My mother is a woman of infinite compassion, strong in her faith and eager to spend eternity with her three children under God's loving care. You cannot reach her by phone on Wednesday nights because she's in prayer meeting or Thursdays because she's with the church youth group or any time on Sunday's because of day service, night service, and an afternoon of private meditation. It is pointless to ask her any sort of common sense question such as, "Mom, what if I was raped? Could I have an abortion then?" Her answer will not waver from what her God would have wanted her to say, "Rhiannon, one day the Lord will bring you back to the church and into His embrace." But when I ask my mother about my birth, something inside of her shifts. I can see in the slight twitch of her eyes that she is aware that she lost something in the service of God. "It smelled like smoke," she'll tell me. "I didn't want to be there. I didn't want to be pregnant. I was worried about the smoke."…show more content… She was born and raised in a village in Guyana and had gone through most of her life without a mother of her own. With Grandma, there's no way to sugarcoat it. She was severely mentally ill. In her manic stage, which would last for ten or fifteen years, she wrote books, travelled the world, spoke six languages, and even saved twin newborns from being drowned by a tribe in the Philippines. All my mother and I ever knew of her was her depressive stage, when she chewed each bite twenty times and spent hours on the toilet screaming my Grandpa's name as he patiently watched her try to pee every night. Indeed, the only words she ever spoke to me were from an old hymn she kept open on the piano, "Trusting Him more and
