W<\/span>hen I was four years old I broke my mother\u2019s heart when I announced that I wanted to become a Catholic.\u00a0 A few weeks earlier I had marched into her bedroom and made a slightly less surprising proclamation.\u00a0 \u201cMommy, I want a penis.\u201d When she explained to me, very technically, why this was impossible I shrugged and told her, \u201cI\u2019ll ask Dad.\u00a0 I bet he\u2019ll say yes.\u201d (He did not.)\u00a0 I wanted a penis because, after several failed attempts, I learned that it was essential if one wanted to successfully pee standing up.\u00a0 My reasons for wanting to become Catholic were far more complex.<\/p>\n

Standing in the kitchen of our house on the North Side of Pittsburgh that morning I tried to explain my motivation for this leap into faith to my mother.\u00a0 She was a late in life lapsed Catholic.\u00a0 When she was in first grade the nuns would rap her left hand with a ruler when she tried to write with her dominant side.\u00a0 When she lived at home during college she and my uncle would replace Sunday Mass with a beer at Goofy\u2019s Pub and my grandmother was none the wiser.\u00a0 The two of them got into endless fights as they planned her wedding to my father with my mother\u2019s most clear victory being the short white mini dress she wore without a veil in the ceremony.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Over Cheerios, I made my case for Catholicism and consented to a series of promises.\u00a0 Yes, to weekly Wednesday CCD classes instead of playing after school.\u00a0 Yes, to sitting still in church every Sunday.\u00a0 Yes, to accepting Jesus Christ as my savior.\u00a0 I would do all of these things as long as they ensured that I could make my first communion when I turned five.\u00a0 By the time she cleared my bowl away my mother had gotten to the bottom of things.\u00a0 I was not newly pious or awakened to the power of the Lord Our Saviour, I was obsessed with the long white dress and veil my mother fought so very hard against less than a decade earlier.\u00a0 I wanted to be Catholic because I want to wear a first communion dress, a beautiful wedding dress made for a girl just my size.\u00a0 My mother and I came to a solution.\u00a0 I would not lie to her about my love for Jesus, and she would make me a bride costume for Halloween.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

A few months later we were walking through Oakland past Heinz Cathedral, the stately gothic church in the center of the University of Pittsburgh campus.\u00a0 As we passed the front steps a wedding let out.\u00a0 My mother led my gaze to the bride.\u00a0 Instead of feeling elated I was heartbroken.\u00a0 \u201cNobody told me, nobody told me.\u201d\u00a0 I was so upset to be ruining this beautiful bride\u2019s wedding even walking by in yellow Osh Kosh overalls and a turtleneck with butterflies on it.\u00a0 I couldn\u2019t ruin this very important day, I had to run away.<\/p>\n

To me being a bride meant being beautifully in love, and every record that my parents ever played for me, from the soundtracks of The Music Man<\/em> or Guys and Dolls<\/em>, to the Beatles, told me that love was the answer.\u00a0 According to these sources, people in love got to wear floor-length gowns, sing pretty songs on bridges or in Cuba and sometimes, if your name fit the rhyme scheme, have the person that loved you sing songs to you in French.\u00a0 Love promised a happily ever after and a magical finality.\u00a0 It was truly the greatest privilege about being an adult.\u00a0 My mother\u2019s wedding dress shenanigans aside, she still got to dress up and go to parties with my father.\u00a0 She would kiss me goodbye, leaving a small cloud of Shalimar in the air around us.\u00a0 My parents were the real Marian Paroo and Harold Hill or Sarah Brown and Sky Masterson.\u00a0 I knew, beyond anything else, that I wanted to grow up to be Michelle, Paul McCartney\u2019s belle, someday.<\/p>\n

Some children, when introduced to the concept of mortality, process this knowledge into an irrational fear of death.\u00a0 This happened to my sister and it meant that I could never play her \u201cI Dreamed a Dream\u201d from Les Miz because she mis-heard the line \u201cWe\u2019re all already damned\u201d to \u201calready dead\u201d and it would launch her into crying fits where she would walk through the house wringing her hands and repeatedly reminding us that we\u2019re all going to die.\u00a0 She was four.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I on the other hand turned my love of love into a fear of losing it.\u00a0 Every morning my parents and I would pile into our dark brown Mitsubishi Colt and drive into downtown Pittsburgh.\u00a0 Our first stop would be to drop my father by the firm where he worked downtown.\u00a0 My mother would time our drop off to a red light where my father would kiss her then me goodbye.\u00a0 One morning as we approached our timing was off.\u00a0 The light was green and my mother pulled over quickly.\u00a0 My father grabbed his briefcase and leapt out of the car, neglecting to kiss either of us.\u00a0 I was distraught.\u00a0 I could not be convinced that he was ever going to come back to us.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t until I heard his three note whistle as he came through the front door that evening that I realized that we might be OK.\u00a0 He knew he was never to make that mistake again.<\/p>\n

Still I was never fully convinced.\u00a0 While my parents showed no signs of distress in those years, I was so insanely devoted to them, and to the idea of growing up to be them, that I couldn\u2019t shake my seeds of worry.\u00a0 When I got my first pets, goldfish, I named them Paul and Lisa in their honor.\u00a0 One night on Channel 13 there was a nature special on Japanese fish that included footage of fighting fish, pushing themselves up against a glass divider in an attempt to get at each other.\u00a0 When the divider was lifted they attacked, simultaneously sucking the air out of their little lungs and dying.\u00a0 I couldn\u2019t get the image out of my head and for the nights to follow I would sneak downstairs to check up on my parent\u2019s namesakes just to make sure they were still OK.\u00a0 I couldn\u2019t imagine a world where they weren\u2019t.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My reasons for wanting to become Catholic were far more complex.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1996","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-memoirs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1996","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1996"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1996\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2123,"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1996\/revisions\/2123"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1996"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1996"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1996"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}