Bye, Mother

My baby looked at me from behind the glass. I could not look her in the eyes, so I look at the ground. I just close my eyes and squeeze thelittle pack of tissues in my hands. My husband did not live long enough to see this day, but he undoubtedly would not have come. He gave up on her as soon as we found out. I hear the doctors shift around and I peer into the glass. There she is. My daughter. Most people know her as the woman who heartlessly slaughtered fourteen high-ranking officials after seducing them, but I can only see my daughter when I look in her eyes.

Our home life was as ideal as it could get. I stayed home to watch her and her siblings grow older while my husband worked to keep a roof over our heads. I was there for the children as much as I could be, but with six little ones needing attention, you canonly delegate your time so well. She was the third of them, a precocious little girl with a huge imagination. When we saw the report, I tried to think of how I wrongedher. What I had missed. Did she set cats on fire when I was nursing her brothers? Did she beat up little boys on the playground at school? For years I racked my brain trying to figure out how my little girl had become a horrible murderer. I could not. I never could.

Our visitations would be short but I could tell the little girl I raised was gone. Some time between her being the two year old wondering how a baby could breathe in my stomach and the eighteen year old I sobbed over as we drove her to college, she was changed drastically. Perhaps it was some time before then or well after. But, all I knew was that the little girl was gone. Yet, as I watched the prison warden and doctors prepare to kill the woman who had stolen my innocent little girl, I couldn't help but cry. She was my baby. I made her in a passionate hour while her siblings slept and tried to give her the love she needed ever since then. And even though I obviously failed, I had to be there.

She was propped up, and I could the blue eyes she had gotten from her father. My long brown hair, which had been shaved off, still stuck up in little plumes. Her pale skin, inherited from both of us, shone in the florescent lights.

"Any last words?"

She looked right at me, and smiled. "Bye, Mother."