It’s Plank Pullin’ time! The one day a week that we strongly resolve to ignore the multitude of specks and sawdust around us and pull one bona fide plank from our own eye. Matthew 7:3-5 style.

Spencer has an exceptional memory.  He’s the one to ask if you ever forget a name or a place, and he’s the one to have remind you that you need to stop for milk on the way home from basketball.  He remembers everything.  The downside to such a memory is that… well, he remembers everything.  It’s not unusual for him to get freshly stressed out over something that happened two years ago, or still carry hurt feelings over something that happened when he was just a little kid.   Something will come up in conversation, it’ll remind him, and I’ll see those shoulders slump.  I’ll often find myself telling him,

“You have to find a way to let it go.”

Sage advice, to be sure, except…. I do the exact same thing.  I always have. When I’m at up at 2 AM for my nightly date with Tivo, it’s rarely current things I’m stressed about, but things that should be long in the past.  Things that for better or worse keep showing up in my subconscious, like an old worn out cassette tape playing over and over and over.   Old fights, old struggles, old stresses.   Hurtful things that have been said to me or done to me…or hurtful things that I have done.  A couple of days ago, I remembered someone I went to school with, and who in fact took me to my Junior prom.   We were good friends at one point, but he moved to a different school, and we ended up losing touch.   For whatever reason (I don’t know that I had one) he wasn’t invited to my wedding.  I heard through mutual friends that he was hurt about that, and the memory still makes me feel terrible.  18 years later.

It’s even worse now that I’m a parent, because added to my nightly playlist are all the times that the kids were hurt, or embarrassed, or disappointed as well.  Everett and the time he worked so hard to memorize all his lines of a play, only to have the director suddenly cancel the whole production at the last minute.   Spencer and the last time he was made fun of for his speech.  Paxton and the time he admitted something he wasn’t proud of, and cried so hard I didn’t think he’d ever stop.

I don’t know why I do it.  It’s not like I sit there and think, “Okay, what uncomfortable memories from the past can I dwell on tonight?”  I don’t.  But sometimes I just close my eyes, and there they are.   And it’s not a matter of not forgiving either.  I’ve been told in the past that I hold a grudge, but I honestly don’t believe I do.  I’m good at forgiving…. just really, really bad at forgetting.

Like Spencer, I just need to find a way to let it go.  Something that, like most planks, is of course always much easier said than done.