America the poor: A Wanderers Tale, Volume One

Chapter 10: School Poems, Churches,and Family Squabbles

My mother was always searching for places, people, and different things to satisfy the hole in her heart. She was eternally empty in her soul, a void that would never be satisfied all her life. Her existence had no real meaning, no purpose, so she perpetually looked for it elsewhere. She filled her void with various abusive boyfriends, bad husbands, religions, vices, copes, or just some places she felt she could finally belong. We would move often across the west side, as I've previously mentioned, and she would change churches and religions just as swiftly, sometimes far more often.

One month she became a Jehovah's Witness, and gave up any and all holidays and celebrations. It's basically a cult of party poopers. Another time she was Episcopal, then Protestant. She ran almost the entire gamut of religious choices, and I was always dragged along for the ride it seemed, willing or not. Most of the time it was not, but subject to her whims nonetheless.

I've learned that Christianity has many facets, and is more a general category of belief than a specific religion. Technically, the overall family religion was catholicism, and that's the way I was originally brought up, long before her spiritual wanderings.

There was a regular neighborhood church,almost a mini-cathedral in my memory,with a very friendly priest that was NOT a child molester. Even though I wasn't welcome in Sunday school after too many uncomfortable questions, I did have an official first communion, with all the appropriate ceremonies and trappings. Dressed in a suit, looking like a small angel, yet I was anything but. I went through the rituals, and the ceremony, but remember no actual faith or belief. I did what was expected of me, and did what I was told to do,nothing more. It was a tidy affair, and many pictures were taken,but that's society, going through the motions, nothing more.

We do the gestures, do what's considered proper, and smile for the camera, but with little to no real meaning. Its recitation by rote, and we go through the motions of believing, but that's where it ends,In hypocrisy, usually. After that, my mother started her church-hopping, so it didn't matter to me anyway.

Wherever she went, I was bound to go as well, for the good or bad. Sometimes it seemed like she tried a different church every two weeks or so.

Sometimes she stayed a month or two if she actually liked it. I remember being dragged to a predominantly black church once, where excessive Christian exuberance was the theme of the day, I'd never seen such dancing as there.

Most of the service was singing, dancing, jumping, and clapping. Certainly wasn't my style. I was not a singing, clapping,or celebrating type of kid. Melancholy was more my nature, then and now.

Some things change with time, and some don't. I was never that happy back then, and still not today. I exist, but not much else. Evil and hopelessness has taken its toll on me, for my entire lifetime. Yet I continue,for good or ill, time shall tell.

So my mother tried almost everything, except for snake handlers, or satanists, and hare krishnas, good thing too, they are quite dirty, from my observations. The whole time she was looking for something she never knew what she was searching for.

God perhaps, a meaning to life, real love(assuming it exists of course), or simply to be accepted somewhere. Maybe to truly be a part of something bigger than herself.

As I've mentioned before, she was considered the "black sheep" of the family, and for very good reasons. She was always hateful, petty, destructive, spiteful, and contrary and destructive to the entire family. To her parents, and both her sisters, she was unloved, by choice seemingly.

She would do things to spite them all, whenever she could. It was not only simple single events, but her very nature. Like she was born under different stars, and despised her own family automatically, never appreciated them, and was therefore ousted. Born of the family, but not really a part of it.