For a Church Mother

You're too young to remember it the way I do, but you're so full of love.    It's odd, seeing it this way.  Your energy comes through, innocence and all -- the hope for connection and making things happy because that's just a better way to be.  I'm struggling with you; you make me conscious that the time when I would have considered meeting you to be natural.  It's not natural now; I think to myself, "you could be the daughter of your mother, whom I might have known" -- and I would still be attracted to her the way I'm attracted to you because you look just like her, and I remember.  Even the way you fidget, the nervous gestures, they are almost identical to the way it was.  The haircut, the depth in the brow, the fingers, although the fingers are so youthful to me now.  I look at my own hands and I know how much closer I am to old age than I used to be.  My hands are getting sun worn.  The veins are starting to bulge out, age trying to protect skin.  Your skin is so fresh.  It's not that your mother's hands didn't age, if I was seeing them, it's that they drew lines and hardened a little, and it was like you just added the youth back over the lines, and they are the same.  Maybe you've struggled with aspects of yourself, I'm not sure.  I can think that you did, but that you came to the conclusion that love overcomes the things that might scare us about ourselves.  When you first spoke, you had a tone in your voice, wonderful, seeking, still vulnerable yet willing.  Inside, you decided that it was too much, that I wouldn't notice what you think is extra weight that you carry in your stomach, that makes you not a teenager while you're still not a mother.  You haven't seen your hips widen and struggled with your ten pound add on, and the drama of the child, so you still think in terms of when you fit into blue jeans that were tight like skin; now the blue jeans have that little draping shirt over the top, so that you don't expose your fear.  You are not fat.  You are in between youth and age.  You are determined to be who you decide to be.  That means that you are open and closed. You don't know yet how to be a older woman, or even how to love an older man, but you aren't really all that happy with the young men your age because to you they are still boys.  Boys only want one thing; you want someone who loves the way that you do, only you still want in from someone who can't give it to you because they haven't figured it out yet.  So there I am, in your memory, what you wanted but what you did not want.  We never even got into the questions.  What about your faith?  Do you have any?  When the liberals were talking next to you, were you thinking "they're so wrong" or "right on" -- is that even what someone your age thinks these days?  "Right on"?  "Hey, brother can you spare a quarter?"  We never went beyond the body issues, how sweet you taste, how caring you are, the things before the taste turns bitter and the caring seems needy.  Do I need to reassure you?  You're still beautiful.  That's the only memory I'll have of you.  You stand up, deciding not to look me in the eyes as you go; I have an appointment at Church ....