A Mother's Role

A Mother's Role

It is a mother's role to sit, and stare, and not pass judgment. She is to be the quiet peacemaker after sons and husbands hurl angry words, lobbing painful insults from mouths to ears, shouting language that can never be taken back. It is a mother's role to soothe them both; husband and son, when one, usually the younger, has stomped away from the home, vowing never to return.

In turn, it is the mother's role to keep the father from doing something rash to the son who has angered him. To keep the boy's name in the will because he is the oldest and, deep down, the father will want to know that though history will repeat itself over and over (he angered his father once, too, though he is ashamed now to admit it), familial legacy has remained intact. Above all, it is a mother's role to put her own feelings aside and harbor serenity within the family.

Congratulations. You failed.

You were never any good at soothing the hurts when your children, your heirs, came to you seeking comfort and consolation. "Dry your tears," you'd tell them, when they fell and scraped their knees, even though they were barely old enough to comprehend. "Men don't cry."

When the older children in the neighborhood punched them, you'd tell your boys to learn to fight back. You never scolded the other children who tortured your own, nor did you ask their mothers to rein their sons and daughters in. You were never that kind of mother, the mother who kissed it all better, but you reconciled yourself to the fact that you were fulfilling your duty to raise men, not boys, and they would be all right in the end.

When he was older and gone, you tried to tell yourself that your son never knew the extent of the anger in the woman whose supposed role it was to comfort. That's not true, you tell yourself now. You never said that it was you, not the father, who took the wand and muttered the words that blasted your eldest from the family tree, leaving a hole singed in blackened soot in its wake. You'd learned that trick from your father-in-law, watching him remove his own daughter, the middle girl, from the tapestry when she wanted to marry a Mudblood. You never had to tell your own boy how angry you were because he; the fruit of your loins, the shame of your heart, simply knew and that was enough because it spared you a conversation.

Mudbloods and Muggle-lovers had no place in your family, the Most Noble and Ancient House of Black, and you told your son this over and over again as you raised him. "You are special," you'd tell him, looking into his warm eyes with your cold glare, encouraging a sense of ancestral responsibility to supercede such trivial desires as love and happiness. "Special," he learned, and heard, but never "loved." You encouraged friendships with purebloods like the Malfoys and Snapes, even the Potters, but in the end he didn't listen to you. In the end he shunned your elitism, turning his back on the very values you'd tried to instill in him since he was small, before he knew who and what he was destined to become. "As a Black, you have a responsibility," you would tell him every chance you had. But you learned too late that children do not always listen to the lessons of their mothers.

You learned too late that your eldest, though your words were repeated like a mantra from the time he was in the womb, had a mind of his own. A mind, you learned too late, that had no patience for his lessons of intolerance that filled his childhood. He preferred instead to side with that Potter boy; the one you know shamed his parents by marrying that Mudblood. Oh, you knew young Potter's parents were too polite to say anything about their son's choice of mate, but you could see the hurt in his mother's eyes when you passed her in Diagon Alley. You forgot how you, and your family, encouraged that shame by exiling her from your circle of friends; invitations conveniently lost, owls never returned. You forgot the angry words you spoke to your child's best friend's mother, all because she took in your son when you no longer would, all because you couldn't look beyond your own bitter righteousness.

In the end, he did come home. You tried to forget how reluctantly, angry and bitterly he came, more than twenty years from the time you'd seen his backside stomp away from you and his father. It was hard to ignore, though you were ready to forgive him briefly, perhaps out of loneliness or perhaps from a sense of duty that he was your last son and, more importantly, the last Black.

But he didn't forgive you.

He locked his monster, his "pet" you heard him tell the house elf, up in your bedroom, allowing it to defile your personal space. Your portrait remained and he took care of that too, installing heavy curtains to hide your face when silencing charms wouldn't work and removal charms failed his attempts to take you away from the house.

But in the end you couldn't forgive him, and wouldn't after the curtains. After he brought the freakish rebels that had filled his life since he left the house all those years ago, you forgot your inherent role as peacemaker. You declared war on anyone and anything that dared disturb you, shouting insults whenever you pleased, making them run to silence you. Normally, they try to be quiet, tiptoeing past your portrait, barely able to breathe in your vicinity. They are afraid of you and you get a sick thrill knowing that despite all of their efforts to stay out of your way inevitably, you will let your voice be heard throughout the house, shouting and screaming and raging. You found a way to remind them all that you were still in charge and they were merely your pawns.

It is late one night when the sounds of shouting disturb your rest. You suck in your breath, ready to begin your hurl of abuse. Filthy scum, abomination, shame of my flesh, you warm yourself up with whispers, ready to unleash your rage. Disg--

"A disgrace boy, you're a DISGRACE."

The words do not come from you, but they sound so familiar. You listen intently as a father and son engage in battle downstairs, a battle that so closely replicates the same one that caused your own son to abandon you all those years ago. This scene, however, is different and you know that even though you cannot, or will not, go downstairs to watch because you can hear the soft cries of a woman who will try later to make the peace.

The crying and arguing continue until it is ended suddenly with the stomp of a foot and slam of a door. You are given your cue to do what they have all feared since the boy and the man began the row. You take a breath and let your voice rage, allowing your emotions to blow the curtains away with your screams.

"DISGRACE, FILTHY SCUM, ABOMINATION, SHAME, DEFILERS..."

Feet pad hurriedly toward your canvas prison and a woman wrestles with your curtains. Your eyes lock briefly as she fights to calm your rage and you see her eyes are filled with tears. This is the woman, the mother of the son who has just walked away and though you cannot show it, you are sympathetic to your sister in agony. You hope she can succeed where you failed so long ago. After all, it is a mother's role to soothe and calm and make the peace. This mother before you knows this as she struggles to shut out the angry voices in her head and from the house. She'll make the peace tonight. She'll do it however and wherever she can, even when she needs to make it with canvas and paint when she can't yet make it with her own son.