Don't Anyone Tell My Mom I Said This

Growing up, my Mother was big on us kids deciding where our faith lied. She exposed us to different philosophies and asked us to decide our church when we reached the final days of our adolescence. Our exposure to faith was limited to what she understood, spending Sundays at a NonDenominational church and our summer’s in Methodist and Baptist Bible Schools. Ever-so-often our exposure was broaden by our friends’ churches, my Mother always willing to let us go when we were asked. Hmm. Some of those churches I visited are stories of their own complete with a convulsing parishner I confused as having a seizure and stood up yelling, “Will someone stop praying and help this woman!” I’m just saying, if convulsing is a normal occurrence in church, there should be signs that give unknowing 10-year-olds a heads up.

When I came home with Sutra’s of Buddhist text in High School, she never told me to stop reading, though I was convinced I was rebelling against her. Even when I left the church a year after being baptized my Mother never stopped me, just saying that she hoped that though I stopped going, whatever I pepper my time with, it is imperative to feed the soul. I thought she was trying to guilt me back to “the faith”, but it wasn’t. Had my Mom been exposed to Wiccan, Buddhism, Islam, etc. we would have been exposed as well.

I connected these words about my Mother while having a beer with a friend this week. It was one of those moments in a conversation where I found an epiphany while discussing random topics. It was one of those conversations where we went everywhere and nowhere at the same time, just filling in the blanks of what we don’t know about each other, and I found a part of my self I didn’t know in that conversation.

I’ve always been hard on my Mom because of my limited exposure of a Patriarchal concept of God, but now I realized in her world, she just wanted me to have a spiritual faith. I thought she was misguided in believing in a Christian God, but I get what she was trying to let us kids do now. Kind of dampens the “I know better then my parents” thing...................damn.