Motherthing

by Ainslie Hogarth

He told me that suffering makes a person special, fills a soul with angular gems of transcendent knowledge, so many perspectives contained within each one. I asked him how I could find those gems and use them, and he said he didn’t know. I asked him why me and he said he didn’t know that either. I pointed out that some people who suffer turn into Charles Manson, and he said that Charles Manson’s problem wasn’t suffering, but that no one loved him, not even his mother, Ralph had seen a show about it on TV. And that even though my mother was selfish, it sounded like she still loved me. “All a person really needs is to feel unconditionally loved,” he said. “It’s built into our programming, a biological necessity, the species couldn’t survive without it. If it weren’t built-in, we’d all be monsters, filled with pain and trying to inflict it on everyone else.”