My mom was Jesus, what’s your excuse?
Growing up in my family was challenging. I suppose growing up in any family is challenging.
My family’s challenge was that my mother often thought she was Jesus. We did not mind that, but the twelve guys that were constantly showing up for dinner were a problem.
All right, twelve guys never showed up for supper, but my mom did think she was Jesus. It led to some very interesting dinner table conversations. Mom was always pissed off at the pope because he never returned her phone calls.
Growing up with a mother that believed she was Jesus was not fun. Despite my joking about it, having a mom that was Jesus was not something that I could talk about at recess.
My mom dealt with mental illness all of her adult life. She was in and out of the psych ward several times as I was growing up.
I am the eldest of four children and the four of us often didn’t know what to expect. Were we going to get mom or “Jesus” at dinner. Learning to manage her mood swings and delusions became the focus of our growing up. After a while it became our daily routine. It was the way things were for us. We didn’t know anything else.
My mom died twenty six years ago. The combination of a poor diet, heavy drinking, cigarettes and years of psychiatric medication caught up to her. She was sixty-one when she died.
I will be sixty-one in July.
I don’t plan on dying.
As I approach the age that my mother was when she died, I realize that sixty-one is a young age to die. There are still things that I want to do and experience.
I would like to see the Toronto Maple Leafs win the Stanley Cup. I want to experience the weddings of my children and I look forward to the possibility of being a grandparent.
I wonder what mom would have been like if she had not died.
Would she still have been Jesus? I will never know.
What I do know that having Jesus as a mom was challenging. She couldn’t do a lot of miracles, but she did manage to be my mom.
Now, I have to talk to the Vatican about some phone calls.
