Power Praying

I wrote this in 1993, when I was living with my mother in Northern California. My perspective is one of cynical bemusement...

My mother sits beneath the hairdryer in her bedroom and reads the bible. Sometimes when I pass the doorway, I see her beating mea culpa on her breast. It's an old signal, evoking early memories of Catholic ritual. It makes me uncomfortable because it dredges up my past, and because watching my mother do it seems faintly blasphemous.

I've thought about this a lot. My mother is not a devout woman. She doesn't go to church. In fact, her cynical attitude—coupled with some very unpleasant experiences of my own in Catholic school—stopped me from attending Mass years ago. So why is she doing this?

She's doing it because the house won't sell. She's in a real pickle, falling behind on her bills and the mortgage, and she will try anything. (This includes burying a statue of St. Joseph in the front garden, based on nebulous reports that several other people did it and “their houses sold right away.”) She's hoping God will have pity on her and save the day. If that means reading the bible, saying prayers and beating your breast, then so be it. It's a system, one that millions of Catholics have used for hundreds of years. When I realized that, my view of the woman under the hairdryer came back into focus.

My mother is a master at manipulation. She uses guilt like other people use power tools. I took me years to see her games coming down the road. Even when I was married for the second time, with a 9 year-old son, she could still push and twist and rotate my emotions into an explosion of rage and helpless self-condemnation.

She barters treatment, advice and prescriptions from a network of doctor friends. She gets first-class service at discount prices from the appliance repair man. She borrows money from a variety of well-heeled associates. This is more than guilt; most of these people are men, and there isn't any doubt that a chemistry's at work. Never mind that she's 65 or so, her beauty fading, her figure succumbing to gravity, alcohol and too much Hagen Daas. It isn't a physical thing. She exudes pheromones like a queen bee, and the drones buzz to the rescue.

This isn't her first return to the flock, either. Her last marriage was to a Catholic, but in order to get it sanctified and marry within the church, she had to confess that all her other marriages were bogus, because the Catholic church still doesn't recognize divorce. It meant denying a couple of husbands and most of her adult life. If I hadn't been so amused by the charade, I would have worried about my father's status. After all, he was her second husband, and if she was denying them all, then my brothers and I were illegitimate in the eyes of the church! But Mom has a deep-seated reluctance to acknowledge her first marriage—she was eighteen, it only lasted a couple of years—so she made the confession retroactive only as far back as her divorce from my father. The lie never bothered her, and she hung the hand-lettered certificate of absolution from the Pope on her bedroom wall.

All for nothing because the Catholic marriage failed, too.

Mother has a quick mind, and she's always worked the angle. If the ride resembled a roller coaster more than a limo, it was because she was impatient. She wanted things to happen right away, and screw the details. You grabbed some fame, you hit it big and you spent it all. Savings accounts were for wimps and tightwads.

As she's gotten older, this impatience with detail has transformed into a stubborn passivity. She's in dire straits, but won't call Social Security and start drawing on the money she deserves. She hobbles on a hurt foot, but won't take up her orthopedist friend's free offer of surgery. There's a complicated pattern of martyrdom going on here. I don't understand it, but it's another thing she's a master at. It serves her sense of perspective.

That brings me back to the hairdryer. Martyrdom is a subject Catholics are very big on. That, and giving over all your troubles to the arms of a large, bearded paternal figure. After four marriages, that's a concept she can understand.

Mom isn't really turning religious. She's just manipulating God. And if man was created in God's image, I'd say she's got a better than even chance of having him come through for her.