A friend tried her hand at writing today, and she wrote this. She doesn’t have a blog, so I’m posting it for her with her permission and anonymity.
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I’m nine. My mom has just been hit by my dad, and she hits the floor. Nose first perhaps, because she has a nosebleed. I remember vaguely witnessing the surprise of the moment. There was a pause, like a moment where everyone had to take a breather to realize “Oh. Oh, this is really happening. This is really what it is.” For my mom, it was as if she was shocked to see her emotional pain in physical form. The blood on the white tile was proof that she was hurting. The next thing I remember is her praying in the prayer room upstairs as my dad stood in the doorway, muttering an apology. I remember my sister and I coaching him to apologize, as if urging him to do something he didn’t know how to do. And there she was, my never battered mother, crying and muttering her prayers surrounded by wads of blood stained tissues. Rocking back and forth.
Many years later, I was rocking back and forth as I prayed. There was no more prayer room, but those murals depicting gods I was sitting in front of were the same ones that my mom had prayed in front of the day of the nosebleed. My dad said to me, “why do you rock back and forth like that like how mummy does.” From that day on, I don’t rock while I pray. These days, I don’t pray at all.
Saturn: in Roman mythology, Saturn is the god of agriculture and son of Jupiter. It is also the sixth planet in Earth’s solar system.
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