And you bribed him with cookies and milk

You tied my internal moral compass to this morally ambiguous father figure: Santa. He could see me when I was sleeping, knew when I was awake; he knew when I was bad or good, and in order to recieve my reward, I had to be good, for Godlight's sake. When I realized there was no such thing as Santa (oops... spoiler alert), I graduated from Godlight to God, the real God who, in addition to knowing my thoughts and holding the keys to my reward, could also fuck with my life in major ways, as in withholding good things, advertantly leading me to bad things for my own good, or even taking my life whenever he wants. He was cast to me by my religious community as Santa, Scrooged. 

I liken God's control over my life to a terrorist/hostage situation. God, in my story, is a terrorist who held me down for 20 years and forced his ideology into my mind. I, in my story, am a hostage who takes this "love" unquestioningly, hoping to survive it, learn from it, and perhaps even learn to identify with this godmanchild who gives me the silence treatment for long periods of time, casts me into his displeasure when I'm bad, and even interrupts me with pangs of guilt when I'm masturbating. 

Now that I'm a full-blown deviant, with no real hope of ever gaining entry into their hypocrit's playground, and as I stand and take a long look back at what I've learned from having endured so long among the righteous, I consider having come into my own a feat within itself: a march upon my own warped sense of righteousness and its unwavering critique of a culture with God splayed across its money, in its anthems, and from the mouths of fundamentalists who, for irony's sake, see life as though through a dark glass. Who is this God, and is he holding love, goodness, and decency hostage on a couch somewhere, bending them to the will of the masses? 

Learning Mother

In living my life these last few years, I'm learning that my mother had a complex, full, separate life before she imagined my existence. She thought for hours on things she's now forgotten, and these things were important, worth her every second. She became consumed with boys, girls, words, science over and over again, as many times as I have and then some. She watched her first television, took her first shower, wrote her first love letter, smoked her first cigarette, drank her first cup of coffee before I drew my first breath. Her body formed around her, reformed, and took on many shapes before my body even existed. For as long as I have been alive, she was alive before me, and has been alive since me, and will live, maybe, another stretch of time equivalent to perhaps the whole of my life, or yours. 

How many times did she reconcile herself to her religion? Did she think about the limits of her experience? Has she questioned her resolve, watched it quiver beneath my brother's lying breath, experienced it anew when she watched her son with his son? When she looks in the mirror at the wrinkling, always in process, does her mind's eye envision my eyes and their wrinkling, always in process? Does she feel the pain of losing me in her cesarean scar, or did she feel my absence most when I was with her?

As much as she believes in Christ, I also believe in me. When she flails, bruising herself against the walls of her own contrition, pleading to the Lamb of God, I trust in myself with all my heart, and lean not onto my own understanding, but in all my ways, acknowledge my internal Lioness, knowing she'll direct my paths. When we fought about religion, were we speaking two different languages? Our mutually-exclusive gods, in fact but not in theory, one in the same? If I'd adopted your metaphors, played your semantic games, offered my "belief" in some things but not others, denied plain-as-day reality before my face and accepted your invented one, would we both have  heard the voice of God?