Sunday November 10 2024 I am in the tuskegee national forest for a few days. The weather is mostly cool and an amazing breeze is passing over my arms once in a while. It’s overcast.
I’m in mourning like so many of us are. I’m not a church goer, I'm an atheist. I realized I have been an atheist my whole life, after decades of trying to fit into some version of christianity that started in my childhood of the lutheran version where it was clear women were not valued as peers.
Sunday, the day people who say they follow the teachings of the man Jesus sit among one another in community to share chants, songs that contain immense violence, be preached to by mostly men who read from a book manufactured by men, filled with the most vile stories of horror wreaked upon others by the characters they reframe as heroes.
That book rarely contains independent heroines (historians study the ways women were written out of christianity) but calls women in service to men, heroines.
The history of religion is violence. Many of the same people sitting in those pews are celebrating the election of a vile sexual predator felon.
Sunday. One of a thousand gods day.
I’m mourning collectively with half the country and am terrified for the people who now have to make plans of custody for their own children adopted or birthed and loved families who may become targets. Or those who may have to plan for the deportation of their family members who have been here for ages and have grown families and communities. Or make a safety plan while they figure out if their coworker or own family member will betray them to the homophobic american version of the nazi special commission the orange monster has in mind.
And I mourn deeply for the millions of girls, women and people with uteruses who will be assaulted with words weapons and denial of care. The echoes of nazi germany being denied by the other half of the country.
I’m mourning the conversations I will probably not get to have with Oldest Son. Because those conversations have not gone well to this day. He’s 43 years old soon. He’s one of the men who sit in those buildings. Next to his pregnant wife. Who is pregnant with their daughter. They sit next to her 12 year old nephew, she has custody of him. He is their child. He is my grandson.
Last year my son made a point to sit me down and tell me they would be raising Grandson (and any future children they would have) with “gender norms” and that if I wanted to be in Grandson’s life, if Son told Grandson the sky was green I had to follow suit. And that if Grandson was spending time with me, he could not watch any “girlie shows” withe me -my grandson and I like watching project runway together. I have never told Grandson to keep anything we do together from anyone. Grandson trusts me with many things he cannot talk to his aunt and Oldest Son about. And he loves project runnway.
There was a lot more in the conversation that had mostly the same tone but that part, when my son actually said the words “if i tell him the sky is green I expect you to tell him the sky is green” I knew we were a canyon apart in our values. And my heart shattered because it was one of those generational echoes I have been recognizing in my own life and extended family as I grow. Here it was coming from Son’s mouth echoing his father’s misogyny and bigotry.
When my children were young we set a tv in our living room on the fireplace hearth for a while, one of those old box style tvs. I can’t recall why, it was temporary, but i think it was in service to their aging and equally bigoted grandfather, the long ago dead ex father in law who could not climb stairs to where we had our family room with a television. In any case one evening when the abuser came home from work, he walked in to us watching the Cosby show. (Obv this was before we knew what a piece of shit bill is). Abuser became enraged and as was his normal approach he came up to me, put his face in mine and spit growled “turn off that black show”.
You can read on my blog about how that abuser has been hiding behind the bible since I told him I was divorcing him in 1997. His use of that book as a weapon epitomizes the statement there is no hate like christian love.
I told Son I would not lie to my grandson and tried to have one of those tough conversations with him. It did not happen. When he shut it all down, I told him I wanted time to think about the things he said and wanted to talk about it all again in the future. He agreed. That was over a year ago.
My son has bandwidth limitations that seem to most often apply to talking with me about substantive topics. He will tell me in most every encounter, text or the rare in person conversation he doesn’t have the bandwidth for me. Even less for conversations that might challenge his values.
To be a bit transparent, our relationship has been going downhill for at least a decade and lots of it has to do with my failing to be the mom he needed when he was young while I was figuring my way through the carnage to my children and I of domestic violence. Nonetheless, I was not the adult mother he or any of my three children needed and deserved.
And.
My son has grown into a very right wing thinking man who is narrow thinking on important issues of humanity. In a confusingly deep twist, until my son came into DIL’s life, the way Grandson is…was just fine. It is wild to watch in real time another white mother figure give over her authority to lead, and lead well, to a white man.
In May of 2024, Son’s little family of three became members of a local newly formed reformation presbyterian church. The tenets are shocking, you can look them up. We are in Alabama. I don’t think my son planned to invite me but when Grandson told me he was going to be baptized, I said I’d like to be there to celebrate him. My son and daughter in law agreed which is when I was told they were also being committed as members.
I hadn’t stepped into a church for years, maybe since Daughter’s wedding 11 years earlier, when soon after, her pastor, the pastor who officiated her wedding, came out as gay and quit the lutheran church in texas where Daughter and SonInLaw were married. As far as I know he lost all contact with people who had on the surface been people who loved him and were expertly guided by him until that single piece of information was revealed that somehow transformed him into something that church could not tolerate. Or maybe it was that he was in Texas in a lutheran church and he wanted the change.
Back to my grandson’s baptism at 11 years old. The congregation is small and led by a friend of my son’s who interestingly is a banker. His sermon that day included these words “an abusive father is better than one who ignores you”…I haven’t looked extensively but i don’t find those words in the bible.
Those words -which are disgusting to me in any environment-may go in one ear and out the other of a parishioner who grew up in a non violent home, but my son, who was beaten by his father with a cutting board so badly his preteen body was bruised for two weeks, was beaten with coax cables, branches, and hit in the head by his own fathers closed fist many times, being counseled by a banker who is indoctrinating him to agree that abuse is preferable over no contact was infuriating to hear.
And because my grandson was part of this experience I did not bring it up.
That silence. That non confrontation. That waiting for an “appropriate” time to talk will be very unlikely now or any time in the future between us.
And that child, my grandson, along with their soon to be born daughter, will be raised in that thinking. If this were the other foot as the saying goes, Son would accuse me of indoctrination.
That is the negligence of the white mothers of america. It’s my negligence. The not bringing something up no matter the consequences even though we have almost no communication at this time and there would be absolutely nothing to lose by trying.
Would it have changed anything? I don't know. I do know that it will be worth it if we do speak again to say it and at the very very least make a hopeful crack in his heart.