Thursday, March 5, 2009
My mom was a nun. She couldn’t bust into song like Whoopi or fly like Sally Field, but for a decade of her life, she devoted her being to the man upstairs.
She joined a convent, or a nunnery, as I liked to call it, in Kansas City right after she graduated from college. She had graduated from the Catholic-affiliated Rockhurst University in Kansas City, Missouri, and majored in theology, so the righteous path to a convent wasn’t too much of a stretch.
Throughout my childhood and adolescence, her years of devotion would occasionally come up, mostly in the form of quirky stories and random anecdotes. Her accounts didn’t have much to do with her hours of prayer and scripture reading, though. The stories she told were filled with what most people don’t associate nuns with—fun. Whether it be occasionally sneaking to a local pub or harmless pranks she played on other nuns and priests, her stories made it sound as if swearing off men wasn’t so bad.
She’d always drive the point home to me that she didn’t leave the vocation for love or a man. She left because the nuns were corrupt (or at least that’s what I told other people). After 10 years, she felt her calling had expired and what she had set out to do hadn’t materialized. She still went to church every weekend for the rest of her life, but knew her life as a nun got the shaft when her role as a mother took over.
Check out Kelly’s short on page 4 about the performance of Doubt that’s playing in Lawrence this weekend. My mom was thankfully never as strict or cold as the main nun in the play, Sister Aloysius Beauvier, but maybe she would have eventually got there if she stuck with it.
I also always used her former vocation to my advantage. When instructors would say on the first day of classes, “Tell the class something interesting about yourself,” I happily offered up my mom’s former calling. The class and instructor were so fascinated with this disclosure that they never noticed my mom being a nun wasn’t actually about me.
And maybe that’s what I learned from my mom: You’re only as interesting as the people you know. After all, we can’t all be singing or flying nuns.
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