Dear reader, if you followed my blog a few years ago, you know that
I've needed to spew some emo-flavored stuff out into the internet from time to
time. I think today is one of those times. If this type of thing makes you
uncomfortable, please feel free to either skip this post altogether or maybe just skip
down toward the end where I talk about my cat. (Because she's
harmless.)
I usually end up blogging around my birthday (because it's my way of
processing getting old), but I didn't need to blog about my birthday this year.
I had an awesome birthday. I had a very nice leisurely lunch
with a friend, I watched some mariachi videos on YouTube, and I saw a movie at
a theater. My heart was full.
But this year, I've noticed that Mother's Day has been hitting me kind
of hard. In recent years, it's been just another Sunday, and I've had fun at
church that weekend just being happy for the mothers who were celebrated. But
lately, I've felt some stuff churning around inside me emotionally, and I think
a lot of it stems from the issues I've had with my birth mother. (Long story short,
I don't have a relationship with her anymore because God told me to leave the
family. So I left.)
"As snow in summer and rain in harvest, so honor is not fitting
for a fool." (Proverbs 26:1)
Yes, honoring your father and your mother is one of the Ten Commandments
(as my pastor preached recently). But what if your father and your mother treated
you so badly that God told you to cut ties with them permanently? What if it
was because they were what the Bible would label as "fools"? What
would it look like to honor them on Mother's Day and Father's Day? What sort of
homage would you pay for their hand in raising you?
Well, I put together a note to my birth mother that I don't really
intend for her to read (I don't really care whether or not she sees it), but I felt
like I needed to express it cathartically. I needed to get it off my chest. Especially if your family situation is similar to mine and you'd like a break from all
the regular "Happy Mother's Day" stuff, I welcome you to read my
therapy note below. Just know that it's dark and very sarcastic. (Wow, it's
snowing in July!)
--------------------
Dear Mom,
1. Thank you for being a stereotypically lazy Mexican. You inspired me
to grow up to be just like you.
2. Thank you for encouraging me to be a medical secretary when you knew
that I wanted to be a writer. Those two careers are so similar. It's like, you
GET me.
3. Thank you for incorrectly remembering my 31st birthday and for
telling my other family members to celebrate me on the wrong day. And thank you
for shooing me off the phone several years after that when I called you to wish
you a Happy Mother's Day. Few people on this Earth have made me feel as loved
and wanted as you did.
4. Thank you for being so internally stoic and macho and for the major
lack of affection that eventually blossomed into weird same-sex attractions at
random times throughout my 20s and 30s. I especially appreciated getting to
work through those tendencies. I'm sure they made me a real catch to all those
eligible bachelors who never asked me out. And my soul especially thanks you
for the huge, healthy doses of codependence and enmeshment that made all of the
above nice and manageable.
5. Thank you for insisting on doing pretty much all the household
chores yourself instead of sharing those responsibilities with me and my
sister. Not knowing how to take care of myself as an adult didn't make me feel
depressed at all.
6. Thank you for yelling at me when I was a little girl when I tried to
tell you that I felt like you loved my sister more than you loved me. The
Prodigal Son's older brother's behavior is so underrated in Scripture, and I'm
glad I got to experience his feelings firsthand -- especially later in life
when God would show favor to other people in certain situations instead of me.
I've had so much fun working through these entitlement and jealousy issues.
7. Thank you for allowing dirty old men to commit adultery with me (at
least in their hearts) at church. I cherish the fact that I get to work through
a truckload of trust issues with every Christian man that I will possibly meet
for the rest of my life. What happened to me isn't a modern-day version of
child sacrifice. Not at all.
8. Thank you for only reading the Bible any time you had to prepare to
teach a Sunday School lesson. I've enjoyed riding the rollercoaster of learning
how to have a quiet time all by myself. Being raised by a religious hypocrite
was especially fun.
9. Thank you for not asking me probing questions after I responded to
an altar call when I was 8 years old and everybody thought I got saved, but I
really didn't. Thank you for teaching me that I could get baptized and take the
Lord's Supper now like a good little Baptist. Thank you for pressuring me to
get baptized later. I had so much fun working through those doubts about my
salvation, even decades after the fact.
10. Thank you for operating in a Jezebel spirit and for training me on
how to follow in your footsteps. What a fabulous journey it has been to escape
from Jezebel's nurturing, insistent grasp. She kept coming back for more, too;
I loved that about her. Thanks so much for carefully painting that target on my
back.
11. Thank you for teaching me how to lie and deceive. It was so awesome getting to cover for you all the time -- like whenever you didn't feel like going
to church on a Wednesday and you would tell us to tell people you weren't
feeling well, when you were actually just enjoying episodes of Matlock or whatever TV show was so much
more important than being in God's house. What an excellent example you set for
me.
12. Thank you for always sending Dad to do your dirty work for you
anytime you felt the need to talk to me about serious things like sex, my new
spiritual beliefs, or finishing college early. Way to take responsibility. Good
for you for being so passive and emotionally disconnected from me. You always
had a knack for making me feel really loved instead of trapped in a lifelong
prison.
13. Last but not least, thank you for all the emotional and spiritual
abuse. I've had so much fun over the past 23 years working through all the
issues that resulted from all that stuff -- especially when I finally found out
several years ago that that's what was making me feel so loved in your house:
abuse.
I could keep going, but I think 13 is a good number to stop at.
Especially since you were the ultimate Proverbs 31 woman.
Love,
Tirzah
--------------------
Seriously, though, Romans 8:28 basically says that God will redeem all
that stuff that happened to me. He'll take the manure and turn it into
fertilizer. He's been doing that for years, and I think He's continually in the
process of doing so.
For instance, I know now that He designed me to be a worship pastor. I
don't know exactly what that will look like in the future (why should I know every
detail ahead of time? that would take all the fun out of it), but I suspect
that I'll need to be prepared for anything. I think I'll need to be pretty
strong on the inside. After all the stuff I've lived through, I think my soul
is probably buff enough to bench-press a Buick. On top of a Cadillac. On top of
a Hummer.
If so, that would definitely be God's handiwork.
Speaking of handiwork, mine ain't always so great. One good thing that
my birth mother really did teach me was that cats like to play with straws. So,
I keep some handy. I thought maybe Choochie was getting tired of the straws, so
I got this idea in my head that I should tie some of the straws together and
make them into a ball. Pffffft. The above photo is the resulting monstrosity. I
tried getting Choochie to play with it, but I ended up accidentally bonking her
in the face with it. I mean, look at it. It ain't exactly conducive to safety. (And it definitely isn't a ball.)
So, I bought a little dumbbell (two balls, each one with a bell inside
it, both connected together with plastic) the other day. Choochie doesn't
really know what to do with it. She and I both just kind of stare at it when I roll
it across the floor. But she's almost 17 years old now, and she isn't as
playful as she used to be. She seems to be very content napping and snuggling.
She seems to have everything she needs.
After Macho died, God showed me that Choochie's needs are different
than Macho's were. Macho was a little drama king who loved my attention, and
he loved for me to sing to him. Choochie doesn't need music. She just needs me.
Choochie knows me as "Mama" (because that's what I call
myself), and I guess you could say that I'm a cat mom, but I certainly don't celebrate Mother's Day for
myself. I personally feel that that's a holiday meant for humans to celebrate
with one another -- not crazy pet owners. But that's just my opinion.
In terms of humans, I'm not anyone's mother, and I really don't want
children anymore. Why would I? I'm 41 years old, and no eligible bachelors currently
want to go out with me (otherwise they would be asking me out), much less marry
me and have kids with me.
And in terms of having parents, God has definitely been parenting me,
filling in the gaps, and healing me. And the healing process is still
continuing.
But hopefully I'm not a fool. Hopefully I'm a better "Mama"
to my cat than my birth mother was to me. That's kind of sad. But hopefully
it's true.
((Hugs))��
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