Delila Jahn
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« Reply #71 on: January 01, 2004, 10:50:33 pm » |
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It worked. I'm amazed. I got on the bb!
Analyze analyze. That's what people do. Read my analyzing to follow. Not sure yet how to get my mail on this cite so send it to my homail address.
delila
Rising from Total Zero
My mother was born in a refugee camp in Munich, Germany. She came to
this country a child, floating on a boat, without a single English word in her mouth,
her mother holding her hand, and vomiting into the sea. They traveled by train from
Halifax to Estevan, Saskatchewan. “When I came [to] this country,” Grandma tells
me. “I was total zero.” Her children taught her English when they came home from
school. Even now she considers herself a dummy.
As far back as I can remember I’ve wanted to be something too. Very young,
I knew what I wasn’t. I was, maybe ten years old when everyone else bragged about
what they’d be when they grew up. A visiting uncle turned finally to me asking, ‘And
you, Delila, what are you going to be?’ and I whispered: something.
I am nearly forty - actually half way between thirty and forty but I’ve acquired
my mother’s habit of rounding numbers up or down to point to a fact: ‘You’re five
years old and you still can’t....’ (when I was really four and so on, through the years,
measuring me both against my older sister and my younger brother, finding me
lacking either way). She stepped on me to raise herself. Now I’m thirty-five, to be
exact but let’s face it - I may as well be forty, right? When I turn forty then, and still
haven’t ‘made my way’ in the world, my mother’s voice will be rounding things up
still further in my head, whether she’s alive or not, whether she suffered a mental
illness or not. .
The facts are presently thus: my sister, isn’t yet that lawyer Dad predicted. My
little brother isn’t the rock star either, though he played the straw broom with such
conviction. So, am I something?
Early on it was clear I needed something, to do something to get something if I
was ever going to be something. So I joined the first cult that came along.
I’d been sent to school dirty, bullied, pegged as a slow learner and put in the
‘stupid row’. When I read To Kill a Mockingbird in high school and Lawrence’s The
Diviners my first year of university, I knew I was white trash. But by then I’d already
found God, right? So what did it matter, how I was raised? And I’d found God, in
whose eyes all flesh was grass, in front of whom all would burn with fervent heat,
before God, who could stand? I had found my purpose: God’s service.
Did I feel accepted? Did I have friends? Did I measure up? Was I good
enough? Of course not. And so what? The world was going to hell. There were
souls to save, what did my pathetic little ego matter when we were in the great war
for souls? This war, fought on your knees in prayer, submission, death to self.
For seven years I clung to this conviction, reading the Bible everyday,
praying, going to meetings, keeping no secrets, watching no television (the devil’s
tool - the idiot box), seeing no men.
Men. By this time I was nearly twenty-four and in 1992, that’s a feat. Twenty
four and still a virgin? Wow. And yet part of my evolving fantasy of myself was to
be the faithful wife of a godly man too. To submit to him - a romantic notion. Sadly,
my celibacy came to a horrible end.
But now I’m telling too much of a story, not reflecting enough on the facts,
essaying as I should. And up until that point in my life I was always concerned about
what I should do. I kept my nose clean, sang with the faithful: “The world behind me,
the cross before me. No turning back. No turning back.”
So keeping to that point - I wanted to be something. I remember now. I was
ten, licking my cold sore, listening to my brother and sister and then wondering how
I’d justify my existence.
I bought a black leather jacket when I left the Lord. Funny to define it that
way now, like I left my husband. I left the Lord. My parents never phoned, had
changed their lifestyle little when we left the nest - except now they could afford to
eat out more often; otherwise, they didn’t notice. What was there to say to them,
though my life had suddenly changed forever, that tree falling in the forest and no one
to hear me dying under it. Except the faithful.
I set a second hand answering machine to pick up on the first ring and listened
to the calls of the faithful as they phoned one by one to plead with a recorded voice
who sounded like she were under water. I saw the sea of Moses, parted. I rubbed my
toe into orange shag carpet and talked back to the leading brother’s voice as it
recorded on a little tape. I locked my door on Sundays and took the C-Train to the
mall downtown so that if they came to admonish, I wouldn’t be home to crumble,
open the door, cry and repent. What would I be now if I wasn’t God’s? God was the
only one who ever died for me, though I was nothing really. He died so at least I owed
him my life, right? I mean, how ungrateful can you get? Who did I think I was? Was
I something?
My black leather jacket marched down street after street in south-west
Calgary, looking for an apartment I could afford to rent, alone. I made my plan to
disappear. All I needed was for someone to come along and move a great big stone
and I was free to go. No, that was Jesus. What was I thinking? Comparing myself to
God? That was heresy, my life. If you turn away, they’d told me, it’s better that you
hadn’t been born - (less than zero).
I have two children, now that I’m thirty-five. My daughter is eight years old,
my son, eighteen months. I’ve lived in my grandmother’s basement for the past four
months, since someone burned our house down. I’m separated from my husband.
“God works in mysterious ways.” someone told me recently, referring to the house
fire, the dissolution of my unhealthy marriage. “God?” I spit back. You think God
did this? It hadn’t occurred to me.
God had plenty of opportunities with me running through thunderstorms and
hail, driving in blizzard conditions, walking home alone, late at night in the big city.
And now with nothing to do with Him in so many years, He’s making some kind of
point now? I hadn’t considered. Will not consider. Refuse to consider. In my
dreams, the faithful still scold me. “You know the Lord and you’re still...” In my
dreams, sometimes I’m still looking for a place to live as they shake their fingers,
shake their heads at me.
I can’t imagine my daughter or my son ever standing up one day and asking
me about the meaning of life. From what I can see, they’ve got that figured out
already.
About a month ago my daughter asked, “Mom, what are you going to be when
you grow up?” I’d just come home from work, tired (I teach). I don’t know what I
answered. But I remember that she asked again: “And what do you think I should
be?” and I told her: something, you’ll be something. Because you are something. I
held her.
She is. I knew she was something the moment she was born, crying the
saddest song I’ve ever heard, the day she turned to me, a first grader asking: “The - I
mean, what does it mean, Mom? The dog, the house. The - what does it really
mean?” And my son who plays the cold air register like a guitar and sings. I knew he
was something the day he burst into the world without a sound, his first serious study,
my face, my husband’s and back again, my son. We, his first subjects. He knew he
was something too, the day he learned to run, pulled toilet paper over his shoulder and
took off down the hallway, into the living room, the roll unraveling behind him.
My grandmother, sick, on that boat, held my mother’s hand. I wonder how it
must have killed her to travel so far to reunite with her abusive husband, to try and
shield her children from him, lose them anyway, to their own addictions. For years
I’ve been tracing the etymology of being zero.
But how can a child be zero? My children put the lie to that notion, and yet,
we all were children; and I could string a list so long of moments, brutal moments
when I knew my existence unjustifiable. Moments, past moments. Now, my children
teach me, otherwise.
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