"Mother of the Year"

EXCERPT

Rob began to sift through the papers, photographs, and documents that chronicled the trauma that had almost cost him his life and had torn him and his family apart. There it was…a copy of the fairy tale Michael Frazier and Lisa has been so proud of: A Mother’s Nightmare, A Mother’s Dream, a human interest story, featured in The Oak Ridger, a small daily paper where Michael worked.  Rob never claimed to know much about writing, but he did know journalists were supposed to tell the “who, what, when, where, why, and how,”, and adhere to the facts when they wrote their stories…This article was largely shreds of distorted truth designed to make Lisa seem like “Mother of the Year.” It conveniently skipped over the ugly parts. Not only did Frazier’s farcical account of Lisa’s “nightmare” fail to mention some of the prime examples of Lisa’s neglect and rejection of Brittany, neatly sweeping those facts under some magical rug, the article also painted the picture that “poor” Lisa, was the savior and heroine, dealing with her “nightmare” on her own. The truth was that Rob and the grandparents were doing the lion’s share of caring for those kids, as Lisa spent  less and less time at home, eager for any opportunity to leave the kids in someone else’s care. As had always been the case with Lisa, how things appeared was the important thing, no matter how far from the truth appearances were.

He began to read it again, choking back the gag reflex it always made him feel. OK, maybe there were some fragments of the truth. In the article, Lisa actually admitted, “It sounds bad, I know, but I was rejecting Brittany. I didn’t want to hold her. When people would say ‘She’s so cute,” I would think, ‘she’s not cute. She’s different.”  Lisa’s own words, verbatim, convicted her.