I was just reminded of a quote by the 13th century poet, Rumi.
“The wound is the place where the light enters you”
I guess that sums up this little piece rather succinctly. The story I want to tell is about exactly that. Wound and light. There’s the standard way this typically goes down - which is the wound first, followed by the light that it reveals. The illumination. The lesson learned from the wound. The redemption. Wisdom. Or justice. Or maybe grace. The light comes in a variety of forms, I guess - depending on the nature of the wound.
But sometimes they happen simultaneously - the wound and the light.
Such is the case with the story of my Grandmama, my Mam. This is a story of unconditional love; a story of safety and security and the knowledge that I was always held. It is also, but not equally, a story of unworthiness and fear and honestly, fairy tale shit of epic proportions. This is what the duality of the nature of plain old people looks like. No heroes, just humans. Kinda weird really, but it’s mine, nonetheless.
I was raised by my maternal grandparents. Not fully, but all my formative years were spent with them. They are my first memories, my first true loves, my first home. My only home, really. My Mam did all the things - the potty training, the tucking in, the cooking, the loving, the sewing, the DIY bang trims - all of it. The story goes that my mother would pop in from “business college” every now and then to check on how cute I was and off again she’d go. I don’t even know what “business college” is. But women couldn’t even get their own credit card in 1970, so I guess it was formal secretary training or something. She was a small-town, unwed 20 year old with questionable ambition and a child to support. Secretary-ing wasn’t particularly lofty, but you could still feed your kid on it back then. She was off at school in the city and my Mam played mama. A role she was born for. I wasn’t around for it, of course, but I bet she mothered from the time she could talk. She was nothing, if not a mother and grandmother.
I lived there full time until I was about four years old, in that little green frame house - the one with the gas heaters and window unit A/C, the kitchen table right in the middle of the long, narrow kitchen. That kitchen table was the altar for all the offerings of my Pap’s garden and as small as it was, could still fit everyone around it somehow. The big meal of the day was served pretty promptly at 12:30pm Monday-Friday, because that’s when my Pap came home for lunch. Sometimes on Sundays, we’d go big and get hamburgers from the Dairy Queen. Saturdays were an entirely different story though. Saturdays were reserved for Sabbath. Which we’ll get to here in a bit.
“Yours is the best lap ever.”
One of my earliest memories is crawling up in my Mam’s lap, while she sat in her recliner, no doubt watching the weather report for the third time that day. “Well, it’s getting pretty fat”, she’d say. But it was the loveliest lap. The warmest and the safest. Home. It was especially perfect when it was cold outside, the window beside her chair, frosted over, the gas heater roaring in the corner. Just as snug as a little bug in a rug.
At bedtime - “Are you warm enough?” she’d ask. And she’d take one of her quilts, passed down from her mama and her mama before her, hold it up in front of the heater, and cover me completely with those mismatched fabric squares, stuffed with thick cotton. Just as snug as a little bug in a rug.
When I was about nine, I figured out that chocolate icing wasn’t my jam. It was summertime and I was in Llano with my Mam & Pap, per the usual. I was perched in front of the Gilligan’s Island reruns and a Duncan Hines commercial came on. Yellow cake with chocolate icing. It looked like pure heaven, I thought. There were always plenty of sweets at my Mam’s, but typically pound cake or peach cobbler. My Pap loved those and also, we’re Texans up in here. Nonetheless, I don’t guess I had ever really had yellow cake with chocolate icing and now I wanted it like dogs want bones.
So she made it. From scratch. This was her love language. A safe lap, warm quilts, chocolate icing upon request - this is how she loved. Love was really rarely ever words with her, rather always a verb. She actionably loved. She did the thing - whatever the love thing was in that moment. In this one, it was spending a couple of unplanned hours baking a homemade cake for her granddaughter, who was hot and bored and overdosing on 1960s and 70s reruns and commercials.
The shows rolled on that afternoon - Beverly Hillbillies, I Dream of Jeannie, Brady Bunch, etc - and I stayed right there in my spot on the floor, little tan skinny legs sprawled out on the carpet, anxiously awaiting that slice of divinity that I’d seen on the tv a couple of hours before. It was gorgeous. When it was finished, it was absolute perfection - a beautiful, creamy looking display of three precise layers of yellow cake, covered in smooth, rich chocolate icing. Duncan Hines cannot hold a candle to my Mam’s baking.
I hated it.
I have no idea how any nine year old kid, in their right mind, can hate a homemade cake with chocolate icing, but I was not about it. I took one bite and turned my little freckled nose right up. Too rich, too chocolatey, I guess. My taste was trained for pound cake and cobbler, I guess. Simple girl, like my Pap, I guess. She baked a masterpiece and I snubbed it. And she just giggled at me. No fussing. No complaining. You see, she knew this was just one more tool in her kit to help her verb-love me better. Chocolate icing was not my love language. We put that entire cake, minus one piece, in a carrier and she sent me down to drop it off to Alma Lou, the neighbor - because her Austin grandkids were there for the summer too - and surely they’d eat the cake, like normal kids with more diverse cake palates.
I dropped off that labor of love and came right back for a piece of pound cake - and got back in time for General Hospital. Luke and Laura were just getting started. She didn’t like to admit it, but she enjoyed watching that “old story” with me. My belly was full from lunch and pound cake and I was safe from condemnation of my whim which created more work for her. Just as snug as a little bug in a rug.
I wasn’t safe from ALL condemnation though. Not by a long shot.
“The wound is the place where the light enters you”
Simultaneously.
My Mam was a devout woman. My Pap, not so much. He ran the Inman’s Exxon down the street, tended his garden and chickens, had coffee on Sundays with the other old men and kept pretty mum about God and Jesus and all that religious business. I don’t really KNOW how he felt about it all and although he was raised in the Church of Christ, I suspect he thought the entire lot of it was mostly garbage. I guess baseball was about as close as he came to regular church-going. We’d shell peas, root for our Astros, and hate the Atlanta Braves together - while my Mam sat at the kitchen table with her little reading lamp and her bible.
I’m uncertain how it came about - I think from her own mama - but my Mam belonged to one of those little non-denominational numbers, the Worldwide Church of God. It was led by a man named Herbert W. Armstrong. Take a quick break right here and use the Google - you’ll find him.
If you’re back from the Google - terrifying, right?
The WCOG chapter that my Mam went to met in Austin at a VFW hall. Row after row of metal folding chairs, coffee stations set up in the back, and stale cookies for the children. The sermons were two hours long. TWO FUCKING HOURS. There was a piano and old fashioned hymns, but never a choir, never a children’s service or playroom. Never any joy at all, really. It was two straight hours of hellfire and brimstone. Lord, let me count the ways that I am not worthy to be taking a single breath of this life I’ve been given, child though I am.
The congregation ate it up. They soaked in that suffering and admonishment like their poor bored children scarfed down those stale cookies they gave out.
The WCOG were God’s only people. They alone were chosen. They didn’t celebrate Christmas or birthdays or Easter. Pagan holidays. For the “worldly”. They observed the Sabbath on Saturdays, and let me tell you - if my Mam had her way, there would have been no tv whatsoever from Friday sundown through Saturday sundown. Thank God for baseball and my Pap. He didn’t go for that nonsense if the Astros or the Reds were playing.
There were rules - so many rules. They all involved the cancellation of basically anything that could make one happy or feel good. The rules would change through the years, after some church leader had some epiphany that could possibly exert a bit more fear or control - but they certainly never let up. The message that we are here to suffer, always in the forefront. Unworthy. The whole entire lot of us.
Especially me.
I liked Luv-It jeans - frivolous. And Lip Smackers - sign of a harlot. I liked Hall & Oates, John Cougar and Charlie Daniels - Satan music. I dove off the high diving board and climbed the tree in the backyard to jump onto the roof - reckless, wild child, untame. I didn’t wear shoes when I didn’t have to - be more mild, more girly. All of these things fell squarely under the dreaded title of “worldly”. And bad things were coming for the worldly. Real bad things. Like Holocaust bad things. And I was Queen of the World.
Herbert W. Armstrong had it all figured out in 1977. Or at least, I guess it was him. The crystal ball revealed and presumably passed down, from him to the WCOG pastor in Austin, that the end of the world, the “Tribulation” was coming in seven years. The Tribulation was going to be Hell on Earth. Hitler’s little antics would be mild, in comparison to what we had coming.
Three and a half years of torture - visuals of gas chambers and the like - were coming soon. Only the WCOG would get whisked away from it all. And not even all of them. Only the most righteous. The ones who kept their tvs off on the Sabbath. They who suffered joylessly the best.
I was a goner for sure.
There’d be no more Astros baseball for the likes of me. I would surely be in the front of that line for the gas chamber, with my wild child, worldly ways. They’d rip my Luv-It jeans right off my unruly little hide, in true Nazi fashion. There would certainly be no more need for my Lip Smackers and John Cougar would be right behind me.
Seven years. I would do the math and try to figure out how much living I’d get to do. According to Herbert, I’d make it to fourteen. Seven years was a pretty long time, right? I would finish Junior High, at least. I hoped I would kiss a boy before they came for me. I almost convinced my seven year old self that fourteen years was actually a good long life. Right? I would miss out on a lot for sure, but there was still time to squeeze in a few more Six Flags trips before I got sent to the death chamber with the other heathens.
I did get in that first kiss when I was twelve though. Got er done. Of course, by then, I knew it was all a bunch of bullshit. It was 1982 and I was well on my way straight to hell in a handbasket. I had moved on to Jordache Jeans and real colored lip gloss, hot rollers and hair feathers that came attached to roach clips. It may have been the beginning of my undoing, I don’t know - but I figured I could just roller skate directly into that Lake of Fire.
This was probably right around the same time that my mother decided she was jumping ship. I don’t know if she ever actually believed any of this garbage or not. I don’t know that she had any strong beliefs about much, to be honest - but one of the new church rules was forbidding women to wear makeup. Harlots again. She worked an 8-5 and you can bet your ass that she wasn’t about to step foot in there with no makeup. That was a leap much too far. She had never been particularly devout or faithful or anything churchy at all really. I don’t guess she had yet realized that she was a fully grown woman with a child of her own, capable of and expected to make her own spiritual and familial choices. Much like other things in our home - moods, rules, expectations etc, church was hit or miss. And when she did make a VFW appearance, she had long since given up on making me go. Hallelujah. Hosanna in the highest.
It was absolutely liberating. Fucking party time, practically. The first thing she did was go out and buy a Christmas tree, complete with yarny ornaments and stockings and gaudy silver tinsel. It was, perhaps, the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. My mother had Worldwide Church of God Christmas Present FOMO for 32 years and holy shit, did she go all out. It was my very first time to celebrate that pagan Satan ritual and I got eighteen presents that year - including a stereo to play all my John Cougar records on. Hello world - I AM COMING FOR YOU - slathered in lip gloss, rocking the roach clip feathers, J Geils Band on blast.
There was a night though, before I got my first Christmas, before I was old enough to understand that this was all a bunch of tinfoil-hat nonsense, when I still lived with the terror in all the corners of my little child brain, that I thought Herbert W. Armstrong got the date wrong for the Nazi-esque end of the world.
It was fall, a cool Friday night at my grandparents, and I was sleeping in the bedroom with the screen door and windows open. I was kind-of jolted awake by this loud, banging, somewhat thunderous noise. It was here, I thought. The Tribulation. I hadn’t even had time to get my act together and become a more docile girl. I had been planning on doing that. There was a solid ten seconds of sheer terror.
It was the Llano High School band. There was a football game or pep rally or something. The thunderous noise I heard was the drums and the crowd. The ten seconds of stomach-churning fear was the fucking high school band. Gas chamber averted. Maybe I would, in fact, make it to fourteen.
All of this, 100% of this, was perpetrated by my beloved Mam. I don’t know that anyone else in my family actually believed in this brand of God whatsoever. Hells bells, I hardly knew God from the Devil during those two hour VFW sermons. This was not a loving deity that the Worldwide Church of God had going here. And those cold folding chairs were surely sent straight from Lucifer himself.
“The wound is the place where the light enters you”
I don’t blame my Mam though. My first true love. The loveliest, safest lap. My quilt warmer, my best verb-love giver - she couldn’t possibly know that she was planting the seeds that would grow into a full-blown anxiety disorder, when her worldly granddaughter grew into adulthood. I cannot even wrap my head around how she got there and how everybody else just followed along, without taking a good hard look and talking some sense into her. I don’t come from a very deep-diving bunch, I guess. Quiet about the lunacy, all of them. To my knowledge, not a single soul tried to talk some logic into her ever.
She died believing every word of that trash. The Tribulation never came in 1984. Or 1989. Or 1994 either. Herbert W. Armstrong also died before any of his prophesied doomsdays. His son took over the looney bin, committed some shady shit - I can’t remember what - and he eventually went down in disgrace. The Worldwide Church of God is still around though, under a new name. Fucking up people left and right.
My Mam though, my beautiful-hearted Mam, I weep for her. I’ve lived long enough now to understand exactly how limited her little life on Earth really was. And I weep for the fully-encountered woman that she never became. Her one dimensional human growth breaks my heart. She loved so well - her children and grands, her family and friends. She mastered that part. But I don’t know if she was ever really, truly ALIVE. Shackled by the shame she was taught that humans should have, and expectation that she was here to trudge through it, content at best - did she ever actually experience any real joyful abandon? She dressed in the closet for sixteen years after she was wed. Did she ever have great sex? Did she ever get those butterflies and flushed cheeks? I don’t suspect she did. Robbed of so many of life’s best delicacies - like cranking up the radio and singing at the top of her lungs or sneaking out her bedroom window without getting caught or nursing a tequila hangover after a rowdy night of laughing her head off with her best pals. She never allowed herself the gift of wild and spontaneous fun or of fucking up either. A one dimensional human experience.
She deserved so much more.
She deserved an occasional buzz and lots of huge, hysterical belly laughs. She deserved to be naughty and wildly alive and fully female human.
She didn’t know that though. She didn’t know that she was allowed unadulterated joy. She lived for 73 years, fully loving and fully guilting her family, chained to trash theology - and never reaching her full intellectual capacity. She was smart and curious and it was mostly dwindled away on a Boogeyman God.
She’s been gone 28 years and I still weep for her loss - both her physical one in death and her spiritual one in life.
“The wound is the place where the light enters you”
The duality of humanity. The equal, simultaneous qualities of unconditional love and very, very conditional worth - those are doozies. Hard to grapple with them both at the same time. Gifts as well, though. It learnt me good. I don’t waste a single opportunity for joyful abandon. I don’t give a solitary brain cell to a Boogeyman God. And I never, ever just swallow whatever garbage someone tries to feed me.
“The wound is the place where the light enters you”
I do it all in honor of my Mam. Because she never knew she could.
And chocolate icing has most definitely become my love language…..
This was so beautifully written. Your mama sounds like a wonderful human being who is a lot like my mother-in-law. You captured her essence so well.