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of cc&d magazine.
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I don’t remember her exact words
in that exact moment
when my mother unknowingly
gave me permission to think,
but in my memory I am
small, thin and preadolescent,
maybe eight or nine.
We are in the living room
back when it still had
ugly brown carpet and
fake wood paneling,
the Pope is on TV.
He is Pope John Paul II
and we are Catholic,
so we are watching.
He is talking about abortion,
a word I have already learned as sinful
in my Catholic school classroom,
so I am listening and nodding,
as if I know what it all means,
but suddenly, across the room,
on the couch, my mother is speaking,
not to me, but to herself
or maybe to Pope John Paul, or God.
Slowly, she is shaking her head no.
Softly, she is saying something
about a woman’s right
and in that moment,
in our female only household,
still at an age where my mother
was infallible to me,
I learned that not everything
they tell you in school is true,
that even the Pope can be wrong,
that disagreeing is OK because
even Girl Scout mothers
who buy Market Day and teach Sunday school
secretly think for themselves and
have opinions they whisper
to television screens
when they don’t know
their children are listening.
