image scroll
For some reason, this picture that I posted yesterday has made me feel even sadder than others I have found.
Maybe it's because I'm a little sleep-deprived. I'm often emotionally labile when I haven't had enough sleep, but that sounded like a lame excuse the moment I wrote it.
To me, this mother looks as sad as sad can ever be. She looks like she's quietly trying to keep it together - maybe because that's expected of her, or because it's important for her to do all of the time, especially when she's in a public space like a hospital ward.
But she looks to me like she's just very quietly not able to keep it together at all. Not any more.
Just imagine -
It's awfully hard to keep it together, day after day, when you have a child. Being a parent has been the most relentlessly difficult task I've ever faced, and I've got it easy: my kids are much older now, and I've made it past all of those newborn, infant, toddler, school-aged, teenaged times; I'm a man and am at least culturally absolved of many of the obligations of being a parent that are demanded of a woman and mother, no matter her circumstances; I started a family when I was in my later 20's, and had learned how to cope with life as an adult - or maybe not; I live in relative affluence, have a steady and rewarding job, and enjoy so many other supports.
I've almost forgotten the continuous demands of caring for an infant - not to mention the interrupted sleep, the sense of isolation, the feelings of inadequacy - "Am I really doing this right? Can I really do this at all?"
And, because of who they are, babies only know how to need and take, not how to meet and give. They need so much, and whatever they give is often so subtle, intangible, fleeting, and easily missed by the parent among all of their other competing demands and needs.
I've never experienced the overwhelming paralysis of postpartum depression that can overshadow a mother to the point of even blocking the sun itself, and the sunshine of her baby.
But I see this woman, and I begin to remember and understand.
I see a young mother burdened with all that a young mother bears in the best of times.
And she's surrounded by chaos. She's surrounded by bullets and explosions and fear and hatred and invasion and resistance and exploitation of a kind that I can't even imagine.
She fears for the physical safety, for the very life, of her baby, and for herself, though maybe she's wondering if that even matters anymore, or if it will ever even be possible again, or if it ever was.
I want to take this young mother and her baby and give them a safe place to live, in the heated modern apartment above our detached two-car garage in the town that was the cradle of our own liberty two hundred and thirty years ago; give them plenty to eat; bring them to the modern hospital with caring nurses and physicians just across the street.
If her husband is still alive, I want him to walk away from both sides of the gunfire and come with them. He can have a job, any job that suits him - he can work as an engineer or laborer or civil servant or health care professional or mechanic or merchant or writer or teacher or musician or whatever else he has done or wants to do.
We're surrounded by schools and colleges and universities - they can go and study whatever they want and need and hope for, and so can their baby someday, and more babies, too, if they have them.
This image makes me want to do that - to just reach out and shield and protect and become friends and absolve myself of this guilt and relieve this sadness of my own.
A picture of me right now will never approach what this woman will always look like to me.
Oh, Dear God, I just don't know.
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Several other diarists have been moved to meditations of their own based on the recent image of a young girl whose parents were shot and killed -
Karen Wehrstein
Hunter's Image, Deconstructed
Tom Kertes
Joeve - blood on our hands
Kos
Welshman
Through one of the threads I also learned of Collages of War
one way to support the troops
another way to support the troops
one way to support the Iraqi people
many other ways to support the troops and the Iraqi people
one way to support victims of torture
one way to witness every day