Today I talked to my mother on the phone and had all my cards laid out on the table. It was a normal conversation for a while, bu then I pressed the issue “So I feel like coming over and visiting you soon”
She told me its not so much a issue of me being with Lisa and Irv that bars me from visiting, its my faith. We talked for a while, and any time I've made any sense, she'd change the subject, and get very defensive. Sometimes I knew she wasn't listening at all.
I made the key issue of the conversation unconditional love, something I don't think she has ever known her whole life. I can't feel hurt because she doesn't love me unconditionally, she doesn't know it herself, she didn't have it as a child. In fact she was severely beaten when sent to live with her aunt for not performing everyday chores up to her linking. She was constantly made to feel ugly because of her then gawky appearance. The poor girl would look at herself in the mirror and see no beauty, perhaps no worth in herself. Even as a teenager, back with her mother, she married my father to get away from home and happened to fall in love with him after the fact. I've been told, that before marriage she was very promiscuous, a trait that came back full force while they were having issues in the last 2 years of the marriage, during the separation and divorce procedures and well after she came to America. That desperate search for love and acceptance never went away, even after “finding Jesus” in Jehovah's Witnesses.
I believe she embraced the faith in order to curb the chaotic lust in her replacing it with a sense of direction and meaning in life. Like hounds, the witnesses smelled weakness, and showed up at the door in a time when the very same aunt who beat her as a child, passed away. She told me her aunt was terrified of death, and that fear was passed unto her, and for reasons I can't explain came up years later when she heard of her death in Brazil. The irony... that the woman who in life, ruined her childhood should in death lead to the ruination of her adulthood and soon to be old age. I was raised in a golden period in my mother's life, free from religious indoctrinations. Free, my God! A free child! How I thank God! Tears of joy come to my eyes when I think of it, how lucky I've been. I remember her most pure self in life, her most joyous moments, parties, holidays and family celebrations which she would now deem pagan. She was beautiful, happy, a woman who set the standard for the woman I would later love. When I was 5 years old I used to watch her putting on make up and in my innocence, call her my girlfriend. Oedipal or not, there was nothing more sacred to me than the ritual of a woman adorning herself. Till this day I am mesmerized by Lisa putting on make up, while modesty in a woman has meant nothing to me. These great attributes were carried over with her new faith, but its as though the colors of her true joyous self were muted like an old painting.
She was living with Tati's father at the time, and I heard they were a happy couple all around. She started studying with the witnesses and jumped on the bandwagon so fanatically that she ended the relationship, simply because he didn't want to be part of it, though he never stopped her. That may have been the second biggest mistake of her life, though I can't complain since its led me to where I am today. In conversations with Tati and my mother in her moments of hindsight, I gather that he might have been “the one” she'd been looking for. Perhaps even the one who could love her unconditionally and teach her by example. Did she run away from it unconsciously? Must one's life lesson be filled with misery in search for love to learn the lesson? Since Paul, then Mark, then Tom (who thankfully she never married), then Henry, she has had nothing but one kind of failure or another, never finding her “soul-mate.” If I ask her today she'll tell me she loves Henry with a grudging undertone that only I can sense, but I know its not the love she set out to look for years ago, nothing like it. Its hard to say if the series of failed relationships tell us more about her desperate search for true love or about the fine Christian brothers of Jehovah's Witnesses, I think its a little of both.
My conclusion is that the poor little girl now looking in the mirror, staring at an aging older woman, has never found something that should be the birthright of every child, unconditional love. I shutter to think of the day she realizes that even in her faith, her Jehovah does not love her unconditionally. When she realizes the disparity between the doctrines of the Watchtower organization and the scripture that says "The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love." 1 John 4:8
Its a hard lesson for a lifetime, and I weep for her. But as I told her in the phone, “remember me in your next life, I will always love you and we'll meet again, perhaps as brother and sister next time”
Love transcends matter, Love transcends time and space, Love transcends the Sun and the Moon, Love transcends the stars, Love transcends the combined light of the entire manifest Universe. By Divine Love we're all connected in a sacred tapestry. This realization reminds me that even my mother's sorrows, 'are but as shadows, illusions, and that even her existence is pure joy.' “For I am divided for love's sake, for the chance of union. This is the creation of the world, that the pain of division is as nothing, and the joy of dissolution all.” - AL 1:29,30
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