misplaced mama

Om.

Tonight was like most nights. I was getting my second wind while making dinner, one of the few things I don’t botch: vegetable quiche with whole wheat crust. Bill played with the girls while I kneaded the dough and chopped the veggies and while the egg pies baked, I got to steal a shower. When it was time to sit and eat, just like every other night Mia played musical chairs and forks and cups and when she finally settled on a spot with all utensils all to her liking, the four of us held hands and got ready to bless the food. Sula immediately started “ooommming” and Mia began to say the blessing:

Blessings on the blossoms Blessings on the fruit Blessings on the leaves and stems….

And then she stopped before saying the last 2 lines. Mama? Dada? Let’s say the one I learn in school!

School? A prayer?

Mia goes to a 2x a week. 2 days a month each parent stays in class. I have not had a chance to co-op yet because two of the mama’s of kids in the class are very pregnant and asked to fill up on their days so after the baby comes they can take a couple months off. My first day will be next week. I usually stay for 15 minutes when I drop her off and come 15 minutes early to watch inside her classroom from the window. So she is there 2 hours with out me. The short time she is there, the walking distance from my house to this school, the cooperative aspect , the price and the fact that I waited to long to get her in anywhere else pushed me to make a decision that The United Methodist Pre-School Cooperative would be just fine. Yup. United Methodist. But here is the thing. I swear somebody somewhere while talking to someone, like the administrator of the school, had told me it is not affiliated with the church. Hearing that and being the person I am which is naïve I figured it was a safe call. I mean, if they say the church and the school aren’t affiliated than how much dogma can bleed over? In hindsight, I think I was feeling desperate and I chose not to go there. Okay, love. What is the blessing you learned?

Bill and I shot each other looks and Mia proceeded.

God is Grace (she meant Great), God is One (I know she meant to say Good but interesting that she chose to hear One). Let us thank Him for our food. Amen. We don’t say Aauuuuuuuumen like at home. Just amen. Like that. Amen. Can you say it like that, too, mama? Amen? Okay. I look at Bill. He looks at me like ‘just forget it until later”.

Amen, we all say

I tell her that’s a very nice blessing and thanked her for sharing it with us. But inside I was struggling. Someone else taught my child a prayer? Someone else made her say that God was a He and that we needed to thank Him for our food? That is a specific belief system. And well, let’s face it, I don’t have a belief “system”.

I have no problem with God. People tried to get me to connect with the Big Guy upstairs my whole life. Except not until I was introduced to a concept broader than a white man in the sky, I never got it. I did finally connected to My god. Which isn’t actually God at all. At least not one I pray to, or one I believe to be outside myself. And myself certainly isn’t a he.

If I feel the need to speak of what seems to be unspeakable, I guess I call it The Source, or The Divine, or The Universe, or sometimes I say Spirit. Or Love.

But the only way I can describe what I truly believe, in what I feel comfortable teaching my daughter isn’t a History or a Scripture, stories about Messiahs or Sins or Being Saved or asking for Atonement. I won’t define her life as a fast car ride to get to a Heaven or Hell. And surely there will be no talk of a Satan. All of the above confused me to no end as a child. All of the above scared me. All of the above taught me to feel guilt, to be judgmental, and to feel segregated to humanity as a whole. Al of the above I can’t speak of because I know none of it to be truth. I also don’t know it to be untrue. So the only way I can describe it is that it’s a mystery.

I come from an Old School kind of Catholic family: first we were Catholic then we were Italian. There was no Bible reading or Born Again business. There were no real political affiliations, but since my family were immigrants pre-depression, we were Democrats. My family believed red wine and balsamic vinegar cured all illness and a drawer in every dresser held plastic containers of Holy Water for minor cuts, skin flare-ups, sore throats and even a few cases of mental illness. A few window ledges held saint statues and desktop bulletin boards were scattered with prayer cards of the Blessed Mother for when we needed her son, St. Jude, for when we were depressed and St. Anthony when my mom couldn’t find her car keys. The Mother was the utmost important figure in my families take of Catholicism. I said the rosary with my grandpa every Saturday night for years (guess that explains my futures infatuations with chanting with mala beads). We mother wasn’t so hardcore, being a women with a scientific mind, she never made me believe the host was the actual body of Christ and the wine was indeed alcohol, not blood. My mother never took me to confession, but my aunt made it her job to take me the first Saturday of every month, where I “confessed” the same 3 things each time for years: not listening to my parents, fighting with my brothers and sisters, and maybe sometimes telling a lie. I was a totally generic confessor.

When I was about 12 years old I gave my Catholic family a bit of a scare. I went to a summer camp up at the lake near my house. Mission Meadows with affiliated with a Covenant Church. I begged my mom because I knew a few cute boys and nice girls from school that were going. She finally complied. I knew she wondered about the church, Catholics don’t tend to farm out their youth on other denominations, like every other religion, their system of beliefs is “correct”. But I think she had faith in me and her mothering to that point(I wasn’t yet a teenager). I remember her saying to my aunt that there were worse things she could beg for than church camp. Come to find out it was Evangelical Covenant. Charismatic. What I think thought was watered down religion ended up being a salvation roller-derby. I came home from camp that year a Born Again. I accepted Jesus into my heart on a warm upstate NY summer night. My cabin-mate yelled out in praise as she saw Jesus walking on the watery ripples of the lake we were in front of.

Praise Jesus! Do you see him? Can you all see him? Praise Jesus!

Yes! I can see him, too! Amen! I somehow didn’t think I sounded as convincing.

Of course I couldn’t see Jesus. I saw nothing. But she so believed and was so convinced He was walking towards her. I felt something, with all that faith, so I joined them. I was excited about the possiblities! I opened my heart to the Lord.

My family was hardly impressed or accepting of my new-found faith. I carried a bible everywhere. I tried to save my parents and my college-aged sisters with 1 John 3:16. First they were humored and then they were downright annoyed. Then my sisters started having fun wth me, making devil horns over me and calling me a freak. My family was not religious. We were Catholic. We believed in hocus- pocus more than salvation. The color red on the door warned off the maloccia or evil. Brown clothe around the neck clothe would send you first class and straight to heaven when you died. After you said something that was not positive or was a ‘god forbid’ type thing, we always, always made the sign of the cross. We worshiped saints. We lit candles. We did not sing and dance and sway and yelp about Jesus Being The Rock Who Rolls My Blues Away.

I was a born again for about 3 years. I swore that my life did changed once I accepted Jesus in my heart. The higher energy faith and power that just didn’t exist in my upbringing, gave me a little push somewhere, though I can’t say where. Although, the teaching that I would go to heaven but my family and friends wouldn’t unless they were save, was stressful and no kid should have to think about that bullshit. And soon after giving up my family and being tired of 6am before school Bible study, I uninvited Jesus in my heart, though according to the camp’s dogma, once He was in, He would never leave. I am pretty certain, that keg parties in the woods, and the sex and the pot pretty much evicted him.

After that I became Atheist. I studied Nietzsch and Kierkegaard. I philosophized. God was dead. Old news. There was nothing but a birth and a death. That’s it. Nothing else. Bang! We’re here. Bang! We’re gone. That’s it. Like a perverse science experiment. Being an atheist was nice because there was nothing I was suppose to behave for, nothing I was suppose to say or feel or believe. I was off the hook. I felt relieved. I began debaucheries.

Then I fell upon the scientific system of yoga. The Mystery started to reveal itself to me slowly, one breath at a time after that first class I stumbled upon in the snowy mountains of Idaho. The teacher had us make a triangle-shape with the pointer fingers and thumbs of both our hands and place it against our third eye, then against our mouth and then our heart. Pure of thought, pure of speech, pure of heart. I liked the sound of that, it was a new language connected to nothing but me. I liked putting myself in the shape of a triangle and using my own breath as the breeze through me, empowering my every fiber, every joint, muscles, my organs, my thoughts. One stretch deeper and one step closer to opening my heart to myself. As I started literally cleaning out my body, a body full of dogma, guilt, limitations, anger, Jim Beam and Cokes, Marlboro Reds, and self-loathing, I opened new rooms, a few more glands, pathways. I worked with color and visuals and sound. I had some hope. This was fun and it made me feel really, really good. Too good. I had to look nowhere but inside myself for this bliss. What a concept.

Then I got into Earth and Goddess Spirituality. The candle lighting and herbs and the rituals and the sensuality of connecting with the core of the planet, the fiber of a leave, the cell of a flower, the spirit of tree. Wandering lost around the soft carpet of forest, sitting naked on hot rocks at Mexican beaches, lighting candles under oak grooves, bleeding into the earth while my body held the language of the moon, making love inside caves at Joshua Tree, offering up gems to the sea. All these were the only churches I would ever attend. The mysticism was similar and it resonated with what I loved about Catholicism; ritual, fire, smell, sound, repetition, an emphasis on The Mother. Earth-Based spirituality offered me stories on all fragments of my psyche and soul: Brigit The Healer and Poet, Hecate the Midwife, Gaia, The Earth Mother, Diana the Moon. It taught me that the here and now and the dirt under my feet are all such blessed Mysteries. It is all there is right now to love and celebrate and take care of. Heaven is only a potential. Potential is a mere idea a hopeful thought, not a reality.

I studied a bit of Hinduism: slightly too much like a normal religion. Then some Tao, but I’m not simple enough and I spent awhile sitting in zazen, not thinking about Zen, but I certainly wasn’t clever enough for all that, althoughBeginners Mind is what I will always strive for.

And for years I got some grounding with the Rastafarians. Their philosophy of I and I (there is no you, or me or us, there is only I and I and that is not two but one) is one of the only dogmas I have been able to keep and pass one. And the belief in filling the body with ital food (what we would probably called whole and organic and home cooked and vibrant) has always been something I admire, respect, and try very hard to follow.

When I gave birth is when it all came together. To trust birth is to trust life, to trust life is to truly love and to trust love is to feel The Mystery like an age old storm. I opened up completely through Love for the first time when I birthed. For real. All the teachings and paths and faiths crossed and made a perfect circle right in the middle. And in that middle spot, perfectly still and humming and balanced…that is where life source dwells for me. I can go there because I am there. When I don’t feel it, it’s because I have wandered from it, learning about life in my own way. I don’t think it ever leaves me know. Each day that I look at my kids I am reminded by who they were and how they came and how they are as they stand in front of me. And that brings me back to that spot. I am so grateful for birth giving me what it did when i truly least expected it to. I finally understood that what I am and what I can do and where I can take myself is what that Mystery is. The Source. The Universe. Me.

Like the most delicious bread of life, I took a pinch of this and a spoon of that and shake of something else. The I have no religion. I would never describe myself as a firm believer in anything. But there is something in everything, a common thread, silvery and pure among a very old and outdated quilt. I believe in the mystery of all—- this beauty and pain. In the random acts of coincidence that occur in my life, in the connections I make with people and nature, in the unknown spiral of birth and death and this small speck of fleshy life we are in right now, right here. It’s like the words I heard over and over at those Saturday evening Novenas with my grandpa: the glorious mystery, the sorrowful mystery. Do I know where I come from? No. Do I know where I am going? No. Do I feel emotionally attached to that lack of knowledge? Sometimes, but I try not to. I do try to always feel that blessed, sparkly, sensual, and for me, fiery presence within me and around me. It’s the mystery. The mystery is me. And my kids. And all of you.

The prayer Mia said tonight is non-offensive and fine. I personally don’t associate God with a gender and the Him part of bothers me a bit, but that’s me. Not her. And I want her to be exposed to all positive forms of worship and faith. She has the right to choose her own path. My own childhood stint with my born-again Christianity did no harm. I may have really annoyed and offended those around me and I may have over-looked hypocrisy that I can see clearly now, but that short time where Jesus Was My Savior only made me a happier, more excitable person. It taught me faith. It wasn’t faith in something I could further on my own path, but it taught me to explore what else there could be. Being Catholic didn’t create totally irreparable damages. I work on the guilt and the sex stuff and female oppression business daily. But the rituals and the smells and the food and the faith in a Mother Goddess and all things magical are things I will keep. I am still an atheist, in my own way. I hold tight to questioning all and everything and coming up with nothing much. I will always be a yogi and a witch. I am forever a temple dancing goddess. But these are not religions. It’s art and life. And I got to experience it all. Ican never stop my children from fulfilling their spiritual calling through denial and inexperience. They must seek and find and stumble into just as I have. Even if Mia decided to become a charismatic evangelical Christian saving souls and on the look out for Satan on every corner, then that will be her choice. I won’t blame the prayer she learned at three. Because I know nothing (thank you, Zen) and I can’t do anything besides live like all is a Mystery and act as if that Mystery stems from Love, Pure Love.

Writing this has been good to let go of my judgments on that little prayer. There really is no right or wrong. There just is. There just is. If we feel it, then it is ours, yours. I and I. So who cares if my daughter says a prayer in school. Maybe when I go in to do my co-op day and it’s snack time, I will teach them our version of blessing food. Bringing in light from the Universe and filling our hands with it and gently sending it through to our food, filling it’s substance up with healing nourishment and energy. Maybe I will even say something about how Love really is the only thing we need.

Om.