Out of tragedy, the essence of what it means to be a mother

I used to be a news reporter, and crime reporting was what I liked best. It was much more clear-cut and visceral than politics, the arts or business where everyone you spoke with had an agenda. A crime was committed, the cops searched for the criminal, maybe there’s a trial to follow up on, and the story was then complete.

I liked the excitement of a fire or a murder or a missing person – it got my adrenaline pumping and I soon learned that many firefighters and cops were in it for the same reason, despite all the public proclamations about wanting to help people. At their very core, they’re excitement junkies and thrive on being part of the action.

I was young and single then, and although I knew I wanted to be a mother one day, I had no compunction about putting an old macabre Edward Gorey alphabet cartoon in my bathroom detailing all the ways in which young children died. (If you want to see the poster I’m talking about, check out this Web site (http://www.wishville.co.uk/gorey.)

That all changed one spring day in 1991 when I came back to the office after wandering around my Park Slope, Brooklyn beat and discovered that a young girl had been killed by a car driven by a teenage joyrider.

Fiona Pechukas was just 17, heartbreakingly beautiful, and took off that day from high school in order to complete some college applications. She had just mailed them when the car careened out of nowhere, pinning her to a bus shelter. She died later that night at a local hospital.

I dutifully went to the family’s home the next day and although I expected the mother to dismiss me as a ghoulish chronicler of other people’s miseries, she instead welcomed me in her home, showed me her daughter’s diaries, and talked to me for about an hour about the child she’d never see again.

As I left that home, I didn’t know if I had the right stuff to be a reporter. I’d gotten too close, seen too much of what it really meant to be a victim, and got a small glimpse into what it meant to be a mother. I stayed a reporter for a few more years, but I didn’t have the hard shell that you need to really be a crime reporter, and I knew it. I still mourn for that mother and wonder what Fiona would be doing today if she had lived.

This morning, that experience came rushing back to me when I picked up the New York Times to read about a local tragedy. A family coming home from a family wedding in a limousine was struck by a drunk driver. A 7-year-old girl, one of the flower children at the wedding, was killed.

Another day, another tragedy, you might think. But what struck me was the fact that the girls’ mother held a news conference just days after the crash and described in chilling, horrific detail what it was like to sit there on the side of the road, clutching what remained of her daughter’s head in her hands for more than an hour.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/05/nyregion/05crash.html?pagewanted=all


A drunk driver had literally smashed her life to pieces and she instinctively knew how to pierce through the tough New York City press corps’ armor to make them feel what she was feeling. To make sure that this crime would not disappear when the next tragedy reared its ugly head. To not let herself or her child be reduced to just another victim. To ensure that the drunk driver would severely punished. The paper’s accounting of the press conference noted that after she finished speaking, there was stunned silence from the throng of reporters gathered – an unheard of event in a city where murder and mayhem are taken for granted, and “Headless body in Topless Bar” is a celebrated tabloid headline.

I ache for that mother today in a way that I couldn’t in 1991 when I had no clue about the depth and ferocity of a mother’s love for her child. I see my little girls in her angel’s face; I got a terrible glimpse into the anguish of what it must be like to lose a child, and I feel a kinship with this unbearably strong woman who felt bound to use this personal tragedy to make the rest of the world feel her pain, and to focus on preventing this from happening to other mothers.

I hated reading her story, but as a mother, I had to read it. I live in New York, but I know that even if I lived in the middle of nowhere, nothing I could do could assure the protection of my children from outside forces, be they drunk drivers, terrorists or deadly illnesses.

Instead, I draw strength from other mothers who’ve gone through tragedies and come out, if not completely whole, at least to the other side. There are other children to care for, new important work that needs to be done. There is no way they can just withdraw from life or even kill themselves, as I’ve felt some of them must want to do after such a tragedy.

In the end, all mothers are working moms and despite our differences, what we share at our core is truly all the same. We push onward, write novels, change diapers, and advocate for our children in a way no other person in the world ever could. To be a mother is to be filled with fear for what could happen, yet completely fearless in our single-minded purpose - to raise our children until they’re old or wise enough to take care of themselves. It’s the toughest job in the world and the most rewarding one I’ll ever know.