And Mary Makes Three

A little after Jesus turned three, Mom developed another great bulge in her belly. Mom was positive that her new baby was going to be a girl and that meant that I would become regular Mary and the new baby, little Mary.

Little Mary came into the world amid shouts, grunts, cries and tears of happiness from both Mom and God. Most important to Mom, Little Mary was born in a hospital. There were no snow angels crafted from dirt, drummer boys sitting in highchairs and I didn’t think that our old, family Doctor was going to deliver my little sister on a sectional sofa.

Still, the birth was unique in its own way: it concluded with my little sister Mary crying and breathing in this world.

The Doctors and Nurses thought that I shouldn’t be in the room so while Mom pushed little Mary out I played in the hallway with Grandmother Mary. She had been assigned to watch over me. Grandmother Mary watched Oprah and Grandmother Mary knew how to multitask so while she watched over me in the hall she also prayed the Rosary.

Jesus was home with Aunt Mary. Who was another Mary in this family of Marys.

Grandmother Mary had a dry face full of creases and ridges that was topped with a thick mane of wavy, gray hair. Her spiny fingers curled under like the brittle branches of small trees during winter. She would grasp each bead of that Rosary, one at a time, and whisper a little prayer not much louder than leaves blown across the driveway. With each bead, I imagined that something good came to pass.

I sat on the floor in the waiting room and played with my Polly Pocket toys. “Grandma,” I said while opening a miniature, plastic dollhouse.

The dollhouse packed up into a small suitcase no bigger than a lunch box. It came complete with working gas Westinghouse oven and stove. I told Mom earlier that for my birthday I wanted a new Maytag washer and dryer. The one in the dollhouse knocked while running. It was a nice home for my dolls but the maintenance costs could go through the roof.

“Yes, dear,” Grandmother paused her prayer and looked up from the beads.

“Why are all the girls in our family named Mary?” I asked.

“Well, your Great, Great Grandmother Mary was a wonderful woman. She loved her son, Jesus, very much and did all that God had asked of her even though she knew it would be extremely painful. See, the first Mary understood the prophecies of the scripture well, better than the Pharisees. Mary understood that it was her destiny to bare a son who she would later have to watch be tortured and crucified in order to save mankind. And even knowing this, Mary agreed to give birth to that child and raise him with love. She stood as a symbol of knowledge, power and devotion.”

“But if she was Jesus N.T.’s mom shouldn’t she be my Great, Great, Great, Great Grandmother.”

“Well, actually it would be Great times eighteen. There have been eighteen generations of Marys in our family. Most families trace their lineage through the father, but we have held tight to our blessed mother. And each one of us reminds the people of the world everyday, subtly if by no other way then the mere mention of our name, that it is a wonderful thing to serve God. Some call her the first Mary because we are all her descendants.”

“And she was a strong woman,” I added.

“Most women are strong, Mary. They must be to put up with men,” Grandmother snickered at her own joke. “To affirm what you said, yes, she was a very strong woman.”

Dad came into the waiting room, his eyes glowing like the stars on a dark night. He told us that my little sister had been born and all was well with the baby and our mother. Grandmother Mary looked up from her beads and smiled. Looking at her hands, I noticed that she still had three beads left. She stayed out in the waiting room five minutes longer to conclude her vigil, which had now transformed into a prayer of thanks.

I walked into the room with God’s hand on my shoulder. He was just as happy with Little Mary’s birth as he had been with Jesus Merv’s birth. I thought that he must have been that happy at my birth and it made me feel warm and wanted. I decided that God must be happy at every child’s birth.

Little Mary was pink, wrinkled, wet and looked awfully surprised to be here. Her body was plump and her eyes opened like great big saucers. She didn’t cry, she just glanced around the room in silence. From the look on her face, I think she wanted to be put back.

I looked at my little sister, another life brought into this world, and smiled. I thought life was great.

Divine Development

Jesus was unloaded from the van in Austin along with the rest of our belongings. He was three days old and could fit inside a shoebox. It seemed like for the first two weeks all Mom and God did was unload boxes and take care of Jesus. During that time Jesus could perform three feats: sleep, cry and make dirty diapers. He would sleep most of the day and cry through all of the night. The dirty diapers came day and night. He could mess that diaper without even waking up or making a face.

Mom told me that I was supposed to leave the baby alone but sometimes I would sneak over to his cradle and peak down inside. Jesus lay in his bed, a pink face sticking out of a warm, downy jumper. He slept hour after hour. I watched his eyes dance behind those tiny lids and I wondered what might fill a baby’s dreams.

Sometimes Jesus would cry and I wished for mom to come get him and change his diaper or put him to her breast so he would stop. Then one day when I heard his cry, I walked over to his cradle. He saw me and stopped crying. Jesus looked at my face and I gazed down upon his. We looked deep into each other’s eyes, I laughed and he smiled. At that moment I realized that Jesus was joy, love and fragile dependence. He was two months old.

Jesus started rolling over a little after he reached three months. He rolled right off the couch and ended up on the floor. Mom panicked. Her hand shot to her mouth as she ran over and scooped him off the floor. She kissed him and hugged him and told him that she loved him. He just looked up at her eyes and smiled. He had no idea that anything bad had happened. Jesus knew not to let little falls bother him. It was a part of growing up.

Jesus began sitting up sometime around six months. Initially, Mom propped him with pillows but by eight months he was sitting all by himself. Jesus sat on the rug in the center of the room playing with brightly colored rattles. His head wobbled like God’s did after two glasses of scotch and soon Jesus would start to lean over to one side and then his whole body tumbled over.

Jesus walked at thirteen months and at a year and a half became a brother I could actually play with. At first it was fun.

Jesus loved to push buttons on any plastic toy that made a sound. If I shook a rattle in front of him he would laugh and try to take it from me. Then when I demonstrated my superior ability to stack blocks, well I was simply nothing less than a hero. Jesus would clap and I would clap along with him.

Just after his second birthday, something happened to Jesus. Dad said he must have become possessed by a demon. He mentioned to Mom that we should rename him Regan. “Strange,” God mused aloud, “because I thought I had banished the last of the demons into a wild boar back in 31 AD.” God looked upon the child who was once a joyful infant. “I guess one must have stayed around long enough just to afflict my son. Satan be gone,” he commanded but Jesus just looked up and said, “No.”

I looked into Jesus’ eyes and couldn’t see anybody living in there but the same little boy who looked up to me from his cradle. I had to agree with God on one point, though, Jesus did begin to demonstrate some rather odd behavior. He started taking the dolls I sat up for tea and throwing them across the room. By the time I brought one doll back the next would already be on its way sailing through the air. I thought boys definitely had a funny idea of how to play tea. I was the only one in the family who could stand him during his demonic twos as God came to call them. To escape from Mom and Dad, Jesus and I would hide behind the sofa together and I would make up stories about space aliens coming down to earth and we had a great time.

When Jesus was three, God banished the demon to an old sofa and we hauled it to the dump. Jesus started to develop personality and was really fun to play with. Jesus and I were always together. He gave me his life and I gave him mine. Mom often corralled us in the family room while she mopped the wood floors in the kitchen and living room. Incarcerated by a wall of upside down chairs, I continued to make up stories for him while we colored or played with blocks.

We grew up in the same world where every other person lived. We thought that our family should be together forever. Protected by our innocence we could not conceive of a life of separation. I no longer remembered life before Jesus and could not imagine one after.

The first time that I thought Jesus might possibly get sick was a little after he turned three. We were playing in the sandbox that God had built in the backyard.

Mom hated that sandbox because she thought all the neighborhood cats used it as a litter box. She always made us wash up after coming in from playing in it. She would throw us in the bathtub and scrub us down with a soapy sponge until she removed the outermost layer of our skin. The water was hot and my skin shone pink like the inside of a grapefruit when she finally let us climb out of the tub.

My father should have been a carpenter. He worked as a teacher but his hobbies included making almost anything out of wood. He made us rocking horses and wooden dolls and everything else you might think could be crafted from wood as well as a few things you never would have imagined. Of all the objects that he created, God’s favorite by far was a birdhouse. He said creating a birdhouse was like nurturing a child. You had to give them all your love, thought and attention. The time you spent with them brought great rewards. If you built them right, they would provide a home full of pleasure and a sanctuary during any storm.

Jesus often helped out Dad in the woodshop, but he was only three so his birdhouses didn’t ever look quite right. The atriums always leaned to the side and either had too big or too small of a hole. They looked like they belonged in an MC Escher drawing or Salvadore Dali painting. Once, Jesus told me that when he got older he was going to be either a carpenter or a savior. I told him that I thought people wanted nice cabinets in their kitchens more than they wanted salvation.

The sandbox God created was by far our favorite thing to play in. We could scrape out trenches and race cars through them. We made castles with moats. We carved out faces with dramatic features. Civilizations rose and fell at our whim. Jesus was particularly good at shaping animal statues. We concluded each trip into the sandbox the same way every time, by building a giant mound that was supposed to be, depending on the day, either a mountain or a volcano.

To build the mountain or volcano we used wet sand that stuck together like glue. First we piled buckets of sand upon themselves and smoothed it over with our hands. Then we dug a hole down to the bottom. Next we tunneled through the mountain at its base, scooping small amounts of sand away so as not to collapse the whole thing. I loved the way the damp sand felt sliding through my fingers.

The finest part of the whole day came at the end, when the tunnel was just about completed. I would be reaching in from my side and Jesus from his, both of us with our arms buried in that mountain of sand up to our elbows. My little fingers moved up and down like a hydraulic rake, scooping the sand back. And I just knew that at any moment I was going to break through to Jesus’ tunnel. My fingers separated and came together, scratched at the remaining wall of sand that stood as a barrier between our two hands. This last bit would fall away and I could feel the tips of Jesus’ fingers paddling the tips of mine. He had soft, kind hands and they tickled and comforted when they met mine hidden away in the darkness of that mountain.

After the tunnel was complete we would either dig out a moat around the mountain and fill the fissure and tunnel with water or leave it as it was and drive our matchbox cars on through the volcano.

One day, after we had already finished building our volcano and were playing with the matchbox cars, I started to notice blotches of black in the trail around the mountain. I looked up and blood was dripping from Jesus’ nose.

“Jesus, you’re bleeding,” I pointed to his face.

Drops of crimson blood slowly fell from his nose. It mixed with the sand and turned black. I jumped back and screamed but Jesus remained still. He just looked at the blotches. Finally his calmness stilled me.

Jesus shrugged his shoulders and wiped a few drops away with the sleeve of his shirt. He kept playing, making a “varoom, varoom” sound as me moved a bulldozer up into the mountain.

The blood stopped on its own after a few minutes. I tried to keep playing but it just wasn’t any fun. I didn’t say anything to Jesus but the blood continued to frighten me. I know that this nosebleed had nothing to do with those that came later. But seeing that blood drip from Jesus’ nose just sort of stuck with me. I think it may have been the first time I ever saw us as mortal and vulnerable.