To be Catholic is to be Yourself

Wednesday Was the Eighth Grade Graduation.

Adrienne has done wonderfully. Once I pulled the plug on homeschooling and put her in a public school, she began to shine. She taught herself ways to get around the dyslexia that astonished me, and quickly became the fastest reader with the best comprehension in class. She was moved from the normal classes up to the honors section and still maintained that flawless academic record. She tested into 100-level college courses which the high school offers concurrently with high school classes, so in four years she will have a both a high school diploma and an associate’s degree. She wants to be an American History teacher and write children’s books. All I want is for her to be happy, and she is. So I am happy.

I thought I would be sad. In fact, I was sad for a day or two before the graduation ceremony. When they started to play “Pomp and Circumstance,” I started to cry even though I swore I wouldn’t. But by the time they started handing out diplomas, the sadness had already retreated. I am all right now.

I was brought up in a very different world than the world I live in. I believed there were only a few acceptable things for a woman to do. I could be a nun which was the best vocation. Or, I could be a prim homeschooling housewife with six or seven children, which was second best. Or, if all else failed, I could be a sickly old maid who wore dowdy clothes and became a teacher. If I was going to be a mother, I’d have to be the kind of mother who just kept having babies over and over again until the first baby made me a grandmother, so I’d never have to say goodbye to motherhood and learn to be something else. That was the only way to be a mother. Those are the things a person could be.

My own mother, who was deeply embarrassed by how ugly and eccentric I was, presumed I was only fit to be the dowdy old maid, so of course I did everything I could to avoid being a dowdy old maid. When I got married, in that ridiculously ornate church with the pipe organ and the Communion rail, I thought I knew exactly how the rest of my life would look. When I saw that double red line on the pregnancy test, I was even more certain. And nothing at all has gone according to plan since then. I’m not an old maid, a nun or a tradwife. I’m only me. There’s no rubric, rule or algorithm for what is acceptable to do. There’s only life. And in this life, I’ve had to learn how to do things I never expected to need to learn. I’ve had to learn how to mourn not having a baby underfoot anymore, and then mourn not being a homeschooling mother. I’ve had to learn to be somebody else instead of just a mother, because I won’t be a mother forever. That’s challenging.

After the graduation, we got too much junk food. I can count on one hand the number of pizzas we’ve ordered in the past few years, but we ordered a pizza. We bought ice cream and one of those gluten free cakes from Kroger that used to cost ten dollars and now cost sixteen. Adrienne ate two slices of cake without icing, scraped the chocolate ganache off and gave it to me, as she’s been doing on special occasions for a decade. We sat around in that awkward lull after a school year ends, when it’s not yet three o’clock in the afternoon and yet there’s nothing to do because you’re already home. Eventually, we watched a Captain America movie together for old times’ sake while eating more treats. I couldn’t shake off the awkward feeling that there was something else I was supposed to be doing.

I Suppose I’ve Felt as if there was Something Else I Was Supposed to be Doing for my Entire Life.

That’s what Catholic guilt really is, isn’t it? Catholic guilt is the awkward feeling that there’s something else we’re supposed to be doing. It’s the constant terror that you aren’t Catholicking right, and you ought to Catholic another way. You can’t put your child in a public school; you have to shell out for Catholic school. No, that’s not good enough either, because real Catholics homeschool. You can’t call yourself a mother because you don’t have the right number of children yet, and anyway, you’re not mothering right. You can’t go to Mass at the friendly church near your house; you have to drive fifteen miles to the one with the Communion rail. You can’t pray ten Hail Marys; you have to pray the whole Rosary. No, not just the five-decade Rosary, all twenty. What, you prayed twenty decades of the Rosary? Don’t you know the Luminous Mysteries are a modernist invention? Do it again, fifteen decades, in Latin this time. Is your skirt long enough? Is your food penitential enough? Did you go to confession recently enough? Did the Body of Christ touch your teeth as you swallowed? Are you SURE you haven’t met all three conditions for a mortal sin?  And so on, for the rest of our lives.

I don’t know if I’ve found a more excellent way, but I’ve found the only way I can be a Catholic.

I can only be a Catholic by being myself.

I cannot be anybody else in the presence of God. I can’t be a nun, a tradwife, or an old maid. I have to be myself. I can’t be a homeschooling mother or somebody who has the attention span to pray twenty decades or somebody who doesn’t have PTSD associated with the sacraments. The only Mary Pezzulo who could ever live her life in the presence of Jesus is me. Mary, the mother of Adrienne, whose polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome broke her body after only one baby. Mary, who is autistic, but got bullied and called names for her autism symptoms, which weren’t her fault, for her entire life. Mary, who came to Steubenville because of its excellent reputation for Catholicism, and found herself in the personality cult of a pack of narcissistic and abusive Franciscan priests and now has severe religious trauma. Mary, who was finally able to go to confession this January after years of extreme panic every time she thought of being alone in the room with a priest, but it was so terrifying I don’t know when I’ll be back. There isn’t another person here. Either the Son of God can sanctify me, the person I am, or I can’t be a saint. Because I can’t be somebody else.

I can only be Catholic by living the life that I actually have, and not some other life. This is all there is. My life can’t look like other people’s lives.

I think of Adrienne, whose very existence was a surprise from the beginning, and has gone on to surprise me in every possible way.

A professor at Franciscan University once cautioned me “Your husband will never disappoint you the way your children disappoint you.” He went on to harangue me that having children is troublesome because the children will always wind up doing things you don’t expect. You’ll raise and educate them to be a certain way, and then they’ll turn into different people who do things you didn’t plan. He seemed to think that that was terrible. But to me, it’s been the best part of parenting. The most exciting thing about being Adrienne’s mother has been watching Adrienne grow up to be who she is. Adrienne doesn’t fit into any mold or cookie-cutter. Adrienne is full of wonderful, exciting, life-changing surprises. She is blessedly different from everybody else, and she doesn’t mind that. I don’t expect her to be exactly like anybody else.

I am certain that God is much better than I am, which means the Father is a better Parent than I could ever be. If I have this glimmer of goodness in me: that I can admire and love my child, because my child is so brilliantly different from everybody else, God must possess that virtue in infinitely greater measure. God created countless people, each blessedly different from everybody else. God keeps creating oddballs, no matter how hard we try to force everybody to conform to a pattern. God must like oddballs better than patterns. God likes human beings who do things in strange ways, better than automata who do exactly what they’re supposed to do.

If that is true, then perhaps I can drop this constant fear that there is something else I should be doing.

Maybe we can all drop it.

The way to be a Catholic is to live your own life, sanctified. That’s all.

That’s what I learned today.