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?