Those White Gloves

Those White Gloves, Marywood, 1963

My Irish ancestors, newly arrived in the United States, chose education and religious vocation as their path in the early 1900’s. My mother’s sister, later known as Sister Marie, accepted the calling.

This divine pursuit robs my mother of her beloved sister when she enters the convent, and in the process, sets up a lifelong love/hate relationship between my mother and the Catholic Church.

Continually steeped in the beliefs and rituals of Mass and the Sacraments, including confession of sins and the terror of burning in hell, my family bought into a feedback system bordering on tyranny.

Plagued by fears of being seen as less than others, pushed my Irish grandparents to seek legitimacy through the Catholic Church. This legacy of fearfulness was handed down to my mother and became the story of my life.

I kept the secrets, the pretense, while my mother covered up her Irish heritage with white gloves and a hat. The weekly parade of her five children every Sunday at Mass proved her devotion to Catholicism.

All of my brothers were altar boys while I sang in the choir. None of us were pure. We skipped out on Catechism, but got good grades in school, drank beer at parties, but never got in trouble with the police. Well, not serious trouble.

I went on to a Catholic all girls college where I majored in home economics. (See photo above.) No, I wasn’t pure. I wasn’t even smart. Let’s call it the luck of the Irish. I’m eighty-six percent Irish—I’m calling it eighty-six percent pure!

My junior year I played house—living with eleven other girls in the home economics practice house. We planned meals, cooked, cleaned, and learned the domestic art of entertaining.

At a time when women were becoming more independent, I was learning how to plate a jello mold.

I wanted to be a writer, but I needed to have stability, so I took a job teaching home economics at an inner city high school in Rochester, NY. Talk about a steep learning curve!

I had graduated from a Catholic girl’s college, after living in a rural town in PA, and I had no experience with diversity. As it turned out, I was teaching life skills that were valued by my students—sewing darts in those tight skirts and learning how to create a meal from whatever you have in the cupboard were popular classes.

I shed the white gloves, the pretense, however the fearfulness was to be a lifelong companion.

Thanks for subscribing to Get Gutsy. Let me know in the COMMENTS what you’re doing to cope with all of the fearfulness around us.

Remember, there’s no expiration on dreams,

Trish

Link to my novel, Paper Bags: https://woodhallpress.com/paper-bags