To My Mother, the Reluctant Catholic: A Mother's Day Tribute

She has a strong sense of sin, if a quirky one. She refused to buy an answering machine until 1994. When I asked her why not, she told me, scowling, "If you're not there when the call comes through, you don't deserve to get it."

My mother earned her PhD in 1994, the same year I earned my bachelor's. I'm not sure what she imagined herself doing with it, whether she dreamed of busying herself with research, pausing to mentor the odd suburban prodigy. Although she has done plenty of both, and well, her real charism is the most unglamorous kind of teaching. She pours her heart into her university's ESOL writing program, where her students are mainly middle-aged women from Asia who support themselves by sewing in sweatshops. If religious orders had a draft pick, the Setonian Sisters of Charity would grab my mother in the first round.

My mother will dispute this call. Although she can still recite whole pages from the Baltimore Catechism, she practices a sort of cafeteria Buddhism. That is, she meditates, striving for something she calls "mindfulness," but attends no temple, and has no particular interest in reaching Nirvana. (I have a feeling my mother is a subtle enough theologian as to disbelieve in nothingness.) She greatly admired one of her students, a monk from Sri Lanka, for the serene look he wore while eating a Tootsie Roll, but confessed to feeling disenchanted after hearing him refer to some ranking abbot or lama as "His Holiness."

"I just don't do Holinesses," she explained sadly.

Maybe not. But I maintain she does do holiness. One of the nicest parts of joining the Church has been meeting so many people like her—people who are self-effacing, caring, unimpressed by hoards of stuff. People like that are rare; the real world does its best to snuff out those qualities by making sure they go completely unrewarded. I'm tempted to speculate that I joined the Church precisely in order to surround myself with members of this endangered species, but that would make me sound an awful mama's boy.

But perhaps the most Catholic thing about my mother is her awareness of her shortcomings, which is keen almost to the point of morbidity. If her life were a manuscript, her conscience would mark it top to bottom in blue ink. She won't recognize herself in my description of her—or rather, she won't recognize the good parts. Most likely, she'll see where I've charged her, by implication, with a million sins, and she'll plead guilty to them all. There are times I wish she thought more like those Calvinists who secretly number themselves among the Elect.

It's not that she wishes she were a solid Republican, stay-at-home mother with an SUV and a turn for making chocolate chip pancakes, but at times I fear she believes only such people should raise children. Once, she sighed, "You were born into the wrong milieu, Max. You should have had a Tom Sawyer childhood in a huge Mormon family."

I told her, "And you should have had your tubes tied, gone on Broadway, and become a gay icon. But we're stuck with each other."

I meant every word. That I was born to the mother I was born to was a happy accident, a comedy of errors. And I'll spend today thanking God for arranging it.

Happy Mothers' Day, Mom.

This Mother's Day Tribute was first posted here.