The frost on the grass this morning caught the early light and turned it into something that was almost beautiful. I noticed that. I set down my coffee and actually looked at it, for a moment, the way you can look at things when you’re not managing anything.
That is how this morning starts. We’ll see how April ends it.
## The Difficult Conversation We Hadn’t Had
There was one more conversation Nathan and I needed to have that I’d been putting off because I couldn’t find the right framing for it. It finally happened on a Wednesday evening in late January, which is not a day associated with important conversations but which turned out to be the one when both of us had the capacity for it.
It was about forgiveness. Not in the theatrical sense — I was not withholding forgiveness as a bargaining chip or drawing out the process for effect. It was more that I hadn’t been sure whether forgiveness was the right word for what I needed to find, and I hadn’t wanted to use a word that wasn’t accurate.
What I said to Nathan was this: I don’t think what you did was a betrayal, in the serious sense of that word. I think it was a failure — a specific failure to honor an agreement and to consider my needs as equal to your mother’s needs in that particular moment. I can forgive a failure. I’m less certain how to forgive a pattern, because a pattern isn’t something that happened; it’s something that’s been happening, and will continue to happen unless we change it, and forgiving a pattern before it’s actually changed seems like it would just clear the slate for more of the same.