I do not have faith. Never have. I am one of those
never quite satisfied, relentless seekers. Oh I am a believer. I just seem to
be short on faith.
Perhaps that is why I have to watch Miracle on 34th Street
over and over, just to hear the line “Faith is believing when common sense
tells you not to.” Not that I have so
much of that either.
Another sacred cinema is The Wizard of Oz. Dorothy after overcoming many
obstacles learns she was the greatest of all, managing to transport herself
back to Kansas to by tapping her ruby slippers together, affirming her belief
that “there is no place like home.” She
returns to that which her heart longs for a story of faith, seeking and belief.
Like these characters in make believe
movies I forge on.
My greatest belief has been in me. Yes the thinking of an addict.
I am an addict. My lucky card is that drugs and alcohol skipped the in
box of genes. But ice cream, cigarettes, work, security and other people are my
addictions.
Love
and my perception of what they may need is my crack. I can put them in a pipe
and just smoke them. Needing them happy to quell my own anxiety. I want, I
want. That is the think of an addict. I
want, what I want, when I want it. I just roll up others lives’, inhale smoking
in the “should” my drug of choice baby.
I’m getting healthier or as they say I am recovering. (Notice present tense,
as the prevailing wisdom is that I will never be healed only that I have a
daily reprieve based on “my fit spiritual condition.” Ha, that is just about the same conundrum as
faith and believing and all. )
You can probably tell my meanderings are one of my defenses. My protective
armor is to baffle with brilliance. This serves me so well that I often dwell in
a state of confusion.
That is why I write, in effort to figure myself out of a hole I have gotten
myself into.
Last weeks hole was a canyon. I can tell you the details, but they are
redundant. If you are a parent you comprehend.
I have dwelt in a constant state of fret since the conception of my
child, which can slip into agitation, anxiety, occasions of extreme
powerlessness or into explosions of rage. Perhaps this perseveration on others is a
spectrum disorder, not contained, all murky in the boundaries.
(When I have resolved my questions of faith/seeking /prayer etc. I will
pray for a conversion experience, or at least pray to be an imploder rather
than an exploder. )
But I digress.
My thinking is an issue, smoking my kid’s life like she was a narcotic
leaves a taint. (Oh did I mention that she is a grown up, an adult who has
lived internationally? Since her return to my neighborhood my momma radar is on
a high alert.)
I was off point in my worry and
cyclical thinking wishing I could check in for an intervention. I could go to
the ER and bellow, “I am being crazy made by my kid.” Yet I am certain there is no treatment for
this ailment.
I am an extra in the opera Aida or better said
I am a human prop. I stand perfectly still for thirty minutes while the rock
star vocalists voices reverberate the sumptuous stage with sound waves. This is
way cool. It is meditation, a Zen practice of sorts.
During
the rehearsal with the cast of 100 with resplendent voices resonating I am
still spinning my mom wheels. There is no quieting my mind. Though I pray, the way my mom and dad did
repetitively chanting the rosary and have spent all of a day immersed in the
opera’s splendor, my mind continues going back to my crack house of fear. It
was like the gallons of Cookies and Cream Ice Cream I used to engorge. Once I
had taken that first bite another would call to me, “eat me, eat me.” Silence
came only when the gallon was consumed.
The ever-looming momma voices of fear would
not be quelled.
Drugging on misguided love I am in
some sort of relapse. (This is when I wish I were sex addict. At least then I
would have guilty pleasure.)
Not responding to prayer, music, talks with enlightened beings, my mind remains
ensconced in a fog. A limbo purgatory of the mind I dwell in the if’s of
someone else’s story.
OCD baby!
When I told my homeless brother of
my fears, he chastised me that I had no faith. He told me how he had reprimanded
our mother through the years when she worried after him.
A man who lives on the streets
reminds his mother, a daily communicant (in layman’s terms that meant she went
to mass every day.) “You already prayed, so where is your faith?”
Stuck in this mental prison I decided to walk
and pray, hoping that movement would temper my anxieties. Three miles through
Detroit’s skyscraper canyons; past decrepit buildings, and along the silver glimmering
thread of the river I am not balmed. My faculties are compromised. I am in a hell
of distress. Rubbing a my Buddha bead bracelet and imploring any and all named deities
for assistance yet still I am tormented.
I am chastising God. “Give my kid a break. Who took her bike? What will
she do for transportation? She has looked for a job for a year. How can I help
her? Is she safe? I will call my Yemini friend. They can call the store where
her bike got stolen. I am in a vortex of past, present and future and “what
ifs.” Obsessing. I am an obsessive. If it
were a ganja I was smoking I would have chilled. But I am gallons into to my
drug and still using, verging on an overdose.
Another rehearsal awaits me. The sun taunts me with its promise, making
my dark thoughts gloomier.
This is a spiritual emergency. I do not get struck off my horse like the
non-believer Saul. Yet there in front of Louis the Hatter, a haberdashery that
has been decking out locals in fine hats since Zoot suit days comes a man dressed
in a bumblebee yellow fleece coat with a matching rosary. It matters not that
he is Black except for the matter that I am a suburban Caucasian middle age
babe in a primarily African American city with a divide so big that fear has been
redlined into consciousness.
His swaying beads match his jaunty walk.
His beads a clacking in a fervency in some fierce prayer of his own. He
is my disciple, the answer to my intercessions. I stop him imploring him to
pray for my daughter. (Sometimes I ponder whether God turns a deaf ear to we
faithless whiners, weary of our droning prattle and lack of faith.)
He proselytizes telling me he was just at an Alcoholic Anonymous
meeting. He speaks of his addiction and his spotty recovery, of his girlfriend
who he says “Is a chaos addict.” He will pray for my daughter and me. I will
pray for him. We remind each other that the best prayer is behavior. We hug. I feel absolved.
I want
to tell you I remain a holy soul full of peace.
I do not.
When my daughter arrives in in my borrowed car
to transport me home she agitated. Like some contagious plague I am lost in my effort’s
to temper her mind and to manage mine.
There is a vehicular eruption. You know the
kind where you feel trapped, no exit all is magnified. I threaten to bolt from
the car, and great drama ensues.
I feel that nasty feeling of a
user who did too much of a bad good thing, like when I smoked two packs of
cigarettes with pots of coffee or ate all the Elf’s in a bag of Keebler
Cookies. I feel like my yellow prayer partner, Mac when he slipped and imbibed
a bit of beer and then a bit more, oh that very slippery slope.
I feel funky…yet…
The encounter with that street disciple and our conversation keeps a glint
in my own dark brain. I pray some more, not for my daughter but for the release
from that ever-looming limbo of parenthood, where I feel tethered to someone
else’s happiness, responsible for the world. Trained by the years of burps and ouches’’ and
night terrors, I cannot put down my call to quell someone else’s alarm and
silence my own siren.
I chip away at the stone in the door that blocks light. That is how
faith is for me; it is effort, great effort. But seeking is not. I forge on.
Though hung over from anger, I
forgive me and release her. And just sort of believe that God gave me Mac the
man of yellow beads and golden heart to steel me against my fear.
And my daughter, well she got her miracle. First her momma let her be.
Second while running through her neighborhood trying to forget the theft of her
bike she encounters a man riding it. With those powerful legs and her
indomitable spirit she catch’s him and retrieves it. And now she rides, soars on. And me, I just
resolve like Mac to try to pray with my behavior and try to be a “less” loving,
perfect momma.
