Bakersfield.com

By: Heather Ijames

            Prevailing Hope

 

My mother recently suffered a loss. She had to quit her job because of misconduct on her employer’s part. The loss, therefore, had not only to do with losing her income, but also losing hope in a person she had previously trusted. The circumstances surrounding her loss are, for lack of a better word, wicked. It is a situation that makes you question decency and humanity. Because when my mother walked away from this bad situation, she was hunted down with a vindictiveness and hostility that she had never faced in all of her fifty-eight years on this earth. 

            She came to me for help. Partly because she sought counsel in my role as an attorney, but mostly because she did what anyone would do in that situation…find refuge in family. What occurred to me during her plight of refuge and counsel is the purpose of this story. At the point when she was asking me why it had happened, how it could have happened, and what could be done to stop it, I just hopelessly looked at her and spoke with complete honesty in saying, “Some people just want to utterly destroy another person.” 

            It was the look of brokenness in her face, the pleading for an answer to be found, the paradox of reversal in the parent asking the child for an answer the parent had originally told the child to begin with…it was all these things that made me hurt in a place not often touched these days. To go from the days when she held me under her wing and painfully told me that the world will inevitably hurt me, to the day when I had to remind her it was so for her as well, is a testament that the deeds of the wicked desire to cut each soul to the bare. When a person is so intent to spray their fury in your life as deadly and abruptly as a severed artery, life often comes to a place where it does not make sense. 

            I wonder, then, where can one find hope in a place such as this? Hope. Just speaking of such takes me back to a white and radiating afternoon where the only light shining down on me in the dark place I sat in was the light coming in from the tall, long, window above me. It was here I felt an overwhelming desire to stop what I was doing and write down what I thought of hope at that very moment. This is what I wrote all those years ago:

 

 

 

            My mother’s pain gives me hope. Because life does not stop throwing you around whether you are thirty, sixty, or ninety, hope will always be novel and welcome at every stage. It will never get old, never get worn, never get diminished. In this, my mother and I can surely cling to this new cycle of hope. In this, we will prevail.