The day I entered the convent

I entered the convent to join the Maryknoll sisters on September 2nd, 1958.  My parents and I were met at the front entrance by Sister Miriam Therese, a middle-aged woman with an earth-mother figure and a face of non-nonsense kindness.  I was taken to a room where I changed my civilian clothes for a postulant’s outfit – black, dowdy everything from short head veil to sturdy black shoes and stockings.  I was then returned to the front rooms of the convent, now officially belonging to Maryknoll, to bid farewell to my parents.

I did not find it difficult.  I was setting out on an exciting adventure and I loved it.  Getting up at 5:30 am, hours of silence and a disciplined routine did not strain me.  It was akin to a honeymoon, I think.  As with a honeymoon, I saw everything through a glow, a positive perspective of naive trust.  I thought I would soon be sent to the missions as part of the commitment made between Maryknoll and me.  I would offer obedience in exchange for the chance to serve the poor in the developing world. 

Only gradually did I realize that Maryknoll and I did not share that perspective.  After nine years, I had been sent no further than Paterson, New Jersey, where I spent three months one summer.  I felt Maryknoll had betrayed its unspoken promise, and, as with a honeymoon that has run into cold reality, the Maryknoll superiors felt that many of us younger sisters were self-willed and rebellious.  In the end it was very much like a divorce. 

But there are many stories about what happened in those nine years between September 1958 and September 1967 when I walked back out that same front door I’d first come in no longer a Maryknoll Sister.

Life is not exactly what one plans

I think it was Phyllis Chessler who said “life is what happens while you’re making plans to do something else.” 

Today was like that.  Not bad.  It just didn’t include much besides breakfast that I’d actually planned for the day.  Tomorrow I hope to describe the day I entered the convent.  If I don’t, you’ll know it was another unplanned day.

My interview to enter the convent

My application to enter the convent went hand in hand with my university applications, and psychologically they felt quite similar.  It didn’t occur to me that I might not be accepted to wherever I applied, and I simply concentrated on filling in the blanks on all the forms.  Maryknoll responded and arranged for an interview at their Motherhouse in Ossining, New York as soon as I had graduated in June.

For me, the trip to New York – my first visit to what had for years been a magical place in my imagination – had all the excitement of an astronaut’s first blast off to the moon.  I was tremendously excited, and it didn’t seem like anything of an irony that I bought an entirely new outfit which I conceivably would not wear more than once.  My mother and father took me around the city, to central park, the theatre, and restaurants, and night clubs.  I loved it.  And yet, two days later, without a twinge, I sat in the parlor at Maryknoll explaining to Sister Francis Assisi, the slightly nervous middle-aged nun who interviewed me, that I had a vocation.

We talked for about an hour, during which I said all the things that were expected of me.  She explained that if I took the vow of obedience I would be expected to do what I was told even if I disagreed.  I thought I understood because I thought what she meant really was “Maryknoll is a very modern, sensible order.  You might not understand everything you are told to do, but we won’t ask you to do stupid or meaningless things like planting a tree upsidedown or washing the same dishes three times to make sure they are clean.”  I said I understood.

Then she put her face in her hands and said “I think you should wait a year.”  “Oh, no,” I said without so much as a pause, “I know already I have a vocation.”  It was the “right” answer.  The first of many right answers I was to give over the subsequent years and that kept me in Maryknoll for longer than some others who were quite possibly more suited to a convent life than I.  It wasn’t that I was lying.  It was just that it never occurred to me to ask what I really thought or felt.  I knew what I was supposed to think and feel, and that was the answer I gave. 

I’ve thought more than once how different my life would have been had I been told to wait for that one year.  Many applicants were.  It may even have been the norm.  My mother would have died when I was a college freshman, and I would not have entered the convent at all.  Would that have been better?

No.  Knowing what I now know about my self and life, I think that the “right” answer I gave then was the right answer after all.

Leaving home for the convent

A friend who entered the convent months before I did has been sharing with me her poignant insightful descriptions of her large Catholic family and her decision to enter Maryknoll.  Today I was reading about the day she left her mother and father and nine younger brothers and sisters, and I found myself saying “Oh, don’t do it!  Don’t go!”

Of course, I was really saying it about the day I myself left my home in Ohio for New York and Maryknoll.  My little sister Cathy, my favourite, who was nine, came into my bedroom hours before I was leaving.  “I don’t want you to go,” was all she said.  I know she has no idea that it almost broke my heart.  But then she still had Mom and three other sisters, along with the five brothers. 

Eight months later she didn’t have Mom anymore.   And I was convinced that God wanted me in the convent.  Worse yet, so was Dad, and my superiors at Maryknoll.  I spent the next three years manufacturing headaches and strange lumps along with a display of neuroses that should have got me sent home.  I tried everything I could think of to get myself out of there by any way short of my having to face the fact that it was I who decided to leave.  If only they would send me, then I wouldn’t have to feel guilty about not doing God’s will.

It would have been a disaster at home had I returned from the convent.  I would no longer have had the authority of being the oldest that was taken for granted when Mom was alive.  Dad’s new wife had four daughters of her own and  I would not have been special.  Nor did I have the maturity to raise my younger brothers and sisters that I thought I did, and I certainly had no insight at all into my father’s need for a wife, not a daughter posing as one.  And had I actually been needed, I would eventually have resented having to finish the job begun by my mother before I could live a life of my own choosing.

So I know it was better that I was not living at home when my mother died, and that I did not return from the convent.  But Cathy – now Catherine – I am sure has no idea that not being there for her during those years is still one of the hardest things I have ever chosen to do.

Enlightenment on the River Cam

Peter and I were walking along the River Cam today, as we often do on Sundays.  On the other side of the river, we could see a man in a yellow jacket, waiving his hands up and down, scrunching down on his hunches, and proclaiming something in a loud voice.  He was by himself, and I thought he was dealing with his drug-induced devils.  It was quite early in the day, but he may have begun early or perhaps, I thought, it was a long trip which had begun the night before.

It was a beautiful sunny day that we appreciated particularly for its rarity this summer, and walked well past Cambridge proper toward Ely.  On the way back, we saw the man again, running occasionally, and stopping again to perform his gyrations.  That was when we saw the punt.  He wasn’t crazy at all, but was giving instructions to someone just learning the rarified technique of punting that the accomplished make look so easy, and the neophyte demonstrates is not.

It gave a great day an extra gloss.  One of my favourite delights is discovering that something has a completely different meaning in a different context than the one to which I originally assigned to it. 

Sex education in my Catholic family

It is my impression that Catholics are not at the cutting edge when it comes to effective sex education.  I’ve heard enough stories from my Jewish and Protestant friends to know that Catholics aren’t the only ones where sex education, if it was present at all, was excruciating.   But the determined silence about sex I experienced was an achievement in a family like mine, and in many other Catholic families, where babies were born annually for years.

I did know first hand from taking care of my younger brothers that boys’ genitals were different from girls’.  We never used explicit words like penis, though, or vagina, and even defecating was given childish names so that we didn’t ever actually use words like urine or feces.  By the time I was about eight, I wanted to know how a woman got pregnant.  My mother had warned me not to walk in the fields alone far from the house because the occasional tramp we saw walking across the land might “do something” that would make me pregnant.  What, I desperately wanted to know, was “something.”

But it was worth more than my life was worth to ask, and if my mother attempted to bring the subject up, I walked out of the room or turned the radio up too loudly to carry on a conversation.  I found her embarrassing and I was not going to enter into some coy conversation about what “we women” had in common.  Especially since I’d already concluded that it was going to come with some stricture about being subordinate to men.  I scoured the encyclopedia we kept in the house for hints, and eventually, broadly figured out for myself what “sexual intercourse” involved.  The internet would have been a lot easier, and more explicit.  Whether in the end it would have made me less neurotic about sex I don’t know.  I would have been terrifyingly vulnerable participating in a chat room at that age and in that condition of ignorance.

In any case, my self-education still left menstruation, which my poor mother eventually managed to tell me about before my periods started.  When they did, I did not feel it was a step into adulthood, but a step into an embarrassing secret.  Not all my friends were quite as neurotic as I was.  Unfortunately, rather than finding this liberating, I suspected they were on the road to getting pregnant “outside of wedlock,” certainly one of the most shameful things a woman could visit upon herself and her family.  Even marrying a non-Catholic was less terrible.

I’ve learned from my sisters that their introduction to sexual information was close to non-existent until my mother died and my father remarried.  To her credit, Aunt Mary, as I called her, and Mother as those left at home were told was the appropriate form of address called her, did make sure that the girls received the rudiments of sex education. 

There is a lot about my Catholic background that has been a strength throughout my life.  But I would consider it a total failure if one is looking for guidelines for the sexual education of children. 

On the other hand, although I applaud and even envy young people today for the knowledge that is so easily available, explicit sexual information isn’t quite enough, is it, to achieve a satisfying sexual relationship?  How does one learn what one’s own preferences are?  how does one learn to be considerate of one’s partner’s needs?  how do you survive the inevitable heartbreak when one’s passion is not reciprocated?  I’m not suggesting I was given any hints about the answers to these questions, but I’m not sure a lot of young people today are given much help either. 

The unique gift of the depressed

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my attraction to people who are depressed – among the short list of people whom I have loved the best, I think there is only one who doesn’t suffer from at least mild depression.  When I look at the list of men to whom I am attracted, they are invariably subject to some kind of depression.   I have to ask myself why.  The way one asks about women who repeatedly choose abusive men. 

Along with the obvious Freudian analysis that my father was a depressive,  I’m finding my motives are complex.  Part of it is being what my sister Dorothy calls “an emotional athlete.”  My version of it goes something like this:  “I can love you the way you need to be loved;  my needs can be put to one side;  I am strong enough to love you.”   Of course, if you are offering to love a depressive, you can’t ever take away his despair, that sense of failure, that insatiable longing to be loved, because it isn’t something that can be filled by someone else.  From his point of view, that someone else will never measure up or won’t really understand him.  Or if you do manage one of these two feats, he will be convinced that he’s not good enough for you.  So if a relationship is going to survive, someone like me has to learn not to need to be needed, has to learn that however important my love might be, it is never going to be a kind of non-medical cure for the emptiness and lonliness of the depressed.  In my case, in important relationships I have found a great deal to love and something between us besides my illusion that I’m important because I’m needed to fill an unrealistic need.  But it has been a steep learning curve and there are times when I still have to learn it all over again.

That part of it I have understood for a long time – and so has Peter, which is part of why I think we are happy that we are still together after 35 years.  But now I’m beginning to get an inkling that there’s more to it from my side of the equation.  Almost every depressive I’ve ever known is on the one hand filled with longing, and at the same time convinced that no one can possibly meet his/her need.  So it makes me feel very special if a depressed – especially an intelligent depressed – man shows some special affection for me.  I am amazed to recognize just how charged my own responses are when I resonate with someone like this.

I have always thought that women who are attracted to men who turn out to be abusive made the mistake of confusing violence with strength.  This may often be so.  But I wonder now if some women also stay with abusive men because they sense a need in the man which he has turned to her to meet.  I would stay with an abusive man for about ten seconds longer than it took me to recognize the abuse.  But the allure of being chosen to meet the needs of an intelligent and depressed man might be a similar dynamic in myself.

There is a third thing about depressed men.  Or at least the depressed men who have been important in my life.  They might sometimes be moody, they might be unreasonably demanding, but in my experience they are not clingy.  They often want to be left alone.  And so do I.  I need hours in the day to be by myself, or I eventually unravel into a kind of disorganized sarcastic bitch.   

By some paradoxical convolution, I think I have gained as much as I have given in my relationship with depressed people whom I love.  This probably sounds strange, but it makes me feel rather fortunate.

The family on the farm: My youngest sister Dorothy

Mom already had cancer when she was pregnant with Dorothy, though the local GP kept giving her antibiotics for the flu.  The operation, when colon cancer was finally diagnosed, gave her five more years and time to be Dorothy’s Mom.  Dorothy, at home alone with her while the rest of us were at school, had a unique time with Mom, unlike time any of the rest of us shared. 

For myself, I was furious that my mother had had yet another baby, and even worse, that I was expected to help care for her.  It’s not my baby, I said, it’s yours.  I didn’t think I liked her very much, but when Mom was hospitalized with cancer, I realized Dorothy was really a very cute baby, and that it was my mother, not my new youngest sister who was my problem. 

What fascinates me most today is that in many ways I think Dorothy and I have some significant things in common that I don’t share with any of my other sisters.  For one thing, we agree we both are what we call “bio-chemical optimists.”  This might make us unique in our immediate family:  possibly the only two who don’t do battle with recurring bouts of depression. 

Dorothy reminds me of our mother in more ways than any of my other sisters.  Like Mom, she is not overly interested in housekeeping, which may be why it’s impossible not to be comfortable in her home.  She shares Mom’s spatial disability, but also her intuitive compassion, along with the same kind of struggle to believe in herself as spontaneously as she can believe in others.

Dorothy has two children who are now energetic young adults.  She is divorced, thrives on living alone, and cares for and about people in her village like an earth mother.  She still believes in rainbows, loves her trees and raspberry bushes, and celebrates the solstice.  She writes poetry, creates musical portraits, and knows that light and dark always go together. 

My sister who became Catherine

I was nine years old when Cathy was born.  I thought she was the most wonderful, beautiful, delightful child in the world.  She had blonde hair and large blue eyes, and a smile that could beguile a snowman.  She played the piano with innovative genius and in a family where outstanding musical ability was average, her musical ability was outstanding.  She also had a wry sense of humour and capacity to mimic that delighted us all, and captivated my father. 

As a six-year-old she was chosen to present the flowers to the Bishop during the confirmation ceremony.  As she came down the aisle, the bishop nudged the priest next to him and said “look at this.”  I remember this tickled Mom, and she often smiled at Cathy’s blue-eyed strategies but didn’t lose sight of the serious child within.  When Mom knew she was dying, she told me Dad loved her especially, but feared he wasn’t going to know how to give her the firm support she needed.  He didn’t.

Cathy described herself as “complicated.”  To me, she seemed to look at the world from just a slightly different point of view – a perspective I found fascinating, often wonderful, and sometimes baffling.  I don’t know anybody else who could make a successful fashion statement wearing a purple shoe on one foot and a green one on the other.  And I suspect it is part of her genius that I still don’t know whether she really had to count to find out how many 8ths there are in an inch.

Cathy was nine when Mom died and of all the children, I think her dying and the new regime established by Dad’s new wife was hardest of all for her.  I had entered the convent just eight months earlier, which meant that she had lost both her mother and her oldest sister who had in many ways been a second mother.  Bit by bit as her joy drained out of her, she replaced purple and green shoes with dark outfits, and serious anguish became her constant companion.  When she was in her early thirties, weeks after she and her husband had moved across the country to Arizona, Brian sat down beside the pool one morning and died. 

Eventually she asked us to call her Catherine, “the name my mother and father gave me.”  I think she was trying to cast off an old image, to step into a new maturity, but in some ways I felt I’d lost her forever.  I still love her with a special unique tenderness, and every once in a while, the old sense of fun glimmers through.  But I think mostly she is sad.  She tries with a painful earnestness to be good and kind and loving, but often asks for directions to understand what her sibs are saying, and I fear she lives with a sense of enduring failure.

Depression runs in our family.  Like so many others who suffer from it, I think Catherine pays a price of pain for the gift that can give so much happiness to others.

Seriously serious

Peter and I went into a Cambridge bookstore yesterday.  He came out with four novels.  I came out with two books on mathematics, and one on “dangerous ideas” by today’s leading thinkers.  

My sister Cathy has said for years that I am unrelentingly serious.   A lot of things make me laugh though, practically every day.  That should count for something, don’t you think?