My Mother’s Bibles- Genesis

“In the beginning…” (a different one)

My mother was born in the 1950’s and raised blue collar Irish Catholic in a small mining town in Montana. She was one of “too many” siblings and went to school taught by mean scary nuns. Because of all the abuse and hypocrisy she endured, she told me she never really resonated with religion.

I guess she was somewhat of a wild and rebellious thing when she was younger - I’ve heard snippets of stories from cousins, aunts, and uncles. The snippets made her sound fun, even cool. But I never got fully fleshed out stories because she became “born again” in her mid-twenties.

That’s the thing about being “born again”, you basically act like your life has started over. You forsake everything you did and everything you were before you took on this new identity. This suited my mom’s temperament really well; the defining emotion of her life was shame. She had full permission to hate her old self. She never told me any stories about her past unless they were cautionary tales - don’t do what she did, stay pure and focused on Jesus, etc.

I was born in the 1980’s, to a much smaller but still basically blue collar family in the same small town - even though the mining industry was gone and it was basically a ghost town. She wanted to isolate us (I have an older brother) from the “secular” world. We were homeschooled and kept away from anything that could be corruptive (except for unsupervised TV and internet, but that’s a different topic). Despite being heavily religious, we almost never went to church - so I only ever really had contact with one neighborhood friend and my grandparents who lived up the street. 

I was very imaginative and also incredibly bored most of the time - this combo often manifested as anxiety. I was scared all the time and worried the worst was always about to happen. I prayed constantly, I begged for forgiveness every day for anything I did or thought that was displeasing to God. As I approached puberty these fears basically became a spiritual psychosis; I obsessively policed my thoughts, believed everyone could read my mind, and that I was being watched at all times (watching The Truman Show was not good for me, lol). 

I would pray the same words over and over and over again. I was always waiting for humiliation or punishment for my failures. At one point, I convinced myself I murdered someone and buried them in our backyard. I was 13.

Who did I murder? No idea, couldn’t tell you.

How did I do it? Again, no clue.

How would I be strong enough to move a body? Shrug. 

These are all questions my mom asked me, she made it clear I was being irrational. So I stopped talking about it. But I had trouble sleeping for weeks and I was so sure it was true. 

I was going to go to jail and then hell. 

I also had violent intrusive thoughts; like putting away dishes next to my mother and having the impulse to grab a knife and stab her in the skull. The fact that I even had that thought was more evidence that I was completely doomed. 

When I look back on those years, I wince. I described myself as “fully crazy”.  

When I told some of these stories to my therapist, he asked me a question that should have been obvious to me as a therapist myself: “Were you inherently crazy, or was your environment crazy?”

I hadn’t realized I was seeing my teenage mental health crises as personal defects, things I made myself “grow out of”. Or, when I was younger, I would have said that “God delivered” me from them.

Whether my mom would have recognized it or not; she raised me to feel the same way about myself as she was made to feel as a kid. I just responded in the reverse. Instead of rebelling against religion and becoming born again, I was raised born again and would eschew all formal religion entirely. 

Those unconscious intergenerational patterns - the things that get repeated over and over again, even when someone is trying to ensure they’re doing things differently. They might have different specific details, but the emotional patterns stay the same. 

The thing she was raised with wounded her and she found salvation in something else.

The thing that she felt saved her, wounded me and I found salvation in leaving it all behind - and living the kind of life that she spent all her energy running from. 

Beginnings are never just beginnings - everything is spiralic, so every beginning is just one twist of the spiral to another. But it helps to start somewhere. 

This was written in the beginning of Bible that she got when she first converted in the early 80’s.

Black handwriting on paper that says, “God, if I have found favor with you show me your ways. I want to think and be like you. I want to kow you and the power of your resurrection. Help me, God, to walk in the fruit of the spirit. Help me no to mistreat people. Help me to be a blessing everywhere I go today. Thank you, Lord”

My intention with this series is to compare and contrast our bibles, where we’re similar and where we diverge. That said, I didn’t make very meaningful notes in my bible regarding Genesis, I think I grew up so immersed in this culture that I knew this book very well.

I can feel her passion and intensity for studying the Bible, she paid special attention to the history. This was an intersection between this new dedication in her life and something fundamental to who she was: she loved history. She told me she wanted to be a history teacher, but that her own history teacher told her it wasn’t a worthwhile career path, so she became a nurse. 

My grandmother loved archaeology, specifically all things Egyptian but she primarily worked as a medical assistant/caregiver. Leaving passions behind for the practical is an intergenerational pattern for certain. Especially the practical concerns of taking care of others, taking care of family. 

The next thing I noticed was her attention to the positive promises God makes to humanity, the rainbow after the flood. The promise of a child for Sarah. She had a special connection to the story of Sarah - especially her “laughter” after finding out she’s pregnant. She had a great sense of humor, and I think she had a desire for joy and playfulness that was hard for her to access, at least from my perspective. She really tried to find this joy in God, in the idea that if you love and follow him well enough your dreams (even the ones that seem impossible) will come true. 

But she never felt like she did that enough, was good enough. She never received the blessings, her dreams never came true. 

Now, I know (more than most), that she’s responsible for most of the choices that resulted in the outcomes of her life. But I also know it wasn’t because she was fundamentally unworthy, and it wasn’t because she didn’t love God enough.  

But I think she moved through the world like that was true, she embodied those stories about herself. I wish she could have operated from a different narrative, and I wish she could have found a path in the middle.