But what a beautiful sight it all became at those reunions: ’jitos from all over the world, some transparent, some looking incarnated but you knew they weren’t if you tested them in some way, like getting them to take a bite out of a taquito or something when, of course, after going through all the motions like he was eating it, the taco would still be there. Although, it really wasn’t such a respectable thing to do to test a santo, even if he had once been your own chiple child! There were some who appeared just as they were in life when they were well and others as morbidly as they looked at the time of their death, or as the M.O.M.A.S. put it, transcendence, that is, all maimed and bloody or deteriorated, if that is how they met their end. But all seemed pretty happy to be there with everybody, no matter what their story in this life had been.

Y one final rumor I would like to dispense with once and for all that followed Las Mothers for a long time, but which I know for a fact was never true. To be a member of M.O.M.A.S. of course you had to have issued the declared santo or martyr from your own womb, coming out of that very place that some malcriado, like Saint Augustine, had so disgracefully referred to back in the fourth century as “being between feces and urine”!

If you applied as a mother and were accepted, your word of having given birth was honored. You were La Blessed Mom, la mother of the new santita or martyr, and as long as you could pay your own way, you got to attend the regional and international conventions y ya.

But for a long time, a rumor followed las M.O.M.A.S. that the appointed board member Mothers were made to sit on chairs much like the ones that popes back in the beginning of their days were made to sit on after a woman who passed herself off as a man had been elected pope. In other words, a chair that was structured to prove that you were in fact a “mom” or, at least, could have been. What happened to that woman pope way back when, by the way, was that she was not only thrown off the throne for not being a man, but dragged through the streets and stoned to death. Nothing like that never happened among the M.O.M.A.S.! ¡Hijo! Imagine las M.O.M.A.S. taking things that far to make sure that they all had wombs!