2005-10-19
The Daughter
When a daughter is born in the Midwest, an entire extended family has a flash forwarded dream sequence. In the moments from her birth, to when she is clean up, APGARed and handed to her beaming parents, her aunts, uncles, grandparents, and parents have had experienced a shared dream sequence starring the freshly born daughter:
So pretty posed in a fluffy dress with her favorite stuffed animal!
So pretty in her nervously sedate dress to go to her first dance!
So pretty waving as she is dropped off at college!
Gets engaged senior year of college!
Gets married shortly thereafter!
Has more daughters!
That's what happens, it's just the facts.
And so when a daughter is born and she is the daughter who does not grow up to do those things - who grows up almost doing them and being either too smart or too stoned to marry her college consorts - there is an internal struggle that she will have. She'll feel like she's letting a lot of people down and like she is a weirdo and that maybe there's just something, you know, WRONG with her. She'll resign herself to being The Disappointment. She'll hook-up with a number of lovers, continue her education, and generally try to stay off of the family radar so that they don't see what she's up to. She stays away so that she's not asked why things are going so horribly off course. She staya away because there must be some huge internal flaw, or some secret that her family never told her about; maybe like a curse or something on her pretty head.
By the time she is 24, when she meets and, rather instantly, becomes the sole object of Jesus Mitchell Christ's romantic attention, she will be in desperate need of both therapy and medication.
I held out alright, for the right guy, and here I was, I mean, 24. Old. Unmarried.
Childless.
And I rejected Jesus? The perfect son of God, He who is without sin? Not only did I reject Jesus, but I was flaunting a torrid affair with His cousin. John the Baptist was a drunken lonely man and no daughter in her right mind would leave Jesus for John. Unless she was rebelling or something. That must be why I kind of had a pitiful love for John! Rebellion! Of course!
Afterall, by the age of 24, she's been shown her path, by her parents' encouragement and her peers' example and she has landed the ultimate in Men. She landed God, dudes. G-O-D. The Heir of the Kingdom of Heaven. The King of Kings was obsessively and dangerously in love with her.
Then she left Him.
It must be cold feet or rebellion; it can't possibly be so bad. The guy is fucking Christ, you know? Christ.
While I was driving from John's warm, albeit kind of gross, cave to my apartment on that dark Saturday morning in the fall, I was convinced that my flight from Jesus must have been nothing more than the rebellion of a self-centered young woman. I believed that I was arrogant to leave Jesus. I believed I was ignorant to leave Jesus. The more I focused in and thought about it, the more strongly I believed that I was disappointing both my family and Jesus' and honestly, it was comforting to think this way. There was nothing wrong with me, I just had cold feet and certainly if anyone would understand, it would be Jesus. Right?
I arrived at my apartment and walked up the rotting stairs with resolve. I had no right to think to myself, "If I was still with Jesus, I wouldn't live in this much of a shit-hole."
But that's what I thought.
I had no right to think "John will have to get over it. Jesus was here first." Nor did I get to think any or the following: "Jesus still wants me back." "I'll have to do some social calculations but by my rough accounting this cloudy morning, I can get Jesus back." "Why would John care?"
But that's all exactly what I was thinking.
And I went into my shitty apartment, the one that kind of smelled like mildew all the time? I went in and I stripped off my jeans and my shirt form the night before, the ones that still smelled like John?
I walked naked down the hallway in that shitty appartment and with the cat as my witness, I washed myself free from sin so that I could get down to the business of wrapping my arms around my 225lb, 6'4" destiny.
Jesus wasn't a little guy.
arizonasarah at 12:27 p.m.