I'm Writing Again

I haven't written anything creative since my dadso died. I'm pretty happy to say that I'm working on a creative nonfiction piece. I am doing so mostly because I teach the genre and make the students write so what the heck I should write too, right?
This piece is a follow up to one called "The Fall" that I wrote years ago and that talks about my loss of faith in Catholicism. It starts in Idaho, then goes back in time, then, oh shit here it is. Just read it and tell me what you think. Harold Wyndam was right when he told Jeremy Petersen, Mark Brown, Dorian and me that if you need to set up a piece too much it's not worth the reading.

Return to the Fold

Idaho, 1999
I am thirty six years old, give or take a few half years. I’ve been in a marriage fraught with problems for almost sixteen years and it’s getting harder and harder to keep it all together. My husband has become less explosive but no less anxious. Prone once to volcanic anger, he is now more like a frayed electrical wire. He can’t contain the agitation anymore; he cries sometimes at odd moments. Things on television make him weep, but he remains steadfast in one aspect of our life together. He will not seek help, not with me or without me.

When I say that I want us to go to couples’ counseling, his response is usually something like “I don’t know why you think we need that.” He has also responded “I don’t know why you think we need a divorce” and famously “I don’t know why you think you’re unhappy.” The last one’s my favorite.

So I’m trying to keep it all held together, but half the time I think that like the dam I live downstream from, the floodgates are gonna give way any minute. We’re all going to be swept away by this man’s swelling anxiety. I’d like to say that at this point in my marriage his anxiety comes and goes, but I don’t think it goes much. It stays, but I have taken to leaving.

I go to church. I go other places too, to school, to the grocery store, to an occasional poetry reading. Sometimes I even read my poetry at downtown readings in the small city thirty miles away from where we live. These are readings he never attends; crowds make him uncomfortable. In a moment of desperation I drive to the local catholic church one Sunday. After Mass, the librarian says in a snide voice “What are you doing here?” as if the devil had taken human form and sneaked in while their backs were turned. I do not go back to that church.

Instead I get in the car on Sundays and drive the thirty miles to the small city and attend Mass at the catholic church that is sort of near my college. There is a church on campus, but I know that many of the English department faculty worship there, and I don’t really want to see them or any of my students. Besides I have gotten the idea that since the church is on campus it might be like a catholic version of the Mormon singles ward, where young ones go to look for other single Mormons to hook up with, excuse me, to wed. I am having none of that.

The other reason to go to a parish where nobody knows me is that I cry a lot during Mass. Not sob out loud crying, but crying nonetheless. I am also nervous at first because I think I will have forgotten everything. I soon find out that forgetting the Mass is impossible if you spent eight years in catholic school and went to Mass twice a week, once with your class and once with your parents.

New Jersey, my entire childhood

I go to Mass with my father, my brothers and my sister. My mother goes with her sisters on Saturday night, but my father likes to go to the 12 o’clock Mass on Sunday. He likes to sleep late, cook and enjoy his breakfast, and have the requisite one hour fast before receiving Communion under his belt before we go to church. Even though we go to 12 o’clock Mass we are always late and always stand along the side walls of the church under the Stations of the Cross. Sometimes someone makes room in a pew, and as the smallest I am allowed to go and sit. Sitting with strangers is better than standing with your family.

Mass is impossible to see when you are a) very small and b) stuffed between a brother and a brother or a brother and a father. Most of the time they put me in front, sort of a tiny masthead figure for the good ship Murphy Familia, but even then there’s always someone or some other family in front of our family, and everyone is taller than me. Mass is better on the occasions when we get there early enough to snag seats. Then I can see and hear and actually pay attention.

Mass changes for catholic kids once they make their first Holy Communion and at the age of seven pledge themselves to something they can’t even begin to understand. Christ = bread, bread=this little dry wafer that you must not chew, so receiving this dry wafer that sticks to the roof of your mouth (do not chew it!) means you are receiving (eating?) Christ. That’s pretty symbolic for a seven year old.