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Later she read about the scandals throughout history. About the ancient aristocrats who moved their daughters into the convent only because it was a more affordable alternative to a dowry. About poor Arcangela Tarabotti, forced into monasticism like many others in the seventeenth century because she was disabled. About the Medicis, and the lay nuns called skivvies, who were made to be servants to the dowried nuns. But it was none of this that deterred her. Only that at some point, Theresa discovered boys. She tucked away her dream then, as if it were any other childish thing, a stuffed toy or
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She was her mother’s daughter, she supposed. Prickly when she was most in need of love.
She was thinking that she had read somewhere once that when a person began a sentence with the word honestly, it usually meant he was lying.
When someone who had been there far longer than she had went away, all the doubts returned. Longevity was no mark of anything. Things could come apart so fast. “But that’s true for everyone,” Mother Lucy Joseph said. “Think of a marriage, husband and wife. The piece of paper, the white wedding dress, they don’t promise anything. A person has to stay there, fight for it, every day.”
The one and only time he’d made the mistake of telling his mother he was babysitting for Maeve on a Saturday night while Julia went out with friends, he got a lecture in four parts about how it was impossible to babysit one’s own child.
People John knew from Dorchester spoke of his brother with reverence. Great kid, they’d say, even now that Patrick was fifty
It was so nice to be on the cusp of parenthood, to be able to judge other people’s choices with confidence, not yet having made any mistakes of their own.
When Nora was pregnant with Brian, Bridget asked where babies came from. Her mother didn’t even glance up. “You buy them at the store.”
When she was young and thought of marriage in the abstract, she believed it was about two individuals, each living a mostly independent existence. Now she saw that marriage was like being in a three-legged race with the same person for the rest of your life. Your hopes, your happiness, your luck, your moods, all yoked to his.
There are as many paths to God as there are souls on earth,” she said in a meeting with the abbey’s hierarchy. This seemed to move them. Afterward, Mother Cecilia said, “That was beautiful, the way you put it.” “I agree,” Mother Placid said. “But don’t be too impressed. That’s not me, it’s Rumi.”
Julia knew which clothing brands and TV shows and bands Maeve liked. She knew which members of the bands were considered the cutest and weighed in with her own opinion. She knew Maeve hated beets, so she simply did not make beets, whereas Nora would have served them up as something close to a punishment. It seemed unjust that Maeve hated Julia’s guts all the same, as if it were written into the code of being thirteen, and no behavior on a mother’s part could change that.
Lately, there were some who came to parlors to discuss their own pasts with priests, terrible stories that Mother Cecilia was not technically allowed to condemn, though she did condemn them. The deeper you came into union with God, the more you came to accept people the way they were. And yet, there were some who could never be accepted or forgiven.
The previous generation hadn’t thought so much about the future. Today, she could just feel the weight on them, their strong desire to do the best thing, even when they didn’t know what that was. They were living in an age of great anxiety. A young woman in a parlor told her she repeated the mantra We are too blessed to be depressed over and over each morning. Mother Cecilia didn’t think that seemed particularly helpful. If you were, you were.
