Entry 9

I'm hopelessly restless. My father's speech in honor of Canaan's anniversary is coming up. I have to attend the speech, so I'm being held off active duty. Worse yet, my father has banned me from base housing. There has been a rumor going around that I slept with the wife of a very important officer and as he doesn't want a scandal, I have been pushed into close quarters with my mother.

I hate my mother. She is a defeated shell of a woman. She rarely ever leaves the house. She scuttles nearly silently from room to room. Worst of all, she isn't used to having me around, so she feels the constant need to pamper and talk. I have no interest in pampering and no use for talk. My only solace is in the time I spend at the gym and even that seems doomed to go badly. Some fool actually made a move on me today! He tried to pick me up! Who wanders around a gym looking for a wife? Better yet, who finds one under two hundred and fifty pounds of iron on a bench press. If I was one of those hoity-toity bitches in short shorts and a halter top, I could see it. I see them with their five pound rubber weights and all I want is to smash their faces into those floor to ceiling mirrors that they love so much. I go to the gym to stay fit. Of all the places I have picked up women, I have only ever picked up one at the gym.

If the only mother I had ever heard stories about as my mother was the Safi King who bakes pies and prattles endlessly, I might not feel the way I do about her. However, years ago when I was still settling into this family, I found a picture of her when she was younger. She had a wild afro, this torn shirt, and a bullhorn. You could see she was screaming. The picture had been taken in her hometown in 2000. Thousands of people had been kept of the voting rolls and she had led a protest. I'm told she stayed at the protest for two weeks solid, until the police came out and broke the place up. Even then she had to be dragged away. There was a clipping of newspaper with her mug shot. Apparently, she knocked two teeth out of an officer's mouth when he tried to drag her off. That's a woman I would like to know. That's a mother I would like to have.

As it is, she fits perfectly with my biological mother. Both lived their lives dragged around by dumber but strong-willed men. Both stood by and said nothing as my fathers abandoned them. I don't know if it was Esau or Kali who broke Safi King's spirit, but that woman with the bullhorn is gone. I would sooner be dead than live to become what she is now.