14 - Parents need not teach their children life is not fair

I’d broken three other friendships when my mother called me into her room.

It always smelled of the beeswax of the candles, sheepskins and in winter the wisps of smoke that came out of the stone-stove when someone threw on another log, all mixed together. I will always have that scent graven in my mind as the scent of sanctuary. By the stone-stove were two low-to-the-floor cushioned seats that you could lean back in, with sheepskins thrown over them; once she’d had me close the door, she gestured me to one of them.

“Your hands are cold, my child.” I hadn’t noticed. She wrapped one of the blankets she’d crocheted around my shoulders, put a hot cup of tea in my hands, sat beside me and said nothing for a while. I sipped, and warmed, and felt peace seep into me in spite of myself.

“Chevenga, what is going on?” she said gently.

“Going on?” Blinking innocently had become more habitual to me lately. “Nothing. What do you mean?”

“Even while Krero’s still in a cast, you aren’t speaking to Mana, or Echana, or Rao Sanganai, or Kamina,” she said. “You gave Grandma the cold shoulder for a while, and you’ve even been called down for not pulling your blows enough in sparring.”

“Mama… do you have a spy service? Or did you get Aunt Tyeraha to set Ikal on me?”

She just laughed, and patted my shoulder. “I have no more spies than any other parent, love. But these things… they are not my Chevenga, as I know him.” She stroked my hair in that utterly tender, half-absent way that mothers do. I said nothing, looking into my tea.

“What is it…how did it start, with your friends?”

“Well with Echana it was that he and I were tossing a ball and he missed a catch and it went down the hill and he was too slow getting it and—”

She cut me off. “No, no, no, love. Spare me the little things that these quarrels seem to be about… tell me the big one, that they are really about. You can’t be having all this going on without there being a big one.”

I sipped my tea, and set my teeth, and stared at the door of the stone-stove, feeling my limbs starting to bristle, as they had so much lately.

“It seems,” she said, so softly as to be hardly more than a whisper, “as if you are angry at everyone.”

I didn’t answer. That, of course, was not denying it.

“You either know why you are, or you don’t,” she said. “Do you?” I signed chalk.

She smoothed the hair back from my forehead. To part of me, that touch, full of love, was painful. “What are you seeing that angers you, when you look at them?”

I stared down at my tea. I was weakening; I felt the start of trembling. Setting my teeth again, I tried to steel my heart. “Mama… I’ve got a paper on the Statute of Referenda due for Sichera-e tomorrow and it’s only about a quarter done…”

“I’ve also heard the kids have been joking about you wanting to take every girl in sight up the mountain with you, by hinting at marriage,” she said. She’d seen me go off with Kagratora-e and her friends at the love-feast, guessed by my look when I came back that I’d been initiated, and congratulated me when I confirmed it, with the usual parental caution to always be honest in love and not become a father before I planned to. “After the love-feast for a while, then you stopped… there must be reasons.”

“That’s not true, that I was trying to get them to make love with me by hinting at marriage,” I said. “I really did want to marry everyone I did that with. I’m not a liar.”

“I know.” She smoothed the blanket in around one of my shoulders where it had partly fallen off from my gesturing. “Why? Chevenga… love. All these things have happened at once. There’s a story here. I want you to tell it to me, because you need me to know it.”

I took a deep breath, and felt it quiver with held-in tears, to my horror. No use pretending she hadn’t noticed.

“It started with Artira,” I said, in barely more than a whisper. I told her the whole thing, how my sister’s envy had kindled my own, how I’d started counting other people’s years, how it was subtracting years that had driven me to seek marriage until I’d had to give up, and so on, all of it.

“But some of them will also die young, even younger than you,” she said.

“They don’t know it! They can have their dreams, of wives and kids and grandkids and all sorts of plans; they don’t have this black wall they’re coming up to on their life-paths, that they have to think of every moment!”

She put her arm around my shoulders. “My Chevenga.”

“There was Artira saying everyone loves me and no one loves her and it’s Chevenga this Chevenga that but everything I am and do and am loved for will be gone when she’s still tossing her kids in the air because they’re still little enough!”

“No wonder you are in pain.” She tightened her arm.

“Grandma… she’s lived more than twice as long as I ever will, and had all that time to do all the things she’s done, so much for the people of Yeola-e and for all of us. My life is going to be two-thirds training for the last third! All my teachers are wasting their time without knowing it!”

“No, they aren't. Their effort is worth it, for the last third.”

“My children, if I ever have any…” Now I started losing it thoroughly, tears making my voice break. “It will be for them… like it was for me. For everyone… when Daddy got killed. Most of their lives… I’ll be a memory. Every time they do… something I’d have been proud of… the thought of my face… will be a knife twisting in their hearts. It’s better I never have kids… If I weren’t going to be semanakraseye I wouldn’t, it’d be too cruel to them. But I’m going to be semanakraseye! I have to have kids! I have to! So they’ll have to suffer this!”

As much to the world as to her, I screamed, “It's not fair!!”

I couldn’t say more for a moment, my throat in too much pain, the sobs too strong. Both her arms were around me now, so tight it almost hurt. I found out later she’d told everyone else in the family that she had to speak with me alone, and asked them all to go elsewhere. She’d known I’d say what no one else should hear.

“I know,” I whispered through the sobs. “I know, mama. ‘It’s not fair’ is something only children say.”

“Parents need not teach their children life is not fair,” she whispered, her lips being close to my ear. “Life itself does a fine job of it. But Chevenga… for all you don’t want to be, you still are a child. No one would fault you for this emotion, if they knew. Let it out, love.”

I was already most of the way to losing control entirely anyway. Given leave by her, I did, and cried as full-throated as when I’d been a baby, and she just rocked me, same as then. It came in waves; there’d be a lull and I’d think of another aspect and it would come roaring back. Sometimes it was wordless; sometimes I railed, saying it’s not fair! many more times.

Like throwing up when you have to, it felt good, and brought peace in its wake, but much more slowly, and through every muscle instead of just the stomach. Lying with my eyes closed against her breast, that somewhere deep in me I remembered owning, I finally felt deeply that all was well, something I hadn’t felt for a long time. That brought back correct thought, quite naturally.

“It’s not their fault,” I whispered. “I shouldn’t hate them for it. The world burned for wrongful anger. I’ll apologize to everyone and make peace with all of them. I’ll set it all right, mama.”

“Five years ago, you swore an oath,” she said tenderly.

“To love two times as much, and I haven’t. I’m forsworn.” Right there, with her as witness, and holding my father’s wisdom tooth as well as my crystal, I renewed it.

I didn’t want to leave her arms, and she didn’t ask me to. She stroked the hair back from my temple over and over just as when I’d been much younger and needed to be soothed to sleep. The paper I could finish in the morning, when I woke up at dawn as I usually did. It crept over me, a sweet heaviness all through my body. My eyes closed of themselves.

I was all but asleep, and must have seemed so, when a warm drop landed on my arm. She wiped it off, quickly but almost too delicately to feel. In the way of women, she didn’t want her tears to be seen, and so had decided to wait until I was sleeping before she let them fall. So I didn’t let on that I wasn’t.

With a feather-touch she twined her fingers in my forelock, so the curls clung around them. She spoke in the faintest quivering whisper. “It’s not fair.”