I Know What My Mother Prays For

I sit next to my mother in church. I sit, I stand, I kneel, I pray next to my mother. I have for the last 28 years. Twenty-nine, if you count the nine months we prayed together, me resting on her pelvis, growing with her every breath. Today, for the first time, I wonder what she prays for.

Does she pray about work? For a peaceful week, for safety, for kindness in her peers, in her students. To make a positive impact. To have the courage to try.

Does she pray for health? For hers, for mine, for my brother’s, my father’s? Mental, physical, emotional. Our weight losses, our weight gains. The little moles on our backs she watches closely when she applies our sunscreen in the summer. Our sugar intake she fears will feed the not-yet-but-could-someday-be pre-cancerous cells lurking in our bodies, the bodies she’s committed her life to, the bodies she created. The bodies she loves.

Does she pray for her husband? The man she married 30 years ago, the father of her children. The blue-eyed, 6 foot, gentle giant whose hair has faded to white. The man whose childish humor makes her eyes roll, but keeps her spirit young all the same. Does she pray for their marriage? For their love? For their friendship?

Does my mother pray for me? Does she pray for my happiness, my life, my dreams? For us?

Does my mother pray for her siblings? Her sister, her brothers; two years, four years, six years younger. For their childhood memories and nicknames that hold them together with an invisible glue. Does she pray for the strength to stand in the place of the mother they’ve lost, to root herself down and hold them close, so they never feel unsteady again.

Does she pray for her father, suddenly alone for the first time in almost 50 years? Living in a large house, empty and quiet; a home that was warm, now gone cold. Cooking in a kitchen where he was served. Standing at a stove where her small footprints imprint the floor. Using a knife molded to the shape of her hand.

My mother prays to her mother. With her eyes closed and head in hands, my mother talks to her mother the only way she can. Kneeling, 20 feet from an altar, a direct line. Their hour long phone calls have turned to one-way conversations, summarized to a singular point of view. Responses come in different forms. They come in dreams, in sunsets, in a dove perched on the porch, cooing on a 10 degree winter day. They take time, but they come. Perhaps there is still a voice on the other end, but it’s a voice only my mother can hear.

My mother is a woman and as I grow deeper into the woman I am becoming, I see my mother in a way I never have. I see her pain, her sorrow, her anxieties. I see her fears, I see her stress and her worry and her struggle. I see her beauty, her age, her wisdom, her strength. I see her. I see my mother praying, and I know what my mother prays for.