Days after the accident I would later recall the smoothness of the woman’s pink skin–the woman who had slammed her SUV into the back of mind–its lack of lines and crows feet, all of which told me she had not reached the age at which I stood, 53-years-old. On recalling how our eldest daughter, now in her final year of law school, and whose arrival at the scene of the accident, brought me calm, I would also wonder, if the woman had children of her own.
No baby seats hung in her car.
I recognized the look in her eyes when demanding to know why I had stopped my SUV. It held fear like that which had lived in my mother’s.
She was afraid of me, felt shame for what she had done, lacked the ability to acknowledge her mistake and imperfection–that she was human.
Our dog, Shylo, the faithful, loving and ever-protective Chihuahua barked when a paramedic enter the back seat to place the C-collar around my neck.
The immediacy of the impact had left me dizzy and nauseous, my head aching terribly and my neck growing stiff.
At my daughter’s insistence on calling the paramedics I grew fearful for the woman driving the Jeep Wrangler. What would she think now? I did not want to hurt or frighten her any more than I already had.
The greatest fear I experienced as my mother’s daughter was that she did not love me. I felt horrible for making her so unhappy. I wished to have been perfect, earned all “A’s” in school, kept my room spotless and made no mistakes so as to give her a child of which to be immensely proud.
No one could live like that, not even my mother, though she tried. And in the interim sprinkled my and the lives of my father, and brother with misery.
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