Three Mothers......

Here in Kansas City the local news reports of a mother who runs into her burning home to rescue her children. She makes it out with two, her body so severely burned she can't make it back inside to save the third child. Three years old.  Firemen find her on the ground near the front door. In time she will find cold comfort in the saving of two. She will forever be haunted by the loss of the third.  That's what a mother does. It's what she is.

Another mother. Another inconceivable tragedy. She super glues her child's hands to a wall.  The two year old girl was repeatedly kicked in the stomach.  A week in the hospital. Two days in a coma. She survives and was just released. Hopefully to some stranger. The people who should have known something, The blood ties of family. In this case meant nothing.  Hopefully the beginning of a better life. The police and press are calling it torture. Give it a name, but it seems to defy description.

My own mother, died at 42. I was 22. Now 10 years her senior, it's hard to separate the sentimentality from the reality. Thirty years can play tricks with a memory. A few old photos you can't remember being taken. Small flashes, moments in time. The lines soften, then blur. You end up left with a few mental snapshots  taken with a soft lens by your minds eye.  I think I've developed an overly sentimental belief, having lost my own, that mothers are what's right with the world. They are supposed to be that one unshakable certainty in a world that is ever reaching new lows.

I was reading about the two mothers. The good one badly burned but now expected to recover. The bad one, locked up in some Texas jail, her 3 other children safer than they've ever been. Two things. I am in awe of the first. Repulsed over the second.  The mother who ran into that fire, she never gave it a single thought. She just did it. There was no other option. It gives a little hope. The second mother. She didn't just act. She thought it through. A sadistic twisted creativity. How does a person even think of something like gluing hands to a wall? It's the thinking it through, the deliberation, I can't get my mind around. They'll claim she is insane. Postpartum depression. Too much stress. Some other bullshit excuse. They'll ignore the forethought, the deliberation.  That's the rub. The courts being what they are, they'll do that dance. Psychiatric examinations. Behind the scenes the attorney and the prosecution will cut a deal. There won't likely be a trial. She will get out. Sooner. Or later. Maybe karma will catch up to her, if it even exists.  Most likely, she'll just get out and go on with life like it never happened.

You have to wonder how much the child will recall. You have to hope that time will blur the lines for her. The lens will soften the hard edges. If she is lucky it will all fade to black. Like it never happened. In a perfect fairytale ending, the suffering mother and the suffering child would somehow find one another. Each filling the void of the other. 

When I was 7 or so, there were a couple of years where I had vivid nightmares.  I'd wake up sweating, afraid. I'd take my pillow and blanket, slip into my mothers room, Go to sleep on the floor next to her bed. Safe. Nightmares imagined and real, kept at bay for the rest of the night. The cool hardwood floor and my mothers soft breathing meant I was safe. There was never a time in my childhood I questioned or gave much thought over my mothers love. It just was. The way it is supposed to be. But not the way it always is. Some aren't so lucky.