I knew that I was loved, and maybe that is where I should start. She’ll be angry at me for writing this, and I want her to know that, yes, I felt loved. I knew that I was loved without a doubt, and even if I didn’t feel secure enough to know that I would wake up in the same place I lay my head down at night, I felt safety in my mother’s love.
I can’t look back on my childhood dysfunction, oddly, without feeling her warmth. She was always there to take care of what my heart needed, even if she dropped the reins on everything else. I could count on her comfort for any little thing that brought tears to my eyes. I could depend on her listening to the little troubles I had, to the things that break a little girl’s heart. When I couldn’t be with her, when I was visiting my father, I slept with a picture of her under my pillow and her scarf wrapped around one of my hands so I could smell her perfume. It’s difficult for a child to be separated from her mother, but this was different. When she wasn’t there, I wasn’t close to God.
I said before that my mother had an ”alliance” with God, because that is what I believed it was. He was on my mother’s side, and I knew this because she talked with Him. This meant that He talked back, and it also meant that she saw Him in various “visions.” In my mind’s eye, she was surrounded with a white ethereal light, like the light glowing from saints’ heads in stained glass windows. Once, when I was four, my mother was lighting a candle near a macrame wall hanging. The thing burst into flames, and panicked, she dragged it off the wall, ran past our bedroom to the bathroom, and flung it in the tub. My sister and I were in bed, not asleep, and I remember seeing a ball of fire trailing my mother down the dark hallway. I thought that it was an angel or God himself, and that this was a Visitation. I’d finally had a vision too.
About a year later, my mother started wearing a nun’s habit. Her best friend and our roommate was a nun, so at the time I didn’t find it strange. It was an ugly habit, not The Flying Nun, black and white, pristine penguin type. It was coarse and khaki in the body, the veil polyester brown. She was starting to gather a little social circle of young people. college students, who I believe now must have thought she was some sort of visionary. She may have been trying to look the part with the veil, or maybe she just wanted to be closer to God, or maybe she wanted to absolve herself of having a child out of wedlock . It’s difficult to obtain these answers from her now. Whatever the reason, I grew embarassed of her – maybe for the first time in my five-year-old life. When Mom came to bring a forgotten lunchbag to my kindergarten classroom one day, a girl raised her hand and asked, “Why does Ashley’s mom dress like a nun?” The teacher couldn’t answer the question, so I answered for her.
“Because God told her to,” I said earnestly, and the class laughed.
Everything my mother did was done upon direct order from the Almighty One. That’s what we were told, that’s what we believed. Once, in the middle of a blizzard, in the middle of the night, she said that God was telling her to pack us up and drive to Charleston, West Virginia, where our father and hers lived. We were living six hours away, in Steubenville, Ohio, at the time. She said that she felt a sign, a physical manifestation of God’s word, like fingers up and down her spine, pushing her to go.
Unfortunately, God was not pushing our ’75 Chrysler Cordoba that night. After two hours of getting no where in an unyielding avalanche of snow, the car gave up. I remember pushing it though I’m not sure how far my mother thought she and two pre-schoolers were going to get. She left us in the car while she knocked on doors, and luckily a nice older lady let us in and gave us some hot chocolate while Mom used the phone. I don’t remember who came and picked us up, or if they said “I told you so” when they did. We went back to Steubenville, and all I remember is that I was sorry we were going back.
