July 7th

Prayer for the Helpless Unborn

Heavenly Father, in Your love for us, protect against the wickedness of the devil, those helpless little ones to whom You have given the gift of life.

Touch with pity the hearts of those women pregnant in our world today who are not thinking of motherhood.

Help them to see that the child they carry is made in Your image - as well as theirs - made for eternal life.

Dispel their fear and selfishness and give them true womanly hearts to love their babies and give them birth and all the needed care that a mother can give.

We ask this through Jesus Christ, Your Son, Our Lord, Who lives and reigns with You and Holy Spirit, One God, forever and ever. Amen.

I grew up in a household with no boundaries - none taught and none excepted.

I was told I was selfish most my life by my mother - constantly (and subconsciously) trying to prove to her my worth.

My birthdays turned into “happy giving birthday to me” days - to celebrate and honoring my mother.

When I was 23 and just moved in my first place solo and which I purchased, I started to take notice of my mothers’ love for me. I have never felt loved, still to this day I don’t know what love is. I have said, “I love you” but know understand its been built on this false representation of what love is. My “I love you” is let me take care of you - let me show you how I would like to be loved and supported. Which no I see this as how all my my relationships have been built. I become the mother that I always desired, which only passing this false impression of love. This is not a love that is balanced, two sides being held strong with the love of God. It becomes a teeter-totter trying to constantly find its balance, it’s a struggle to feel calm and secure, unpredictable and caught in a circle going no where.

There are brief moments of feeling “equal” “balanced” but generally tilts one way. I usually surrender and allow the other to have control to give the “feeling” of balance. This stems from my up-bringing, always trying to keep the peace to give the illusion of balance, in other words… LOVE.

I enable, I allow, I don’t show love to myself, I don’t show the respect to either and this leads to not only hurting myself, it hurts God by not being the individual He made me to be. By being in a relationship that is not in the natural balance of life, dismisses the love that can be felt with God.

I understand and see that I am/was not in a healthy relationship, never have been with anyone, not even God. It is/was one sided and not made in His image. It was ideas controlled by the outside world on what was needed to feel love.

I have never had a healthy parental relationship with a male. My biological father was verbally abusive, making fun of the way I looked and that “I was just like my mother”. He lived in another state, and only saw him in the summers and that didn’t start until I was in first grade. My parents divorced when I was 2 or 3. He always felt like an uncle more than a father. It was easy to stop visiting and having contact with him after my 9th grade year summer visiting. And till this day, with the few times I have seen him since then, I know it was one of the healthiest and loving actions I taken for myself. I remember shortly after I stepped away from him, my grandma Shirley told me that he had called her and told her that he has been trying to connect with me, she told me she knew he was lying.

I once asked my mom about the day I was born. Her answer was with disgust and that the hospital made her change her own sheets, since it was on the army base. Nothing else was said, I never asked again.

I have never seen a photo of my mom pregnant with me, no photos of the possibility love was there. My thoughts turned to that I must have been part of a product of sexual assault… I was trauma for her, and reminded her of that trauma daily. This is when I started to “try” to get her to love me. I started to pay close attention to our relationship and noticed that the words, “I love you” never came out of her mouth. If I was to state, “I love you” she would reply but it felt empty… only saying the words- yet no understanding the meaning, never on her own time, in her own words. It took me months to get the courage and trust to speak up about how this made me feel and that I needed to hear it from her. She started to saying it more often, yet it fell away.

Most of our conversations, we’re not conversations. I would ask a question and she would reply or repeat what I said back to her. For example, “Mom, I don’t think I have empathy.” and her reply, “You have empathy” …end of conversation. “Mom, I don’t think you know me”, her reply, “I know you.”… end of conversation. “Mom, I don’t understand profile and republicans (this was during the first Obama election), what happens to the babies that are born to mothers who don’t want them, who takes care of them?” This one I asked while she was driving us, probably to Kohls. Her reply is silence, and keeps on driving.

I do have this “knowing” that my mom loves me, otherwise I would have been an aborted baby. She allowed this darkness to take her over and became completely emotional detached. She never got an annulment before marrying again, and the second time wasn’t in a church. She would tell me if she got an annulment that means that her children were not valid. This never made sense to me. And the realization that the church did nothing of the sort, yet she did that on her own. I have two older siblings with the same father. The oldest passed at 33, liver failure and the middle child is now 45 with an alcohol and drug problem, yet she pretends none of that is happened/happening.

It was only the second or third year after my sister’s passing, I called my mom to see how she was doing and she told me, “It gets easier every year.” I still don’t understand how someone could lose a child to liver failure at a young age and not feel. It has been 15 years since her passing and every birthday, passing date, and so many times during a single week that I do not think and mediate on her death. I pray for her soul and that Jesus has/had mercy on her. Prayer helps ease my mind that Jesus has her.

I wasn't taught about prayer, even though I grew up Catholic. We never discussed anything at home and only went on holidays and attended the Wednesday nights for a while. I never understood the classes and we were never asked questions regarding what was being taught. Jesus was never brought into our home, or into our lives. The same around the Catholic was shared, which was buried into the subconscious.

I remember being at a Mass in my early 20’s, it was right after I had “come out”, the priest stated at the end of the Mass that there was a camp for people who are gay. I looked at my mom and asked what this was, she told me, “We just don’t pay attention to that.” There are a lot of things I have learned that my mom would just ignore. If you ignore or don’t pay attention, it will just go away… yet it doesn’t it festers in your soul and destroys you from the inside out.

She would tell me on the regular that she hates to think, so she just keeps moving. She was an awful sleeper too, many nights watching late night TV and trying to sleep on the couch. Day after day, becoming more healthy and trying to control this outside perspective of how the world saw our family. She looked like she had it all together, this perfect family. There was this one Christmas when her and my step-dad came in from smoking a cigarette in the front yard, she told me that they were talking about how proud they were of us because of the cars we drove. Her visual of what all the neighbors could see. Yet here we all are inside drinkers and drug users that are barely holding our lives together, and most of the cars are leased.