We had to write a piece of short creative non-fiction (less than 1500 words) for my creative writing class. It had to be written in second-person, and involve a parent-figure. This was mine, from the perspective of my mother.
Serenity
by B.L. Hoover
The weight of your circumstances was shouldered by your children only gradually. In the beginning there was acceptance, even delight, as six small hands clapped in wonder when you healed shoe-holes with circles of colored cardboard; when they ate the white-labeled peanut butter, the endless potato soup, the milk rising dream-like from powder in a box, just so. This was the world they knew; trailer park magic, unremarkable and taken as only proper by those with too much youth to question it.
The first cracks in reality you’d crafted so carefully for them appeared in the form of a large cardboard box; you recall the mid-December day when, after nine hours of making change down at the station, you found it sitting on the front porch. So many cans and canisters, packages and pouches, a dizzying variety of colorful labels, more than they’d ever seen before. You told them it was from Santa, and maybe even you wanted to believe it, but you saw the envelope with the church insignia and the twenty-dollar bill folded modestly inside of a prayer. You were thirty, and it was short.
“God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.”
Your cheeks flaming sunset shame, your hands shaking pale, you smothered it in your purse like it had fangs. That was the first unclosing; the tiniest shift of the curtain you'd worked so hard to draw over reality. Dimly, your children seemed to realize that there was something more to this than Christmas and reindeer, something hardened and not-talked-about. You tried to hide it from them with tender lies. It was never “can’t afford;” there were endless streams of sensible-to-small-children reasons why they simply could not get the things they asked for.
Even the most well-intentioned lies always have a cost in the end, though, and the reckoning was more than you'd feared it would be. Your oldest daughter cut her brand-new primary teeth on resentment for the other children who had asked for too much, whose wishes and requests had cleaned out Santa and the stores, so that there was simply nothing left to bring and put under their tree. You watched her sad growth into a solitary lover of books, secrets, and locked doors. The years-later truth didn’t make her hate you, but it did make her ashamed. You’ve thought of trying to explain, but really, what can you say? What words could ever convey how much you wish it could have been something, anything, else?
You called her yesterday to ask for a bit of money—just enough for some bread and milk to tide you over. She understands this to mean that you haven’t eaten in two days, and by lunchtime, she is there with a box of groceries—a twenty-dollar bill stashed underneath the canned green beans. Your eyes fill with tears as pale as milk; perhaps no words are needed after all. She too has fixed the beans, the potato soup, the butterless rice and the dented cans of greens. Her eyes hold the weight now, and yours the grief and regret. She’s not quite thirty. Her lunch break is short.
God, grant her the serenity.I thought that you all, at least, would appreciate this.
Please keep the poor in your thoughts and prayers. The suffering in the community of the impoverished is invisible and intense, especially now.
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