| Cinthia Ritchie |
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| Mary With PMS What a drag being Jesus' mom. He's never home, out wandering the streets until all hours, casting out demons and healing the sick. Last week you almost smacked him, hard, when you found him wandering the temple. "Where were you, we were worried sick!" Hands clenched, flies gathering on the sleeves of your robe, wrinkled and stained from the three day search. You thought he was dead. You imagined him lying in a ditch, the smooth underside of his throat slashed. You were afraid some man had lured him into an alley and touched him there, down there, with dirty, stinking hands. There is so much to worry about, you can't do this, you are too small, too thin; in the winters, your feet are always cold. All you wanted was a child with strong, quick hands, a carpenter, like Joseph; Instead you got the son of God who forgets to come home at night, falling asleep in the street, his head propped against a rock and once, a leper's oozing, smelly leg. How can you care about the sick when there's so much to do around the house, chopping wood and sweeping the stairs and hey, would it kill him to clean the donkey's stall once in awhile? The problem, of course, is the father always looking over your shoulder and telling you how to raise this son, handing down rules and proclamations so tiresome you can't imagine anyone following them. Why not eat meat on holy days, and all of that sacrificing and butchering of lambs, why, it just makes you tired. You are the one, after all, who has to clean the smocks and any woman knows how hard it is to wash out blood once its had time to set. You want full custody, total parental rights, a few hundred a year in support so Joseph can stop working so hard. Maybe buy more sheep, take a trip next spring, just the three of you without any of that "God said this," and "God wants that" stuff. You've had enough, thank you. You've never even met the man and now he thinks he knows better than you how to raise this son he's never touched. Who does he think he is, this man in the sky, this modern day Zeus, made of air and breath, and if he really wants to know what it's like to have a child why didn't he do it himself, carry it for nine long months and then push it out a small hole in his body, sweating and crying and begging for mercy? You worry, oh how you worry, down on your hands and knees at night, your ear pressed to the earth as if listening to a heartbeat. Your son is a misfit, a freak, preaching on about Moses and Noah and some guy Abraham who tried to knife his own son. He will die young, it's written all over his face, that face that is slowly changing into a man's. Yesterday you noticed a pimple on his neck, red and angry from where it had been squeezed, and this made you cry, you couldn't help it, your face buried in the hot, blurry shade of a fig tree. All you ever wanted was to be happy. |
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