ways, usually involving violence in the community or violence that is self-inflicted. I watched a lot of those kids, a lot of my peers, have nobody on their side. no adults on their side for years and years and years. And I always knew that the difference between my reality and theirs was that. That that was the difference. Because we came from the same stuff and we had the same potential.

But there was a teacher or a community member who said, I'm going to hold her hand a little bit through this. I'm going to walk her through this next door. And I would look back and there would be five kids with nobody to hold their hand and nobody to walk them through that next door. So you become now my favorite definition of leadership. You just figure out what you needed when you were younger and you create that or you become that, which is what you do.

It's a new year and instead of trying to reinvent myself, I've been asking a simpler question. What would actually support me right now? And honestly, a big part of that answer is my home. I want my space to feel calmer, more functional and a little more like a place that can reflect my goals and energy for this year, which is why I've been turning to Wayfair. It's truly a one-stop shop for everything your home needs this season. What surprised me most was how easy it was to find exactly what I wanted in my style and within my budget, whether you're organizing kids' rooms, upgrading your work from home setup, tackling clutter, or just trying to make weeknight dinners easy. Wayfair really does have everything. Your home doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to support the life you're living right now.

Get organized, refreshed, and back on track this new year for way less. head to wayfair.com right now to shop all things home. That's W-A-Y-F-A-I-R-com. Wayfair. Every style, every home. Sister, why were you having that reaction when Ashley was talking? I felt like you were thinking of something amazing. Were you having a reaction? I was just, I was connecting with the things that make you read. Like, I'm no longer even inhabiting this situation. I am I am going to go rectify whatever that is happening over there. Is that the place where like we can offer forgiveness for us, but we cannot tolerate observing it happening to someone else?

You understand the weight of it unlike anybody else. When you have felt that pain in your body and you know it, you understand. the weight of it. You understand what it means to carry it. You understand how hard it is to get it off of you. Like, you get it. That's my passion point. That's where what makes me most angry is my passion point. Yeah. That is where I most easily show up and get things done is when it has to do with children. Anything having to do with kids, it's like, you need me there. I'm there. And it's like, I'm there with bells on. I'm there with bells on because I know how important it is to show up for kids. I know how easily that can alter the trajectory of their entire lives, just having somebody

show up. My band director showed up. Yes. I love your band director. Did you see that? I had a, I had a talk at my alma mater, a place that I didn't graduate from until 2018. Hey. Hey. So I did my thing and I finally graduated. And they had me back. I'm my college's first writer in residence. So I've been doing that this semester. Oh, my God, Ashley. And at my first event, my high school band director showed up.

And I saw him in the crowd with a mat. He had a mask on. And I walked out on stage and, you know, I try to like look out, get my bearings. And my eyes went directly. to him. And the first thing I said before I even gave any of my speech was Mr. Kathy? Because there he was. And somebody who shows up for you like that, somebody who routinely talks to you about your ability to get and to give, it's like you can never, ever, ever get enough of that. He waited until the end of the signing line. He stood there and he waited until it was all the way over. He was the last.

person I talked to. And the thing he said to me was, I loved watching you on that stage. That's how you pour love into people. Because that's what he used to tell us all the time. Of course I'm here with you guys. Of course I'm working with you guys. I'm pouring love into you. I love you guys. So to have him show up 17 years later to tell me that the work that he had done on my behalf, that he saw me turn that around and be able to do it for somebody else. It's like, what feels better than that? I can't imagine. And that's just somebody showing up, an adult who loved me, who showed up for me as an adult trying to love other people.

And not even, you know, I remember talking to a parenting expert a long time ago. And I think maybe it was during the divorce. I don't know. I was worrying about the myriad ways that I was fucking up my kids. And she said, actually, there's two indicators that kids will do all right. And one is just one adult. And it doesn't even have to be parent. Just one adult who is, I don't know, a mentor, somebody like your band director,

just somebody who shows up and loves in a steady way. And the second was humility, the kind of humility that asks for help. Thank God we have a little bit more time. with Ashley. So we're going to end this episode. But don't worry, everybody. We have Ashley back. And we're going to start this next episode talking to Ashley about the power of apology. We've talked a lot about the power of forgiveness. I want to talk about apology and what it means to our kids. For the next right thing, let's just do what Ashley tells us to do and pour some love into somebody today. Anybody. Find somebody. All right. When this week gets hard, don't forget. We can do hard things.

I give you Tishmilton and Brandy Carlisle. I walked through fire. I came out the other side. I chase desire. I made sure I got what's mine. I continued to believe that I'm a... We're adventurers and... heart breaks on map a final destination we'll laugh they've stopped asking directions

to places they've been to be we'll find we can do a heart a brand new star and sometimes things fall apart i continue to believe people People are free and it took some time fine Because we're adventurers and hot destination They've stopped asking directions To places they've never been And too hard To play never been

Yeah. We Can Do Hard Things is produced in partnership with Cadence 13 Studios. Be sure to rate, review, and follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Odyssey, or wherever you get your podcasts. Especially be sure to rate and review the podcast if you really liked it. If you didn't, don't worry about it. It's fine.