Strange, Holy and Rare

When I was four years old I slept soundly in my second story room bed with the window open and a warm June breeze tickled my cheek. I awoke when a dream I had, a disturbing one, ripped me violently from my sleep. I wailed for Mama. Mama came to my bedside as I recounted the events of a nightmare so terrible it's recurred at least once in my slumber annually, nearly every year since: my mother standing in our tomato garden in a white polyester robe and plastic halo. "Bye bye," she told me. "I'm going to heaven." The worst part of the dream was that I could see on her face that she wasn't the least bit remorseful that she had chosen to ascend to heaven rather than stay on earth with me. Just as my pudgy hands reached for her she was gone, and my eyes tore open, and there my mama was. On earth with me. Of course I couldn't articulate any of this to her with a vocabulary of about thirty-six words, so I probably said something like, "I don't want you to go." She caressed my hair gently and wiped the cold sweat from my brow. And she said, "One day I will die. Could be tonight, you never know. And I will go to heaven and you will see me there when you die."

I recoiled back at her brutal honesty. "You're not supposed to say that to a four year-old, you strange woman," I wanted to scold. "You are supposed to tell me we will be together here forever and death and pain will never touch me". But, again, thirty-six words. We lived a charmed life with my father in a Philadelphia suburb with wonderful friends, a wonderful church, diverse like a '90's textbook. I had a little blonde best friend who is still my best friend to this day. I had countless aunts, uncles and cousins who loved each other, and me, endlessly. And here my mother, who is supposed to shield me from anything outside of this blessed bubble, popped it herself. It was then that I saw her beyond her role as "mother" and saw a glimpse into this person's brain, whom I began to find more and more unusual the more I made her acquaintance.

My mother Anne Bradley, née Gilles, is a strange, holy and rare woman. The strangest, holiest and rarest person I know, in fact. For instance; she is unreasonably kind. I believe kindness and compassion are paramount values but as I've entered adulthood--no, actually, when I moved to Los Angeles--I realized some people don't deserve my gracious restraint. Some people deserve to be ripped a new one. My mother does not need to restrain her tongue. Her heart sees even the most hideous, obnoxious, ill-mannered creature through God's eyes and she pours out a frustrating amount of patience and tenderness in response to ugliness. She is so healed, she does not experience offense. Or, if she does, she processes it in private conversations between her and God, and she moves on. This quality became intolerable as a teenager in need of an empathetic ear; venting to my mama turned from therapy session to lecture as she would suddenly turn my self-righteous logic against me and I could no longer play the victim of my narrative. "Just be the mom who validates how I feel!" At this stage in my life I had a decisively more extensive vocabulary. So I openly lamented my resentment for how her piousness interfered with my pity-parties. She is so unsettlingly steady. She is so irrationally reasonable. She is so terribly holy.

She is so holy that she would willingly sacrifice our charmed suburban life to return to her birthplace of poverty and trauma because she knew she and my father were called to go after the earthquake in her native Haiti and devote themselves to restoration. I raged. I thought it so uncouth that my mother and father were doing the very dangerous and reckless sorts of things I was supposed to be doing in my early teenage-hood. She was stealing my youthful thunder with her radical, sacrificial love and her complete disregard for my feelings about the matter. It dawned on me then that my mother is not a shield from the world, but a window to it. She was intentional about all those times she let me glimpse beyond us and into the void, because this is simply how the world is. She will stop at nothing to change it; and the more I waste my precious time building a façade of comfort to protect myself from it, I will shrink so far into myself I won't even be a shadow of the woman I'm meant to be.

The world does not need any more complacency. It needs the rarity of a of a courageous, self-forgetting, ego-murdering, strange, holy, woman. I rewind my mental cassette and I now perceive the brilliance of the transparency I was once so critical of and bewildered by. "One day I will die. Could be tonight, you never know. And I will go to heaven and you will see me there when you die".

This truth was not brutality. It was complete serenity.

As gentle as mama is, she does not tread lightly in this life. She is a heavy stepper. This is the world and my mother is in it, not of it. Even with a plastic halo she is the most beautiful angel our tomato garden could ever hope to see. Imagine her glory when the halo is real?