No, this is not a post about abortion. This is a post about my mother. My mother is anti-abortion. She's anti-a lot of things including non-Jehovah's Witnesses. My mom, however, is not a bible thumping, snake handling evangelist. You'd think with the whole "I don't really have a close relationship with my gay son because the bible says his 'lifestyle' is wrong" thing she'd be one of those mean and nasty Christians we've come to know and despise. She's not.
Mom is actually just a really docile, timid person who happens to be extremely faithful because she finds the real world too scary to deal with on terms other than Jesus infused absolutes. She came from a family of 6 kids. She was the sensitive one who cried a lot. Mom married her first real boyfriend and was a devout Catholic until her brother died tragically and Jehovah's Witnesses showed up at her door with "the truth" about what happens to the dead. She was ripe for their brand of mind control.
Because I know her personality so well, I can't be mad at her for being a JoJo (my endearing nickname for Jehovah's Witnesses). I can be furious at the JoJos for destroying my family, but I totally get why she's one of them. I don't have it in my heart to trash their organization in front of her even though I'm usually the first one to bitch about their mind-fuckery. She was the perfect recruit and raised us in the faith for no other reason than she felt like she was throwing us a life jacket. My brother stuck around, I bolted on the first bus to Boston days after I graduated high school.
I had a nearly idyllic childhood with the sweetest mom on earth who defended and fought for her children tooth and nail. I had a mother who never missed a dance performance, piano recital, or high school theatre production. (She was "shocked" when I came out?!) With or without Jehovah, I'll always love and look back fondly on the home she made for us.
I've always had a mean streak, perhaps it's part of the gay gene. JoJo's try to get follwers to "strip off the old personality" and become meek, governable people. Maybe it was all the Whitney Houston, maybe it was all the Sally Jesse Raphael, but I could not drop the sarcastic remarks and cynical comments post bible-study. Mom pushed me to try to change but also laughed at my mocking jokes in secret dissent, out of ear shot of the congregation elders.
The organization's publications are written in near biblical prose which reads as culturally out of touch and ridiculous to any outside intellectual. Imagine Yoda with a handful of Jesus thrown in and you've got the perennial Jehovah's Witness journal: The Watchtower. As an ideal JoJo, my mom would even use some of their phrases in everyday speech, to which I would heckle her until she doubled over laughing and begged me to stop. "Do not be mislead. Bad associations spoil useful habits" would turn into "Do not be misfed. Bacon wrapped scallops make for fatty rabbits." At church, Satan is referred to commonly as "the father of the lie." If mom were to make any semi-transparent exaggeration, I would respond with a quick, "what are you getting Satan for father's day." And on and on...
My mean streak would also prompt me to terrorize her, which I did at every possible interval. Just as she was afraid of an oncoming Armageddon, she was equally afraid of thunderstorms. She would close all the curtains in the house, unplug every electronic device, put on a pair of rubber-soled shoes, and hide in the hallway or basement with candles and provisions in case this was the thunderstorm to preface Jehovah's Day of Anger. I would take every opportunity to prey on this fear.
One time during a thunderstorm I pretended to be talking on the phone. Mid-conversation I threw the portable down started screaming that lightning was shooting out of it. I "somehow" could "hear the electricity" coming over the line so I threw the phone against the wall and could "actually see live electricity coming out of the receiver." Mom hugged me tightly and thanked Jehovah for saving me from my impending, lightning induced death. She would thank him for the "biblical" hope of the resurrection where dead, faithful, lightning-struck Christians could walk the earth and praise his glory. I would bury my face in her shoulder and laugh hysterically.
Sometimes she would make us get in the car because the car was "the safest place to be in a thunderstorm." We'd be sitting in the driveway with mom cowering/praying in the front seat, I would wait until shit really got loud, roll down my window, and hang from the waist out of the car, taunting the storm at the top of my lungs. I'm sure I added 15 years to her life.
Always one to push the envelope, screaming out of the open car window in the pouring rain and clapping thunder stopped scaring the B'Jesus out of mom, so I had to find another way to engage in good old son/mother terror mongering. In the dead of summer, with dark, ominous clouds rolling in, I would wait for the interior of the house to get really dark, and for mom to get her candles going. I crept quietly into the kitchen, took out the aluminium foil and wrapped a couple of layers around my chest. "Mom! Come see my new outfit!" She'd come running into the living room to the sight of me standing chest out in front of the picture window. Maternal panic ensues.
Now for the coup d'etat.
Once she realized sitting in the car was no good and that she had to hide the cordless phone and aluminum foil during "God's Discos" as I referred to them, I had to freak her out with something completely novel. Being a creative kid with a knack for fashion, I scoured my closet (this was my designated thunderstorm shelter) for shirts with metal embellishments, shoes with taps, anything that would taunt nature's electric forces and make my mother crap her pants. "Of course! How could I be so blind!", I exclaimed. Yes, I had found the perfect instrument to solicit surefire electrocution: the much despised wire hanger.
I bent the hanger into a halo-like headband with the hook pointing straight up like a skyscraper lightning rod and snickered homosexually into my bedroom mirror. With a stealthy leap out of my bedroom window, I was ankle deep in the late-summer downpour with streaks of lightning in every direction. I went up to the picture window and banged on the glass furiously. When mom appeared, candle in hand, and saw my accessory of death, she screamed a hair-raising scream to which I threw my arms in the air and ran like an epileptic around the front yard.
Rarely in my life have I laughed as hard as I did when scaring my mother. I miss her.
