Maternal Anxiety

By: RDV


That her daughter was someone she could no longer trust was a knowledge so painful to her. Often her thoughts were divided between affection and reproof, but when a salubrious chance for confrontation approached she found herself invariably tight-lipped. She brooded night and day, hoping that such as it was, there was benefit that could be ripped off from such wild behavior coming from someone she loved so much. She waited, while enduring such cruel execution of anxiety in her heart, for the daughter’s late night return. She resented suspicions by all means, but when time ticked on and the beloved wouldn’t return, she would be full of it, her thoughts dispersed with accusatory atoms, numbering infinitely. Then she would receive her with churlish alarm, her temper towering, her mind in a violent somersault; oftentimes, she would express disappointment if that would only attain the protocol of admonishing her ritually. The child, for all her good and bad, was sincerely apologetic; though whether or not she remembered feeling so, she went on hiding the nature of her external world from her mother. The mother still believed that her frequent absence from home was largely necessitated by her schooling, if not by her need to attend to her impressionable friends from time to time. She would forgive her for her neglect because forgiveness was where she felt herself in the right place; she would hope that her misgivings were not but hideous injustice to her daughter’s virtues, because hope was the only thing she knew. She needed to adjust to what she saw, she needed, above all, to keep believing.