The Weight of Hatred

I have been hiding lately. I have been slinking around, hoping to avoid anyone who hates me. Seems easy until you realize that there are a great number of people who hate me. Reminds me sadly, of our neighborhood squirrel dilemma. We have a neighbor who is trapping squirrels. He hates the squirrels. How do you hate squirrels? I mean have you ever looked deeply into the brown doe-like eyes of a squirrel? I mean, they get eye contact, their bushy tails flick and flit manically, they take one random chomp on a blackened, dirt-encrusted nut, and leap off into infinity. Who hates that?

Well, I’ll tell you who hates squirrel repartee, our neighbor. With a protruding belly that, if were on a woman, would indicate his 54th week of pregnancy, a pair of precariously torn gray sweatpants with holes in all the wrong and questionable places, and a set of long jagged, dirt-filled fingernails, he drags out these wire cages wherein he plops a few walnuts, a squirrel delicacy. Within a few hours there is, within a trampoline bounce, the vision of a poor gray squirrel feverishly trying to escape. In fact, it’s as though those desperate squirrels have telepathic abilities right to our three children, because everyone that is caught seems to send out an S.O.S. signal right over the lattice topped fence to our children, which comes indoors translated in complete and utter hysterics. Rick has intervened on more than one Squirrel Peace Treaty to have them released: So far, his negotiation skills have proven quite successful – so far.

I guess the thing that takes it to a whole new level is that we have reason to suspect that our neighbor is….is….eating the captured squirrels. Now, don’t get me wrong in some places of the globe, even the United States, I understand that. In fact, squirrel is a fine lean meat I suppose, but when you live in the tenth largest city in the United States where food is plentiful and you live a mere ten feet away from your suburban neighbors, isn’t hunting squirrels just a tad inappropriate?

And, if only he hunted them, but he doesn’t. He drowns them. I have awakened to more than one nightmare envisioning Darryl with his dirty hands around the scrawny, furry neck of a squirrel, while it fights for its last breath underwater. Think Glenn Close in that bathtub scene of “Fatal Attraction,” and you are right there with me. Remember how that big meat cleaver was still beside her and that weird trickle of blood oozed to the surface out of her mouth through the water? Well, these squirrels aren’t even armed with meat cleavers!

And, it’s not like this neighbor fellow needs the food. He must assuredly have plenty of food to maintain the status quo of his present physique. I guess it bothers me, because I enjoy watching squirrel antics. It’s like “The Three Stooges” in the animal world. In fact, Sophie got her nickname, “Squirrel,” because when she was fussy, usually around dusk, I would put nuts on the fence line to calm her. Holding her on my hips, her bothered cries would turn to giggles and then, full out belly-laughs as we watched the squirrels chase each other for the nuts. For us squirrels are free entertainment, and for our neighbor, squirrels are a free meal: It’s all perspective I guess.

Well, the squirrel population is dramatically down in our neighborhood for reasons I suppose are profoundly clear. They are either dead at the filthy hands of our hungry neighbor, or have been scared off by the death trap next door. Either way, they don’t come around much anymore.

Just like any of the living squirrels avoiding Darryl’s Death Trap, I am avoiding my own death trap. It’s not a true death trap, though I’ve felt – for sure – there are people who would prefer me dead rather than alive. I don’t think they are going to drown me, or for that matter, do anything harmful to me, except that is, to hate me.

Hate itself is pretty harmful, I guess. Knowing when you’re hated is maybe instinctual; a mechanism God has given us for self-preservation. I know when I’m hated and I know there are quite a few people who have opted to hate me for reasons I cannot alter or change in any way.

Just last week I talked to a friend I haven’t talked to in nearly five years. The magic of Facebook allowed us to reconnect. There was good and bad that came from our reconnection. I got to catch up on her life and hear about her family and children. Sadly, I told her about my mother and my mom’s decision to kill herself just four months ago. As I was crying, trying to hold it back, I said, “I don’t know what my mother told people about me, but it must have been something bad, because everyone hates me.” My friend responded, “I know what she told people, because she called my mom just twelve months ago.”

I was shocked. This friend was not as much a family friend, as she was my friend alone. Our parents never socialized, ever. How my mother even got the telephone number of my former junior high classmate’s mother, I don’t know. As my friend told me all the things my mother told someone she barely knew, I was shocked. All the emotions I have struggled with over the last four months were even more jumbled. You see, it was just one of many stories I’ve heard over the last four months.

For inexplicable reasons, as though people are cleansing their souls to me, like a priest on the other side of a confessional, I am hearing many stories of how my mother seemed to hate me, wanting to spread a vast net of hatred over anything good I ever was or did. I am getting all the dirty laundry dropped off with stains and tears. A woman my mother worked with ten years ago whose name I don’t even know contacted me on Facebook to unfurl the banner of my mother’s meanness toward me.

Here it is that I miss my mother and have to struggle with also knowing that she hated me. I long to hear her voice, be comforted in her arms and smell her sweet perfume wafting into a room. I am continually saddened to tears that she put a gun to her temple and ended it all. It horrifies me beyond what I can adequately express. I miss her. To the heart of it all, I just miss her. I want her back, even though she hated me.

I want her the way she was when I was in high school, my best friend, laughing and silly. The alcohol had not yet won. She loved me then. She cared about me, or at least pretended very well that she did. I can’t be sure she ever loved me and have accepted that it shouldn’t much matter, at this point. Back then, she appeared to want to know about my life and was usually more sober than drunk. I still knew I wasn’t her favorite. I still heard her incessant stories of how I wasn’t smart, but they weren’t as mean as the things to come. She had not told me really mean things yet, like she didn’t care if I died. She was vibrant and fun, and even if she didn’t, even if she never did, I thought fully enough to be OK, that she loved me then.

Our relationship worked then, I suppose, because I had never even thought of disagreeing with her, even if it meant sitting amidst a number of acceptable people to hear how stupid I was for the hundredth time, or hearing what an unpleasant temperament I had compared to all the more favorable people in our family, and though they all surely had their faults, we just chose to overlook them in lieu of micro-examining mine over and over. Yeah, things were fine, because I was OK being subtly disparaged. I mean, I had always figured every family needs a target, right? The one they don’t understand the most is an obvious choice.

After hearing my friend’s account of what my mother told her mom, it’s no wonder all my family detests me. No wonder they can’t see the truth that my mother’s alcoholism separated us long before I made clear, firm, and healthy boundaries to separate from her verbal and emotional abuse. The weight of their hatred toward me is a boulder. It is immense. If I could escape it, I would. If I could flit away on the top of a fence to some other place like a squirrel running from Darryl, I would.

No one knows of all the things she whispered to me: It had always seemed inappropriate to share with anyone else. Frankly, it was too hurtful to share with anyone else, somehow embarrassing. There was a shame I felt about it. I did not know how to share such hurt that was mine alone. I still fumble with it. I didn’t always respond the way I should have. I didn’t know how to respond. All I know is that the weight of hatred is heavy.

In one of the strangest accounts of Paul in the Bible, it briefly states within just one sentence that Paul was once stoned by an angry mob. In fact, after they stoned him, they “dragged him outside the city, thinking he was dead” (Acts 14: 19). It states that well after the mob left, he stirred, rose, and walked back into the city to preach more. Can you even imagine? He walked back into the city from where he had just been thrown out to preach more! He did not give up. There was no doubt that he knew the people hated him. They wanted him dead and it wasn’t just intuition that told him that.

This morning, as I stirred, not wanting to face another day just knowing that my enemies were out there, God said, “Have faith.” I grumbled and again, the message was, “Have faith.” Then, I waited for God’s prompting to see what He had for me in regards to this. I opened my Bible to find Psalm 25. It says, “O Lord, I give my life to you. I trust in you, my God! Do not let me be disgraced, or let my enemies rejoice in my defeat. No one who trusts in you will ever be disgraced, but disgrace comes to those who try to deceive others.” In verse 25:7, “Do not remember the rebellious sins of my youth. Remember me in the light of your unfailing love, for you are merciful, O Lord.”