QUACK

The Blind Peeping Tom

 “Though your sins are like scarlet,

  They shall be as white as snow.

  Though they are red as crimson,

  They shall be like wool.”

-           Isaiah 1:18

THIS CHAPTER IS FROM ALLEN'S POINT OF VIEW

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Do you think Jesus loved Mary more than Joseph? I would suppose He did, wouldn’t you say? She’d been there for Him right from the very start, whereas Joseph seemed liked he wasn’t ready to step up to the plate until the angel Gabriel came to him. And she was there up to the very end, too. Who wouldn’t want that in a parent?

While I’ve got nothing on Jesus, I certainly loved my mother more than my father when I was a child. Back then, it had been impossible not to equivocate love with presence, and so I loved the parent who was around more. That was my mother. On hindsight, my father had a job that provided for our family, but to a kid, the one who cooked and cleaned and kissed your wounds and who tucked you in at night was the sure winner for my affections.

My memories of my mom are the kind that are fuzzy around the edges and pastel-colored in my head. I can see her clearly, cooking and cleaning and reading me and my brother bedtime stories. She was the kind of story-teller that changed voices to fit the characters – tiny and hiccupping for Baby Bear, deep and grumpy for Father Bear, her usual timid self for Mother Bear – and more than the story, it was her voice that soothed me and sent me to sleep.

The time she started to lose her eyesight, my memories of her just about started to lose color and sharpness, too. I was maybe twelve when I started to notice things. She’d lose track of where she put things, demand that they be shown to her, even though they were two feet from where she stood. She’d stare at middle distances like she was willing to make something appear from thin air. She’d spill and drop and bump into things. She’d once cut herself using a paring knife, and had needed stitches. I had to bring her to the ER myself, somehow managing to hold a towel to her cut with one hand while tugging Aaron along with the other. She’d stopped reading stories to Aaron before bedtime, insisting that he learn to read for himself.

Sometimes she’d stare at us as if she was trying to memorize our features down to the last detail, and other times see right through us as though we weren’t there.

She was completely blind by the time I turned fifteen.

She tried to hide it from us, what was happening to her. My father and I, she’d get so angry at us when all we wanted to do was help. And so from being the parent I loved, she became also the parent I began to hate viscerally because of her stubbornness and refusal to get any help. I was consumed by this eating powerlessness and crippling helplessness and boiling frustration that I translated it into the next available emotion: anger.

I became so angry with my mother that she wanted to (really, poorly attempted to) hide her sickness from us when I firmly believed we could have helped her. We could have done anything, everything to fix things, no matter what the doctors told us, because I didn’t believe them. I felt I knew better than any of them, and why shouldn’t I, when it was my mother and not theirs who was on the line.

But then, after a while, my mother refused to go to the doctors altogether, since there was never any good news. All the more I became angry at her.