I Know My Mother Loved Me. The Church Could Have Helped Her Accept Me.
nytimes.comMy mom raised hell at her Catholic high school in the 1950s. Carol smoked, skipped class and talked back to Mother Bourke, the formidable headmistress.
Whenever the nuns asked her to rat on a fellow student or admit to some suspected sin, she’d reply, “My father says I don’t have to do that,” upon which Mother Bourke would send her home to her father.
At Mom’s 50th birthday party, her best friends from school, Cynthia and Mary, gave her a little notecard in a silver frame. The card read “Very Good” — in the style and with the school insignia of the good conduct notes that Mother Bourke handed out to the best behaved.
Mom said she had been a “no-notes girl”: a student who never got a card because she acted fresh. When I came along, adopted by my parents when they were in their mid-30s, Mom gave me two godmothers, Cynthia and Mary, and my baptism was a big family affair.
