Mary

“You can come in.”

“I do not mean to intrude, Ama. I just…I could not be alone today.”

“None of us should be alone, daughter. Not on today, of all days.”

” In the night, it occurred to me that women are creatures of fire, and the world will surely seek to smother us.  Would you pray for me, Ama? Would you cup your hands around my light and protect it, most blessed lady? Without him, I am so afraid to dwindle, and, dwindling, come to nothing.”

“Hush, love, and do not break your own heart, when there are others who will do it for you. Do not bloody your fists against walls which will not be brought down. Men are holding the pens and the keys to the gates. Your world is very closed now. We are closed in together.”

“Yes.  Yes.  My world is very closed.  My prison is in their words, and they will make me into an enemy, and then they will demolish me, unwind my fibres utterly.  Why?  Why am I a devil, when you so easily became their saint? Why hate me, and love you so much.”

“The world needs enemies, child, and men so rarely realise that we women, all of us, are the same, from the inside out, even when we are at our most different.  Be brave for me, and remember that we are no so very different, you and I. Both of us have loved and touched him.  Both of us were there.  Tell your story, child, and tell it to anybody who will lesson, for it is in the telling that we survive, and our bodies may become hymns. Ours was ever a spoken history.”

“Let men keep their books.  We’ll teach our secrets in whispers in the dark. But what if I can’t find the words. How can I speak, if I don’t know how?”

“Tell me, daughter. Tell it to me, now.”

“In crowds, in narrow spaces crammed full of people, he had a way of centring, closing. That was what I noticed about him first.  He would close his eyes and open them and there you’d be, the only person in all the world.  You know these things already, mother – these were the things which you gave to him, human things which warm to the touch. These were the things that you told him while you carried him.”

“I moulded him with my own two hands.  He was my life’s work.”

“You made him into the man that he was, that listener…that great listener.  He loved to listen to the way that people talked.   I have lain with him in the warm glow of lamps, and we have talked until we were out of words and I did not see God in him, but I looked into his eyes and I saw you there, and…”

“And?”

“And I thought that love was supposed to make things different.  I thought that the world was supposed to be remade by love.”

“Men don’t remake the world, child. They can’t. Not even him.  It’s a woman’s right, her skill – tear down the world, rebuild it in her own image, out of her own flesh and bone.  Little girls and daughters wait for men to change the world, but a woman is the world; her muscles are the earth, the softness of her belly is the sea and I am layers of rock and mountains around this tiny golden heart. Men need women to make life.”

“I’ve been thinking about this, about how he reached inside of me and left life behind in its wonder and glory.  Son of God, they call him, but he was yours first, wasn’t he, and made in your image. The mother is the plan. She is the root of all life.

“I wasn’t always a mother.  Remember that.  I was a girl and I was scared and it was very dark.  I could not look directly at it, the angel of the lord, Yahweh’s brightest light, his voice on earth, and his message to me.  I shaded my eyes with my hands and I listened and I obeyed.  I felt nothing.  Later, I felt like every inch of my body was burnt, raw.  Later, I was brimming over with feeling, but then, right then, in the dark, I knelt and I was terrified and there was no-one there to comfort me.  I bore my son in tribulation, like Eve did, once and I will lose him.  If the sun shines when they kill him, I will never forgive Him.  Let the world go dark.  Let the sky mourn for my broken heart. For what has been taken from me.”

“You didn’t know?  He didn’t know?”

“Women never matter, and they never need to be told, nor included.  Women sweep and cook and mend clothes and rear children.  A woman is quiet so that she can go on existing.  No woman is merely a woman; our existence is fraught and complicated..  A woman is bound in language; she is a mother, a daughter, a sister, a wife.  Women are embellished and categorised  into silence and out of existence.  No, I didn’t know.  No, he didn’t know either, and, when he knew he didn’t tell me.  He couldn’t.  He couldn’t because I am his mother, and he loved me.  He loves me. He had to try and save me from the pain.”

“Is it time yet?”

“It’s not quite time.  Time yet to bind your hair with linen, wash your face with water cool from flowing under the ground.  You’re a maiden no longer, though it doesn’t show yet.  You’ll never make a wife now.  What ever made you think that you could be a wife for him?  There is no woman who is or has ever been a match for Him.  Eve knew it, and she was the first. She would have fought if she could, but she went into the wilderness in silence, and that’s been the woman’s way, ever since. It’s been passed down in whispers since then, and you never heard, did you?  You were never warned.”

“I just loved him.”

“I know that.  Believe me, I know.  I loved him too, from that very first moment when my body stood around him like an army, when my flesh bowed in around him like a prayer.  There were times when I wanted to carve him out of me.  To save us both the pain.”

“I thought you didn’t know?”

“I didn’t.  I didn’t know.  I had no idea.  And yet, I was a mother from that moment.  There is nothing more fearsome than the mother of a threatened child.  There is a particular sorrow reserved for the mothers of first born sons.”

“And there was nothing that you could do.  Would you have…didn’t you try?”

“And break my own heart?  The world surely broke it for me.  You said that women are like flame which flickers.  Well, if woman is a flame then man – the world which men built – is a strong breeze before a gathering dark.  Mary, I…”

“Three men came to you, didn’t they, chasing after a star?  Find me my star, mother and I’ll take this promise of mine far, far away where they won’t touch him.  Carry me out of this land, and far away across many seas. I will be gone. This is my promise, Mary: that though life dwindles, it renews and it goes on.”