My mother’s Bibles (Mom Stuff pt. 3)

Let's begin at the beginning. Well, I guess the beginning after the end. In late July I was cleaning out my mother's house. It was the house she bought after my father left when I was 14. I remember her feeling so proud to be able to buy a house on her own. It was only across the street from the duplex we'd rented while he was still around.

But the proximity didn't matter. It was one of the few times I could tell that she felt good about herself. I remember her saying "I've always wanted to leave [you] with something". She'd felt all her parents had left her was pain and poverty.

20 years later, walking into the emptiness, things weren't terribly different. I won't describe the state the house was in, for many reasons, but let's just say I don't know if I'll ever be able to have a cat again, because even imagining scooping a litter box makes me instantly dry heave.

The experience was shades of anger mixed with layers of guilt. I could tell how poorly she'd been cared for. I believed that if I hadn't chosen to leave and live my life, she'd still be around and in better shape than she had been before she died.

But then I remind myself that no one in my family, my mother especially, ever really cared what I had to say or what I foresaw or what I recommended. That's a very specific shade of anger - the kind that comes from being right but never listened to.

While clearing out the house, after I'd saved the irreplaceable pictures and heirlooms, I worried about her books. I pulled out many for myself, and donated many others. Totes and totes of books. She loved to read, an ability she also largely lost in the last few years of her life.

Among the books I couldn't bear to throw away or donate were her bibles - four of them, to be exact. I also found my teenage bible. I was a very fervent evangelical Christian from childhood to 18. Now I'm something in between spiritual and agnostic.

Once I got home, I went through each of them, page by page. Here is the roster:

My mother's first bible after she got saved - circa 1980, she was in her mid-twenties Her little red leather travel bible - she got this before her trip to London in her mid-twenties, one of the most meaningful experiences in her life. A bible I gave her when I was a kid, a "women's bible". A Joyce Meyer bible - definitely post-divorce. She was fixated on being a "woman of God" and always worried about money. Joyce scratched both itches.

My bible was a "Quest" faux leather version, I remember having a hard cover version of the same one that I beat to shreds, but I must have tossed it when I upgraded.

I wanted to feel closer to her, see her beautiful handwriting. Maybe I could understand her better now that I'm not quite as angry or resentful toward her or Christianity as I used to be.

What I found was all the ways we are heart-achingly similar. Some of them were obvious - she handed her self-hatred directly down to me. But there were so many subtle patterns, so many loops. We both struggled with money. We both impulsively spend, blame our character defects, self-flagellate, and then spend to feel better about that. Some of the ways she talks about herself are exact things I've said about myself.

My mother had terrible boundaries, but even so - I came across things in her Bible that I know she wouldn't have said out loud to me growing up. Somehow they got transmitted into my psyche anyway.

I'll likely spend the most time on the oldest bible. Her highlighting and notating waned over time, but in this first one I can see and feel how this new faith, this "salvation," validated and then cemented all of the things she'd been hating about herself her whole life. In this religion, it's a virtue to admit your failings and confess your sins. And if all you're full of is shame, trauma, and self-doubt, you have total permission to feel that way forever.

I'd like to understand these personal and generational histories so I can have a different outcome. If I look at it, really see it, and don't let myself dissociate away from it (well, not completely), I might be able to pick a better choice at the crossroads.

I actually have no idea what that means or what it looks like. But that's the essence of grief - you never know what it's going to be or feel like until it arrives, and the only thing you can rely on is that it will shift and change as you engage with it.

I know she'd hate being examined and talked about, her desire was to be unseen and unnoticed. To take up as little space as possible. I know because I'm the same way. But I'm tired of it, I'll take up space for the both of us.

We'll begin at the beginning: Genesis.