JESSIE'S WAIT

The probably isn't anything worse than a demanding parent who robs a woman of her life

There wasn't much left of the scab on her left arm when she'd finished picking at it, bored to tears, in the little cell they'd put her in. It wasn't that Jessie was what they call a “self-harmer” but she did like to consider herself to be a self-healer.

It seemed ages since she'd been arrested at the scene of her mother's death. She'd been sitting on the bottom step of the stairs staring at the motionless body of her parent where it lay, the kitchen knife (worn blade because mother had bought it years ago, before the war) still in one unshaking hand.

All her life (and that was quite long because Jessie was almost seventy herself) her mother had got in the way of proper living. When she'd been young and had wanted to do the stuff young folks did mother had forbade it.

“You'll not go out there dancing!” she'd raged. “Dancing is sin, for the good Lord's sake! Folks who go dancing are the very worst sinners, all legs waving and music playing and the hoary sweat of young men dripping on you from their breath and all that nonsense! No, young lady, you won't go dancing, not if you live under my roof!”

And that had been the teller. Of course she lived under mother's roof because, well, the older woman was her mother and wasn't she a cripple to the bargain? She couldn't walk, at least not above a few steps, on her own and down all the long years Jessie had been her carer.

“Unpaid,” she thought as she sat on that step. “Unpaid and unthanked.”

Even when she'd been in her twenties and had wanted a career of her own mother had got in the way. She'd wanted to go to college and learn to be a teacher. She loved little children and knew she'd be good at it, but mother had raged at her in that irrational way she could

“You go off to college and leave me here on my own to suffer and waste away while you sit in rows with boys and let them tease you with their eyes and other parts while some mad professor teaches you about Lady Chatterley and her love? I should think not, young lady! What better thing can a young woman do than look after the mother who cared for her when she was too little to care for herself, I ask you that?”

So that had been that, and in a single act of rebellion one night she'd gone off dancing on the pretext of visiting a maiden aunt who was dying (they all died young back then, except mother, that was, and she just lived on and on like an old battleship serenely rotting away becalmed on an endless ocean called life.) But the dance had been a disappointment because she'd known nobody there, didn't know a single step anyway and even though she was only in her twenties they were all so much younger than her!

Her thirties had come along, and with them the worst of days because every so often she met an old school-friend (she'd had friends back in her school-days) pushing a pram or proudly carrying a babe in arms, and smiling that serene smile common to new mothers the world over, and just being plain happy. And there was she still living at home with a mother who had become her torment and feeling just about as miserable as a woman can feel.

“I want to get married,” she had told her mother. “I want to have a man of my own, a husband, and children round my feet. I want to be happy!”

But her mother had been most severe from her wheelchair that always gave off that faint aroma of urine. “I've never heard anything so sinful!” she had scorned. “Would the Pope get married, that wonderful man in the bosom of our Lord? Would he have children? Or the priest down the road, the man of God who everyone cherishes, would he have a wife and children? You sinful child, wanting such a thing!”

And she had dared suggest, “but mother, look at me, I'm here, standing in front of your wheelchair, that must surely mean that you have been with a man, have given birth to a child, have done those things you deny me the right to do...”

But mother had just looked away with that slight smile that sometimes crossed her face and muttered something about virgin births… There had been more than the one virgin birth, didn't the wretched child know that?

Her forties had shocked her because they just hadn't been there. One day she'd remembered it was her fortieth birthday and what seemed the very next week she was suffering her forty-ninth, and all that long decade she'd done nothing much more than lavish aid and care on a woman she was learning to despise.

Her fifties had brought the menopause and the accompanying discomforts of nights when her bedding got wet with all the sweating she was doing, even when the weather was cold ... and mother was still there.

By the time she was in her sixties her mother had reached ninety and really ought to have died a long time ago. All she did was sit on that still-aromatic wheelchair and moan. But being a religious woman, devoted to her God in her own way, she also looked forward to her own death with a kind of yearning affection - “when I get there the Good Lord will bless me and I'll sit next to him, on his right hand side, and be like a wife to him... then I'll be in Paradise, young lady.”

Then had come the bombshell. The straw that would break any camel's back. Mother had stared at her with those wet eyes of hers, pale and wet, constantly leaking, and said “and to think, young lady, you as could have brought me happiness never did … you as who could have given me a grandchild never did....”

That was when she'd done it. It had been as automatic as breathing had been using that old carving knife of mother's and lunging at the old woman and sending her then and there to her Maker. She'd even cut herself in her anger. Cut herself real deep in her left arm, but that didn't matter.

It had given her a scab to pick at while she waited in her tiny cell for the end of things.

Reviews

[little thoughts]

Amazing writing! That how i define it.

[Peter Rogerson]

Thanks. It's encouraging to get positive feedback.