I have heard many horror stories about mean nuns. If there were any physically mean nuns in my K-12 Catholic education, at two schools, one an all girl Catholic h.s., I never witnessed nuns being mean. Only boys misbehaved and if they did, they often disappeared from our school. I have heard so many stories of nuns, and sometimes priests, cracking knuckles with rulers, using wooden paddles with air holes to increase the pain when a principal would 'spank' a rule breaker, but I never heard such stories in my K-12 years of Catholic education. My only memories of mean nuns consist of verbal abuse, which, I know quite well, can be awful but the meanest nun in my grammar school, Sister Jerome Marie, wasn't sarcastically abusive all that much. Additionally, she mostly reserved her invectives for boys.
My older brother, Chuck the Fuck, got as much negative attention from 'the nuns' as any kid in our school ever did. The nuns told my parents not to bother to send him to a Catholic h.s. because he was destined for prison, had no future and there was no point spending money to send him to a Catholic high school. This being the world Stanley Kubrick created in A Clockwork Orange, where all the nasty boys become vicious, violent cops, my bro, Chuck the Fuck, went on to become a judge. Chuck is a real shit. He beat me up when I was 1, 2, 3, 4 and then my Irish twin, eleven months younger than me, grew to be larger than Chuck. Chuck had also been beating Joe up every chance he got but once Joe saw that he, Joe, was bigger than Chuck the Fuck (my special name for the fuck), Joe told Chuck that if Chuck ever hit him or me (and I remember perking up as Joe talked, surprised he was including me in putting an end to our suffering at Chuck's nasty hand!), Joe would beat him up real good. Chuck, being a bully, was also a coward. He never beat me or Joe up after Joe set him straight. Our parents kept having kids and Chuck beat on all of them but the baby, my baby sister, my only sister. Everyone doted on our baby sister. I guess fifteen year olds, and Chuck was 15 when she was born, didn't beat on babies. Chuck the fuck beat up on Tomy, born when I was 7. Chuck punched Tom when Chuck was in college, then law school and little guy Tom in middle school and high school.
And our parents, and later when Chuck was routinely hitting Tom, our single parent dad that Chuck and Tom lived with for awhile, never once suggested to Chuck that he stop hitting his siblings.
And Chuck did not limit his bullying violence to his siblings. He just chose his outside the family victims more carefully. He only chose boys that were younger than him and had no big brothers.
What about nuns and presidential politics? How I ramble.
So. Mostly I thought of all the nuns as sweethearts, except for Sister Jerome Marie, my fifth grade teacher who was actually tough. I never heard of her hitting any student but she was mean*. On the first day of my fifth grade, with me fantasizing that God has made a mistake, was playing a trick on me and I was really in another fifth grade class, with one of the nice nuns, Sister Jerome Marie said to me, in front of our whole, overcrowded class of at least fifty students, "So you are So-and-So Fitzpatrick. I had your brother last year." I swear my teeth chattered, I was like the cowardly lion facing the Wizard of Oz for the first time, chattering and also chewing on my tail. I said nothing, just shivered. "You brother is a son of a bitch." For any non catholics reading, you might not know that a nun calling an 11 year old boy as asshole no matter what a little shit he may have been, was just not done.
I was thrilled, frightened but thrilled. I couldn't wait to tell my dad what Sister Jerome Marie had said. Dad did not ruin Chuck's day by yelling at him for being regarded as an asshole by a nun. Oh no. Dad called up one of the priests and wailed complaints about Sister Jerome Marie. Dad had a point. Nuns should not call anyone an asshole in front of children. Or in front of anyone, I guess, but dad's anger focussed on the classroom setting.
There was one nun that I never had as a teacher but I had gotten to know pretty well. For many years, my mom made me her gift to God. As my mother put it, loudly and frequently, to me and everyone in our parish that would listen, "Since my mother gave one of her children to God, for my sister Joanne is now a nun, I am going to give one of my children to God, my daughter." Every time she said it, I would think, but never said because my mom would have punished me for talking back, "Why do you want to give me away?" Sometimes I thought "You have four sons so you give away your only daughter?" Plus, mom had lost two girls in infancy, my first two sisters. Her decision to give me away to God really stung. I still think that as her only surviving girlchild for many years, with my sister that lived only coming along as I started high school, mom should have given God a son.
Since I had a vocation and the whole goddamned parish knew, for occasionally they were asked to pray for my vocation. That didn't happen often but when it did, I felt so doomed.
One tiny positive in that hellish nightmare of having a vocation, and feeling guilty about my dishonesty because I knew God had not called me to a vocation, so I was a liar!, was for many years, I had to stay after school and help Sister Mary David clean the altar and lay out the vestments for the following day's masses. It was a massive parish, swolen by the post World War II Baby Boom. The nuns were just about the only ones at the 7 a.m. mass. The 8 a.m. mass was for pious holy rolling kids, or kids with bully moms like mine. Yeah, I went to daily mass at 8 a.m., privileged to be a couple minutes late for our 8:30 school start time and then allowed to eat breakfast after I had made my First Communion. In those days, you couldn't eat three hours before communion. That changed as I got older. So I went to mass daily and stayed after school daily to sweep the marble flooring of the very big altar. Dust the alter and its holy things carefully. And hand Sister Mary David the vestments as she laid them out in reverse order for the priests could put them on in the right order without having to lift them out of their drawers. Priests were treated with great deference.
Doing this every school day for years lead to me getting to know several nuns and all the priests.
I liked the peaceful experience cleaning that altar with Sister Mary David.
I thought that by now, I would remember the name of the nun who first talked to me, and all the kids in our school, about her views of having a female president. Maybe she came around to give us a singing class now and then? I never had in in class, don't remember her cleaning altars with me.And, by the way, I think this sentence, the sentence of having a publicly declared vocation, only lasted several years. It only seemed like forever when I was 8, 9, 10, maybe 11.
Eventually my aunt the nun saved me. But right now I want to wrap this presidential commentary up.
Sister Mary Somebody must have been the choir teacher. She came around to all the classrooms regularly for something. This seems odd because Sister Mary David, the nun I knew best, was my piano teacher for years, until Sister Mary David and this nun with the female president preocupation, left the convent. Say, I wonder if they were lovers and left their marriage to God to be together? I like that. I definitely got to know the presidentially obsessed nun because I hung out with Sister Mary David.
But all the nuns knew me quite well, all saw me after school walking along with Sister Mary David, stopping to chat whenever SMD stopped to chat. And of course, being holy people, and teachers and priests, they all were very nice to me. Plus they all knew my whole family, mom dad and all sibs.
During the presidential campaign when J.F. Kennedy ran, the first Catholic to run for President, Sister Mary Somebody, took to running around saying "People keep saying when will we have a female president." Sidebar: I never heard anyone but Sister Mary Somebody suggest we should have a female president. I was mildly shocked the first time I heard such a suggestion. A female president? As if. Girls became moms, teachers, nurses or nuns.
Sister Mary Somebody had a bee in her bonnet. She would blast out her first sentence, see the line in quotes above and the, the bombast rising in her tone, "I would never want to be president and no sane female ever would." She would pause, probably for effect and she achieved good effect with the big, drawn-in breath that she slowly exhaled before she said "No woman would ever want that job. Only crazy people would want that job. Only men would want that job."
A couple of times, I even glanced around to see if the coast was clear for Sister Mary Somebody's indiscretion, to see if any priests were within earshot. I think she scanned her environment before she delivered her subversive talk about females ever becoming president.
Hilary, Sister Mary Somebody would have thought you must be out of your mind to want to be president. and I think, Hilary, that you are cray cray, a warmongering, corporate-military-industrial-complex loving lunatic.
*I know I had the highest IQ in my grade school because some numb nuts teacher told me so, forgetting, I guess, that I had several brothers attending the same school. So, although I was, for the most part, a docile girl, I lived with constant torment resulting from too many brothers. For example: we were limited to one hour of television a day. My mom, the early adaptor! My brothers and I argued daily over what we would watch for that one hour. Mom never would let me watch 'girl' shows separately because, and she was probably right, my brothers would sneak in and watch more than an hour. So it was a tightly enforced one hour. Mom solved her problem of dealing with our squabbles by declaring our television watching to be ruled by democracy, majority rules. Bu mom!, the boys are more than me and the boys never pick my shows. So every Friday night, we watched "The Man From U.N.C.L.E." And don't get me wrong, I learned to love it. I still have a slight crush on Ilia Kuriakan. But it was an acquired taste. Once my mom made up her mind with her children, she never wavered. We were only limited to one hour a day when my dad was not home. When dad was home, he watched tv as much as he wished and he liked to watch a lot. And my dad, bless him, totally understood that I was entitled to, only very rarely, get to watch a girl show, which he would gamely watch with me. Mom would always be in the background, warning my dad. "Charles, you are such a bad influenced on your children!" Anyway, long paragraph coming to an end: I snottily bragged about having the highest IQ in the school, helpfully pointing out often, to my bros, that if I had the highest, theirs was lower than mine. I loved Mr. Mildice.
After I finished 4th grade, with my 4th grade teacher seating me along side bookshelves filled with a self-study, homeschooling educational program that went up to grade 12. She had realized I was bored out of my gourd in class. She said if I kept quiet, I could work my way through the lessons. I got up to the 11th grade curriculum in those books by the end of 4th grade. That teacher got the nuns to urge my parents to send me to a gifted kids school. My parents considered that but they decided that my brother Chuck would torment the whole family in his jealousy that I had been singled out as smarter than him. When I walked into Sister Jerome Marie's class, having been assigned to my nightmare choice of 5th grade teacher -- my grade school had three classes for each grade, crammed to the rafters with boomers -- I kept praying that I was in a nightmare and over in my real life, I was starting at my new school for gifted kids. I was not particular interested in the smart label. I didn't really believe I was smart. I was interested in going to a school without Chuck. I still find it hard to believe my parents withheld the possibility of the right education for me to accommodate their eldest son, the first born penis. Please note: my parents accommodated Chuck's bad behavior, his bullying of the whole family, his terrorism, for he terrorized my parents as much as us kids, priotizing his appeasement above my education. They were afraid of him and the havoc he very likely would have wrecked on the whole family if he was always jealous that his little sister was going to a school for smart kids. They never considered, I guess, that as parents they might have exercised some parental authority, attempted to discipline Chuck.
When I was in the 7th grade, my class happened to be let out ahead of Chuck's 8th grade class. I had waited for his class to come out so I could walk home with Ellen from next door. I was facing the school doors as Chuck burst out, saw me and, as if he had carefully choreographed himself, he almost danced over to me, jumped up like a hooper ball player going to a jump shot, and smackd me in my left eye with his right hand on the way down. I had a real shiner. And the nuns told me I was a crybaby and a tattle taler when I reported Chuck's assault to them. I had a faint hope that a nun might discipline Chuck for that black eye (it didn't get black until a little later) because I knew my parents would not discipline him.
"2007, VI" ["It is hard to have hope"] by Wendell Berry. Text as published in This Day: New & Collected Sabbath Poems (Counterpoint, 2013).
