A mother’s cruelty
I thought my father was impervious to pain. But I reckoned without his mother.
A firework exploded in my father’s face when he was a child, requiring him to undergo several painful skin grafts. I was with him when he was stung on the tongue by a wasp at the beginning of a five-hour fishing match. He completed the match with barely a word about it. When I was eight years old, my father was involved in a car crash that dislocated both of his knees and propelled him through the windscreen of his vehicle. I distinctly remember him coming home from hospital just a few hours later and casually picking pieces of bloody glass from his scalp.
As a child, I was convinced that he was impervious to pain. But as an adult, I realised that there was one thing almost guaranteed to cause him pain.
And that one thing was his own mother.
She had been married in an age in which husbands placed their wives on a pedestal. Unfortunately, when my grandfather died, she — consciously or otherwise — expected everyone else to treat her in the same way.
Even now that I am the same age as my father was when his mother finally died, I have never figured out whether she was unfeeling or actually cruel.
