I was reading a news article this morning, about a woman who supposedly used a stun gun on her son to wake him up for the Easter service.
She said she didn’t actually use it, but the investigators found some telling bumps on the boy’s legs.
Now, I know that sometimes kids can be frustrating. I know this because I was a frustrating kid at times. I clashed horrendously with my mother, it was a mixture of difficult personalities and constant misunderstandings. I was also smacked sometimes. -shrug-
But the point of this post is not to berate this woman’s parenting skills. The fact that she was hauled up in front of a court room for her actions is telling.
I am writing this post because the news website posted a photograph of this woman.
A colour photograph, taken with a sharp-eyed camera. It was otherwise an insignificant story. Scant, lacking detail, except for that photograph.
Her hair was in neat dreadlocks, gleaming maroon strands intertwined with black. Voluminous, lustrous.
Her face, defiant.
At first glance she looked angry, distasteful, the face of a criminal woman seeking to abuse her child.
But I wanted to look more closely.
Her face seemed resigned, the more I stared at it.
There were hollow dark circles beneath her eyes and her colour ashen. Her mouth curved slightly to the left, in a way that signified determination, and a little anxiety.
But her eyes stood out to me the most.
Slightly yellowed, they gazed out at the camera. Tired, telling eyes. The more I stared, the more I felt drawn to them.
There was pain in her eyes. A pain I didn’t know, and couldn’t touch.
Something hard in those dark, dull orbs, born of time and consistent disappointment.
My eyes bored into hers; mine alive as each minute passed, and hers dead, frozen in time, encapsulated in a moment only she would ever understand.
What was she thinking?
Ocean Bream 