She would glare back at him, and he would look away.
Nevertheless, I couldn’t stop wondering about the man and the woman who had created me. Why didn’t they ever want to see me? Why had they no interest in me? From reading, I knew that fathers more than mothers abandoned their children. There were many biblical lessons my grandmother taught me about such things, but I always wondered how my mother could give birth to me and then just leave and never return. No matter how many times I asked, sometimes being slapped for doing so too often or told to go to my room and read a passage from the Bible, I continued to inquire. Many times, I saw my grandfather on the verge of telling me, but he never did.
What my grandmother was willing to say was that no matter what my mother might tell me, she fled from me because she couldn’t abide the evil she had seen in her own child.
“She had looked into the face of evil many times, so she knew what it was,” my grandmother said.
Whenever she said something like this, I felt the tears come into my eyes. How could I be so evil? What had I done after I was born? What could I have done before I was born? It made no sense, and I think my grandfather especially realized that I knew it didn’t make sense for them to continue telling me this.
Finally, one night, when she thought I was old enough to understand the truth, she sat me down in the kitchen and told me everything, laying it all out like one of her biblical stories that had a bad ending to illustrate some sin.
She ended with “And it came to pass that you were born without the grace of God.”
That made it sound as if I was born without a soul, and when I asked her if that was true, she said, “We’ll see. We’ll see
what you become.”
What a horrible childhood I had endured, and what a hard life I still had. To this day, I would like to blame my mother for everything, especially leaving me to live with them, but under the circumstances that were finally revealed to me, that was impossible. I never believed she fled from me because she saw evil in me. She never looked at me long enough. She never wanted to, but how could I blame her? If anything, the truth left me feeling just as sorry for her, if not sorrier.
How do you blame a young woman for being raped and forced to have the child who was created, a child no one wanted, a child whose grandparents feared she would bring the wrath of God down on their heads?