by Motavenda Melchizedek
She looked like a monster. Built. Put together in some artificial way. And to see it so clearly....so literally for the 1st time...freaked me out.
The blood left my face. My mouth dropped open. And I could only say ,“Oh my God”. Again and again, as I looked at each sister in the photo and how destroyed they were and ashamed of the evidence seeping out. Of the horror hidden still in their incest gushing forth. Oozing out in their present moments.
And there to keep it all fucking together with the ‘just right’ look was their mother. My mother. The monster. Holding space for the Perpetrator Original. And his daughter who years later became a nun who wore his face.......
And I really felt hate for the woman who held it all in place.
Wondering how she could steal from her own children their lives.
And I do not want to hear one fucking word about how they chose it. ‘Cause that seals the lid shut. And they deserve the chance to grasp for air.
And mother sent pictures with pride.
And I stood gasping in horror.
And I thought...“My Mother”.... my own mother. To have her family portrait.......what she wouldn’t do.
And yes I did feel rage. How unspiritual of me. To feel rage in the face of the death of my sisters at the hands of my mother.
I felt sick with more than vile rage but at the knowledge of her blood coursing through me.
And stunned that she could dare to write to me of the “loose ends” in my life as though hers were neatly tied together.
The family pictures.
The family pictures, they came in the mail. And I ignored her letter knowing an assault lay buried or right up front. But somewhere. To knock me off center enough that I would believe her lie. But it was too late. The balance finally had shifted.
And I was shocked with disbelief that it had come to pass after so many years that they at long last stood revealing themselves to each other so completely.
The Grandfather Perpetrator sat firmly inside the body of his manly daughter the nun. He was more her than she would ever have the chance to be and I understood her meanness and her need to slap down any happiness she saw. And the grief welled in my heart for all the children she would know and for the child buried deep inside her that her father sat on killing.
And her brother my uncle the priest. Smiling. At my shattered sister across the room. Obese. Unrecognizable. I would never have known the depths of my father’s crimes were I not to see her now. In this photo. And to have known her physical beauty. Ruined.
And my mother. Smiling. Has begun to take the form of a monster. Mutating. Second in command to the lie that she lives that it never happened. And she smiles with pride at her pathetic creation....that has turned on itself in its largeness and begun to amplify the hideousness at its core.
That we do not know. This is the lie. That leads to all distortion. That we do not know. That we were somehow not there. Inside our own lives. That we did not experience our own existence. And the crimes therein....Against little children. Grown now. Into screaming distortions of the lie. Of the happy family.
