My mother once told me a story when I was a little kid.
Her mother had disappeared.
They didn’t know if or when she would come back. I was told she had thrown in the towel on her life as a mother to ten and a wife to an old man. And even as a nine-year-old girl myself, I admired that action. Something about that story told me you don’t have to live in a hell—whether created by your own hands or someone else. Her actions said, Go ahead and save yourself.
I recall the awe in my own mother’s tone, a grasping for her own power at thirty-nine years old. The years her arms held a little baby in a foreign land, a child fathered by a man who ended up not being THE MAN of her dreams—or eventually, mine.
The power of my mother’s mother, the one that declared you don’t have to stay there, lives in me.
I guess that’s my grandmother’s legacy—the power to choose and the power to leave. To admit to yourself, this is killing me. Even if the ten children who came from her own body became collateral damage, there is still beauty in saving yourself for the sake of all of them. I feel her imprinted power of choice still alive in me, and perhaps that’s why I too was able to leave.
It is said that my grandmother eventually returned—relief in the eyes of those she left behind, of course. My mother said it was the only time she ever saw her father cry.
Mary was different upon her return to the home that had once felt like a death sentence—a place where she was never alone. Her skin, her hair, her body—renewed.
I pray a little bit of my grandmother finds you too.
On the days when the hell of your life starts to burn at your feet- Mary comes through- You don’t have to stay here, go ahead and save yourself even for the sake of just you.
