Define Motherhood

I have been reading Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk About Kevin off and on (mostly off than on, hahaha) since late last year. I haven't read any reviews when I bought it though it had that Good Morning America: Read This! label on the cover (and I didn't buy it because of that - I don't watch Good Morning America, I live on the other side of the world).

I finally finished it a handful of days ago. For the past couple of weeks I've spent my late night and witching hour reading the book, getting further drawn in while the horror builds up page after page. It's an epistolary novel with the mother, Eva Katchadourian, writing to her husband, Franklin, about their son Kevin. Eva talks about Kevin, her son who killed more than a handful of his classmates and a teacher inside the school gym one fateful Thursday.

Frankly, I was going for the dead bear shot.

It's not an easy story to tell and that's why I admired the manner by which Shriver handled this novel. We're all probably exposed to news and documentaries about kids on a shooting spree in school and the last thing we want to read about, before we turn in at night, is a novel about a kid gone wrong, right? You just might want to pick this up. In fact, I encourage you to pick this up. On some parts you could feel the violence, yes, plus. But there's more to this book than the violence that occurred in school. It's Eva's side of the story. She writes to her husband to make sense of the tragedy, looking back from the time they both decided to have a child and her realization early on, that there is something terribly wrong about Kevin.

Given that the last book I read before I decided to finish this is Room, a part of me chuckled in disbelief at the contradictory views on motherhood when it came to play. Well, not exactly contradictory. It's just that in Room, despite the violence, the darkness enveloping the story, you could actually feel Ma's enduring love for her son, Jack. It's in Jack's voice, it's in the story. This book, on the other hand, lets you inside Eva's head, on how her son, seemingly perfect from birth, felt wrong, and how she doubted her love for her own kid, at times. I'm not going to compare the two books; I just wanted to start from there. Because in real life, not every mother is like Ma and not every kid born is like Jack, much as we want them to be.

Those of us with reading diaries or book blogs aren't all parents, but we all were children once. We all went through the parental disagreements, some more than others, probably. This is where I started relating to Eva, and to some extent, Kevin. Yes, Kevin. Seriously. While I don't think he is purely evil (even if he killed classmates he didn't like in the story), I do think, to some extent, that he wasn't brought up properly. Of course it's easy to dump that all in, it's just fiction anyway. Am I trying to find fault here? Yes and no.

Yes, because Eva herself went through the entire process of finding her own faults for the entire book. Her letters to her husband is her apology, so to speak, for her son Kevin and for herself, for feeling like she raised a monster, for not doing anything about it because she felt defeated in a battle of wills most of the time, for recognizing that at times she didn't even like her own son. These are feelings you won't necessarily hear from a mother. But Eva is an honest mother. Of course she made mistakes but that feeling of helplessness, I think, becomes part of motherhood, one way or another.

And no, because Kevin is a smart boy. Unfortunately, he's also an angry boy. He knows how to pull strings even as a kid. Like he perfected that art of annoyance even before he could speak. There are real-life Kevins out there. I believe that. Is it pure "I-gave-birth-to-Satan's-son?" kind of thing? No. But he was placed in a situation where he felt the need to kill people for kicks. Let me take that back. He grew up testing the extent of what he could get away with, and unfortunately, murder is one of them.

Kids have a well-tuned radar to detect the difference between an adult who's interested and an adult who's keen to seem interested.

And the most heartbreaking thing about the book is that both Eva and Kevin are the only ones who understand each other to the core. You cannot find fault there.

While it's not an easy book to read I think it is beautifully written. Peeking through the letters gives you that sense of intruding upon someone else's private, honest thoughts. And Eva is being her private and honest self with these letters to Franklin; all her love, regret, blame, remorse, forgiveness, sadness and hope. The last one is all she have left. Plus, love. Love, in spite of. She is Kevin's mother after all. She loved and still loves Kevin, in spite of. Which is a good thing. Because I think Kevin, in his perverted world view, feels the same about her. I can only hope that.