My mother had her demons. Things of her past would keep her up at night, and at times I would hear her sobbing, incoherently babbling about a man named Tom. She would forget these night terrors by morning, I learned that after one particularly horrid night that I had spent by her side comforting her. I asked her about it the next morning, and she had no recollection of the previous night’s events, or at least that is what she led me to believe. From an early age, I knew not to ask her about the man named Tom, or the blood would drain from her already pale face and she’d spend the next few hours locked in her room. Mayella really never knew how to be a mother, having had me in her early twenties with a man that had vanished when he heard the news of her …show more content…
As pages went by, the entries became even darker than they had already been. After years of leading a lonely life, she had done something unforgivable in the eyes of the citizens of Maycomb: she had seeked the touch of a black man. To cover up her actions, she testified against Tom Robinson and accused him of raping her. But even after she had won the case, Mayella had become overridden with guilt, especially after Tom had been shot by some townspeople. To add on to her situation, her father had been found dead, seeming to have killed himself. As I reached the end of the journal, I felt more connected with my mother than I had ever been. I now knew who the man named Tom was, and the struggles she had gone through. Reading the diary pages, I had realized that the kind of guilt that my mother had for what she had done was so deeply rooted inside of her, she would have never recovered or let go of that overwhelming feeling. In a way, her death had torn her away from the clutches of self-condemnation she had put herself in ever since the incident with Tom