Dear Diary

Stammering and incoherent with rage, my mother confronted me with my diary, the decorative little lock pried open and several pages ripped from the binding. You'll pay for writing this! she screamed at me, You just wait and see! Hatred had made her wild-eyed and fueled by an afternoon's worth of drinking she had become a force to be reckoned with. In the interests of self preservation, I lunged for the little book, snatched her it from her and made for the front door. She stumbled after me but I was young, sober, and driven by fear. She reached for me but I was already gone, running through the yard and up the sidewalk as fast as a 12 year old can move. When I was sure she wouldn't follow, I eased up and caught my breath, tucked the diary inside my sweater, and headed for the sanctuary of the library, powerfully afraid but also incredibly angry, feeling the invasion of privacy almost like a physical violation. Nothing was safe from her, I realized, no thought or emotion, no act, no need. I refused to think about the consequences that were sure to follow, couldn't bear to think about the things I had written and she had read - wishing for her to suffer, to be inflicted with pain and isolation, to die, hateful things that welled up and had to have an outlet otherwise they would have suffocated me. The world became a blurry place that cold afternoon.

Parenthood had never been kind to my mother. She openly blamed her children for her unhappiness, her loss of freedom and spending money, her being tied down, her inability to sustain a happy marriage. We had, she complained, literally driven her to drink. No one was exactly sure what she had expected from marriage or having a family, but clearly we weren't it - she was, so she liked to say, undermined at every turn, betrayed and unloved, treated badly and deprived. She insisted she'd played no role in any of this but was rather a victim, martyred by the needs and wants of offspring she'd never wanted in the first place, condemned to a role she found thankless and demeaning. No closet crammed with evening wear, no pink convertible or 3 month summer vacations, no middle class comforts were enough to offset her resentments of motherhood. Through the years she grew old and fat and more malicious on little but her own bitterness and discontent, at the last not even able to find solace in alcohol. Her body would eventually turn inward on itself from cancer while her mind evaporated from dementia and whiskey soaked brain cells. And still remembering, among so many other things, my diary, I could not find the slightest hint of compassion or regret for her.

My daddy, knowing that I would seek the refuge of fiction, found me at the library. I watched him walk in slowly, hat in hand, gray faced and raccoon-eyed with weariness and resignation. He sat across from me, a daughter who was on the road to becoming a stranger, and gave me a slight, sad smile. How do we make this right? he asked me. I put aside my H. Allen Smith satire, always my first choice for such times, and told him the truth, We don't. It may have been the closest I'd ever come to actually speaking what I knew was true but my daddy - ever the peacemaker, ever the first to craft a compromise and calm troubled waters - just shook his head. We'll find a way, he told me, it's not as bad as it seems right now. But of course it was and continued to be. He was to keep looking until the cancer overtook her but he never found the elusive way.

We should have more respect for what children see - happy faces don't fool them for long and their vision is often far clearer than our own.