If not for anybody else, why now? What makes this timing the best for me?
Unexpectedly and quickly.
Mom was the heart and soul of my very large family and there is a huge Eva-shaped hole in our life where she used to be.
Eva was an amazing woman. She rescued herself from the horrible situation of living with an alchoholic mother who used her teenage daughters as bait to lure men to buy her drinks and keep her company. My mom experienced the poverty and dispair of a family one generation off the reservation during the Great Depression. I have a black and white picture of Mom as a baby, sitting on her angry teenage mother's lap on the running board of a WPA truck, alongside her father and two older barefoot siblings. Her father's hawkish nose and darker complexion is clearly not Anglo-Saxon, but the ethnicity is indeterminate. He could have been an immigrant, but in fact he was just the opposite. In any case, it looks like a scene from Grapes of Wrath. They look poor as the dirt beneath their feet. Which they were.
Mom was always better than her beginnings. She hated anything vulgar, dirty or demeaning to the human spirit. She loved music, dancing and a good time, but she preached and practiced moderation in all pleasures of the flesh and insisted that any problem could be solved, any obstacle surmounted if you only persevered and worked hard enough at it. She had only one semester of higher education, but she self-taught and educated herself on everything under the sun. She learned something new every day, I think.
She was a great teacher, both by example and by intent. She taught her kids how to dissect ideas and formulate their own opinions and she valued the opinions we expressed enough to challenge them and debate them. She treated us as equals in competitive games but demanded our respect as our parent and elder.
She was a voracious reader and was up-to-date on current events, science and music until the day she died. She was a modern woman in every way, independent, open-minded and technically savvy.
She abhorred laziness and irresponsible conduct. One of her favorite sayings whenever facing an unpleasant or intimidating task was "somebody needs to do that and guess what, turns out, I'm somebody," or sometimes "you're somebody," if I was the one expressing doubt or dragging my feet. She was humble and convinced that she was somehow less accomplished than most, a leftover from her impoverished childhood but she never let that stop her from being the somebody. She expressed amazement at her offspring's accomplishments and never took credit that they sprung off her shoulders.
Mom was determined to create the perfect homelife for raising babies, and I grew up in a Brady-bunch, Patridge Family, Father-knows-best, Leave It To Beaver - Donna Reed atmosphere. My home was a place where children were safe to grow up and every kid wanted my mom to be their mom. For those of us who had the priviledge to actually be related (I have six siblings and something like fifty nephews and nieces, counting spouses, and over a hundred cousins) she had a unique place in each and every heart. A season later and we are all still mourning deeply and often bursting into tears at surprising moments even as life compels our attention.
My connection with Eva, the woman, the mother, the friend, was on so many levels that losing my mom emptied my soul in a way I never anticipated. What I was experiencing went way beyond writer's block, I couldn't think or feel anything to write about. Even more frightening, I lost my connection to the divine for the first time in my life. It was if somebody had cut the cable out at the pole, blown up my receiver or torn down the transmitter. For months I had a sense that life was pointless, work was meaningless and goodness wasn't good, it was just rules that the powerful imposed on the weak to maintain control. I bobbed above the surface of my depression long enough to keep my daughter fed, clothed and loved, but I was mostly going through the motions in a puppet-like fashion. I was a two-dimensional cartoon of myself.
On Memorial Day I woke up before dawn and stared into the darkness, as I have often done over the past few months. There on the mantle was a book I had recently unpacked in our move to a new home. I had placed it it in its usual place of honor, not because of respect for the content but to create that sense of home for my husband who was returning from across the planet. I picked it up and starting reading the Kaddish from The Gates of Prayer. It resonated and comforted me in a way that nothing else had since that day in February when my son called with news of my mother's untimely death. It reopened my soul to the divine. I'm still in mourning, I am still anguished and sad but now I am back among the living, ready to grow again, with a renewed sense of interest in what kind of Jew I will be.
My mother-in-law is understandably pleased that I'm undergoing conversion but I don't know how my mother would have reacted to this news.
I would like to say she would have been joyous at the prospect of my gaining insight and growing spiritually but I suspect she might have been saddened by what she perceived as a change of heart. Although she would never have criticized and would probably have been overtly supportive and interested in hearing my whys and hows.
No, she wouldn't have been sad because she saw conversion as a failure on her part, it's just that she would have finally understood what I meant when I spoke to her of Jesus of Nazareth.
I have repeatedly tried to explain what I think about the historical Jesus and the church Paul created in his image, going back to my childhood. I told her many times that I believed that Jesus existed and while he may have been a divinely inspired Jewish Rabbi, I didn't think he was any more or less God than I am and I don't think he thought or said that he was the only son of God. That belief is strengthened by what I have studied thus far from other Jewish scholars, predecessors, contemporaries and subsequent to his time.
My mother, who had no problem with my studying native mysticism, elemental witchcraft, earth-based spirituality and celebrating celtic inspired seasonal holidays, was always convinced that "as long as I still had Jesus, I was going to heaven" even though she confided to me that she was uncertain if there was an afterlife. In fact, later in life Mom would call me for reassurance of the evidence I held that one existed.
She would never fight conversion, she long ago decreed in raising her six offspring that religion was personal and that while they might share their religion with us and instruct us in morality and spirituality, each child must chose for him or herself what they believed.
My mother put her family at the center of her belief; she even forbid us to have a religious service upon her death, instructing us to gather instead for a family celebration at a later date as the only appropriate way to honor her. Perhaps she didn't think what I believed was a religion (I get that a lot) or just never got it, no matter how many times I told her that I wasn't a Christian. Ironic, that losing her is the impetus for this change.
I also don't know what she would think if I told her that I think she would have made a great Jewish mother, and I don't mean in the Jewish Triangle sort of way, either.
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