Is acceptance the same as forgiveness?

I am a member of the sandwich generation. I am simultaneously taking care of my children and my parents. It’s hard. To be a member of this club you have to surrender your life long role of being a child. No more regressions to age 12 when you visit family. No more tattling on siblings.
The difficulty increases when you have struggled in your relationship with one of your parents, like I have. I have mother issues. To some extent, we all do so I won’t bore you with the details. If you are reading this and you know me, you have heard it all before.

Two weeks ago I received a document from the nursing home my mother was transferring to at the end of her time in a transitional care unit. It was titled “Life History”. I was to answer the questions asked about my mother’s life history so that the folks working on her unit could come to understand her better. I was stunned that they would think that I could provide them anything worthwhile. I have never understood my mother. How could I possibly have anything that could help them? Trying to be a good daughter and knowing it would gnaw at me until I did it, I opened the document assuming I could wrap this up in 30 minutes.

But Noooooo

It took a week.

Who knew?

Who knew the havoc such simple questions would create?
Who knew the peace such simple questions would bring?

Not me, that’s for sure.

The questions were simple enough that I could not impose my own perspective, emotions, and pain on them. I found myself attacking this task with the energy of writing the biography of someone for an English term paper. I really wanted to get an A.

Place of birth
Date of birth
Siblings (with names and ages)
High School attended
Clubs
Awards
Goals

As I answered these questions I had to retrieve memories of what my mother and grandmother told me about their lives. To be honest, I said I didn’t know a lot of the information, and I truly didn’t. Siblings; my mother is 85 and was the youngest. She is the only living member of her family. Her father died when she was 8. Her favorite brother when she was 12. She experienced loss of her immediate family early in life and it followed her through life. I started to wonder how this affects a person. How does it feel to watch all your family members die? How does it feel to happen periodically througout your life rather than lumped all together in your adulthood? How does it feel to be the only one left behind? Do you feel abandoned?

College
Major
Interests
Profession
Goals

My mother did not go to college so I was able to legitimately pass on this section. But there’s that word again, goals. My mother wanted to go to college but was not able to afford it. Did that create a longing? A desire?

First date
Wedding
Children

My mother lost her second child, a daughter. She died 2 days after she was born. Now the family she created had loss. What does it do to someone to see that type of pattern repeat itself? Does it create fear? Do you distance yourself so that you can shield yourself from pain?

Jobs
Family vacations
Family rituals
Illnesses
Traumatic events

I was able to give more information here. I wrote long paragraphs as if I needed to prove I knew something about this woman that has been at the core of my life for 51 years. I was grateful that “goals” was not in this section. It should have been. I was still struggling with the fact that I did not know what my mother’s goals in life might have been. When I talked about my own goals growing up I was told having goals was a luxury. I felt unheard, ignored, and belittled.

I get it now Mom. I really do.

I can write several pages of how I moved past my feelings of the past and came to realize that she is a person who had experiences, most of which were not good, and they shaped her into the person she is now. I never saw that before. I think you can only see it when you can no longer regress back to being the child. The child inside keeps us from seeing our parents as people. I can now accept all that my mother is and was. I can now accept my mother for who she is without comparing her to what I wanted her to be for me, the child.

But I have one last question. So many people tell me that we need to forgive. I have had a list of things I knew I needed to forgive my mother for. But now, now that the child is gone and there is acceptance, I have no idea what I should forgive her for?

So, my question is this: Is acceptance the same as forgiveness?