Chucks

We stuck our feet out the car window--three pairs of 8th-grade feet, three different colors of high-top Chuck Taylors, three different girls on our way to play in a volleyball game where, I am fairly certain, we lost. We were not the winning-est middle-school volleyball team. But we had a hell of a good time getting there.

Two of my closest girlfriends and I decided to make Converse All-Stars in bright colors part of our back-to-school shopping lists. My best childhood friend chose red; she was the undisputed leader of our group and red matched her alpha-girl personality and aggressive athleticism. She was a warrior, but with a big, bleeding heart underneath the ferocity.

My other friend had a pair of teal ones. She was the girliest of the three of us, pretty, soft-spoken, pastel, and kind.

I had the yellow pair. That was my signature color. It was happy. It was sunny. When I wore it, I felt like I could be the very best me--the optimistic me, the laughing me, the spotlight-stealing me. I didn't feel yellow every day, but I certainly wanted to. Yellow represented who I most wanted to be.

I wore that pair of yellow Chucks until the soles came off. By the time they were no longer wearable, that particular late-80s fashion trend had passed and no one wore them anymore. I went on a quest in high-school to find another pair like them, but no other pair of sneakers I could find in stores were quite as fitting for me as that pair of yellow high-top All Stars.

Which is why I squealed in delight a couple of weeks ago when a friend from work showed me her bright green Chuck Taylors. They're back! And they're once again fabulous! I knew I had to have them.

I am not much of a shopper. I do not like to spend money on myself. Yet every now and then, a girl just has to have shoes. Especially when said shoes make a girl's heart ache from fond memories of joyful afternoons setting out on an adventure with feet recklessly hanging out of the car windows.

On a recent day that I woke with my heart heavy from my mother's loss, I went in search of these shoes. Shoes that wouldn't just serve as an ironic-but-not-really-because-I-kinda-think-they're-awesome fashion statement. Shoes that took me back to a time in my life when I can truly say I was the most carefree and radiantly happy.

I went into this venture thinking I would get the red ones. I am a red girl now. That color gives me strength and confidence and helps me remember that I, too, am a warrior. It makes me think of fighting a blood cancer and kicking its ass.

Or maybe the dark blue ones. Blue makes me think of my dad, and our shared love of the UK Wildcats, and the last color I saw him wear in this world.

But the Chucks I brought home, the ones I put on and showed my husband, saying, "Oh my God, do these shoes totally look like me or what?", were the classic black ones. Seriously, if you've never met me and have no idea what I look like, think of a pair of black low-top Chuck Taylors sticking out from dark-washed bootcut Levis. And there you go. We've met.

It seems trivial to write about shoes, I know. But finding a soul mate in a pair of Converse is magical and healing.

After finding the shoes, I came back home and fell into a deep sleep. Shopping on a rainy Saturday is my Ambien. I had my first dream about my mother since she died, and I woke up needing to sob but so full of grief that I didn't even have the energy to cry.

In the dream, I had come home after Ainsley's swim practice. Jason stood in the kitchen holding our phone.

"I know it's not possible, and I don't know how it happened," dream Jason said, "but your mother called while you were gone and left you a message."

He played the message we both know could not have been sent by a dead person. My mother's voice filled the room, saying,

"I just want you to know I got here okay. I was hoping I'd catch you at home because I really wanted to hear your voice. But I know you're busy and I'll call you back later."

I know, right?

I wandered around for a while, completely out of sorts. I was comforted. But also made more raw. My heart told me that my mother had just reached out to me. I had no idea how I was going to make it through the night, and have friends over, and pretend that I was okay when I could not have been any less okay.

I cooked dinner. I drank a beer. I put on my new shoes. And, for a little while, I felt whole again. Every time I looked down, I thought, Oh, hello me. There you are. You're not lost after all. You're still who you used to be, just a little darker now.

My world is no longer, and probably will never again be, yellow. For some time, it will probably be black. That sounds depressing, I know. But it's okay. I have the shoes to match.

Keep Off the Grass

Last weekend was prom weekend at my school. One of my students asked me how I spent the day of my prom. Did I get my hair done? My nails? Get ready at a friend's house, take a bunch of pictures? No, I told them, before my junior prom, I just mowed the grass. These young whippersnappers today. They have no idea.



"I am not a child anymore. You need to trust me. It's prom, and I need to do this. I promise I won't get hurt. Now, give me the keys."

It's May, 1991, and my mom and I are fighting, bitterly. A change in the mother-daughter power balance is about to happen, and the air is charged both from the storms moving in and from the electric emotions between a strong-willed 17-year-old girl and her reluctant mother. After a pause in which I am sure I am about to lose, my mother hands me the keys. And I do what every teen girl would do in the same circumstance:

I start up my dad's riding lawnmower.

Things were complicated at home that spring. Dad had fallen spectacularly off the sobriety wagon, foregoing all responsibilities including, but not limited to, basic hygiene and employment. Yet somehow I was at the peak of my high-school success: I had been selected as a Governor's Scholar, won my grade's school-wide essay contest, played The Artful Dodger in Oliver! and, most importantly, had really great hair and had kept a serious boyfriend for over a year. I put those two things together because I am convinced they are related. I knew people suspected my home life was, in the words of Allison in The Breakfast Club, "unsatisfying." But I did not want to confirm this. I felt on the brink of actually getting away and making a decent life for myself and I didn't want any busybody teachers or pesky counsellors finding the skeletons in that particular closet. It was fine if they could smell the corpses, I just didn't want the bones to poke out from under the door.

So when my dad decided that keeping the grass mowed was optional, and mom decided anything not worth dad's time was not worth hers, either, I began to panic. There for all to see was clear evidence that all was not right with the Crankies. Having grass grow to hip-high in a house people actually live in raises a pretty big red flag.

I didn't care about the neighbors. They knew we were screwed up long before. But when my best friend offered to drive to junior prom, I knew that he and his date would see the jungle that had grown around our house and, for the first time, I worried what people might think. That grass had to be mowed.

The problem was that despite my parents being two people who didn't care nearly enough about matters of the home, they cared almost too much about their youngest daughter. Their overly-protective parental restraining order mandated that I was not allowed to come within 5 feet of a working lawnmower.

"You'll cut your toes off on that hill," Dad would say in reference to the steep front hill which had given him several close calls over the years.

"I know a guy whose son got killed when his riding mower flipped and fell on top of him," Mom would say when I suggested I drive Dad's little lawn tractor instead of the death trap that was our ancient push mower. Ah, nothing brings the grisly like a worried mother.

Meanwhile, a warm, wet spring nourished our untended lawn. It grew above our ankles; then to our knees; then to a height where Mom and I thought for sure we were going to get cited by the city. She took a run at the grass one day only to have the mower clog and choke while her smoker's lungs and years of inactivity prohibited her from making any real progress. We feared what might be growing in there; snakes and wolf spiders for sure, for we saw them scurry across our walkway from time to time. Whatever else might have been hiding I hoped I'd never see. My closest girlfriend, who knew my secrets but who never let on like she knew, much to my eternal appreciation, called it my "Children of the Corn yard." She joked that if we didn't do something soon the Corn God was going to start speaking through me and asking for a sacrifice. I was both amused and terrified.

The morning of prom I stopped being amused. The situation had tipped to critical. Before anyone else in the house rose from their hangovers/depressive slumbers, I threw on a pair of old jeans, two pairs of socks, boots, and a pair of winter gloves. The ancient push mower was rusted and I didn't exactly know what tetanus was, but I knew it was a possibility given the conditions. I thought maybe I could get out and start mowing before anyone was the wiser. I did not anticipate not knowing how to start a lawnmower and that riding mowers actually use keys. Mom learned of my scheme pretty quickly when I began rummaging around the house.

"Are you crazy? You're not going out there and mowing. We'll hire someone next week."

"I am being picked up for prom in 6 hours and I can't have people show up and see our yard like this."

"Have them pick you up at the top of the street."

"It's supposed to storm. And I will be wearing a dress and heels. I'm not walking up the street in the rain to get picked up at the corner like a hooker."

We argued. And somehow I won. We figured out how to start both mowers and I was let loose in the wild. I would have felt very grown-up and superior except that I was seriously afraid I might accidentally run over a stray dog or cat or perhaps some small deer that had taken up residence in our own private wilderness refuge.

It was a slow process. I'll never forget the noise the two mowers made as they stuttered and coughed through the high grass--grrrr---chkchkchk---grrrr---chkchkchk--as I walked and rode so slowly I thought for sure I would never get finished and the lawn would just have to have a reverse Mohawk.

4 hours later everything was mowed except for a small portion of the Hill of Death. It would have to do. Once the rain started I had to acknowledge my mother's hand signals from the front door, calling me to just walk it on in. A gallon of water, a hot shower, and some quality time burning my ears off with hot rollers, and I found myself picture-ready on the walkway with Jason and our best friend. I did not and could not invite them in, but from the outside they probably couldn't tell that I had anything other than a semi-normal suburban life. Well, the unnatural mounds of grass clippings might have given something away. But maybe they thought we were making hay.

Several days later my father went to rehab for the umpteenth time and we hired someone to finish the lawn job I had started. As it always did, the listing ship that was my adolescence righted itself. Since I did not die under rotating blades, it became my job over the rest of the summer to help mow the grass. Being trusted to not to kill oneself with heavy equipment does have a downside. I grumbled, but I enjoyed it. At one point I even added a copy of the lawnmower key to my key chain, much to my parents' amusement; I didn't get my real driver's license until August and didn't have a car of my own to drive, so the Craftsman out in the shed was as close as I could come to vehicular independence. I named her "Sally" and threatened to take her with me to college.

For I earned those keys. I fought the lawn. And the lawn did not win.

Little Lamb

"That's a special little girl you have."

This from a friend of the family who has called to check in on us. And by us, I mostly mean me. I'm doing a fantastic job of leading the world at large to believe I'm handling Mom's death gracefully, but there are a handful of intuitive people, friends of my mother's, mostly, who know the bond we had and know how it was at the end, who call me from time to time to make sure I'm not crouched in a corner with exposed wrists and a packet of razor blades.

When anyone asks me how I'm doing, I feel like Han Solo at the intercom on the Death Star. Everything's perfectly alright now. We're fine. We're all fine here now, thank you. How are you? And then I blast the intergalactic PA system, because clearly I'm not fine and I don't want Imperial company.

And inevitably, after whoever is calling me that day finds out that I am still hanging on to the ledge and have not yet let go, she asks me about Ainsley. And I pause, because how Ainsley is doing is a really fantastic question.

She did wonderfully at the funeral. She played "Amazing Grace" on the guitar and even though the entire room starting sniffing while she played  it (let's not kid ourselves; the communal weeping is the entire point of "Amazing Grace" at a funeral), she kept herself together with a preternatural poise. During the entire experience, Ainsley has not shed a tear. It has caused me both worry and frustration; I have a hard time believing she's not devastated over the loss of a woman who loved her beyond reason and who was a huge part of her everyday life. And the part of me who has wept nearly every minute I've found myself alone in my house the past 3 weeks is almost angry that she isn't wearing her heart on a tear-and snot-covered sleeve.

I see small signs, though, of her grief. Little things that, if I look too long, make my soul hurt. Like when she comes down the stairs every morning carrying the little stuffed lamb that someone gave Mom while she was in the hospital. Or like this morning, when I caught her reflection in the rear-view mirror, carefully stroking the tiny gold angel pendant that was the last necklace my mother wore and which has now become hers.

They are subtle signs that behind that resilience that children have, that ability to continue to seek joy and embrace fun shortly after a death, she hurts. And occasionally, but not as often as her non-stoic mother would like, she fesses up.

Ainsley competed in a regional speech competition last weekend and, to our surprise, advanced to state. This is fairly surprising for a child who talks so quietly in everyday conversation that I have to ask her to repeat herself 5 or 6 times and still sometimes have to nod and hope that I didn't just agree to buy her a pony.

I found myself in an inexplicable funk shortly after we got home from the competition; the day loomed large ahead of me and free time is currently not my friend. I watched Ainsley and Jason frolic around the house, laughing and having fun. I thought of how very proud Mom would be of her "baby." Of what a beautiful girl she has become. Of how very fully she lives her life. My heart became even heavier thinking that "Mamaw" was not going to be a part of this life anymore.

"Oh, Ainsley," I sighed later that night, when it was just the two of us getting clean and ready for bed. "I really miss your Mamaw tonight. If she were still here, she would be so proud of you today."

"I know. I thought of her when I first got up this morning and thought of her again right before I gave my speech."

"You did?"

"Yeah, I thought of her right before I started talking and decided I was going to do it for Mamaw."

The lump in my throat eventually went away, though it might have taken some tequila to dissolve it.

Yes, family friends. That is a very special little girl that I have.

Above Water

When I was a skinny little daredevil child, I regularly waited in long lines on hot, summer days to jump off of the high-dive at my local pool. The first time I jumped I was, naturally, scared as hell, but my friends made it look more like fun and less like death.

I'll never forget the nervous anticipation as the line took us up the long stairs to the platform. The number of people in front of me shrank as each person at the head of the line took a deep breath and leaped into the abyss. But there was always someone in front of me, a buffer, as it were, between myself and the deep blue unknown.

Until suddenly there wasn't.

I was alone on the platform, 10 feet above the water. It might as well have been 100 feet up for how very vulnerable I felt. I was wearing a Puritanly modest swim suit, but I felt utterly naked. It was just me and the humid Kentucky air. And very far below, so far my nearsighted eyes couldn't clearly make out the markings on the bottom, the clear, chlorinated, seemingly deadly pool.

It was my turn. So reluctantly, and with no one left to prepare me, I jumped.

This is exactly how I felt after the passing of my mother.

I was a small child again, and it was my turn. No one was ahead of me, and I was alone over cold, unknown depths. Jason and I have lost all of our parents now; it's just us against the world, and no one is there to buffer our fall. We are next in line.

It happened so fast. One day I was visiting my mother in the hospital, listening to a hopeful oncologist. The next, we were told that something had gone wrong and that we needed to move my mother to hospice. Ultimately it was not the cancer itself, but the brutal regimen we had to choose to fight the cancer, that proved too hard for her body to take.

I had braced myself for the worst, because that is what I do. I listened attentively to my mother a week before she died when she went over her desired funeral arrangements with me, even though I kept telling her she was going to make it, because I knew that relentless optimism and denial do not, by themselves, cure leukemia. I knew what she wanted, I knew she didn't want to suffer, and I knew she was leaving us days before anyone else seemed to know. But nothing prepared me for the feeling of complete loneliness I felt in the hour after her death, sitting alone in a hospice conference room, wanting to make all the necessary phone calls before heading home to begin grieving with my husband and child.

But I did the same thing the brave little girl I used to be did on the high dive that day--I jumped.

Despite the fact that I've lost Jason's stepfather and mother and my own father, there was just so very much I didn't know about handling my mother's death. I thought I knew what I was in for. Yet you can't possibly know until you're at the end of the platform.

I had no idea how many times I would start to pick up the phone to ask her a question about her own arrangements, or for a friend's phone number I simply could not find.

I had no idea how calm I could be, how businesslike, when getting a call from the funeral director the day of the visitation asking me a macabre and technical question about the appearance of my mother's body for the family hour. How horrifyingly easy it was in the end to separate my responsibilities as funeral planner from my emotions as grieving daughter.

I had no idea that I could cry so much I felt dehydrated for the better part of a week.

I had no idea how much harder it would be to get through a death without my mother crying with me.

Mom told me years ago, after Jason lost his grandmother, how her heart ached for anyone who lost a mother. She told me you never really get over it, and nothing is ever the same again. She was so sad for Jason's mom. I prayed at the time that it would be a long, long time before Jason or I experienced this.

It was not nearly long enough.

I know that healing will come. I know because it has to. My life will never be the same again; I am now a parent-less person, and that's a game-changing title. But I am a parent myself, and Ainsley needs me now more than ever. Our little family just got smaller, and I need to mom up to fill the gaping void left by the death of a person who used to say that, though she loved her two daughters beyond reason, felt "there's just something special about Ainsley."

I look at her, our precious, only child, and feel bad for her in so many ways. For someday it will be her turn. She will find herself standing on the platform, the head of the line.

And like those before her, she will have no choice but to jump.

Calling

There is nothing, and I mean nothing, that I hate worse than talking on the telephone.

Clearing a shower drain of decomposed hair is a close second, but it's still second. Thank God for Facebook, email, and text messaging so that I rarely have to actually pick up a phone to see how a friend is doing, or confirm weekend plans, or share information about how awesome the kid is to far-away family members.

And of course, since my mom's cancer diagnosis, I've spent most of my precious little free time on the phone.

My sister, bless her heart, passed along all telephone-notification duties to me while we were sitting at Mom's bedside the night she was admitted. She's older, and she's bossy, and before I could say "No," she had volunteered me for the one job I didn't want. No matter; for a variety of reasons, Mom's friends have chosen to seek me out, anyway. Believe it or not, dear readers, but people find me approachable. Yeah, I know. I don't get it, either.

I knew this was coming. The night my dad died, I was the only one able to form complete, coherent sentences. Grief has a way of not hitting me until well after the fact. Plus, I am a Responsibility Champion. True story. I have that title on one of my favorite coffee mugs, so it must be accurate. I do not allow myself the luxury of a nervous breakdown until all my chores are finished, because I want to enjoy the nervous breakdown, and I can't do that when I'm worried that I never did get my bathroom cleaned. So, being the responsible one, between the hours of 3am and 5am on the night my father passed away, I broke the news to his brothers, his sister, his best friend, and to various friends of the family who we knew would pull through for my mom at first light. This is my role in my family during deathly crises, to speak in a calm voice while everyone around me sobs. My sobbing waits until hours after the funeral, when the kid's in bed, and Jason hands me a beer, and I know all my responsibilities have ended.

Knowing that this is who I am, I sucked it up and called Mom's sole surviving sibling and her large circle of cousins, nieces, friends, and neighbors. And it was, without a doubt, one of the hardest hours of my life to date.

No one ever takes the news that someone they love has cancer the way you think they should. The ones I thought would cry were stoic and in shock. The ones I thought would be strong and offer help cried openly and had no words to offer. The common thread I heard over and over, with only slight variation, was, "But she can't die. I love her so much."

I have yet to form a good response to this.


Since that first day, I have been on the phone more than I've been off it. Every day is a different day for someone who is fighting leukemia, so her status changes more than Kentucky weather in springtime. Which is to say, more than daily.

When I'm not calling, people are calling me. And I take the call, no matter what I'm doing. Because I know every call is someone who loves my mother, who cannot visit her in the hospital because her immune system is wiped out, who cannot call her in her room because she is so often sleeping or trying to catch her breath. The irony is that it's my mother who is the great telephone communicator in good times; the woman spends HOURS a night using the only social media she's ever cared to learn. I have never called her, in the years since she got call waiting, when I was not the second person she was trying to have a phone conversation with.

But she cannot do that now, so I am her voice. A somewhat reluctant voice, but a voice nonetheless.

I will continue to have a close love-hate relationship with my phone until she gets better. And I know that there is a chance that she will not beat leukemia, and I will once again find myself in the kitchen of the house I grew up in, being the calm voice that delivers bad news while those around me begin to grieve.

And when this storm has passed, I know I will still have to make the occasional phone call. But loved ones, take note: my first choice from here on out will always be text.

And Then This Happens

You know how it is. It's Thursday, you're doing fine, going along, living your life, setting the alarm on your iPhone to get Jon Stewart tickets as soon as they go on sale for the night he comes to your city, wondering what craft brew you might get at the growler station on Friday night, and your phone rings.

And at the other end is someone who tells you your mother is in the hospital because her doctor thinks she has acute myeloid leukemia. And then two days later the bone marrow biopsy confirms that the doctor was right. Suddenly, everything you thought you knew about the fairness of life has been thrown out the window.

So, yeah, that happened. As you can imagine, I'm feeling a wide variety of things right now, including, but not limited to, blind rage against whatever forces conspired to allow my father, myself, the second love of my mother's life, and now my mother to all get (and in 2 of the above cases, die of) cancer. It seems like a bit much for one family.

Needless to say, I will not exactly be swimming in free time over the next months. I would tell you the prognosis, but it's fairly depressing, and I am pretending not to know. Really, I don't; a lot of how this goes depends on how much she wants to fight.

I may be blogging from time to time, as I will need to do some things to maintain both sanity and some semblance of normalcy. But I would imagine I will be on hiatus for a while.

Please keep my family in your thoughts. As my mother would say, we have a long row to hoe.

Faith, Shaken and Stirred

The church was on fire.

Not literally. But there was a heat and energy I simply could not comprehend, and I was just as afraid as if there were actual flames at the pulpit. Women in floral-print cotton dresses fanned themselves in the late-spring heat and waved their hands to the sky, many speaking in a language that was not exactly English. It was going on midnight, I was tired, and the scene I was witnessing showed no signs of stopping on that April Saturday when I went to my first, and last, Pentecostal revival. I was only ten, but I knew: my mother's faith was not going to be my faith. Her faith was scary.

That was her last revival, too. My mother was a fervent believer, but only a sporadic church-goer. The revival had been the suggestion of a friend, and Mom went, hoping to feel God's presence in her life, which had been a rather bleak existence while we lived in Knox County. When the revival ended, in the wee hours of a muggy morning, we did not speak much of it and we did not go to that church again. Instead, I talked to her about the bible stories I was reading in a book my grandmother bought for me from some travelling Jehovah's Witnesses and we prayed together when we felt we needed some extra help. And that's pretty much how things went for us for years: we tried different churches at the suggestion of our friends, either together or separately; we came up with a laundry list of reasons why we didn't like those churches; we slept in on Sunday mornings and simply talked to each other about God and prayed for each other instead. I loved my God with my whole heart but I did not need a church to tell me how to live a good life.

And all was well until I went to college, took a Philosophy of Religion class, and realized I didn't know what the hell I believed any more.

It was a lively class. I learned that several of my new college friends were agnostic, a term I had never heard before but which, when explained, made a lot of sense. It was wise, I thought, to admit that you don't know if God exists. Perfectly sane and reasonable.

And then I sat alone at my desk in the wee hours of the morning and found myself trying to write a paper arguing whether or not the arguments in a book we read called Atheism: The Case Against God were valid,  and my own not knowing made me feel the exact opposite of sane and reasonable.

As I wrote myself in circles, discussing something I had just learned about called Occam's Razor without really discussing it, in that way college freshmen are wont to do, I saw my mother's disapproving face. I was basically saying the arguments in the book were valid, and I had nothing to come back on except that I believed in God because I just DID, damn it, and there was my lovely Christian mother shaking her head every time I closed my eyes to clear my head.

There were several camps in the discussions we'd had in class about this book. There were the Believers, with the most vocal among them being a guy who started every single comment he made with, "I always thought that..." He had been taught well in Sunday School, and he was sticking to every lesson he had ever learned about faith in his church basement. I admired him for this, because I was sore afraid of the other camp: the Non-Believers. They were the first people I had ever heard who openly admitted to not believing in a higher power of any sort. This even went beyond the Baha'i girl I knew at Governor's Scholars, who had totally rocked my WASP world. Their arguments against God were grounded in logic and reason and science, things I had previously been a really big fan of, but which I found myself hating ever so slightly because some in the class made it seem I had to choose between those things and God. And God and I, we had been pretty close up to that point.

Another camp were my agnostic friends, and they could argue from both sides because they didn't really have a dog in that fight. I sat with them and just nodded every time they opened their mouths, and hoped that by doing so the professor wouldn't actually call on me to have an opinion of my own. Because I was a part of the last camp: the quiet few who were so overwhelmed by all this passionate open-mindedness that we avoided eye contact with the teacher and thanked God/Supreme Being/Earth Goddess/Nothing that this was only a six-week course.

The night I hit my spiritual rock-bottom alone in my room writing my take-home final essay, I resigned myself to my new status: I couldn't find a logically false argument in the book called A Case Against God and therefore I was an atheist. (That shaky logic right there is why I didn't take another philosophy class in college.) I was about ready to call my mom and break this devastating news when I ran into a classmate, an upperclassman I had met through Jason's new fraternity, in the computer lab. He listened to several minutes of my spiritual existential angst and offered to take me to Spivey's, a 24-hour dive that specialized in hangover food for the very brave. He encouraged me to get the cheese sticks with my burger, listened to me beat myself up over my paper, told me not to give up on my faith just yet, and let me in on a surprising secret:

Our professor was an esteemed member of the congregation of the local Presbyterian church. The one right on campus.

Well. I would have bet money, based on what the good Doctor had said during class arguments, that he was on the Non-Believer side of the room. It occurred to me that maybe he was just trying to get those of us brought up in tent revivals, who had been taught that the Bible was the infallible word of God and that all truths were contained within, who had never actually met anyone who did not believe in the supremacy of the Judeo-Christian God, to...think. To actually sit down, hear the other side, and come up with a reason for our faith besides, "I always thought that..." and "Because my mother told me so."

What, exactly, DO you think about God? I asked myself. I know you want to believe. So do it. Write this final. Make an argument. And then let's put this whole thing behind us and continue to only go to church on Easter Sunday like all the other lazy Christians in your family.

Yet I went back to the lab, cracked my tired knuckles, and continued to write that I had to sort of agree with the author of the book because I could find no solid reason not to agree with him. Because it was 3am, I was tired, and I just wanted to pass the class and go home on break.

We filed into the classroom to turn in our finals and have one last class. I had come to peace with my struggles with the following statement, which I had thought right before my pre-dawn nap but had not put on paper:

I believe in God, a Supreme Being, something that surrounds us and penetrates us and binds us together--you know, like The Force. But I don't really know why. It's not because my mom does, or because I was raised that way. I believe...because I want to believe. And it's not logical. And it's not scientific. But I feel it's there. And that's faith--believing when everything and everyone around you points in the other direction. Because you have felt things you, personally, cannot explain otherwise. I could be wrong, though, so I will never push my beliefs on another and I will respect everyone's point of view. With God/Supreme Being/Earth Mother/Nothing as my witness, I shall never discuss religion again.

The professor finally came in and told us a story from some time he had spent in Africa studying tribal religions. This tribe teaches their children from a young age that the gods are out in the jungle, and that they are fearsome creatures. The children believe this because their parents and the elders all tell them so. Then, when the children come of age, the elders put on masks and costumes and take the children out into the jungle. They behave as the fearsome gods, and the children believe they are seeing their deities in all their awesome majesty.

And then the elders take their masks off, show that they've just been tribe members all along, and beat the crap out of the kids.

"I am afraid in this class I may have done this same thing to some of you," the professor said. He appeared to be almost crying. And he turned and left.

In retrospect, it's not surprising that I needed counseling that spring.

If I'm being completely honest, I still don't always know what I believe. On paper, I am a Catholic. After all those years of not knowing the nature of my own faith and having moments of agnosticism and something awfully close to atheism, I felt God's presence in a little Catholic church my sister, brother-in-law, and nephew attended. I converted and led quite a happy religious existence for several years.

But doubts do come, and the masks of the fearsome gods are stripped away, and I feel the sting of the elders' lashes against my spiritual backside.

It doesn't take much to rattle my faith. An example of Catholic hypocrisy here (you don't have to look real hard to find these, sadly), a "Where-was-God-when-this-happened" tragedy there. And I'm right back in that classroom, trying hard not to make eye contact with anybody.

Every so often, I come back to an online quiz a friend sent me several years ago that allegedly tells you what religion you truly are. I re-take it every time I have a crisis of faith. I've never expected Roman Catholic to be my first match; I love the serenity and beauty of the Catholic Mass, but only up to the point that the priest begins the homily by talking about the horrors of books in public school libraries that teach it's okay if Heather has two mommies. (True story. I know the church's stance on gay marriage, but do we have to attack school libraries while we're at it?) Yet my fairly consistent top-five religious matches make me wonder what, exactly, I am. Unitarian Universalist. Quaker. Buddhist. Even (gasp!) Neo-Pagan and New Age. Bring on the Yanni and Enya, kids. Apparently, I've gone granola.

Sunday night found me reluctantly going to a Vespers service, the first service I've been to since the homily that made me flush red with anger. The kid was asked to be a server, so off we went. It was a lovely service; there was no homily, just call-and-response and prayer and long moments of respectful silence led by the parish's newest priest, a Ugandan man whose speaking voice could bring peace to the Middle East. More of this, I thought, could get me firmly on the Believers side of the room. I like God best when people get out of His way.

And when the elders don't wear masks.