“You really want to eat that?” David, my husband, says to Corey, who is stuffing ancient alphabet blocks into his mouth. Corey smiles without teeth at his father and goes back to toughening his gums on germy wood.
“Sara.” David turns to me.
His eyes plead like those of the stained glass Jesus that looks down on us from the back wall of Prince of Peace Lutheran, my mother's church. On this Sunday of our visit, when we are supposed to sit together as a family, the three of us have left my mother alone out in the pews.
“I know,” I say, and squeeze his shoulder.
This Sunday ritual is not one David and I usually perform. We don't brag about our child's ability to sit through novenas and never-ending prayers, not about his angelic cheeks or curls—although he has them.
My son saw the old ladies coming for him, leaning in from all sides of the church, reaching for him all perfume and talcum, and he screamed. My mother, who says all babies adore her, looked at me with eyes that said without words—you have ruined this for me—and frowned even more deeply when her cherub Corey turned into a bucking giant whoopy cushion, bright red and gushing tears and noises. She pushed him back to me and we skulked down the aisle to the closed-off cry room where we are pariahs, unseen and unheard, but still expected to watch and listen.
Suffer the little children, Jesus said, but the church women won't have it: children noisy, children refusing to sleep cozy on their bosoms, children not behaving like the angels their grandmothers tell the other grandmothers they are. I don't mind our banishment—this is not my congregation—I don't even mind my mother's frustration. We're here with her, which is what she wanted. And we're frustrating her, which is something I seem to have worked at my whole life.
“We're irredeemable,” I say to David, and nudge him to look at his son, who is now on his hands and knees on the cry room carpet, chewing a valley into the binding of a book.
“At least it's not a Bible.” David says. He mimes gnawing on a tall stack of psalms and edicts.
Above the pastor's head, stained glass Jesus glows golden with sun. His arms reach out to the lambs at his feet. Beneath Him, the ladies of Prince of Peace kneel to take their wafers and wine and all the many blessings of communion.
“Sara.” David turns to me.
His eyes plead like those of the stained glass Jesus that looks down on us from the back wall of Prince of Peace Lutheran, my mother's church. On this Sunday of our visit, when we are supposed to sit together as a family, the three of us have left my mother alone out in the pews.
“I know,” I say, and squeeze his shoulder.
This Sunday ritual is not one David and I usually perform. We don't brag about our child's ability to sit through novenas and never-ending prayers, not about his angelic cheeks or curls—although he has them.
My son saw the old ladies coming for him, leaning in from all sides of the church, reaching for him all perfume and talcum, and he screamed. My mother, who says all babies adore her, looked at me with eyes that said without words—you have ruined this for me—and frowned even more deeply when her cherub Corey turned into a bucking giant whoopy cushion, bright red and gushing tears and noises. She pushed him back to me and we skulked down the aisle to the closed-off cry room where we are pariahs, unseen and unheard, but still expected to watch and listen.
Suffer the little children, Jesus said, but the church women won't have it: children noisy, children refusing to sleep cozy on their bosoms, children not behaving like the angels their grandmothers tell the other grandmothers they are. I don't mind our banishment—this is not my congregation—I don't even mind my mother's frustration. We're here with her, which is what she wanted. And we're frustrating her, which is something I seem to have worked at my whole life.
“We're irredeemable,” I say to David, and nudge him to look at his son, who is now on his hands and knees on the cry room carpet, chewing a valley into the binding of a book.
“At least it's not a Bible.” David says. He mimes gnawing on a tall stack of psalms and edicts.
Above the pastor's head, stained glass Jesus glows golden with sun. His arms reach out to the lambs at his feet. Beneath Him, the ladies of Prince of Peace kneel to take their wafers and wine and all the many blessings of communion.
Jenny Robertson is a poet, painter, and fiction writer living near Traverse City, Michigan. Her poems have appeared in Dunes Review and Greatest Lakes Review, and she was the 2012 recipient of the William J. Shaw Memorial Prize for Poetry. Her chapbook of short stories, Hard Winter, First Thaw, was published in 2009. She will be entering Pacific University's MFA in Writing program in June 2012.
No comments:
Post a Comment