it's still a love song.

I made my own Gods...

and I killed them too.

Daddy was one of my first.

Mama tumbling down stairs backwards, white nursing uniform turning red, broken ribs...

Misty eyed, I often sit and try to remember memories from long ago but still see and feel things through a child's eyes.

Mama showed me where to put things like emotions, hurt, and pain. They exist somewhere within titles like: Black, strong and woman, bubbling under waves of suppression...

Say it with me...I'm a strooooong Black woman!

"Mama should have done what he told her to do and he wouldn't have hit her."

My sister's face full of shock after asking me years later why I cried to see my father after all he'd done to our mother. I mean, it was simple. Coming up in my household, (and many others like mine) it wasn't uncommon to get hit for doing something that shouldn't have been done. My early attempts at logic lacked common sense but why?

When Daddy said...

"I hit you because I love you." Daddy put it plainly standing on the stairway looking up at me with his hard hat on. I shook my head and said, "ok".

...She was weak for leaving him. The lines were drawn.

Daddy died a few years later. I looked for him in mementos, photographs, stories about the good things and one day, I found him.

People were afraid of him, his gun, his walk but people loved to be around him. He was fun, charismatic, the life of the party, the drug dealer, the healer. He reminded me of Daddy and slowly he became my God.

There's nothing like staring God in the eyes as His fist is coming down onto your face or as your teeth are coming through your flesh from the impact of being slapped...while you're pregnant with His immaculately concepted child...

Amen.

I stayed...long enough to realize what God really is. The very thing that sustains us, keeps us breathing life, keeps the seasons right and exact, allows us to see the beauty in all things...its all around us, within us, yet we search for it to be given to us by others. God and love just is.

Mama never remarried, never had a real man since she left Daddy over 23 years ago. She never needed anyone else to worship besides herself.

I buried my false images of God with the strong, Black woman who never weaps, never cries, & never hurts just like Mama did.