{"id":394,"date":"2017-12-18T02:48:57","date_gmt":"2017-12-18T02:48:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/noellesickels.com\/wp\/?p=394"},"modified":"2017-12-18T02:48:57","modified_gmt":"2017-12-18T02:48:57","slug":"story-of-the-month-mother","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/noellesickels.com\/wp\/?p=394","title":{"rendered":"Story of the Month: Mother"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>It didn\u2019t start out as it usually does.<\/p>\n

I slept with my sister in those days.\u00a0 She can tell you no one ever crept into our room, not even at harvest time when the moon was full and the village was swollen with itinerant threshers.\u00a0 We used to hear them singing sometimes on their way back from the fields in the evening.\u00a0 And once, when it was my turn to do the early morning milking, a group of three passed our gate just as I was walking to the goat pen.\u00a0 One looked my way and I held his look a bit longer than I should have, but I never spoke to him or to any of them.<\/p>\n

I never knew anyone.\u00a0 Not even that old man my parents jostled up against me when they saw with their own eyes that I wasn\u2019t lying about what had happened.\u00a0 He was warm next to me at night, smelling pleasantly of fresh-cut wood and honest sweat. Sometimes, depending on what I\u2019d fixed for supper, I\u2019d catch, too, a vapor of lentils or a sigh of fish.\u00a0 Sleeping close in the climate of his body was the nearest I came to knowing him.\u00a0 He never even tried.\u00a0 I think he was a little afraid of me and, later, of the boy, too.\u00a0 Not much passed to soften his fears, either.<\/p>\n

Now that I\u2019m an old woman and have seen all that I have seen, I can understand how we were an unsettling pair, the boy and I.\u00a0 I\u2019m not afraid of anything myself, not any more at least, but I know there are things people do fear and should fear.\u00a0 The old man stood by us, I\u2019ll give him that, and it wasn\u2019t an easy thing to do.<\/p>\n

I wasn\u2019t given a choice, you know.\u00a0 I was just told what was to be, and that after it had already begun.\u00a0 I guess you could say that\u2019s the lot of most women.\u00a0 At least, there\u2019s plenty who\u2019d say that.\u00a0 But a hard fact\u2019s a hard fact, no matter how grand the messenger.\u00a0 It was, in a way, the most natural of things in a woman\u2019s life, but unusual, too, so unusual that it marked me apart from every other woman, from every other person.\u00a0 Apart, as I\u2019ve said, from my timid, kindly old husband; apart also from my sister who shied from touching me in the weeks before my marriage even in our narrow, shared bed; apart from my neighbors with their clusters of children; apart from my worried parents and the mistrustful rabbi.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s no wonder, then, that I stayed so near to my son, in his boyhood of course but when he\u2019d become a man, too, and was out in the world, going places I was not always welcome, drawing about him friends who did little more than tolerate me, who could not fathom me, nor how he was mine in a way he could not ever be theirs or anyone else\u2019s, however much they wanted him to belong to them, wanted him to care for them, to make them his only reason.\u00a0 They hung on his every word, repeated his stories.\u00a0 Even today there are people who hunger to hear those tales again and again and who object if the teller puts a phrase out of place or substitutes one word for another.\u00a0 They are trying to make up for not having been there in person, I guess, for not having faced the force of his living presence.\u00a0 Some brooding ones seem to feel cheated, too, at having missed his dying presence.\u00a0 They can not know that his presence called up not only hopes, but also envy and frustration, and not just in his enemies.\u00a0 The repeaters of his stories never tell that part.<\/p>\n

But I came to explain about me, not about him.\u00a0 Too many are already on that task, anyway.\u00a0 They will fail in their explanations and descriptions.\u00a0 They want him to be about rewards and punishments, but he was never interested in what a person might deserve or not deserve.\u00a0 He made promises he couldn\u2019t keep so that he could give what he did give, face-to-face love with no expectation of return.\u00a0 There\u2019s few brave enough to follow him in that.<\/p>\n

It shouldn\u2019t be so difficult to understand about me.\u00a0 Just discount the angel and imagine the life of an ordinary woman with a bent for contemplation; a mild, disinterested husband; and a bright, well-meaning, attractive son who died too young.\u00a0 An ordinary woman who met with extraordinary loneliness and grief.\u00a0 Though it did mean I got to witness directly the whole prophesied journey.\u00a0 Full of grace, and all that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It didn\u2019t start out as it usually does. I slept with my sister in those days.\u00a0 She can tell you […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"Layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["entry","author-noellesickelswp","post-394","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-allposts","category-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/noellesickels.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/noellesickels.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/noellesickels.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/noellesickels.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/noellesickels.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=394"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/noellesickels.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":398,"href":"https:\/\/noellesickels.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394\/revisions\/398"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/noellesickels.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=394"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/noellesickels.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=394"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/noellesickels.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=394"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}