A few weeks ago I was in a thrift store looking through clothing. Two racks down a woman in her mid to late forties was complaining to her friend about her kid misbehaving. Therapy wasn’t working. He was apparently a pretty rebellious eight year old. I thought back to being a quiet and timid eight year old and wondered what such a young kid had to be rebellious about.
“Ever since he found out I have cancer he doesn’t listen to me”. Well now I get it.
You can tell the woman is damaged, and I mean beyond her cancer diagnosis. She doesn’t speak intelligently and one gets the feeling that she has—and has always had—a broken life.
“Whenever he is mad at me he just tells me to go die. So now when he’s acting up I tell him to go die”. She says it like its something normal to say here in this store. You aren’t another kid at the playground saying mean things to him. You are his mother. He’s eight and you are his mother.
Her friend acts like this is normal.
I forget what I am doing. I just mechanically push each piece of clothing across the rack one by one while I listen to her talk.
I feel bad for the kid, just like any sane person would. But I’m also struggling with how to feel about the mother. Here’s this broken woman who has cancer and will probably die soon. Her son hates her for it. The person she should love most hates her because she is dying.
The tragedy of life manifested in this lady looking at clothes across from me. You almost want to curse God, the universe, and fate all at once. Especially for this kid who has done nothing wrong.
Even if cancer is something she can’t control, there were obviously things this woman was doing to make things worse. But then again how much did her shit childhood contribute to who she is today. Maybe her mother told her to go die when she was eight. Probably not.
I couldn’t listen to anymore of it so I left the store.
She will die soon and her son won’t have a mother. He will probably grow up broken and bitter. Broken and bitter people don’t become good parents.
As I get older life becomes both more beautiful and more tragic. For brief moments heaven is visible. Other times it seems to be an abyss.
I don’t know if there’s a moral to this story.
TheSisyphusBlog 