Unraveling Family Myths

The Story of My Immaculate Conception

I watched Life of Pi last night. A capture of a performance at the Wyndham Theatre. I love that they use the word “capture” rather than recording. There’s something in the former verb that implies a more intentional action—and a persistence of the life captured.

The play brought the novel back to me. But this time, I wasn’t struck in an intellectual way, nor did it prod me toward abstract, spiritual meditation, (“I have a story that will make you believe in God,” says Piscine Patel). It made me wonder about the stories that I choose to see.

And tell.

Here’s a story I rarely tell:

There are some stories that have no origin. That is, the first memory is a reference to to a story already incorporated into the history of your world. Somehow there from the beginning like a whisper in your mother’s blood pounding on the placenta. It’s impossible to tease the strands of conversation apart to find a moment of conscious transference.

Maybe she was sitting on the couch, and maybe I was kneeling between her legs while she was combing tangles out of my hair when she told me that she was a virgin when I was conceived. That is, she was still a virgin after the conception, and a virgin four months later walking down the aisle in a wedding dress that concealed the tiny, but insistent, life. “Special” was the word the family used. Being special was both a calling and a curse for all those years.

When the vomiting and the suspicions began, my grandmother took my mother to the doctor to confirm that her hymen was intact. “You know, your mother and your father never actually…” was a refrain I heard often, one that prefaced my grandmother’s nostalgia.

A lot of people say that science is a religion. I’m inclined to believe that it’s one that can oppose other religions, or dovetail singularly in a child’s mind.

Grandma and grandpa went to the Baptist church twice a week. Mother had stopped going when I was six. She was looking to lava lamps and little pills for her visions. I sat next to Grandma on the pew Sundays and Wednesdays, rolling the skin between her thumb and her forefinger, with my thumb and forefinger, until she shot me scornful looks. If I were lucky, Grandpa would snore and wake with a jerk, and she’d turn her scorn on him.

Snoring is sensuous, too. In its own way, I figured. Snoring has a texture not at all like the strange elasticity of Grandma’s hand, or the delicate, stippled skin on Grandpa’s arms, but like the thick terry cloth robe he wore at night when his yellowed feet were shoved into slippers, and he clinked his spoon against the ice cream dish. Not everyone in church needed to hear those intimate sounds. I understood.

Grandpa cleared his throat a lot, and grumbled about things I didn’t understand. He never commented on how “special” I was, but he made me feel special. By the time I arrived in his story, it didn’t matter to him that I wasn’t flesh of his flesh or blood of his blood. There are black and white photos of him holding me in the crook of his arm. He’s standing next to a car in a driveway I don’t recognize. Grandma must have taken the picture. I can hear her, with her clipped sentences, telling him what to do.

My grandmother was complex, I suppose. But, of the strands that made up her personality, scorn shone brightly. Her compassion was present, but sometimes you had to look for it. I always wondered why Grandpa was the one who said grace and mumbled about God’s will, though it was Grandma who insisted we go to church twice a week. There was a time when I was particularly solipsistic and believed it was her attempt to save me from the messiness of the circumstances of my birth. “Special” being a euphemism: a little tap dance in front of “bastard”.

Now I think maybe it was a tightrope walk to keep our family’s myth on the right side of the Lord. Maybe my immaculate conception was blaspheme, and I would surely destroy the family.

Maybe I did. I still think this story is about me.

At church the pastor would talk about the virgin birth, resurrections, and speaking in tongues. We never talked about any of these things at home. Once a woman stood up in the back of the congregation during the sermon and began speaking in gibberish. My grandfather was a deacon and help to usher her quickly out of the church. The pastor apologized and said that the woman had been under stress.

We never talked about her. Though I had so many questions. What was it like to be under stress? Was everyone who spoke in tongues in the Bible under stress?

Can I speak in tongues? How does one distinguish the tongues of demons from God?

Once when we were driving somewhere in Pasadena—my mother was driving, and my aunt was in the front seat—I pointed to a tall building with a cross on top. St. Luke’s Hospital. “See, I was born under that cross.” My aunt started shouting at my mother. “What are you telling this kid?” My mother shot me a scornful look.

There was a cross on the top of the building where I was born. That is a fact. When you’re telling a story, it’s that facts that will always upset people.

At 26, I meet the man who is my father, who I call my maybe father, who claims paternity. He began with, “You know, your mother and I never…”

“I know the story,” I say.

Much later he tells me that before my mother got pregnant, he found her in a clinch with some guy in a car.

I don’t ask him what happened.

That might be another story.

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P.S. Fun fact (for me): The hospital where I was born is now used as a film location.

Thank you for taking the time to read or listen. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the subject—please consider sharing them in the comments on Substack. You’re welcome to link to your own relevant post.

I’ll be back next week with a new poem.

Warmly,
Ren

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