As a little girl I often wore a bonnet. When I first saw this picture of my big sister and me in an old photo album, I assumed a bonnet was what all little girls wore. But it wasn’t. I wore it because I was sickly, prone to perpetual colds, coughs, sore throats, and ear infections. There wasn’t much more you could do than plop a hat on a sick kid in the 1950s. Colds, old wives believed, were brought on by the cold. And earaches, I suppose, by a bitter wind.
At one point a doctor scolded my mother. If I didn’t get well, he said, I could lose my hearing. She must have been frozen in fear and shame to be thought a bad mother.
I had to wait until I was 3 to get the tonsillectomy that would help. The surgery required an overnight hospital stay without my parents. It wasn’t their choice; parents weren’t allowed to stay. It would be a few years before someone realized that children might need their parents when they were sick and scared, that mothers did not interfere with doing good. No, parents practiced medicine of a more powerful kind: calm, soothing, loving, and constant.
I have vague memories, images really, of that night alone. I was in a crib in a room with other children. I was terrified, although I didn’t have a word for what I was feeling then. It felt like my parents had disappeared and were not coming back. The room was big, I was small, and the night was long. There were pictures of cartoon characters on the walls, pictures meant to cheer us. But in the dark, they weren’t cartoons, they were monsters.
I’ve been thinking about that time, about fear and abandonment. About monsters that come out of the dark. And about those bonnets, my flimsy defense against the world.
In every day’s news I’m reminded that parents love their children. Children need their parents. And that all of us need helpers when we’re down and hurt. Families need other families. Neighbors need other neighbors, or that’s the end of neighboring and neighborhoods, towns, cities and countries. I’m reminded every day of what we’re not, and what we have become. An evil army of cartoon misfits and masked miscreants has transformed into monsters that blame the innocent and kill the good.
We can see it all clearly and with our own eyes; we can hear without interference; we know who’s lying, who’s dying, and which side is the right side. We speak out, we step, and we pray, hard.
“The eyes of the Lord are upon the righteous, and his ears are open unto their cry. The face of the Lord is against them that do evil, to cut off the remembrance of them from the earth.” — Psalm 34: 15-16
