Chapter Twenty – Four There Goes The Love of My Life. Not.

Chapter Twenty – Four

 

There Goes The Love of My Life.  Not.

 

“There goes my sex object.  There goes my sex object. 

What’ll I do for sex now?  There goes the guy I have sex with.”   

-- Fucked Mother Legion True, Monday, 06 June 1988, Othello Drive, Ames, Iowa, out loud and to … herself

 

This afternoon, a Wednesday one, I just received email news that my new friend is, this upcoming Saturday, separating from her husband of, O, I think about 12 or 13 years’ time.  Herry and I?  Same, very same amount of married – to – each – other time before physically not sleeping all night under the same roof together ever again, not quite a couple of weeks short of 12½, I am figuring.  She has asked me to meet her here Friday for lunch, and more; for her that means a good, long hour’s drive one way.  She can’t really separate tomorrow, the kids nine and 11, being in school and all.  And, too, they don’t know yet.  But she and husband have, gleaned from her electronically transmitted statement to me, apparently determined to sit them both down Friday evening and together tell them.  I am not going to give up her name; it is too soon, and those babes of hers, well, they don’t know yet.

 

I am left thinking tonight, wondering if she will – – and she will.  She will ask.  “What did you think, Legion?   Ya’ know, what’dya’ think when Herry walked out the door?  When he really, really walked?” 

 

Racing across my cranium that night of Monday, 06 June 1988?  Sure’s hell wasn’t, patriarchal bible – wise or Cinderella fairytale – or storybook – wise, what it should have been.  Ya’ know, like, “Om’god, Om’god,    there … there goes the love of my life!  Om’god, whatever will I do?  There goes the only man I’ve ever loved.  There goes the only man I will ever love.  Whatever will I do?  My Prince.  My Hero.  My Knight.  Om’god, My Prince,       My Loving Husband!  What will I do now?!  Whatever will I do now?!”

 

Actually no, those were none of the lines in my mind that evening, that school night also – albeit the academic year’s very last one for my three Truemaier Boys – who themselves then, however, by that latest of hours were already fast, fast asleep.  I do quite well recall standing in the Othello Drive back hallway right at its summit into the gargantuan living room with its so offensive and appalling shag, chartreuse – to – olive carpeting.      My right hip leaned into its white framework just before the portal into the three Truemaier Boys’ one, tiny, ‘collective’ bedroom done up in a very darkish shade of gray – charcoal almost – the only other bedroom inside that entire mansion besides ‘the master’s’, teal – matted one.  My left hand’s digits, one of them gold – banded, rested akimbo on my left hip.  A stoned stare fell out that front room’s southerly window while my backside confronted the den’s entrance – itself just opposite the one to Zane’s, Jesse’s and Mirzah’s bedroom. 

 

The den ... that place had for nearly the past year been Herry’s and the Boys’ pornography – perusing room and at least his, if not also their, midnight and First Day mornings’ masturbating meetinghouse.  As well as, of course, the Boys’ piano parlor.  That den also housed those other two things in its secrets’ – keeping, built – in secretary, both of which had fallen down and opened themselves up to me, its duster:  i) that two – month – old letter from Kansas City’s White Law Firm stating that the Good and Wonderful Dr. Edinsmaier’s boss was about to terminate Horrid Herod for gross incompetence and malpractice if he dared fuck up yet a third time by deliberately choosing to value his slumber over his job, not to mention over his own family’s security as well as that of the two unconscious, lumpy – breasted, stranger – DEhumans and ii) Zane’s penciled plea to Ms. Ann Landers for advice from her on how to stop smoking stolen cigarettes – beings how it was that Z hadn’t even graduated from and stopped attending elementary school yet.

 

Exactly what my brain was thinking through its facial orbs and out Othello’s frontal window on my whole world my mawwiage – ending friend will hear from me come lunchtime Friday?  “There goes my sex object.  There goes my sex object.  There.  Goes.  My.  Sex.  Object.  What’ll I do for sex now?  There goes the guy       I have sex with.”

 

And further, “I don’t know if I can last without a good fuck.  I don’t think I can.  M’god.  I never have.          I’ve never had to.  Wha’th’fuck am I gonna do now?”  And that was it.  Truly.  That.  Was.  It.

 

I cried.  I remember crying, sobbing actually into a snot – filled and muffling towel, all – all of it – on behalf of loathing and lamenting my loss of a fairly fine fucking machine.  A doggone dandy dildo.  And … that was it.  Absolutely all of it.  I moved closer to that window and sunk a knee into the floral – strewn blue and green fabric of the sofa cushion below it.  There was no moon, dark as dark could be, pitch – black out.  All three Boys on the other side of that Monday wall slumbered away.  While Herry walked away. 

 

My thinking to this very afternoon about that silenced night’s hour?  It hasn’t changed.  Not one scintilla. 

 

When we have lunch together the day after tomorrow, I shall tell my soon – to – be – divorced friend this.  

 

Silenced, indeed, the human body’s biggest and busiest sex organ had been that brain of mine.  Like a scratched and scarred vinyl LP suddenly skips, then slows and eventually stops on its turntable right in the midst of the song, I decidedly set about that very darkened night to stifle all sexual desire.  Braver too, I believe, than almost anything I’d done before, this celibate endeavor was, probably braver even, for me, than growing and bearing babies.  Not holier, mind you, not that at all; it just consumed from me far more raw courage.  From that very next Tuesday morning on, whoever the passionate and libidinized Legion True had been up until the eve before … ceased.  She ceased to be.  Dwelling on any of that was not going to uplift and sustain me right then nor help me last out the length of a marriage – dissolution tenure.  After all, my spirit was not free; all along it had been disgustedly cloaked anyhow.  Feigned or fitting wantonness evidently hadn’t endured it through even a decade and a half of one mawwiage.  

 

Momentarily I was ambushed and backslid but just one time:  Herry returned to Othello Drive but for not even an entire night’s worth of the nocent nooky nasty just once, 22 July 1988.  The end of da’Man’s workweek at that, I am thinking and as per usual of course with the Good and Wonderful and Brilliant Dr. Herod Edinsmaier, with all of his whiskered stubble as well. 

 

With this last fuck no chrome, diagnostic penlight did Still Husband Herry thrust inside the tunnel so that it glowed up at him through my brown bushy pubis.  Also no vintage Bakelite hand mirror of mine angled just so in order to best accommodate the vista of his purposefully orchestrated voyeuristic viewing venue.  No names ruthlessly blathered out onto my belly even, not of those others with a twisted feminine lingo – ya’ remember them, Reader, from a couple of chapters before … ya’ know, those such as Edwina and Inga and Rhoda and Theresa, or of those others including Fannie Issicran McLive’s which had been, from off of the pages of his spiral notebook journal with the Creighton University emblem on its blue cover, litanized out loud to me by Hustler Herry late at night just six weeks’ time earlier on – on that same Monday, the 06^th of June 1988.  And while my first name – Legion – still, of course as always before, eluded Herry’s tongue and lips, at least there were no loathsome labels sprayed and splayed and splattered – along with Dr. Edinsmaier’s pillared seminal loogie – onto me either.  We all remember these, too, don’t we?  Cunt.  Pussy.  Twat.  Strange. 

 

Entitled Husband Herod Edinsmaier just took it, dressed and left.  The final walk he acted like it was, out that same front door, denying to himself apparently that that definitive dos – à – dos dance deed he had already done the month before. 

 

Denying, too, Dr. Herod Edinsmaier most certainly was, that this last fuck he should’ve paid for.  It had been  no freebie.  I was that two – dollar … Whore.  His.  And nothing more.  Not one thing more.

 

 *     *     *     *

 

There is that one absolute Truth.  It, too, involves abandon but not that of the reckless, wild and free – spirit kind.  The Truth that any fucked mother remembers; she remembers it from her heart and especially from her gut, her gutted solar – plexus gut:  my Boys –– not my vagina, not my clitoris and not my Gräfenberg spot –– need me.  They need all of me.  Unlike the bust – ups and the heartbreaks on soap TV, this requirement for all of Legion True to stay focused on Jesse, Zane and Mirzah wasn’t going to just miraculously evaporate by next Thursday’s midday operatic episode involving the lovely va – jay – jay and her DivaCup device of some screen darling named Brooke, Erica, Liza, Bianca, Kendall, Greenlee, Krystal or Maureen, er, Maria either. 

 

As much as I hurt, I identified right off that that ache was merely in my groin.  From that then, I knew – equally right off – that:  Herry’d lost. 

 

Ya’ see, Reader, the Truth of All of This is:  Herod Edinsmaier wanted me dead.  Dead.  Dead.  Dead.  Absolutely – not – breathing – anymore – at – all dead. 

 

But no sane mama, fucked or otherwise, will ever by her own hand be driven over that edge:  the one where it is that her babes are ultimately abandoned by her.  The children, as old as they ever grew to become, would never believe that they hadn’t killed her.  So she rocks and rocks and rocks.  She rocks – until she not only prevails at breathing but eventually someday, one day, that one minute arrives when she somehow rises up out of that rocking chair, throws off the mental shawl she has swaddled and warmed and calmed and steadied and steeled herself within during all of those rocking hours –– and goes forth to fight.

 

Mirzah, into the telephone receiver from his apartment in Iowa City at his age of 22, freshly entering graduate work and amazingly unconcerned and apathetic about the utter absence of his childhood memory, blasély announced to me, “No, no I don’t, Ma.  Ma, I don’t remember anything about my life before I was 11.  I don’t.”  Of the three, littlest Mirzah is, indeed, the son in whose life I existed before becoming The Invisible Mother to him and to his two older brothers, the shortest, the least amount of actual physical time. 

 

Herry actually snorted whenever I mentioned the “bonds” or “the bonding” between a mother and child, especially between a mother and her little, little child.  The littlest loves of her life.  Even – Herod did – long, long after the three birthings and the three maternal – baby bondings inside my three to four years’ worth of babies’ – gestating and – lactating moments.  Even – Herod actually sneered – to the cross – examiner in civil district court and in front of multiple family law judges multiple times.  This so – called ‘father’ to three children and the professional Wonderful, Good and Brilliant Dr. Edinsmaier always, always actually sniggered on that one.  The one of … the maternal – child bond.

 

Mirzah, you will recall I had declared to AmTaham when Mirzah had helped to load up his Grandpa’s Caddy Blue, was at 8, at 7, at 6 and always, always before then the kindest human being I had ever known to walk the World.  Yes, it was Mirzah whose name in Persian is a title meaning honor, respect, integrity and is only bestowed upon a designee who is a scholar, a high official or a royal prince.  Mirzah, my littlest prince.  And it was that same some 6’ tall, littlest love of my life, that same person, in skin and bones only, who was now forthwith so nonchalantly telling me, “I’m glad, too.  I’m just fine with that.  I don’t want to remember anything before then anyhow.”

 

“On Becoming.”  I put this epithet here right now because I need to remind myself that the next song lyrics        I happen to write down will have to be entitled something like “On Becoming,” ya’ know, about becoming other than – other than who you were when you were tiny and influenced by, well, whoever were your influencers then.  Truth, Friends and Friendship, Yourself.  On Becoming with regard to yourself, with regard to the people whom you purposefully choose to put into your life and, most especially, the Truth of your life now.  What your reality is now … transformed or transcended from what it was back then? 

 

If it is different and you are different, then is that a good thing?  It might be.  It might very well not be.  If your reality isn’t panning out in at least these three aspects of your life, then these changes in you along your way   Of Becoming don’t work.  Just like, for Not Males, for DEhumans, the five rights of the Male – only – constructed First Amendment, ie, these rights supposedly for all human beings, don’t work.  Not in our Female reality do they.

 

Atheist that I too am, about this ideology of Mirzah’s I am ecstatic.  It took no change at all and certainly not from his few times accompanying me as a Friends Meeting attendee where no – dogma – at – all is Quakerism’s creed for Mirzah in young adulthood to take a verbal as well as an active stance on his atheism.  Perhaps, and    I so desire that Jesse and Zane are, likewise, atheists; but about this thinking in them I am uncertain.  If either professes there to be a ‘god’, then I could easily believe for them both that ‘it’ would be as mine, too, that is, one which is a combination of ... Truth and Nature.  Truth in Nature maybe.  I am pleased, so pleased, that in all three of my adult children, their independent studies and those of AmTaham’s and mine also have taken them through to and taught all of them the purity of the Truth of ... the Laws of Science.  Reason.

 

As allYa’all Readers know, Herry’s an atheist and always had been a vehemently professed one, too, of course.  However, the Good Doctor had a brilliant idea and very, very suddenly then one fine morning just took up with the daily genuflecting and the cross – across – the – chest signing at st. saniqua’s holy roman catholic church noontime services about six months before our first court appearances.  Since that specific strut stunt of Herry’s, why, I wasn’t at all surprised to also hear in another recent, in – person conversation with the adult student Mirzah that Dr. Herod Edinsmaier still attended to in that Grubtrop, West Virginia burg of his now some of those same superstitious gesticulations, one, for example, entailing sacrosanct words spoken over waters with their sprinklings here and there too, I believe.  Although all of that performed – the Big H – – that hypocrisy – –     not during the weekday middays as Holy Herry had so punctiliously chosen to effectually execute just before custody court hearings but, now, mostly only on weekends when enough other folks in the borough’s hilly hollow can see for themselves his own holiness’s worship and witnessing and, thus of course, Dr. Herod Edinsmaier’s most pinnacled pillaredness.  Quite probably, though, no snakes – that is, no live, writhing and truly serpentine reptilians – are involved. 

 

AmTaham the Atheist was another of Daddy’s titles.  I will have to admit though that his, almost exactly like Herry’s ruse, continued week to week in a christian modus operandi inside and around Williamsburg; and he so successfully hid from me for over four decades his areligious appellation!  I do recall that he never made it a point, let alone ever a strong one, to attend church when out of that area and traveling.  But I assumed that that was because he was so tired, so entirely exhausted from work, that the very few times when he was away from his family and farming labors, he so badly needed the time off on Sundays for rest and reading.  I never knew until our both washing out brushes after together painting fresh mint the dingy mustard downstairs bathroom walls on Havencourt that AmTaham, too, had no god!  I was 42, a mother to three, a divorced mother to three now and was only finding this out then, that AmTaham had had no great religious love in his life since at least his preteen age of 12 years!  True it was, one could certainly state, that I was, indeed, ... utterly shocked! 

 

AmTaham’s explanation wholly accounted for why we four kiddos – Legion, Endys, Ardys and Sterling –     had always gone to public school and for his and Mehitable’s never enrolling any one of us children into that ensnaring preacher’s religious school in town, that’s for damn sure.  “It matters not one whit to me, Kitty!  If it makes you happy though – ya’ know, religion – well then, so be it.  Go for it.”

 

“What?!  You’re not angry?!  Pissed off?!  Even just a little?” 

 

“No.  No, I am not.”

 

“Whoooa!  I’m stunned.”  I hadn’t told this man, my father, for almost ten years purposefully.  I didn’t know how to so I hadn’t.  I had actually gone nearly a full decade trying to hide the fact from him and Mehitable that  I no longer attended any patriarchal lutheran church, or specifically the lutheran church – missouri synod, the imprisoning, fuckly flock into which I had been so ceremoniously captured by the androcentrically dictated and cultishly and magically ‘purifying’ machination holy – rollers term ‘baptism’ some forty years earlier!  And that I had, for that long, not only not gone there anymore, not believed that twaddly bunk anymore and had actually heartily disavowed former roman catholic mawwying – monk martin luther’s “this is most certainly true” enslaving – and incarcerating – like mother – fuck for everything which he wrote down but I had actually and formally also taken up with another gang of mind bandits of whom I didn’t think the two of them, AmTaham and Mehitable, would ever approve, that is, the Society of Friends – those wacko, quacko Quakers! 

 

“Truly, Legion,” as he pressed out the brush’s leftover paint under the flushing faucet, “far be it from me to tell you what to do or where to worship.  Or, as a matter of fact, Kitty, whether or not you want to at all!”

 

“Wha’?”  My forehead skin tissue and the brain fissures behind it furled right up.  I pointblank stared at him thinking, “What, really?  What is really going on with you, Daddy?  You don’t care?!  Why, you were the fuckin’ church treasurer, for chris’sake!  Not now – but you were when I was a little kiddo.  And served with all manner of important men there, you did Daddy, on tons of committees.  For chrissake, Daddy, you mawwied off two of us three daughters down that very same memorial lutheran church aisle right here in Ames!  What do you mean you don’t care if I do or if I don’t?” 

 

“You do too care, Daddy” is, instead, what I said out loud.  Kindly, that is, in a gentle and tender, deferring – type tone.

 

“No.  No, I do not.”

 

“Woooow,” again I whirred softly.  Yet I knew right then and there that something huge and thunderous was happening here.  It was.  What was going down, down in this little condo basement on Havencourt in the middle of a mundane day and both of us just doing a commonplace chore, was fricking massive.  Worthy of blockbusting, ceremonial status itself it was.

 

This main mountain of a man in and throughout all of my life finally explained.  It seemed that he unburdened himself; it actually looked to be an unbridling.  That for AmTaham to tell me I could see a weight lifting from his psyche the pressuring likes of which he had been bearing up under within himself for, lo O, some almost five decades I now know it to have been.  And that to at last be getting this stunning tonnage off and out of him and giving it up specifically to me, his favorite female child, meant something so freeing that AmTaham had not allowed himself to ever before feel, let alone, outwardly or publicly express.  “I don’t believe in any of that.  And I haven’t, Kitty.  No.  No, I have not.  Not since I was 12.”

 

I don’t know with certainty what a militant atheist is, but I so do now know, and am, what a militant feminist is.  Daddy went on to tell me a tale that would truly make me into what a radically changed nonbeliever is and so want to adhere to what my feminist idea of militancy is – if its details had happened to me.  And I so desire that I sure as hell wouldn’t’ve languished and struggled for nearly half a century before my arduously trying to yank and wrest off of me such a contumelious yoke.

 

Daddy began the story by recounting that he had raised his adolescent arm high into the sixth – grade classroom air.  “Excuse me, Herr Reverend.  But, ah, what about Lucy?”  The year was 1931, and Great – Grandma Ava Saffron True and Great – Grandpa Zebulon True enrolled and sent their elementary school – aged children to religious school, all six of them. 

 

Curious that fact is from how I, as a little girl, remember them, my ancestoring paternal grandparents.  The two of them were not, not at all, now that I think back on it, extremely religious.  No bible thumpers for sure and no “Bless this” or “God’ll gitcha for that” to any of their six nor to us grandkiddos ever.  O sure, Ava Saffron and Zebulon attended church, maybe even more so at holiday times.  They did own a family bible I think and probably prayed over food, too.  They kept a beautifully chiming clock on the mantle but certainly no wooden, embossed and encrusted or just plain ol’ gold cross with a hung and stone – cold, dead human above it.  Both are buried in that churchly cemetery, this is true.  Yet I remember nothing about the Truemaier Boys’ Great – Grandma or Great – Grandpa, either one, offering up any, let alone, oodles of time in town at churchy socials or policy – and funds –  making functions.  Uh – uh.  I think that the town – a village it was really, Conroy – a half a dozen miles to the north of Williamsburg, did have at that time a public educational structure besides the one room used as a school inside the very small, dark brown sanctum proper; but I don’t know why the True kids walked in to the church for schooling and not the public building.  Not at all interested in rescuing anyone’s scriptures from the leftists or from the religious right, for that matter, I do know that Ava Saffron and Zebulon were no ecclesiastical zealots.

 

“Excuse me, Herr Reverend, there’s Lucy from Africa and that big Scopes Trial about her.”  From his home hayloft reading renditions AmTaham soaked up all of the World’s written history to date and, at age 12, full – well knew that when he had been six years old even without benefit of television or the internet in 1925, to spread it around, a mighty big, big deal had taken place four states away in Tennessee. 

 

The Herr Reverend, thin but well over 6’ tall and also the parish’s high priest, by AmTaham’s story, stepped from his post at the front of approximately 20 children of every primary age and in less than a half a dozen strides loomed above the sixth – grader’s desk which seated my daddy.  Two pious fists gripped the two not – so –  holy lapels of Papa’s jacket and, before almighty god himself and everyone else present in the school,  Herr Reverend hoisted 12 – year – old AmTaham up out of his chair and plopped him soundly onto the wooden plank flooring. 

 

Herr Reverend wasn’t done trying to humiliate the child yet.  With a right indexing phalanx as equally bony as the rest of his skeletal mass and continuing his left – handed grasp on Daddy’s clothing, Herr Reverend pierced AmTaham’s chest, pounding his finger into the cartilaginous xiphoid that was AmTaham’s ossifying sternal plate over and over and over and screamed at the top of his pipes, “DAS IST VERBOTTEN!  VERBOTTEN, YOU HEAR ME!?  YOU.WILL.BELIEVE.WHAT.IT.IS.I.TELL.YOU.TO.BELIEVE!  FORSTEH!  FORSTEH!?  FORSTEH, MASTER AMTAHAM TRUE? ! ! !”

 

JYeah, Pa spoke German, low, high, every which way and so had Herr Reverend before and after that one edict in such lofty English that really, really took away AmTaham True’s attention, “You will believe what it is I tell you to believe.”

 

“Well, that was it, Kitty.  He’d lost.  He’d lost the argument of that day – and ... and he had lost me, too.  From that moment on, I have never believed.  Not for one minute have I.  It was all in that oooone sentence, Legion.  Gone.  All gone.”

 

“But, Daddy, Om’goodness!”

 

“I know.”

 

“Daddy!”

 

“I know!  Pretty wild, isn’t it?!” his 70 – year – old, lower jaw swung over to the right side and those billowing, snow – white shocks of his nodded just ever so slightly, up and down, up and down. 

 

“Whooooa!  I’ll say!  Yeah!  Om’god, Daddy!”  I had put down the cleaning supplies waaaay back at the “strode – over – to – me”  part and was just enthralled now, rapturously listening on through to the end of it all.  I was witnessing in mental slow motion and AmTaham’s fine lexical – flashback fashion, the long – ago struggle and razor – sharp stropping that had been the coming of age of my very own father. 

 

Indeed, a ceremony as worthy as any friggin’ patriarchally organized religious sacramental one this moment that 1931 schoolday in AmTaham’s history had been for him.

 

*     *     *     *

 

Of course, there was more.  A bequest to me AmTaham made it.  A scant two years out from his last one, this especial conversation on an ordinary afternoon whose exact June 1989 date I cannot even remember, was a man’s truest gift ever to his little girl, she no child anymore but about to finally … to finally … because of the substance and the depth of this gift … to finally come of age – at 42 – herself. 

 

“But you took us!  You drove us yourself!  We went to sunday school and, an’ to catechism, Daddy.  We are all confirmed, aren’t we?  You and Mama, … you made us!  The two of you made us go, Daddy!”  As a matter of fact, if AmTaham couldn’t spare the time away from the fieldwork to attend the church service and hear the sermon himself, why, he still drove us four children into sunday school for an hour –– only to have to turn right around and come back into town the mile and a half to pick us all up again in 60 or so minutes.  Mehitable was bilaterally and legally blind; she could never do it, not that I recall.  Yet we still went.  “Not every sunday, no, but too fucking damn many of ‘em, Daddy, we were sent!”  I didn’t say ‘fucking’, not then.  But it was there in my mind:  the absolute belief that our kids’ – that any kids’ – being forced, ever, to attend “sunday school” or any other genre of religious education or training is, indeed, … child abuse.

 

Then he began his gift to me, “I’m sorry, Legion.  I’m really sorry that we did that.  Your mother and me.    That we did that to you children.”

 

“You are?”

 

“O yeah.  O yes.  Yup.  Ya’ know, your mom?  She doesn’t believe either,”  his bold globes bored straight into my own eyes and that massive frosty mane barely nodded.

 

“Whaaaat?!”

 

“It’s true:  she does not.  And neither does your brother, Legion.  Rowland and Wyman don’t either.”

 

“O my my!  My, my … my, my, my!” I had become essentially speechless.  The painting equipment was of no matter anymore; I just sat and stared.  All of these loves in my life, I’m 42 but just finding out for the very first time that my father, my mother, my brother, my favorite first cousin and his dad which makes Rowland my uncle – and my favorite uncle, at that, so also the very fancied one of mine … … all of these people, these really, really, really good people, well, most of them anyhow, are, everyone of them … atheists.  And for what seems like just ever they have been such all along!  “Whew!  This is, this is … Om’goodness, Daddy!”

 

“Yeah, I know.  Big, isn’t it?!”

 

“I’ll say!”

 

“I really want you to know, Kitty, I’m so sorry we did this to you, your mama and I.  I’m sorry.  I’m truly sorry.”

 

I did, I asked it right then and there and am so glad that I did because … because I know.  I know.  “Why did you, Daddy?  Why?  If you didn’t believe and Mama didn’t believe either, then why did you do this to us kids?  And to yourself, Daddy?  Why weren’t you true to yourself?”

 

I don’t like his answer.  In fact, I hate it.  It is so the everyday, all – day – long hypocrisy in her rationalizations – and – justifications’ thinking and in the actions of my mother whose putting on the dog is, for her in the Midwest, a fervor.  A religion of fever pitch, a sickness saving or changing her face is.  Making herself and us children out to others to be, ourselves, other than what we really are.  This hypocrisy is now, as always has been the way of her, routinely practiced by Mehitable to the same extreme degree as a fiery devotee to any of the World’s so – called great religions today.  And just now, by his answer to my penetrating query, this pretense of piety and virtue was extended to me not only from Mehitable and, of course from Herry out of whom I had come to expect it, but also from the one person on whom I had always thought I could count to be, well, true – AmTaham True himself. 

 

“We had to live in this community.”

 

“Okaaay.  But  …”

 

“We had, ah, we had, your mother and I, ah, we had to live in this community.  You know.  You know, get along with the people who’re here.  Deal with these folks everyday, Legion.  We had to live in this town.”

 

It was all a guise, a disguise, another fucking, rusing beguiling.  So it was a mien, an air, a bearing having to do with tradition and with business and with getting along, being agreeable, conforming!  Appearances.  To get what you wanted.  Especially that:  to get done what you wanted.  In the end ... to have as the outcome that which was in it for you.  Mehitable?  Yes.  Herry?  Of course, Herry.  Bilaterally genuflecting both left and right, that Good and Wonderful Community Pillar.  Yes!  Anything!  Aprovechar Herry?  Of course, Herry!  Anything to get done the gutting of the goddamn bitch.  Taking her children – all of them – away from her! 

 

But, AmTaham?  This was so not AmTaham.  Or, so had been my thinking – for a helluva long, long time. 

 

As much as I love AmTaham and AmTaham’s massive gift of Truth to me and as much as the soulful release of no religion in my heritage is, which it so is – weighty and wonderful and finally facilitating me through the final rite of passage to, … well, completeness as an adult human being – I find his specific hypocrisy truly hard to abide.  Uplifting and sustaining me after this revelation is, indeed however, the knowledge that nearly all of us Trues, the Ancestors in Training that we are and that AmTaham has already righteously become, are a mighty fine family of free – thinking … atheists!  Freedom from religion.  Yes!

 

We are moral atheists, we Trues.  Certainly not every atheist is:  Behold Dr. Herod Edinsmaier, his comings and goings and thinkings and doings.  Altruist agronomists Rowland and Wyman both and AmTaham – all wanting to feed somebody somewhere in the World so they grew something – grew something including up us children – toward that end beginning with arising themselves, as both fathers and farmers all, around 4 am every morning.  Day in and day out.  How moral is that!  To an art form.

 

“Early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.”  All three of these men owned all three of these attributes for sure, AmTaham wealthy in the estate that, in Emily Dickinson’s words, were his friends.  “My friends are my estate.”   Notwithstanding their greatness, I recognized two years later, AmTaham just dead and Rowland near death and assured passage into Ancestor status, one thing that I should have discerned earlier when both men were alive and fairly well:  Of all the living relatives, and perhaps also of unrelated friends of theirs, during all of the mighty fine discussions that AmTaham told me had taken place and resulted in his knowing the thinking of Rowland and Wyman and of his own son Sterling, none, absolutely none of these conversations involved or engaged in them ... female people.  We DEhumans.  Us Others.  Except one – except for one female:  AmTaham knew Mehitable’s beliefs.  

 

I thought, “Why?  Why would this be? Why were there no women and girls in on these hardly unholy men’s conversations?  Except for Mom.  And then she?  She probably only talked to Daddy about it.  I can’t even see Mehitable talking to Sterling, her son, my brother, about atheism and about freedom from religion so, yeah, probably she talked about her non – beliefs only to Daddy.” 

 

And then it hit me:  the why of it all, the answer to my own querying.

 

“We, we females, were are not to be trusted.  Indeed, not to be trusted to know our own minds.  And think of it?  If we did, if we did think what we wanted to think, why, we could, we could get into suuuuch trouble.  Wouldn’t we?  We could.  Therefore, being the bedazzling creatures that we so are, wouldn’t we, we seducers?  Such trouble.  Especially we girls, us daughters.  Big, big trouble.  I mean the pregnant – kind – of – trouble shit, not to mention the “For shame!  For shame!  You –  bring – such – shame – down – upon – this – family!” troublesome type of shame. 

 

The same, the very, very same shame for which other tribes’ fathers and brothers, uncles and male cousins, tribesmen other than the Trues or even the Edinsmaiers, excuse their behaviors.  These other but godly guys perceive themselves as embarrassed, as humiliated, as dishonored and so by their macabre use of canon and edict out of and under the beguiling and disgusting disguise of “established” patriarchal religions, those males, the ones with gods, excuse such grisly deeds of theirs to their own.  To their own flesh and blood babies.  Cut off clitorises.  Throw acid in faces and onto breasts’ tissues.  Stone to death pregnant or just – weaning women with only their heads above dirt.  Force abortions on women wanting to be mothers.  Force abortions and all manner of birth control on little, raped girls kidnapped and made soldiers.  The atrocities do not cease.  Not in their entries as statistics and data on rosters somewhere and not in reality.

 

This is the reason, I truly believe, that I was 42 years old and had been at least a once – or a twice – legally and religiously married mother to three babies myself before I, a Not Male, was “allowed”, as was my parents’ tradition just exactly the same as these other of the World’s tribesmen’s “family rituals,” to ultimately come of age.  “Allowed” to be … adult ... although I had been for over two decades’ time!  My Own independent and autonomous Human Being. 

 

AmTaham apologized, yes; that he did do.  But, with his first dying before I recognized the connection to this millennia – old oppression, with or without the inclusion in our lives of formal religion, I am left thinking that perhaps his apology, his gift of the Truth about us Trues, to me wasn’t … well, complete.  Free – thinkers, we Trues?  This, our legacy?  No.  Not all of us.  Only the males and the old, cold matriarchs of us.  Mehitable?  She has never, ever said she was sorry nor wrong.  No, no apology to me forthwith nor straightaway from this particular True Ancestor in Training.  Not on this matter of four decades of androcentric religious battering – and on no other matter ever either.  Ever.  And she?  She still lives.

 

I guess I am wrong about AmTaham’s never disrespecting females and never being disloyal to his own daughters.  I guess I am wrong on that one.  I am so saddened to know this, of course. 

 

But I have already recovered from this memory, this recovered memory.  It is a good thing to know oneself, one’s birthright – including and especially the bad, sad things there.  One needs in any adulthood to come to the knowledge that one is one’s own best friend ever, the love of one’s own life.  This knowledge we have by eight years of age; almost all of us do.  We know this.  My littlest prince, Mirzah, free – thinker status that he has so worthily developed all along and fully come into as a young adult, needs to recover the rest of his memory and, therefore, all of his knowledge from his childhood.  And it’s not about the religiosity nor its absence.

 

It is about Trust and the betrayal. 

 

And On Becoming the Ancestor who never, never, ever betrays any of the loves of his life!