Holy Vaxx
by Bernadette Roe
Art by Sean Kang
“Holy Vaxx” is the winner of our “Back to Normal” Creative Nonfiction Contest. Judge Annie Palmer shares why she chose Roe’s essay as the winner:
This piece is incredible. Bernadette Roe’s quotes had me in tears, and feeling connected as an observer to the narrator’s relationship with her mother. The essay is layered perfectly, and I feel Roe honored the complexity and depth of the narrator’s mother as a person. The way that Roe ties the mother’s mental health, childhood experiences, and family background to how she walks through the world is absolutely exquisite. I went through a full span of emotions. It felt like each paragraph was a deeper look into the mother’s psyche, reasoning, and the narrator’s dynamic with her.
First there is the layer of now, the pandemic, and the vaccine. Then the layer of the narrator and her mother challenging each other’s world views, and then, the insight into the mother’s life, which shapes the fabric of her world and what she believes. It’s easy for all of us to write someone off who has a starkly contrasting view of reality than our own, but Roe has gracefully painted a portrait of an intimate relationship and its complexity surrounding COVID and other external events—all in just six pages.
My only critique is I wanted to hear a little about the narrator’s father and the way her mother interacts with him if he is juxtaposed, but the focus was the narrator’s mother so there’s no fault there. Roe’s quotes were the glue for me. I felt as if I was hearing the conversations.
The last paragraph is simply gorgeous.
I hadn’t wanted to tell my mother that I got vaccinated but decided to go for it in the hope that it would put an end to the stream of YouTube videos she sent me. This thinking, however, was particularly shortsighted on my part. “I got Pfizer,” I said to her. “Oh, Bernadette,” she gasped. “You’ll be dead in five years.” The videos were a common form of communication for my mother, which she sent to me and my siblings in an ongoing stream. A particularly notable one began with the header: “CREEPY Pro-Jab Propaganda on CHRIST Statue and it Gets WORSE.” The speaker, Michael Knowles, lamented the fact that the Brazilian statue of Christ the Redeemer had been lit up with a message that read: “Vaccine Saves.” Knowles called the action “very creepy, extremely sacrilegious, and also just not true.” He gave a smug little laugh. “You know how I know this? I know this with scientific certainty.”
Once Mom found out it was too late for me, she began sending videos about how to spiritually recover from the vaccine. “If people have been forcibly vaccinated against Covid-19, drink the exorcized Holy Water,” the video said. “Or take the blessed Miraculous Medal and let it soak in the water by saying this prayer: ‘Holy Virgin Mary, Bless this water to purify me from the attacks of evil in my body.’”
It wasn’t like I didn’t know how Mom would react. Protection has been one of my mother’s preoccupations all her life. She has been warning me for years about prophetic tragedies coming for us. Since 2009, she has prepped us for an event called “The Warning,” a moment where a blazing cross will appear in the sky and the whole world will grind to a halt. Sometimes called the “Illumination of Conscience,” the Warning will make each person completely aware of their sins. “Some will die on the spot,” Mom tells me, “from shame and horror at their actions.” Others will wail at their personal perversions and the natural response from this will be a complete conversion plus, she likes to add, a change in political parties. I’ve been waiting for The Warning for years now, mainly because it sounds so exciting and also, with the passing of each uneventful year, I get a surge of delight in proving her wrong. But when I point out the delay in a global examination of conscience, my mom shrugs and says it’s coming any day.
During the election between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, Mom repeatedly called to warn me of a second Civil War in the US and that it would be best if I packed up and returned to Canada. When I didn’t do that, she called with advice on how to deal with Biden’s inauguration day. There would be a three day power outage, she explained. I should prepare. Did I have canned food in the apartment? Batteries? Powdered milk? If the outage dragged on, I shouldn’t worry because I could always eat the dog’s food.
While the prophecies sound anxiety inducing, they don’t seem to create that emotion in my mother. Instead, she gets excited by them. She prepares. She’s active. The basement of my parents’ home is lined with cans of Heinz baked beans, boxes of Ichiban noodles, jugs of water, batteries, radios, and a portable toilet that one is expected to line with plastic bags prior to use. When I mention that none of these catastrophes has come to pass, she says that it’s because her Sunday Holy Hour group has mitigated the chastisements of God through prayer and sacrifice. The most common response from my mom is “not yet. Not yet, Bernadette.”
My mother prefers skirts and only wears pants to paint the fences in the backyard or work in the garden, a small patch of soil dense with apple and pear trees. “Plants should be food-yielding, so we’ll have an ongoing supply at the End,” she explains. “Frankly,” I tell her, “if the world collapses and I’m peeing in a portable toilet in the living room and fighting off strangers who want our pear supply, I’d rather be dead.” She just smiles and goes on weeding.
My mother grew up unprotected. She is the daughter of immigrants who lived through their own wasteland of the World Wars. My grandmother was an orphan, raised on an island in northern Germany. She was sexually assaulted by three different men and barely survived an abortion she performed on herself with a knitting needle. My grandfather was raised by a Moravian minister, and their home in Frankfurt an der Oder burned to the ground when he was a boy. At 19, he was drafted into the German army and sent on the mission to capture Russia. He himself was captured and held in a POW camp until he escaped, only to move to Canada with my grandmother and spend the rest of his life crawling through PTSD and depression.
“Once I walked in on him in the bathroom,” my mother remembered. “He was flushing all of our documents down the toilet. We tried to tell him that in Canada, the government was different but he didn’t believe it.” For months at a time he wouldn’t bathe or even brush his teeth. “The smell,” my mom said, shaking her head. “I know what depression smells like.”
When she was eight, her father attempted suicide. My mom was the one who walked in on the aftermath, running upstairs to the neighbor to announce, “My daddy cut himself.” The doctors sewed up the wound and he was left with a scar across his throat in the shape of a smile. She left home at 16 to make her own way in the world and met my father when she was 18. He was a shy, handsome Californian who had served his term in the Vietnam War and made his way up north to work on a ranch after his cousin told him that Canada was filled with beautiful women. They married and I became the third of six children.
Mom had always been casually Catholic but when she suffered postpartum depression, a priest helped her by getting her to go to daily Mass, to say the rosary with us every evening, and turn her life into a true devotion to Christ. The rigor suited her well. She’s never been someone to live half way. So, we were soon carted off to morning Mass and the house gradually filled with the aesthetic objects of Catholicism: large statues of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, bowls of rosaries, and in the dining room, a 3D art piece of Our Lady crying blood. “All I want,” she said to me, “is for you to be a good Catholic and to see you in heaven with Jesus.”
My bedtime stories were the stories of the lives of the saints. Saint Agnes, stripped naked in front of all of Rome, prayed and her hair grew so long that it covered her body as she was paraded through the streets, only to be beheaded at the end. There was Maria Goretti, who was stabbed to death by a neighbor, Alessandro, after she resisted his sexual advances. Felicity and Perpetua were martyred in Carthage. Perpetua, a new mother, was a noblewoman while Felicity, who was pregnant, was her slave. Wild animals were set upon them and after they were severely wounded, the two women were put to death by the sword.
Mom was unconcerned with the violence of these stories; we kids were thrilled by it. The stories were exciting! Angels often swooped down mid-plot, miracles happened all over the place, and the conclusion was always joyful: the martyrs lived through temporary pain to be received into heaven, celebrated by the eternal arms of the Father. What could be better, my mom pointed out and I wondered if she saw herself in these women. A mother of a big family is a martyr herself, her life full of quotidian sufferings. “What I didn’t get from Pa or Dad, I get from Him,” she said, without artifice or irony. “Jesus is my best friend.”
When the coronavirus pandemic first started making headlines, she informed me of what was really going on. The deep state was in cahoots with Bill Gates to reduce world population and thus had created the virus. Their second incentive was to destroy the presidency of Donald Trump. The vaccine was part of the conspiracy. It was meant to kill. When a long-time family friend told my mom in the parking lot after Mass, “I’d sooner go to a concentration camp than get the vaccine,” Mom called to tell me. She added that those who refused to submit to the vaccine would soon be locked into buildings. She didn’t sound afraid. She sounded triumphant. We could all become martyrs anyday.
It can be difficult having a mother who’s larger than life, especially since I have my father’s disposition of mildness and meekness. And yet, I never think of fighting with her about these topics. Why did I not rebel when I was the only adult in line to get vaccines for an international trip, waiting for shots that everyone else had received as children? Why did I not lose my temper when I listened to her talk about epsom salt baths to detox from the Pfizer shot? Why do I not resent her for wanting me to come back to Calgary?
There was one part of my mom’s story I didn’t know until I was 29. In the car one day, she casually mentioned how her dad gave her away the day she was born. “I never told you?” she asked, reading my incredulous face. “Pa was so worried about finances that he gave me to a neighbor. A week later, Grandma marched over and said, ‘Give me my baby back.’” She turned away from me to look out the window. “I wish Grandma had never told me,” she said, quieter. “It made me realize that Pa would never look out for me.”
Someone who was abandoned as a child would be fixated on spending eternity with her own children. She is, in her own way, giving us the protected childhood she never had. Although her forms of protection seemed at best kooky, and at worst, completely medically incorrect, I finally understand why she thinks the way that she does. She devoted her entire life to the preservation of her family.
This is why I don’t fight back. I used to but I see the phone calls now as her way to connect with me, to fuss over me, the daughter on the other side of the continent. The kid who doesn’t ask for money or dating advice. It’s not that I don’t care about her. It’s just that I don’t need her as badly as the rest of my siblings seem to. So I let her tell me about ominous predictions because it seems kind to make her feel needed. And frankly, the ultimate reason why I don’t cut her off is because I love hearing the sound of her voice, even if I don’t agree with what she’s saying. It was the voice that lulled me to sleep as a little girl when I heard about the death of St. Agnes, the voice that was so soothing, even in the midst of the violent stories of martyrdom. They were never upsetting because I never knew what it felt like to be unsafe. I have always known that if I was in danger, she’d pop out her gold fillings to sell if it would mean getting me back home. She’d sell her hair. She’d give herself in exchange for my life. I was never unprotected.
“You don’t know,” she said the last time I left Calgary, hugging me into her tumble of blonde hair, “You don’t even know how much I love you.”
Sean Kang, The Party
