Sun Days on Orcas | I’m alive thanks to Catholicism

My mom was proposed to five times before saying yes. How does that happen? Did she seriously lead a bunch of guys on, then dash their dreams? Were things a little more flippant back then, and you asked a girl to marry you on the second date? Or did people “wait until they were married,” so jump into marriage as fast as possible?

My mom was fun, pretty, and social. She loved to ride horses, go to dances, and waterski with her Catholic youth group in college. The only way to get farther with a great catch like my mom was to marry her.

What all those guys found out was that you could only marry her once you committed to Catholicism.

Awesome filter. I’m pretty partial to my dad, so all of those nos led her to him. The fifth guy. The one whose astrology-loving mother and barely Lutheran parents raised a slightly-churched choir boy with the prepubescent voice of an angel. “Golden Voice,” so he was called in his youth.

They met on Bourbon Street before it became the Sodom and Gomorrah it is today. She was a nurse helping deliver babies at Charity Hospital and he was a petroleum engineer working out on oil rigs for Shell. They lived just down the hall from each other and he never seemed to notice her, as she says. I bet he assumed that his cerebral nature didn’t align with her social vibe. It all changed the day his roommate asked her to stay with him while he was sick.

They got to know each other over orange juice and aspirin, and got married three months later at Saint Louis Cathedral – once he’d finished the proper steps to becoming a Catholic, of course.

I give him a lot of credit for that. He must have really loved my mom. It’s actually a good idea – ‘Do you love me enough to do all of this religious stuff for the rest of your life?’ And you see who’ll stick around.

I am the fifth of five children, thanks to Catholic procreation. I wouldn’t be here if contraceptives had anything to do with it. Thank God! (I don’t say that here for political reasons relating to the whole abortion issue, but simply in relief that I’m on the earth!)

My devout mother believed that however many children they had would be God’s plan for them. Around the time of her fourth pregnancy, her secular father pulled her aside. “This has got to stop, Janny,” he said. “It’s getting embarrassing.”

Eleven lonely yet relieved years of near-abstinence went by. I guess my parents just couldn’t hold back any longer one night while watching The Johnny Carson Show. (I learned all of this later when I helped my parents dejunk their house and came upon some Catholic “Marriage Encounter” journals they had written in years before.)

“Were you sad when you found out you were pregnant for the fifth time?” I probed one day, knowing my mom would never want to admit any negativity surrounding my conception.

“You were our little caboose! Our bonus!”

“Oh, come on, Mom! Eleven years after all the others! You thought you were done. You can tell me. Did you cry when you found out?”

“Of course not!”

“You had to have. You were told you had to start all over again with a baby at 40. Come on. It’s okay to tell me.”

After about five minutes of this, she said, “Well… Okay, my eyes welled up when I was walking out of the doctor’s office.”

Not long after I was on the way, she and my dad sought the advice of a more “modern” priest, hoping he’d grant them Catholic clemency for having her tubes tied. He did. When I was born, she sealed the deal. So much for God’s say in it!

It was the beginning of a life being the youngest one in a house full of teenagers.

To be continued…