“Right,” I said, not understanding where this was going.
“So,” she smiled broadly at me.
“Which was I?”
“Huh?”
“Honey, when I suddenly understood that this was the way Jack saw the world, it hit me like a ton of bricks!” she said wonderingly. “Here for years I had been ‘saving’ guys like your father and Jack. Why? Because I didn’t see the world the way they did. I was raised, as a Catholic, to help my fellow man. Hell, that’s why I became a nurse!”
The thing was, she was in deadly earnest. I didn’t know what else to say, so I just listened.
“I didn’t think the world was a jungle. I didn’t think men were beasts!” she said. “I thought I was helping them!”
This was too much. I couldn’t believe my own mother had been that naïve.
“But,” I interrupted her, in exasperation. “But they are. Why wouldn’t you get that?”
“Because,” she explained. “I was raised in a Catholic ghetto, where those rules I was telling you about limited the ability of men – and women -- to act like beasts. Therefore I, and most people in my generation, bought into the whole idea that everyone is essentially good, and that all it took was the just the right combination of circumstances and people to bring out the best in someone. All it took was a, a …”
“…soulmate,” I finished her sentence for her.
“Yep!” she said, and clapped her hands together. “That’s exactly right, honey.”
I took a deep breath. This was pretty wild. I actually agreed with her.
“A-and I kept chasing that dream until my own daughter moved out, and I had to get deathly ill in order to have my eyes opened to the truth: my ‘soulmate’ was using me, just like every man had used me.”
Then she teared up again, so I handed her the Kleenex box. Clearly, nothing was going to stop her. She blew her nose, took a deep breath, and went on.
“Why did I allow this? Because I was living outside the Catholic world I was brought up in, but still thinking in that Catholic way,” she explained. “What I didn’t get was that I was unprotected by the Catholic rules. The same rules I laughed at and threw out the window when I was young.
“So, so you went back to church to find the rules again?” I was trying to make sense of all this.
Because I was living outside the Catholic world I was brought up in, but still thinking in that Catholic way,” she explained.
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REGINA Fiction