Rendezvous
25 August 09 : 01.07 AM
Mom is ill. A fever at 40 and a voice so soft I hardly recognize as hers. This is the voice she has after operations, after treatments, not the voice she has as she thanks the hairstylist after he's done his job and we're ready to leave the salon.
Mom's voice, like everybody's, changes its tone with different occasions. But not one voice and its myriad of changes has the same effect as hers on me.
When it's calm towards me in a time when it needs to not be, it makes me feel ashamed and saddened. Like that time she brought me to the psychiatrist, and paid $300 for each session so that I have a letter or something for the principal explaining why I don't go to school and to excuse me for all the subsequently times I was going to skip school. When I apologized, she just said, it's okay, just try to go to school more. Or like when she told me at 16, it didn't matter if I continued studying or not, she just wanted me to do what I wanted.
Then when it's frantic and worried about me especially when it's something that I know is under my control. Like the whole issue last August- when she saw me crying and shuddering as I got off the cab. Hearing things about her daughter that would get most parents angry. Being angry at those she believed inflicted all this on her daughter.
Her voice, the quiet voice as she drove me home telling me how uncomfortable she feels. This is not the voice that she used on me a couple of weeks ago so that I shouted back, albeit senselessly and thoughtlessly, in front of everybody including that who finds it hard to be family. A voice I felt was excessively harsh. And I refused to apologise.
Though I didn't think I was wrong then, I know I'm wrong now. Not because I think I deserved being spoken to that way, but because I can't keep having her voice quieten and weaken before I remember how this voice has spoken to me in comforting ways when I least deserve it.