Good Catholic Kids

Birthdays, anniversaries, and other special dates almost always put me in a funk. I can be contemplative. Or sad. But I usually just want to be alone until it’s over. I don’t know why, but I feel lonely. I am always missing someone. I am missing my parents. Especially today, their 63rd wedding anniversary.

My parents raised my brother, sister, and me much the same as they were—good Catholic kids. They cared about church. They cared about school. They cared about family.

Family was incredibly important to my parents. We had a big extended family that we saw all the time. Sunday dinners, vacations, and every life milestone were spent with aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents. Family was everything.

But their path to parenthood was not easy, even for good Catholic kids.

Ed & Carol - October 21, 1961

My parents got married in 1961 when my dad was 24 and my mom was 22. This was, according to my mom, old maid territory. Most of her friends were married within a year of high school and started families right away. It’s what good Catholic kids did.

They met when my mom, a teller at the Philadelphia Police and Fire Credit Union, helped my dad, a young (and very handsome) police officer. According to her, my mom was uninterested, but my dad insisted until she agreed to date. They were married six months later.

Having kids was a priority, but kids didn’t come.

My mom rarely talked about her married life before my brother was born. I’ve heard a story about her first Christmas turkey—forgetting to take the giblets out before stuffing and roasting it and one of her first dinners with my dad’s family, when his youngest brother came out at the dining room table, shocking for the early 1960s. But not a lot more.

I do know a few things about their journey to have a family. Today, we’d call her experience traumatizing, but in the early ’60s, it was normal.

First, they sought medical advice. Dad was quickly given a clean bill of health (no details about that were ever shared, but I can imagine…), but she was subjected to invasive procedures and severe judgment. The most shocking story she told me, when I was an adult and going through my own health crisis, was how a doctor had left an instrument and gauze inside of her. Even though she told him she didn’t feel right before she left the hospital, he insisted it was in her head. Later that night, she had to remove the medical debris from her uterus in the bathtub.

She never trusted doctors after that. Her mistrust of them became ingrained and would haunt both of us as my own health crises unfolded. That mistrust left her isolated from medical care for years, a choice that would eventually play a role in her untimely death.

She could never have imagined that as a scared 24-year-old desperate to become a mother.

After a few years, they decided to pursue adoption with Catholic Social Services and the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. Good Catholic kids, they were. And again, my dad—my handsome, good, police officer dad—sailed through the interviews, the psychological tests, and whatever else they needed to do. If you asked him, he would say it was easy.

For my mom, however, it was not easy. The process included oversight from a nun. I never understood what her role was—overseer, psychologist, decision-maker—I am not sure. But she did interview my mom. And as part of the interview, she told my mother that she didn’t have kids because God didn’t think she was worthy of being a mother. She told my sweet, trusting, faithful, good Catholic mother that she was not pregnant because she was not good.

I am still furious for her today.

She spent her life believing that the only reason she became a mother was because my dad was worthy, not her. Because good Catholic kids believe God’s servants.

 My parents persevered, adopting my brother in 1966 and me in 1968. Then, miraculously, while they were preparing to adopt again, my mom got pregnant with my sister. I guess God thought she was finally worthy.

Carol, my mother

 My parents' marriage wasn’t perfect, of course, but I never doubted their devotion or their love for each other. My mother eventually found her voice and was a bit of a terror. Still devoted to the church and her family, she became the parent you didn’t mess with. Dad, forever working shift work, was an occasional figure in the house, who tried to get in his parenting during brief stints when we were all home together. But that belied the real dad—a true softy. Loving, emotional, and deeply caring.

Mom passed away in 2005. Her mistrust of doctors, exacerbated by her treatment by some uncaring gynecologist in the 1960s, played a part in her death. She never saw a doctor after my sister was born until, in her 60s, she had a problem with a salivary gland that became infected and, we think, may have affected her aorta. She did see doctors—she couldn’t ignore what looked like a tumor on her neck—but they never definitively diagnosed anything and died from an aortic aneurysm at 64.

 I remember the year she died; she was so excited about the prospect of turning 65 and, maybe, buying a Lexus. It was somehow a sign that she had made it. That she could finally enjoy life.

Edward, my father

Dad died the day before my birthday in 2009. His death was not a surprise, having suffered with COPD and poor circulation for more than 15 years. Seeing him in the hospital was almost normal. He was covered in scars from arterial transplants in his legs using veins from his arms. His breathing became more and more difficult until he was admitted to the hospital one last time. His last few months were spent in the ICU. My sister and I will always regret that his last months were spent in a hospital, where he endured a slow and difficult end.

So, each year on October 21, my sister and I check in with each other since we both feel a twinge on this day. It’s a mix of sadness, gratitude, regret, and love. And so, on this anniversary of their marriage, I’m left with the same mix of contemplation, sadness, and love. These are the roots I’ve come from, the ones I’m still trying to make sense of.

Looking back on their lives and their marriage, I see now that, for better or worse, these are the roots I come from—the ones that still shape me as I try to make sense of my own story, my unwritten self.