We don’t like mothers who “don’t like” their own sons
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| Image: All Rights Reserved |
| New York : Perennial |
| 2004 |
I will never forget sitting in the civil courtroom and hearing the judge with the tiny pupils announce primly that the court finds for the defendant. I’d have expected to feel so relieved. But I didn’t. Public vindication of my motherhood, I discovered, meant nothing to me. If anything, I was irate.
Supposedly we were all to go home now, and I would feel redeemed. To the contrary, I knew I’d go home and feel hideous, as usual, and desolate, as usual, and dirty, as usual. I’d wanted to be cleansed, but my experience on that bench was much like a typically sweaty, gritty afternoon in a Ghana hotel room: turning on the shower to find out that the water main was turned off. This disdainful rusty drip was the only baptism the law could afford me.
The sole aspect of the verdict that gave me the slightest satisfaction was being stuck with my own court costs. Although the judge may not have thought much about Mary Woolford’s case, she had clearly taken a personal dislike to me, and plain animosity from key parties (ask Denny Corbitt) can cost you. Throughout the trial I had been aware that I cut an unsympathetic figure. I had disciplined myself never to cry. I’d been loath to use you and Celia for so venal a purpose as ducking liability, and so the fact that my son had not only killed his classmates but my own husband and daughter tended to get lost in the shuffle. Though I know they didn’t mean to undermine my defense, that testimony from your parents about my fatally forthcoming visit to Gloucester was disastrous; we don’t like mothers who “don’t like” their own sons.
I don’t much like such mothers, either.
I had broken the most primitive of rules, profaned the most sacred ties. Had I instead protested Kevin’s innocence in the face of mountains of hard evidence to the contrary, had I rallied his “tormentors” for having driven him to it, had I insisted that after he started taking Prozac “he was a completely different boy” – well I guarantee you that Mary Woolford and that defense fund she raised through the Internet would have forced to pay my court costs to the final dime. Instead, my demeanor was repeatedly described in the papers as “defiant”, while my disagreeable characterizations of my own flesh and blood were submitted no-comment, to hang me out to dry. With such an ice-queen for a mother, little wonder, observed our local Journal News, that KK turned bad boy.
Extract from the book We need to talk about Kevin
By Lionel Shriver
All Rights Reserved.
New York : Perennial, 2004
Call number : English SHR
Extract contributed by Ashanti Devi
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To what extent, if at all, should parents be held responsible for their children’s troubled lives?
July 4th, 2010 at 1:20 pm
Its time when parents just think about their own comforts, Specially Mothers. Its not the fact that mother does not like her son, fact is that she does not like the presence of daughter in law. She never like that her own son listens his wife and loves her.
July 21st, 2010 at 12:58 pm
It’s when parents ignore their children until the children are feeling neglected. Especially mothers, sometimes maothers are too busy to even notice their children.
July 21st, 2010 at 12:59 pm
It’s when parents ignore their children until the children are feeling neglected. Especially mothers, sometimes mothers are too busy to even notice their children.
July 29th, 2010 at 2:50 pm
Yes, parents should be held responsible if their child is having a troubled life. Parents should always care for them even if they have many weakness. If the parents don’t care about the child why in the first place the parent want to have the child in this world, is very unfair to the child as the child will feel lonely, neglected, and will be more afraid to step up and talk about the problems their are having, as their relationship has became more to a feeling that the parents is a stranger.