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They’re just singing songs and reading aloud but I’m on the verge of vomiting my guts out all over the rows of pristine conformity and feeling the feelings I hoped I’d never feel again. The kind where I have to scratch my arms to keep the emotions down. Why now? On this happy holiday of family and food and music?

Because I see the conveyer belt I was on. I’m watching the life I almost had in all of these women. I’m thinking about how I used to see myself. A girl to someday marry a good man and have many children. A lover of that unfeeling man in the sky. The one who empowers molesters and pedophiles and manipulators.

The one I ran away from in self preservation. The one whose abhorrence is pervasive in my life.

Maybe it’s that I see myself in both the mother and the child. I’m taken back to my five year old mindset. I’m taken back to early memories of running around in church, beloved by all adults. I want to hold and feed and watch children even while I myself am a bright and shiny and new child. I overhear talk about me “she will make a great mother some day” in Spanish and English, the mothers and grandmothers dote on me. I am filled with my first taste of pride. In this way, I was taught to see myself as a mother even in my earliest years. I’m reminded of a picture that makes it’s way onto my dashboard every now and again. At six, I was cast as the Virgin Mary in my church’s living nativity. I was proud, worthy, and impressionable. I dreamed of marrying the boy who played Joseph. I believed it was destiny. I believed it was my role. I was a wife and a mother at the age of six. All I needed was time, but my future was set in stone, or should I say scripture.

So watching curly headed little girls running around church as natural as running in a park, I see me. I see inside their minds. Their excitement of the lights and feelings and joy of the holiday. “Away in a Manger” on repeat in their heads.

I am the child and the mother. But really, I am the teenage disappointment hiding in the bathroom stall

#poetry #religious trauma #12.24.21