September

1

There was a woman who was afflicted by a disease from which there was no known cure. Because of her affliction she bled for twelve years without ceasing. Hoping to find relief from her suffering, and to reestablish communion with the town from which she was exiled due to her illness, she came to the place where she knew the crowds were gathered to see the man that they called Jesus. 

* Confession is either healthy, explanatory, therapeutic words strung together in unified cohesion: collective understanding, expulsion of infection that leads to healing. Or it isn’t. It can also be urgent. Amplified explosive that only serves to further wound. “I didn’t ask you why you did it.” My words are spat toward the older daughter, frustrated. She is standing in the middle of our office behind her little sister who spins slowly in the swivel desk chair and has a towel strung across her lap. The standing one has scissors in her hand. A chunk of the tiny sister’s hair is splattered on the floor at their feet. They both snap their heads to the doorway where I have sabotaged their hairdresser fantasy with my mom interpretation of the scissors being dangerous. “Scissors are not toys.” I say, take them from her hand. The instruction this moment is “not to.” Immediately the instruction becomes “to.” Go and wash your hands, I say. They walk slowly, heads down in shared sister strife. The one old enough to reason doesn’t understand. Why she did what she did is important to her. She would like to be a hair cutter when she grows up mommy, she says. Or a doctor. Or maybe the president. What am I teaching her about the importance of women’s words when I tell her that why she did what she did doesn’t matter if she was not obedient? But as her mother, I just want her to listen to me. I know better. I want her to trust me while I teach her the intellect of questioning all that is around her. I don’t want to listen to her tell me why she cut her sister’s hair. I only want her to be better than I am.

* The woman struggled to get through the people, knowing that if she could only be in Jesus’ presence that she would be healed. So she pushed through the crowds pressing around Him from all sides. She had no intention of speaking to him knowing only that if she were able to touch his robes that she would be healed. *

Before I understood better I believed that truth was linear. Sixteen year old me wrote truth through a letter of confession to my mother dripping with words too heavy to hold on my tongue, but I didn’t write all truth only some. A coward’s lightsaber, wooden lead burrito acting as the sauder between the fetus in my womb and my mother’s disappointment. I wrote, “I’m sorry, mom,” and I was. I cried and smudged the impact, left no trace of real understanding. I threw the pencil aside. Scribbled at the top of the letter with a pen. Circles. Blue ink. I’m sorry, mom, I continued writing. Party. Swallowed pink drinks. Drink. Only one. I’m sorry. I lied to you about where I was. You don’t know who I am. Not really. I’m sorry. I’d wanted so badly to be inducted into the shrine of adult decisions and drawn so alluredly to the enigmas of responsibility that I behaved irresponsibly to prove to myself that I was responsible enough but I wasn’t. I didn’t write any of those things. I wrote: I’m sorry. I’m pregnant. *

When Jesus passed by where she was waiting, she reached out, and grasped hold of his robe. Immediately her bleeding stopped and she was healed from her disease. “Who has touched me?” He asked the disciples that were with him. But they did not know, replying that many people were around him, anyone might have touched him. Knowing it had been the woman and that she had been healed he asked her why she had touched his robes. She publicly confessed to the people there that for twelve years she had bled without ceasing, but was now healed from her affliction. He told his disciples when they questioned him that he knew he had been touched by someone who took power through him. * As children, my brother was younger than me but wiser, he would have known to be more sensitive if he had been the oldest. He would have recognized that our mom was only as strong as the expectations that her matriarchal ancestors had bequeathed her and he would have protected her more from me. She would have favored him not because he deserved it but because he had arrived first and already possessed most of it. “It took me a long time to warm up to him,” she confessed to me about my brother as mothers do in ‘I’ve considered killing myself also’ solidarity, “especially after your father drug you screaming from the hospital when he was born. I wanted to leave him there and come chasing after you.” My brother never challenged her like I did. He never pulled into the driveway as a teen past curfew to the sole light of the street light in the middle of the teardrop drive, the bulbs in the barn and house night-air cool, while she is asleep on the couch, rising slowly only when my footsteps wake her in the foggy midnight hours. He deserves to be her favorite. I am unaware of the way a mother’s worry lines become etched on a woman’s face. 2 While in the same place someone came from the ruler of the synagogue’s house, saying to him “your daughter is dead. Do not trouble the teacher.” But when Jesus heard it, He answered him, saying, “Do not be afraid; only believe, and she will be made well.” 

* I am called “mama” by two snack desperate mouths with hands that want to touch me all the time: these two living fruit I’ve borne, they’ve grown from small cherries to one grand champion sized pumpkin and one slightly oversized watermelon: my babies. They have my blue eyed insubordination. “You have a great responsibility,” I tell my oldest. I hold her chin gently in the palm of my hand gently caressing slow passes of her cheek with my thumb, gaze into her intense eyes. “Your beauty makes your responsibility greater.” The little watermelon parrots: “responsaboobie,” and the pumpkin and I share in the laughter of two older humans who recognize her innocence. How do I make them understand. I want to love them so fiercely that they reject disobedience. “Mommy,” she says. My universe is available for their inquiry, they can pluck answers like stars from me until I am bereft of all light and they are incandescent if it will embed into them the consciousness of vigilance I will dismember my implosions one confession at a time hand them small pieces if there is a chance they can be spared the necessity of learning the hard way. “sometimes, I just get so mad,” her slight lisp “sh-ing” her sometimes, “I just want to do things by myself but you tell me not to.” If I’d been where my mom thought I was, if I didn’t go to the places where she would have disapproved, if I had only listened, but there was nothing she could have said that would have made me obey. I am aware of the way a mother’s worry lines become etched on a woman’s face. * When Jesus arrived at the Rabbi’s home mourners had gathered to be with the family. He told the people there waiting for him that the girl was not dead, that she was only sleeping. They laughed at him, mocking him, knowing that she was not sleeping, and that she was dead. 

* She caught me writing my shame sentences. Heavy word drops flooded the distance between us. “I’m pregnant,” I blurted, gasping in snotty, wet face. I expected the glass wall between us to shatter; the house of expectations built from playing cards dealt to crumble. I expected rage. Anger. Shouts. Earthquake and tsunami shifting tectonic plates: a birth certificate would be signed before a high school diploma. Breathe. Blood smell. Iron. I bite the insides of my mouth clamping down to regain control, ground myself on this moonlit porch in the past dark velvet night, in the hardened hollow of insulated snowfall velcroed to the porch’s railing outside, sunken into the windowsills, coating the cement path through the garden where mom’s hyacinth nested dormant to hibernate until spring thawed. My words are deadened in the frost, the echo’s: protected from reverberation by the snow, there would be no whisked away syllables on the crystalized breeze, they were trapped here, in the silence between us where her contemplative gaze has not moved from watching me flounder in too deep water. “Who knows?” “He does.” The father I meant. “You’ll tell him you had a miscarriage.” I will not. “No one can ever know.” You’re too young. Girls your age miscarry. Your body can’t hold the baby full term. If you decide to keep this baby you can’t live here. I didn’t know him, this man who had done this to me. My father didn’t know either, she said, but she had married him anyway. Guilt. I wouldn’t have to do that, she said but if I kept it I would have to leave, and go live with him, she said, and what would the people at church think? Resistance is futile. * Jesus instructed all the people who had gathered there to wait outside the room where the girl who was not dead only sleeping was lain; he took only her parents and three disciples in with him and sat down on the bed beside the dead girl. Jesus took her by the hand. He called to her, “little girl, rise.” Her spirit was returned to her, and she arose immediately. *

When my brother and I were small there were only a few rules in our house. Only a few things our mom kept for herself: things in the house that we weren’t allowed to play with. One was a sewing basket that was our great grandmother’s. My brother played with it often. She keeps it hidden on the front porch now, underneath a brown coffee table so that her granddaughter’s don’t break it before they are old enough to protect it. Another sacred item in our house was a small, crystal, blue bird she brought home from Jamaica as a momento from her honeymoon. One day, before my brother was born or maybe when he was still a baby, I took it from its perch atop the baby grand where she spent hours practicing to accompany the hymn singing at church, and ran around the house flying with it. I ran to the laundry room where she was folding clothes. She saw me holding it between my hands. I made eye contact with her. And dropped it to the floor. It shattered. She cried silently while she picked up the larger pieces and tried to arrange them back together, recognizing it could not be fixed, she scooped them into the trash. 3 Jesus instructed that someone find food for the little girl to eat. And her parents were amazed. He charged them to tell no one of the miracle that had been performed.

* Empty cigarette packs litter the passenger floor of my car and I suck in a final breath before killing the engine to trudge in and serve people food that I don’t eat, smile for money to pay rent for an empty apartment that I use to buy whiskey instead. Wake. Sleep. Repeat. Every month I bleed a reminder, my uterus rots, withers. I wake. Sleep. Repeat. Death crept inside me in the guise of a clinician’s lavender gloved hands. Wake. Sleep. Repeat. Bleed. I took life and bled for weeks. The bleeding stopped eventually but the stains will never wash from my hands. This year she would have turned five. *

And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’ *

“When she does something that you do, and it causes her to be disobedient, it makes me angry, but it makes me even more angry because I know she learned it from you.” I gauge the comprehension level of our daughters. Their father speaks accountability -she doesn’t like when her sister is punished so we lean on that. “Scissors are not toys,” he reiterates for me. The dinner table has stilled while a father teaches a daughter. She nods. Chews slowly. The parrot nods. Chews slowly. This year their sister would have turned twelve. *

There was a woman who had had a discharge of blood for twelve years, and who had suffered much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had, and was no better but rather grew worse. She had heard reports about Jesus and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his garment. For she said, “If I touch even his garments, I will be made well.” And immediately the flow of blood dried up, and she was healed of her disease. * My mother was present, just outside the room, when my oldest daughter was born. She pressed her ear to the door and waited for the cry that signalled all was well. She was not in the room for the birth of her second granddaughter either, but was ushered in immediately afterward with my brother and his wife. Smiling. Proud. I wrap presents for only two children on Christmas eve. Cook dinner for four. I mourn in silence in September, though I count the years every year. In the abortion clinic my mother waits in a plastic, green chair waiting room. A man throws away bloody, lavender gloves. I am brought to her once I regain consciousness and the ability to stand. I am given a thick pad. “You may bleed heavily for a few weeks,” the nurse I’d cried to in the procedure room tells me. Her face is lined and tired. She sadly holds extra pads out toward me. “Part of the deal with this is you can never tell anyone” mom says as we drive away. Gray, salt littered snow forces itself between the cracks of the sidewalks on both sides of her ford ranger. The sunshine masks the outcry of chemical assault to the concrete while chunks of it burn slowly away, drip silently alongside the salt melted snow, and down into the storm drains.