It’s been a difficult Summer. Though my faith can never be broken, it is fragile and fragmented. I have no doubts that it is real or it is good, but things conspire to undermine it: my father’s ill-health and imminent decline, my love/hate relationship with my mother, my husband’s fragile nature and dissatisfaction with his current lot in life, my own mid-life concerns and little plagues, a good friend’s grave illness – serious lack of sleep.

Never do I think, “Just pack it in and stop believing.” “Forget about ever going back to church”, or “don’t bother to pray”. In fact, when I do go to church, not surprisingly, I am uplifted and restored – momentarily, but it fades quickly into the tiring slog of the week, the reality of what my life has evolved into with its ever-present guilts.

I know I’m not perfect. I know I have my faults. My cynical nature, quick-temper and lack of tact are real flaws, but I love my husband with all my heart and I hate to see him sad, confused and forced to go against his personal grain – for me. I stay home and write, manage the daily contact with my mother, (the care-giver of my father), run her errands, take her shopping, and do my best to keep a tidy house and treat my man to delicious meals, while he works so hard at a job that gives him no sense of fulfillment or creativity – no feeling of having done anything worthwhile. We both struggle.

I can barely face my father and I feel consumed with the guilt. He is another person, sitting slumped in his recliner with the lift mechanism. His eyes still sparkle with that Irish-twinkle blue, but the movements are stunted and the speech is so quiet and garbled, I don’t know what he says to me and I can’t respond. He drools and I can hardly stand it. What does that make me?

I miss the way it all used to be–before I was a grown-up. Even after I got married, when it was two sets of lives – mine and my husband’s and Mom and Daddy’s. They lived in the house I grew up in, with it’s reupholstered furniture and wear-worn cabinets and patched up rugs. They listened to classical music and drank sherry every day and we, moved from flat to flat to town-home and then to our cozy house of today. We talked on the phone and we laughed and carried on. We got together a couple of times a month and we ate fantastic home-cooked meals and drank wine and joked and Daddy and I did cryptic crosswords and my husband went for walks with my him while Mom and I drank tea and chatted about family down east.

All gone. All those days disappearing into the past – swallowed up by the present reality. They live here now–in our town, not 5 minutes away, in a sweet, luxuriously appointed apartment with a fireplace and 2 bathrooms and a laundry room en suite.
Mom does laundry every single day, and she keeps “her bathroom” spotless and lovely with the pink flower-trimmed bathmat and the organza shower curtain — the bathroom she never had at home.
Unspeakable, hidden things happen in my father’s bathroom. Things you don’t talk about unless you’re family. The former Chartered Accountant and erudite epistolarian (it seems there is no politician, newspaper or magazine to which he did not write) is reduced to protective underwear and a stranger giving him his ablutions.

I have yet to weep.

Yesterday, my mother confided in me that she struggles with her faith as well. Although she receives communion every Sunday from a kind extraordinary minister, she sometimes can’t even keep her eyes open – depending on how went the night before. I tell her that God knows she’s still trying and he doesn’t expect her to go through this without questions.

I confided in her that I have not been to confession in years. I asked her why, as a family, we always went to a different church at Easter and Christmas to make our confessions. She said “Because we knew the priest too well.” Maybe that’s why I like to remain anonymous. When I’ve tried to get involved, it has backfired. I just don’t fit.

I sometimes think I was meant to be a nun – closeted away with my faith, able to believe from the confines of a cell in a monastery, in the mountains. If I hadn’t met my husband, perhaps that’s where I’d be.

I confess to sometimes wanting to run, far away.

I confess to Almighty God…

Latin Version:

Confíteor Deo omnipoténti et vobis, fratres,
quia peccávi nimis
cogitatióne, verbo, ópere, et omissióne:
mea culpa, mea culpa, mea máxima culpa.

Ideo precor beátam Maríam semper Vírginem,
omnes Angelos et Sanctos,
et vos, fratres, oráre pro me
ad Dóminum Deum nostrum.

English Translation:

I confess to almighty God,
and to you, my brothers and sisters,
that I have sinned through my own fault,
in my thoughts and in my words,
in what I have done, and in what I have failed to do;
and I ask blessed Mary, ever virgin,
all the angels and saints,
and you, my brothers and sisters,
to pray for me to the Lord our God.