PROLOGUE to Don’t Look by Patricia McLaughlin

I am rocking back and forth, back and forth, as the bowed legs of the chair creak rhythmically. I am four years old, staring intently out the window as my grandmother is in the kitchen cooking. She is large and speaks in a language I do not understand. Her strangeness scares me. My father is at work, all my siblings are at school, and my mother is gone. I do not understand about babies and giving birth. I only know something has changed and my mother is not here. The fear of that fact resonates through my little being until she returns, and my world wears on again, as it should.

I rarely write about my mother, although her memory remains a noble constancy in my life. To me, my father, other relatives, religious denominations, and political systems all have a level of inconsistency, at times hypocrisy, of what they could, or should be. Not my mother. From my earliest childhood, she could confront any situation and shape it into a manageable outcome. For anyone, except herself.

I don’t know if my mother regretted her life. I know she regretted aspects of it, as we all do. I know there were times when she wanted more. She wanted to go to college and study music. She wanted to be a missionary or a nutritionist. She wanted to get married to a man who would be a fine spiritual leader in the home. She wanted to have two girls and two boys, and live in a nice home, one where her children would be proud to bring their friends. These are the aspirations she was not able to fully achieve.

I also know she wanted a piano during the Depression, saved for one, and bought it against her father’s wishes. I know she hated alcohol and would not tolerate it from my father. Why did she meet some challenges with success and not others?

What made her so powerless in the presence of my father’s inappropriate outbursts of anger? Why did she allow us to be put in such dangerous situations with him? Why was she afraid to be in water only three feet deep? Why could she not drive an automobile with some level of confidence? Why is it we ask for some things in life, and with determination go and get them, while others, even those impacting our very survival, remain just beyond our reach?

My son died. I still cannot pen those words without a deep sensation rising up into my throat, causing my breath to catch, my eyes to burn. I have to swallow hard before it suffocates me. If my mother did not achieve everything she wanted in life, I have allowed her to achieve something more in death. It has been the memories of her life that have been the safe conduit for me to comprehend, on some level, the death of my son. She is the one who has taken me into the deep waters. She is the one who is leading me through the valley of the shadow of death. She is my spiritual beacon, keeping me out of the danger of my loss, a loss that in a moment, in the tiny jerk of a wrist, could sweep me away.

It is her unrelenting hope that guides me now, and I want to rail against it! I want to condemn anything that tries to put a salve on such a deep wound. I want to damn her hope chest, her precious Jesus, and her perfect ravioli in our messed up home. My son died. But her spirit will not allow me to speak in tongues of rage for very long. In the end, I am still that little girl sitting by her side on those red velvet pews, singing the alto line on all the hymns. So I write about my mother.