Thank you, Red Car. At first when I read your sentence: “You are human and you have emotions,” I thought to myself: I already know that, but reading it again, I thought to myself: interesting my own mother did not seem to have known that simple fact, that I have emotions too. My goodness, such simplicity, yes, of course, everyone knows a human has emotions (one of which is the ability to get HURT)- but my own mother missed that fact!

Thank you Jack, again.

Luise: Your comment is wise. As a matter of fact, I thought along these lines myself after writing the post, at night, lying awake. I thought: what is the usefulness of guilt, what is the purpose of it: to learn, to change. I thought to myself: What do I need to learn? To not argue in the presence of a child, daytime or night time (the reason he woke up), to not express distress in the presence of the child as in arguing and violence. And then, in my present interactions: to be gentler with people, to treat the child inside each person with calm, kindness, gentleness. I can be gentler.

I realize I cannot make my behavior any less severe in retrospect, minimize it, it was bad and at the time I was a bad person for executing that behavior. No changing that. But now that I learned, conditional on ongoing changing of attitude and behavior, humility and kindness, what is the purpose of suffering? Forgive myself, what a concept, wipe the page clean, not from memory but from suffering.

Thank you so much, Luise!

anita