Grudges and resentment

Families can be full of them. Much worse than with friends because there is a distance there that you cannot have with families.

I remember as a child around the ages from eleven to fourteen - before I started to get a mind of my own - sitting around the dining room table with my sister, Mum and Dad listening to Mum - it was always Mum - regaling us with tales of woe about her father and Dad's mother. This was when they were the two grandparents still alive. She hated them both and for a long while we never visited Granda. Looking back it was nasty and quite vitriolic. It boiled down to a character assassination of two people who my sister and I didn't really know.

When she relented as Granda got older and frailer we resumed visits. I would have been sixteen or so. I realised that he was OK. In fact he was a nice man. I wish I had known him longer for he had fought in the First World War when he was sixteen and would have had some stories; I got some from Mum later. Unfortunately he became ill and died a couple of years after we started up our visits. I think Mum felt a little guilty.

How sad. How sad that resentments could soil what might have been a nice relationship.

When we had our own children the last thing that entered our minds was to do what Mum did, to instill ill feeling into our children towards their Grandparents, or indeed anyone else.

Resentments, grudges. They are so destructive. It's one thing to wheel out old annoyances in the heat of a row. It's another to keep them bubbling away when things have calmed down.

Growing up in that atmosphere of what amounted to hatred has had a positive effect on me. Forgive and forget. Or, if not forget at least accept. Move on. Learn from the row and repair the damage as nothing is irredeemable when it comes to human relationships.

We've just come out of a debilitating family row. I've learnt. I'll try to amend some of my behaviour. I bear no ill will, in fact I understand why others have been annoyed.

Providing the other parties do the same we will all be the better for it.

When I think of my mother now I do not feel resentment at all. I feel a huge sense of sadness that so much energy was spent on such a negative thing and sadness that I never got close to either Grandma or Granda.

You see I accept how she was. I couldn't change her - neither could she - so why fret on what cannot be changed. She had many redeeming traits so celebrate them is what I say.

And what I say to my family now.