Can’t change or can’t forgive?

 I reconnected with my cousin and my nephew when I took the kids to Shanghai, and now my nephew and niece are back in the City of Rain, I set up a couple of dinner gatherings and a fun day at the amusement park yesterday. I saw how much fun my kids could have with their cousins, and the grief hit me—I lost touch with my niece and nephew because when Angel and I were dating, he didn’t want me to hang out with my niece and nephew because he thought I was just cleaning up my cousin’s mess. My cousin got divorced and had to be a single mother and often needed help from family for taking care of her kids. I absolutely loved taking care of them and spending money on them, and Angel was the opposite of supportive of that. To maintain our relationship I listened to Angel and stopped hanging out with my cousin’s family. 

What Angel failed to see, like most other stupid humans, was that life is unpredictable and non-linear, non-binary. He couldn’t see that our kids could be autistic and could be socially isolated and having other sibling figures in their life really enriched their social awareness. He just looked at everyone in my family in a condescending way, like his mother, actually, like his entire family. This is one big thing that ripped us apart—I sacrificed, left everyone in my life to make our marriage whole, and yet to this day, he has never changed the way he thinks.

I’m not sure if I can ever forgive him for this. I know he cannot change his values fundamentally; he never has. If he doesn’t change them then there’s nothing to forgive really.