15 Dec I AM THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION
My mother was raised Catholic. I was not. Her childhood was Northern Californian suburban bourgeoise. Mine was not. After attending all girls’ private Catholic schools – through college – my mother came of age in the 1960s in the San Francisco Bay Area at the moment of “turn on, tune in, drop out.” (Timothy Leary) My mother fled the Church and its patriarchal domination. She stopped wearing bras and tailored dresses and sewed her own flouncy frocks. She sought out forbidden pleasures through sex and psychedelics. Then she experimented with sobriety, vegetarianism, and Eastern spirituality.
With the thrust of youthful rebellion – from the Church and middle class, mid-century conventions – my mother pulled up her roots, seven generations deep, from the Bay Area and transplanted us in a strange town in Southern Arizona.
That is how I ended up in Hell. Every summer day in Tucson sizzles over 100º. The city itself is a grid of black asphalt scars cut across dirt. Beige, sand-colored, single-level cinderblock structures, sometimes bedazzled in kitsch, sprawl in every direction. The only real beauty of the place is the homicidal wilderness waiting to kill you if you leave your climate-controlled domicile or vehicle for longer than one minute.
My spiritual seeker parents had lost the path to enlightenment and were stranded in a wasteland. My childhood in the Sonoran Desert was parched. I thirsted not only for rain and lush greenery, but also for order and tradition. I longed for a guiding myth. My grandparents secretly baptized me in their bathtub while babysitting me, but that didn’t give me access to the ornate rituals of Catholicism that I envied, and feared. I turned my focus to getting good grades in school, the space where I had control over outcomes.
This is how I, the child of two hippy dropouts, ended up choosing to go to a Catholic college preparatory high school. Unfortunately, it did not go well. My freshman literature teacher censored my poetry to protect me from the teasing he anticipated from my classmates. The Wrangler-wearing rednecks constantly harassed me in the hallways. And the jocks threatened to beat up my gay best friend every day. The hypocrisy and injustice smoldered in me, until I exploded.
On the last day of my sophomore year, I descended the school steps and set fire to my Bible. I never returned. The next fall I ended up at a public “alternative” high school which was basically daycare for teenagers, with an open campus and sanctioned smoke breaks. My classmates were gang members, drug dealers, teen moms, and queer kids. Although the academic program was a total joke, the social aspect was real. The faculty treated us like adults and the students were kind to each other. In one class we were asked what we wanted to be when we “grew up.” By the measures of real life (e.g. from my peers: jail time, rehab, homelessness, childbirth, etc.) we had all already been initiated into adulthood. When the question made its way around the circle to me, I said, “I want to be the Immaculate Conception.” There were no follow-up questions.
For more than twenty-five years I’ve been contemplating what I, at seventeen years old, meant by that. I wanted to be made innocent again. I wanted to germinate and sprout from the ground of hardship, trauma, failure, and disappointment. That I have done. I have grieved countless losses. I have let my old selves die. And I have birthed myself anew, again and again. I am the Immaculate Conception.
Catherine Brooks, 2022