She is 17 and beautiful, not just on the outside, with her dark hair and Snow White complexion and her perfect teeth, which never needed braces; but on the inside where it counts.
She has always been beautiful: interested in other people, careful about their feelings, warm, considerate, a smiling, sweet, loving, gentle, wonderful girl.
Read MoreIn the middle of exams she called from school to tell me that I am the only mother she knows who didn't send a survival package to her overworked, over-stressed, over-programmed daughter, that I am the only mother who never sends packages.
Why don't I bake brownies and rush with them to the post office, she demanded to know. Why don't I stock up on candy and granola bars and Advil and Nyquil and wrap them in tissue and pack them in a box and send them air mail, special delivery to the away-from-home daughter I say I love.
Read MoreThe woman was hassled. You could see it in her eyes, in the way they darted about the place, and in her footsteps, quick and impatient, eager to keep walking past. But the storefront intrigued the little girl at her side. "What does the sign say, Mommy?" the child asked. "It says, `All items $1,"' the woman explained. "You mean everything in that store costs a dollar?" the child said.
"That's right," the mother replied.
Read MoreSometimes you don't want to hear it. You want to drive past the house, away from problems that shouldn't exist at all.
He said this. She said that. He has a lawyer. She has a lawyer. Two adults who vowed to love each other now spend their time tearing each other apart. And in the middle there is always a child, a bewildered child, who loves them both. This time the child is not even 3 when Mommy leaves.
Read MoreMy mother-in-law makes her bed the minute she gets out of it. So does my friend, Anne. Pat keeps Windex and paper towels in the bathroom and wipes down the sink in the morning before she leaves for work. Caryn folds clothes when the dryer buzzes. A different Ann vacuums her garage once a week. Each insists that what she does is easy. "If you make your bed right away, it's done for the day," my mother-in-law likes to say. "Plus it tidies up the room." "If you empty the dryer when it buzzes, then you don't have to iron the clothes," Caryn continually tells me. "It only takes a second. And it saves so much time."
Read MoreThe argument is that they're going to do it anyway. "Nothing will stop kids from having sex. Nothing has ever stopped them. At least if they use condoms they'll be safe." That's what my friend says, and three 14-year-olds agree. These 14-year-olds, like most American kids, are used to watching people "do it" on TV, are accustomed to reading magazines brimming with sexual advice, are constantly digesting ads that romanticize and trivialize sex, are always listening to "sex is natural, sex is good, not everybody does it, but everybody should" songs. Many get the same message when they see their parents leave home and them for a life of sex and ease.
Read MoreThe TV clicker is missing. It vanished 10 days ago somewhere between 7 p.m. and 8:15 p.m.. The 14-year-old had it last. This is fact. It was in my hand and she stole it from me. "Give me that," she said, grabbing the remote control before I could. I had mistakenly changed the station instead of turning up the volume during a riveting scene of "Life Goes On." The entire family yelped. "I can't believe you still don't know how to use this thing," my daughter said.
Read MoreNo doubt you read the story, or glanced at it at least.
It was short, buried inside the paper; a tragedy, yes, but there weren't any pictures or sidebars full of family history. Nobody died. It was a small tragedy, comparatively speaking, just another hit-and-run early last month. Two young men, one 17, one 22, were hit by a car while crossing the street in Weymouth. The men were airlifted to Boston hospitals.
Read MoreShe called last week, upset, frustrated, furious. Her husband walked out on her 12 years ago leaving her with four children, 10, 9, 6 and 5. He still loved her, he told her then. He was just tired of being married. "But don't worry," he said. "They're my children and I intend to provide for them. Don't you think for a minute that I'm deserting you." Yet that's exactly what he did.
Read MoreMost days I can read the news, even the most hideous, horrible news, and rationalize and think things like: "It's not for me to judge," and "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone," and know deep within myself that people behave in certain ways because they were abused or deprived or maltreated and are therefore, many times, not totally responsible for their own aberrant behavior. Most days I can do this because I believe that…
Read MoreIt is too eerily familiar. The exasperation in her voice. The long sighs. The shifting attitude.
"Do you think this looks nice?" she asked me this morning.
She was scrutinizing herself in the mirror, inspecting her white stretch pants and her extra, extra large white T-shirt that she'd covered with a complimenting white sweat shirt that came to her waist.
Read MoreYou wonder, sometimes. You walk around the mall and see a lovely young girl with pink cheeks and shiny eyes and a warm, trusting smile holding the hand of a skinny boy who struts a little because you'd strut, too, if someone looked at you the way she looks at him, and you sigh and think, isn't that nice? Isn't love grand?
And then you're waiting in line and there's another girl beside you. Not much older than the first, she is well-dressed, pretty still, but her brow is furrowed and a line, like stitches, divides her forehead. Her mouth droops as though invisible weights tug at the corners, though it is only a child, about 2, who tugs at her sleeve.
Every afternoon she races in from school, raids the refrigerator, then heads for the piano. "So how was your day?" I shout over Jimmy crack corn and I don't care. "Fine," she answers, distracted, immediately lost in the notes of a song she has been drumming on her desk and rehearsing in her head throughout the day. "How'd you do on your vocabulary test?" "We didn't have it. Wanna' hear me play Remington Steele?
Read MoreThe Patriot Ledger
Beverly Beckham
1985
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