Sunday After Sunday (revised)
I grew up
under the watchful gaze
of saints and sorrowful mothers.
The Church wasn't a place we visited,
it was the air we breathed.
It ruled our calendars,
our clothing,
our speech.
Every room in our home
held a crucifix,
a statue of Mary,
a candle that had burned too low
but still clung to its flame.
The Virgin was the blueprint,
and we,
girls,
were to follow.
Pure, quiet, enduring.
Faith was not a feeling,
but a law.
We didn’t ask why.
We didn’t speak during Mass.
We fasted. We knelt.
We confessed sins
we were too young to understand,
our small hands trembling
in velvet-lined confessionals,
whispering guilt into shadows.
Our bodies were covered,
our doubts, more so.
There was no space
between God
and shame.
And my grandmother,
she was the high priestess of it all.
Strict in voice,
sharp in judgment,
her rosary beads clicking like warnings,
every prayer a lesson.
She kept a house of rules,
of folded hands and straight backs,
where girls were watched more closely
than the boys ever were.
She had no patience
for questions,
no tolerance
for softness.
There was a right way
and a wrong way,
and I was always
half a breath away
from the wrong,
my exhale often putting me over the edge.
At times,
I thought she loved God
more than she loved us.
I thought fear
was her native tongue.
Maybe she does. Maybe it was.
But I was too young to see
what fear had cost her.
She, the rebel
I never recognized -
who left her village
before her wedding veil was even sewn,
who followed a man
across the sea
with no certainty but her hunger
to live differently.
She was a girl once, too,
and the weight of that
startles me now.
In a world that gave her
so few choices,
she made one:
to survive,
to start again
on foreign soil
with no map
and no soft landings.
She was alone here
long before we came.
Her English
was broken,
but her work ethic
was fluent.
She labored,
scrubbed,
prayed.
She sent money
back home
to people
who judged her.
And she raised us
with what she had:
rules and rosaries,
sacrifice and silence.
She gave us the only kind of love
she knew would protect us:
discipline.
Now I watch her,
older, smaller,
her hands shaking
as she lights another candle
for someone she loves.
I see the fear still tucked
beneath her skin,
but I see the love too,
quiet, desperate, enduring.
She didn’t know how
to show it gently,
so she showed it in survival.
I carry that now,
alongside the ache.
Her voice still lives
in the corners of my thoughts,
but so does her courage.
She taught me to kneel
but more than that,
she taught me
to get up again.