juliaipsa {the blog}

Every Sunday until I left for college, I spent at church with my family.  I can count on one hand the Sundays when this wasn't the case.

The first, because I had missed so many Sunday birthday parties that I finally gathered up enough courage to ask if I could skip church for Beth's pool party.  Just this once, please.  Perhaps because her oldest never asked for anything, my request struck a chord with uhmmah.  I was made to wait a day or two for the decision, and my father surprisingly granted permission.  Even more shocking, this nine-year-old was spared both a lecture and warning.  My parents knew what I knew, that this was a one-time deal and that I was not foolish enough to ask again.

The second was actually before the first.  My sister and I were sent to church on our own.  I wasn't able to get my mother to explain why she wasn't going; or why, since she was insisting that her daughters attend but wouldn't herself, she couldn't drop us off and pick us up.  Leaves rustling around my dress shoes.  Sunday dresses.  The deacon's coat, a light camel tan.  My mother and the deacon quietly, just barely, bowing to one another before he walked us to his car.  My father missing once again.  Twenty some years later, it's just now dawning on me that there might have been an abortion that day.  I don't know if clinics had Sunday hours in the eighties.

For the past three weeks my body's been waking up between four and five every morning.  Like clockwork.  The cold urges me to stay nestled in bed, so it is there, curled into a ball, that I wait for the light to take over the living room.  Only around seven does sleep finally return.  The daily radio alarm streaming from my sister's bedroom is the only thing that stops the vivid, unsettling dreams.  There have been naked people that I don't care to see naked.  There have been insignificant replays of recent conversations.  There have been snippets of childhood memories that I unquestioningly follow without hate or regret or pain.  It's only when they spur revelations like this one that my indifference momentarily disappears.