A Success

Since March 18, I have completely filled an edition of this book (the one on the bottom) with fiction. I have 7.75 completed first drafts of stories and some nice ideas to which I may return later.

I mention this because fiction, though absorbing, is very hard work. As you may have guessed, blogging is easy for me. But writing fiction is very hard, and the hardest part is sitting in a chair long enough and often enough to finish it.

In case you are still worried about  "the bodis riper", which I rather unfairly stopped while Hewbert was lingering in bed between life and death, I have not destroyed it or anything like that. But it was at 100,000 words (ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND)--most of them deliberately misspelled--and just ponder, for the moment, what it feels like to an author have written a funny, popular story of 100,000 words (so far) that she knows nobody will never, ever, publish, let alone pay a dime for.

Nevertheless I feel badly for its fans (especially Notburga, whose brilliant (and edifying) Sheep Horror Comic can be found here), so maybe I will finish "the bodis riper" by rewriting a chapter every Sunday and thus gaining the momentum to finish it. I do actually know how it ends. And although it is rubbish, it is our rubbish, so I supposed I should treat it with more respect. (Sigh.)  And when it is done, we can have a virtual party.

I'm Making a Dress...

...with my mother, but she's doing most of the work.

"Lookit, Binkie," she said at some point. "This won't do."

She was referring to my "running backstitches", whose steps were too wide.

How to get my mother to make the whole dress herself before she leaves in the morning? Hmm, hmm, hmm...

Stay tuned.

Divorced and Remarried, Catholic Style

The first person to say anything nasty to me about my being divorced was another Catholic divorcée. This was during a "writing centre" session at theology school, about six years after the annulment, five years after the divorce. Once or twice a week, I met with fellow students to advise them about the papers they were writing--sometimes to explain essay structure, sometimes just to check their spelling, and sometimes to suggest cures for writer's block. As these there theological papers, the conversation sometimes flowed to the personal, and one fellow student--ten or twenty years my senior--confided that she was divorced.

"Oh," I said, and followed that up with something very few people at the college knew, "I'm divorced, too. I got an annulment afterwards," I added, as I always, always did, to remove the sting of scandal.

"Well, I guess that makes you better than the rest of us," snarled my fellow divorcée.

Being attacked for having submitted myself to the annulment process was a new experience. Years before, at a dinner in the basement of the Oratorians' Saint Vincent de Paul Church, locus of old school, orthodox, rather traditional Toronto Catholics, I had responded to a polite question about my ex-husband with, "I don't know. The marriage has been annulled."

"It never happened then," said the chap--lay or priest, I don't remember--warmly, and may God shower blessings on his head now and forever. My inner wounds, let us say, were still fresh, and I was spiritually bleeding, and I was rather afraid of all these old school, orthodox, rather traditional Toronto Catholics. I cannot begin to imagine why I was at that dinner at all. However, I am so glad I was, and even though "it never happened" is not an exact explanation of what an annulment is, that was the best possible thing anyone there could have said.

One thing I could count on, among orthodox Catholics in the 1990s, was consistency. When it came to annulments, nobody made nasty remarks about rubber stamps, and only ex-Catholics made jokes about paying for repairs to the church roof. Roma locuta, causa finita seemed to be the motto, and I felt glad and strengthened after the abysmal, painful, unavoidable, blessed, freeing annulment process. Despite allowing me to marry an anti-Catholic, the Church had saved me, given me the certificates, dusted me off. Toronto ruled in my favour, and then so did the Papal Nuncio. Ottawa locuta, causa finita.  I kept the papers in an orange gift box. In case of fire, I would have grabbed it first. This was not so much because I hoped to marry again--although I did--but because the papers proved that I was not still married. To have gone through all that, and I did everything one after the other--Abandonment, Separation, Divorce, Annulment, and have people tell me my ex still had claims on me was just unthinkable.

And, indeed, it did not happen until after I announced my engagement to B.A. on Seraphic Singles and got a long and nasty comment from a very unhappy male stranger, who apparently resented the money he thought my diocese had spent on my behalf, etc. However, I got a handful of strange comments and emails from male readers at that time--two virtually broke up with me--and although it shocked me that a complete stranger resented my happiness, he did not have the same impact as either my fellow divorcée or that blessed man in the church hall who so warmly said, "Then it never happened."

So when Pope Francis alleges that the "Divorced and Remarried" are not already welcomed by the Church, I cautiously agree that there may be a few isolated individuals who take out their own disappointments on Catholics who have gone through a divorce, got an annulment, and been remarried in the Church.  Twice-married "Professional Catholics" like me--it's not a term of pride, incidentally, but it's currently a fair description--get grilled before we are allowed to peddle our wares in European Catholic magazines and on European Catholic radio shows. It's not particularly pleasant, but tough beans. There's an important principle at stake, and both Saint Thomas More and Saint John Fisher died for it, Saint John Fisher quite horribly.

And that's it. That's the only kind of "unwelcome" I have had from my Church, insofar that I was divorced and remarried: unhappy people being surly and media people fulfilling their responsibility towards their Catholic audience. If  you write a book called "Seraphic Singles", and it is marketed as a Catholic book, you had better have been single when you wrote it, as I discovered in a recording studio in Warsaw. Fortunately, I was.

But we all know that by "Divorced and Remarried" nobody is really talking about people like me, are they? The existence and experiences of Catholics faithful enough to put themselves in the hands of God and the Church by applying for an annulment have been swept under the carpet. Nobody notices us or talks about us: all they can talk about are divorced people who never bothered and are not so much remarried as married to two people simultaneously, or married to one person in the eyes of God, and married to another person only in the eyes of the state. I was so annoyed by how little attention was being paid to Catholics who are divorced and remarried licitly, I decided to come out as "divorced, annulled and remarried" in my column at the Catholic Register.

Well, I guess that makes you better than the rest of us.

The Boomers are such a hoot. Their creed was "We don't need a piece of paper to prove our love for each other," and now it is "We don't need a piece of paper to prove that we're free to marry somebody else." I assume it is the Boomers--particularly the German Boomers--who are clamouring to receive communion, since my generation and Polish Pretend Daughter's generation are not that excited about church attendance, particularly those members among the vast numbers who rate their sex lives over the teachings of Christ and His Church. And as it was not well rubbed into my generation how spiritually damnable it is to receive the Eucharist when you are in a state of mortal sin, I would bet my last dollar that most "Divorced and [Illicitly]Remarried" Canadian Catholics who still go to Church are receiving communion ANYWAY.  In a big urban parish, who's to stop them? A EMHC? Don't make me laugh. The priest? Does he know the couple from Adam (and Eve)?

I am amusing myself by imagining scenes in which a man and a woman and their (or "their") children are socializing after Mass and casually mention that one or both have "former" spouses elsewhere. I suppose it could happen, although "Gosh, your son doesn't look like his father" isn't really the first after-Mass remark that comes to mind.

I suppose it might happen that a Boomer, approaching retirement and bored senseless by his priest's sermons, which he thinks he could write better, decides to give ministry a go himself, and asks his priest about his becoming a deacon. The priest might say, "Well, you realize that if your wife dies, it's a life of celibacy for you," and the Boomer might reply, "You mean my current wife?" Then the priest says--incidentally, they're speaking German--"How many wives have you had?" And the man chortles and says there was Greta, back in 1972, but they're been divorced for yonks, and he hasn't seen her since their daughter's wedding last year. He and Mitzi got hitched at the Rathaus in 1984. The priest, staggered, then says something awkward like, "Wait a minute. Have you ever had that marriage regularized?" And Gerhardt (his name is Gerhardt) is dead shocked and says, after a pause, "Well, I know we've never had children of our own, but we have also never indulged in Greek practices." Then he goes home and writes an outraged letter to Cardinal Kasper and maybe one to Bild.

Honestly, I cannot imagine any situation in which a divorced-and-remarried Catholic who isn't trying to become the Henry VIII of his parish church would reveal to all and sundry that he has never bothered to get an annulment. It would surely only come up if, like me, he set himself up as some kind of spokesman for Catholicism. We do not turn away children from baptism or Catholic schools because their parents are bigamous/adulterers, so I really do not understand what is going on, or why Pope Francis seems to think "the Church" has been unwelcoming to the "divorced and remarried" any more or less than it has been to other notorious--and by notorious, I mean widely known, scandalous, out-and-proud, public, sanctimoniously unrepentant--sinners.

As for public adulterers who indignantly say they are no such thing receiving Communion, someone on Father Z made a really excellent analogy. A bleeding-heart with a faulty understanding of the Eucharist as "a family meal" suggested that to invite the Divorced-and-Remarried to Mass but not give them communion was akin to being a warm Italian Mama (nice stereotype there), who invites you in, and lets you smell the delicious food, and then doesn't feed you anything. However, this was countered by a wit with a much better understanding of the Eucharist as "the unbloody sacrifice" who said the Church was like the Italian Mama who, after inviting you in, discovers that you are bleeding from a hideous gut wound, and stops you from eating anything because it could kill you.

***
UPDATE (Aug 7): Voice of the Family announcement here.

The Unbearable Humiliation of Writing

On Monday I took a seat at the back of the bus and took a new book out of my (B.A.'s, really, but I stole it) tweed bag. The lady who sat next to me stole covert glances at the title which was, embarrassingly enough, How to be a Writer.

"Two of my books have been published," I silently informed her, in case she read minds, too. "One of them was published in three countries."

It shouldn't be embarrassing to read a book called How to be a Writer. After all, it wouldn't be embarrassing to be caught reading a book called Be Your Own Plumber. In fact, I bet the woman beside me on the bus would have been impressed had she caught me reading such a book. Angling for Dummies might have sent her mind off on an amusing train of thought having nothing to do with me. Step-by-Step Guide to Dressmaking--now that would be a worthy book, and one I almost bought in a charity shop during last Saturday's excursion to North Berwick. However, I was embarrassed by How to be a Writer. That said, I was less embarrassed about reading such a book than I had ever been before in my life, for there I was actually reading it. 

Now I wish someone had given it to me, along with the typewriter, as my combination Confirmation/Elementary School Graduation present. Of course, even then it might have been too late, and I would have rolled my eyes and repeated that old half-lie, "Nobody can teach you how to write." 

And that probably seemed true at the time, for I thought nobody had taught me how to write--beyond the alphabet, phonics, basic grammar, punctuation and spelling. As a matter of fact, I had taught myself how to write, mostly by reading for hours and hours a day. I read so much, my parents actually discouraged me from reading, and when I stopped reading novels--except for university classes, and I rather despised myself for having to fall back on them to get a degree--I accounted it as an acquired virtue.  

Yes, I know: sad. 

I taught myself to write also by keeping a diary for thirty years and by writing stories. In Grade 5, possibly as a PR stunt on my behalf, the teacher asked me to read my latest story--horror, complete with falling into hell by accident--to the entire class. Although I was convinced that they all hated my guts, they fell silent and listened with rapt attention. Sadly, it did not improve my attitude towards them, but it did give me that first heady rush of the storyteller's power over others. 

My great ambition was to write my first book by age 14, as Gordon Korman had with This Can't Be Happening at Macdonald Hall!, but I was utterly daunted by the prospect and remained so for decades. Finally I wrote a novel by filling three thick blank books outside Dooney's Café in Toronto in longhand while buying cappuccino and little meals I could barely afford. I have never read the damn thing, but by then I had guessed that the only way to write a novel was to put one word in front of another until I had more than 60,000 words. To do this, I had to sit in one place for hours at a time, returning to it daily, and block out the demonic voice that said "This sucks." 

It wasn't until I started to teach writing skills at a community college that I realized the demonic voice that had prevented me from writing a novel before age 14, age 24 and age 31, possessed other people, too. In fact, this demon seemed to possess all my writing students. When, clearing my throat, I mentioned his existence, they all laughed and nodded. He sat in their heads, telling them their writing sucked. I don't know why they were laughing, unless it was from the relief that he wasn't picking on just them.

I advised them that the only way to finish their homework assignments was to block out the Writing Demon's voice until they had finished their first draft. Write up to their minimum or maximum without a single cross-out, I said, and only then go back and change things. 

"How long can you do that for?" asked a student.

I said I didn't know, but I would find out.

I found out. But I can't remember how long it did take. (Two months, maybe?) Indeed, I have never returned to that manuscript. I have never sat down and read it. I may never sit down and read it, for I am not sure I could take the pain of the humiliation of having written complete rubbish.

Writing the rubbish, I can do. Editing the rubbish....

The difference between an amateur and a professional, claims How to Be a Writer, is not in the writing but in the rewriting. Amateurs write. Professionals rewrite.  In fact, the author recommends the writer complete not one or two or three drafts before allowing his work to be exposed to the glance of another, but eleven. ELEVEN! I haven't written eleven drafts in my life. I have written--at maximum--three, but generally I have had one master draft and erased and corrected, first with a pencil and then with a computer. In between, when I typed, I typed one copy. Sometimes I might write and then type, but when it came to stories, my friends just had to put up with white-out.

Eleven drafts! ELEVEN!

I would think that by eleven drafts,  I would be so sick of second-guessing myself, I would throw up every morning before facing the computer. However, I would probably be spared the sick horror of discovering a really stupid mistake in a draft AFTER I had sent it to an editor, famous agent or publisher. And, as a matter of fact, I am a lot more careful in my paid assignments than I am in anything else. Of course, such assignments are usually no more than 800 words, and I edit, cut, spell-check, read and reread like crazy to make sure they are actually under 800 words. Over 800 words, and someone else starts cutting for me. 

Another good reason to write eleven (honestly, though, eleven?) drafts is so that you can de-friend your characters. Until I was 19 and quit writing fiction for years--a sad story, let's not go there--I just blatantly wrote stories about people I knew. My friends. Our enemies. Teachers. Star Trek characters. These started as scripts. Come to think of it, I  think they also ended as scripts. I wanted to be a playwright but almost never saw any plays. (Personal revelation: no wonder I thought theatre began and ended with Marlowe, Shakespeare and Shaw: I was taken to see only Marlowe, Shakespeare and Shaw. And the two occasions I branched out--on my own--I was vapourized by the sight of full frontal nudity.) Anyway, scripts. Scripts meant dialogue, and I had a good ear for dialogue. Dialogue and plot were the be-all and end-all, as far as I was concerned, and being able to reproduce my friends' verbal quirks was--I believed--my greatest skill. 

It was fun, and it was funny, and the lightning pace of written conversaton never gave me enough time to think "This sucks"--which I never ever did until the Great Shock. And, meanwhile, I assumed that other writers, REAL writers, made up THEIR characters from absolutely nothing.

Since then I have understood that only God can make something out of nothing. Nancy Mitford, Evelyn Waugh--all the 20th century authors I most admired--made up characters out of bits of their friends and family. "Linda" of The Pursuit of Love is part Nancy, part her sister Diana, part her sister Deborah and part of whatever alchemy goes into making characters unique beings you remember forever as if they were real people. "Fabrice Sauveterre" was a Nancy-eye view of her lover Gaston Palewski, who in real life had such appalling body odour, it is a mystery how he managed to have as many lovers as he did.  "Catriona McClelland" of Ceremony of Innocence is a number of women, mostly older and smarter than me, who have scared me rather a lot. "Denis Erlichmann" is a highly romanticized portrait of a German seminarian whom I very much doubt his friends (who are also in the novel) would recognize. "Suzy" is both me at 19 and all my writing students under 23 combined, but particularly the baby-faced one I worked so hard to help and dissed me so much in the Teacher Evaluation form. 

However, the good thing about all these models is that I hadn't seen them in years or they were away in Germany, completely innocent of the liberties I was taking with my memories of them. The tricky task now--I hope 11 drafts can solve it--is to refine and change my current cast of characters so much that my circle of acquaintances doesn't assume that I am taking revenge on some helpless friend by making him or her the villain. If he's blond, he must be Piotr (and how cruel to make him a spotty coalminer!). If she's dark-haired, she must be Anita (and how bitchy to suggest she might ever use a ouija board--well, women all hate each other, you know). Being chastised for cruelty is like sugar to the yeast of the Writing Demon, who roars up whenever given a chance, because if there is anything he hates, it's creation. 

On the other hand, such accusations can be a spur to indignation because it is an insult to one's ability to capture the people around us perfectly. "If I ever write a character entirely based on you," I have said more than once, "you will be left in no doubt." And indignation is great--it gives you someone to be mad at other than yourself. And as we know, women have a big problem with blame: the female creed seems to be "If at first you can't succeed, tell yourself you are a disgusting human being and develop an eating disorder." Really, we should be more like men and say things like, "You know, the editor of Blood & Aphorisms is clearly brain-dead, and I'll show him!"

And meanwhile, I say it again, I wish I had read "How to Be a Writer" when I was twelve. Indignation with an unappreciative public should be balanced by humility, and if even fantastic swing-dancers keep on taking lessons, well, then, heck, maybe I could still learn a thing or six million.

:Mad Trad 4: C is for Confession

My column about Benediction cause a bit of a flutter in the Prairies, I have recalled, because it included some Latin. I reassured my editor that this next piece would have no Latin at all. Of course, it is enthusiastic about the Sacrament of Reconciliation, only calling it, as did everyone before 1963, and many after, "Confession."

There are different theories on when one should go to Confession. One school of thought is that you ought not to go at all unless you are conscious of some serious, big, fat, nasty sin. Needless to say, this is not the Traddy school of thought.

Right. Copied from my email, and previously appearing in the Prairie Messenger, here is my piece on Confession:

Five Minutes Old

Every once in a while, usually on a Saturday, I get a short phone call from my husband [Benedict Ambrose].

“Five minutes old,” he says.

This is a reference to G.K. Chesterton, the English convert who said that the “first essential answer” to the question “Why did you join the church of Rome?” was “To get rid of my sins.” Chesterton believed that the Catholic who steps out of the confessional steps out again into the dawn of his beginning, re-made in God’s own image: “The accumulations of time can no longer terrify. He may be grey and gouty, but he is only five minutes old.”

Given the relief of absolution, it is strange that nowadays we go to confession so rarely. It is doubly strange when we consider the popularity of celebrity magazines and talk shows where people confess their sins to the world and beg forgiveness of such spiritual leaders as Oprah Winfrey. Politicians rush to apologize for historical sins for which no reasonable person could blame them personally. We love public acts of contrition, however self-serving. We love psychotherapy, too, and we confess our dietary lapses to our coach at Jenny Craig. But we’re scared to go to confession. I’m scared to go to confession.

I’ve often wondered what made our ancestors so much braver than we. Saturday after Saturday they queued outside wooden boxes, staring inwardly at their remembered sins, running over in their minds the Act of Contrition, memorized from so many repetitions: “O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee, and I detest all my sins, because I dread the loss of heaven and the pains of hell, but mostly because I have offended Thee, my God, Who are all good and deserving of my love. I firmly resolve with the help of Thy grace to confess my sins, to do penance, and to amend my life. Amen.” They would sooner have lost an arm than receive the Eucharist in a state of serious sin. They took St. Paul’s words on the subject very seriously.

Surely it was no less painful then than now to recognize one’s own evil-doing and to confess it aloud to a priest. Our natural tendency is to defend ourselves; how odd to accuse ourselves, especially if we have not yet been caught out. But, as it says in the first letter of John, “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1: 8-9).”

God alone can forgive sins, but Christ imparted his own power to forgive sins to his disciples when he said, “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained” (John 21:23). Positive evidence that the successors of the apostles heard confessions and forgave sins reaches as far back as Pope Clement’s first century Epistle to the Corinthians. It seems, though, that confession in the first Christian centuries was usually a much more public affair than nowadays. Thank goodness for the development of the private box, say I.

Confession, we know, is not enough. Indeed, it is only part of the entire sacrament of penance, which includes true contrition (sorrow) for sins, confession and “satisfaction” (penance). To be forgiven our sins, we actually have to be sorry for them, and so not only do we have to recognize and remember them, which is embarrassing, we have to grieve over them, too, which is painful. I very much admire those Catholics who manage to get to confession once a month, let alone once a week.

The last time I went to confession, it was relatively easy, for I was at a Catholic conference where priests offered to hear confessions. Also, I had been trying to make myself go to confession for weeks and was even a little frightened that something seemed to be holding me back. Finally, the conference featured a little film called “The Forgotten Sacrament”, which urged the regular confession of even venial sins, to clean the grime off the soul as one cleans a window, to let the light in. With all this encouragement, I managed to get down on my knees before a grille and say “Bless me, Father for I have sinned.”

Afterwards I borrowed a friend’s phone and called home. My husband answered.

“Five minutes old,” I said.

***

By the way,  I know an elderly Protestant convert who was told by a priest in the 1970s that Confession was a very late development, and she promptly lost her belief in the Confession as one of the Seven Sacraments. Way to go, priest. I wonder if you are married now, or one of those legendary Communist plants, or  dead, and what your story was. While researching this column, I found this article invaluable. It directly contradict Father Hippy's soul-endangering b.s.

Liking Men

It is sad how many women who want to get married and have children actually don't like men.

I wrote an entire post on this subject, and it depressed me so much, I erased the whole thing.

But it is an important subject, so I will try again. I may have to resort to a list.

1. Not all men are the same. Some men grow up in toxic, anti-female cultures, and some do not.

2. Of the men who grow up in toxic, anti-female cultures, not all of them sign up for it. My youngest brother, for example, was dead sick of hearing locker room talk at his (notoriously anti-female) all-male high school by the time he graduated. He once told me he bragged to male colleagues at work about his smart, ambitious sisters.

3. Some men who grow up in female-positive cultures nevertheless become virulently anti-woman. They say things like, "A woman's place is in the kitchen, and if you find her in some other room, the chain is too long." What psychic wounds create an attitude like that I cannot even begin to imagine.

4. If you don't like the men around you, go away. Meet entirely different kinds of men.

5. Try to be kind to the men who are sincerely kind to you, to avoid the men who are rotten to you, and to cultivate the intelligence to distinguish between them.

6. Men in  your favourite books are not like men in life for the following reasons:

a) those books were written before 1963
b) those books were written about a social class of men different from the you know best interacting with a social class of women different from the one you are in (and before 1963)
c) those books were very often written about men from a country different from the one you and the men you know were born in (and before 1963)
d) those books were written by professional liars for whom ordinary life (even before 1963) was so painful, they lost themselves in dreams.

Jane Austen never married. Louisa May Alcott never married. Lucy Maud Montgomery was miserable in her marriage and, we now know, committed suicide. About Georgette Heyer, we know precious little, as she was darned sure to keep it that way.

7. If you really do not like men as they are -- real live human beings beyond the control of your imagination -- as cranky, happy, silly, serious, imperfect, sinful and saintly as women are--then give up hoping to marry them and have their children.  If you live in a country where women are considered less than dogs and horses, you have my abject sympathy and all I can do is suggest you try to emigrate somewhere else. But if you live in a country where you are pretty sure, in your heart of hearts, most or many men value women as companions, colleagues and fellow citizens, then put away your romance novels and get to know some, not as potential husbands, but as themselves.

When Your Married Relations Squabble

I will never forget the first time I felt on a level of equality with my mother and grandmother. I was 25 or 26, married, and visiting from the city where I lived with my then-husband. He didn't like coming with me because he didn't like my family. Let's not go there. Anyway, I was in the kitchen and my mother and her mother were sniping at each other. It was probably very mild sniping, as my mother was the apple of her mother's eye, but eventually I got sick of it and said, "If you two don't cut it out, I'm going home."

They cut it out.

Holy guacamole. Two of the three primary authority figures in my life had just caved before me. For a very long time I assumed it was part of the magic status that comes along with being a Married Woman. However, I now realize that it really stemmed from being acknowledged by both as an adult. There are other ways to be acknowledged as an adult--setting up your home away from home is one, having a proper 9-5 job is another, handing your mother  rent money because you are over 21 but still living in her house is another.  Adult is as adult does.

That said, your mum and dad and grandmas and grandpas are always your mum, dad, grandmas and grandpas, so they are always going to have one heckuva psychological influence on you, sometimes even after they are dead. Benedict Ambrose's heroic maternal grandmother was so influential in the life of B.A. that although she is on the road to heaven, she is also haunting my kitchen, telling me I am washing dishes the wrong way.

One thing it never occurred to me to do--not in a million zillion years--was intervene between my mother and grandmother. And to give them credit, it never occurred to either of them to ask me to take their side on any dispute. I seem to have grown up under very good, if rather strict, parenting, for I cannot remember a single serious instance of my mother moaning to me about my father, or my father about my mother, or my mother about my grandmother, or my grandmother about either of them. In fact, my grandmother praised my mother to me more, I believe, than she praised my mother in person.

They were the adults; we were the kids. They managed their own relationships without us, and the survivors still do. Surely my parents must quarrel occasionally; B.A. and I fell out last night over the not-so-simple simple syrup I was trying to make. However, I can remember only 2 of their quarrels in all my 40+ years; the last was 24 years ago.

And I am very thankful because I understand from a thousand sad divorce stories that parents pit their children--underage and adult--against each other all the time, and I think this is just horrid behaviour. Presumably parents feel that they would take a bullet for their children--why on earth do they do something so psychologically cruel to them in reality? My only explanation is the whole divorce-process itself. Divorcing people are crazy people.

I went through a divorce myself, and I was pretty crazy. The damage lasted for years. Anyone who runs away from her husband should run to a convent and have the nuns lock the doors. At the time I thought it was just me, but a woman the ex and both I knew was a minister's daughter, and her mother said all divorcing people were crazy: don't get emotionally involved with them.

Fortunately, I didn't drag any innocent children though that awful time, there being no innocent children around to drag. Oh, except my younger brother and sister. I do feel badly about that.  I remember one phone conversation with my 18 year old brother, when I was off my head, and suddenly stopping myself and saying, "Wait. Maybe you're too young to hear all this." "Yeah, " said my 18 year old brother, and I shut up.

As children, you're pretty helpless before your older brothers' and sisters' and parents' and grandparents' relationship disputes, but when you are an adult, you know enough (or should know enough) to refuse to take sides between people with an equal right to your loyalty*, to refuse to be the family counselor, to refuse to put up with craziness. As an adult you have the right (and the responsibility to your sanity to say), "If you don't cut it out, I'm going home."

One of the first things we learned in "Introduction to Ministry" class was that when we encountered a problem we couldn't handle, we refer the person to whom we are "ministering" to an expert. It was a mantra banged into our heads: refer, refer, REFER. It was also mentioned, by the by, that it is usually not ideal to "minister" to our own family members. Well, my goodness, if an actual priest isn't supposed to minister to his own family members--hearing their confessions (except in dire emergency), counselling them, etc.--imagine how unqualified you and I are to do so!

When I was a teenager, teenagers with alcoholic parents were refered to an AA offshoot called, if I recall correctly, "Alateen". (I read about it in Seventeen magazine.) This was probably to stop them from becoming victims of co-dependence, the overwhelming impulse to help the out-of-control parent who refuses to help him- or herself. There should be one for children whose parents are divorcing and so out-of-control as to enlist them in a war against their own mother or own father. This, to me, is psychological child abuse, and it remains so even when the children are grown up.

Married people squabble. Of course they do. And there are happy married couples who squabble and there are unhappy married couples who squabble. But here's a freaky thing: the unhappy married couples are no less married because they are unhappy. You know that line in movies when two agonized lovers say to each other, "This thing [our relationship] is bigger than both of us" ? It's true. I have seen two absolutely dysfunctional people (who, come to think of it, weren't even married) who were completely stuck to each other (and the bottle), and their relationship was an erotic war in which "secondary partners" were pawns and fodder. Their romance looked like a life-sentence, and when I last saw the female half, I barely recognized her--she looked so old and crazy.

Blah. Shudder. So what I am saying is that as sad it is when your parents or grandparents or married brothers and sisters are having marital disputes, not only should you keep out of them--save to give shelter to whoever needs shelter and to REFER your parent, grandparent or sibling to Catholic Family Services--you should refuse to be sucked in.  REFUSE. Say, "I can do this, but I can't hear that. It is too much for me. Here's the phone number for Catholic Family Services/a counsellor I know."

On airplanes you will notice that the travelling parent is always supposed to put on his/her own  oxygen mask on (should it drop from above) before putting one on his/her child. This is because an adult cannot help the child if she/he has passed out, and the child certainly can't help her/him. Well, although as an adult you can give your parents money, shelter, etc., etc., you are still their child. You can NOT solve their emotional problems, and if they crazily try to make you try, you must draw the line. "Cut it out, or I'm going home." Otherwise, you will be trying to put an oxygen mask on your parent(s) while you are passing out yourself.


*Naturally it's different in the case of siblings, for your loyalty is usually going to be with your blood sibling. However, the last thing you want to do is somehow exacerbate tension between your sibling and his/her spouse, or create a war between you and the spouse. So if you do listen to squabble stuff, remind yourself that's only half the story, and forget everything you have heard--unless it is a clear case of abuse, in which case, offer shelter and REFER.