Catholic School
So, I think I have lightly hit on the fact that I attended a private Catholic school in my youth. Today I saw a Buzzfeed thing about that very subject, so now's the time to dive in, I suppose.
Religion was already weird in my family by the time I was born, or even by the time I attended the aforementioned school. Everyone had different religions or no religion or had switched religions. Some could find a common foothold with someone else, but most times there were a lot of arguments.
My mother attended a private Catholic boarding high school and on Halloween 1978 she converted to Catholicism from her childhood religion of Presbyterian. My father and his sister, unbeknownst to each other in the moment, converted from non practicing Baptists to Mormons; he while at college & she while in Germany, where her then husband was stationed. Even my mothers sister converted to Anglicanism in her twenties. My sister was baptized Presbyterian and then followed over with my mom to the Catholic church and finished her religious childhood duties there of Sunday school, First Communion, and Confirmation.
I, however, was born after all of the change overs. I was baptized in the Catholic church and spent time with fellow Catholic childhood friends attending Sunday school. Around the time of my First Communion things became weird, religiously speaking, for me.
First Communion is basically when you are allowed to receive the Eucharist. You're about eight and you start preparing for this elaborate ceremony that will happen in the spring time. It looks like a wedding for children. The boys wear clothing a little whiter than normal Sunday wear. The girls wear what resemble wedding dresses and veils. You have to practice for your big walk down the isle to partake in the holy ceremony for eating the for real remains of your lord and savior. It really is just table wine and thin round wafers with a cross imprinted in them, but you are SUPPOSED to believe that it is really the blood and body of Jesus Christ. There are even ghost stories about how if you don't, the stuff will turn into rotting flesh and pellets of blood, "For swears, it really happened to a priest that my sisters cousins half brothers babysitters moms uncles sisters daughter knew once."
So, needless to say I was the only eight year old in my class who thought it was a bit strange. I went with it though, because I was told it was a special day, that I was special and something about receiving a lot of attention. I was sorely lacking in the attention department so of course I decided to be excited.
Also, my dad decided, around that time that I should go to his church. My impressions of his church, when I was a child, were not very favourable. The church was surrounded by a fence and I wondered what they were keeping locked inside. The church, itself, was dark, and at the front sat very aged and stern people. When we got to the portion of the Salem Witch Trials in history later, I would recall this and find an oddly uncomforting parallel. They were all in black robes with weird hats on and their gazes could have melted the flesh from your bones. They were very judging, I felt, up there on their pedestals. I felt like if I put one toe out of line they'd hang me and fillet me right there in front of everyone.
I was a little excited though about what I thought was snack time. Later I would find out that my sister did the very same thing before me. They were passing out water and cubes of sandwich bread in paper cups. I audibly exclaimed, "We get snacks?!?" It was loud. I didn't mean to be loud. I felt vultures staring me down and turned to find the witch hunter people scowling at me with very disapproving looks. My father was hunched down in his seat with his hand over his face, trying to hide.
The other memories are less scary, but also further proved my resoluteness to try and get out of going to church with him any way that I could. The Sunday school classrooms taught weird things that I couldn't quite wrap my head around, but that wasn't anything remotely new, since it was the same at the Catholic church. But what bothered me the most is that they locked the doors and you couldn't leave until they said that you could. That was something I couldn't get on board with. Also the kids were rather mean compared to the Catholic kids I was used to. Sure I had the Fertito brothers to contend with, but they were a walk in the park compared to these kids.
And there was a weird baptism in the fake pool in the basement. The basement was all cement with hardly any lighting. I was rather nervous about our basement at home, but this one put it to shame in the creepsville department. Sure there were no dead beetles, but in it's blandness and conformity, I felt completely trapped. The fake pool looked like a large, above ground hot tub with a lid. The opened the lid on a hinge and an old person walked up some steps and submerged himself in the water with his clothes on. Really he was probably 18, but that might as well have been old to my child self, especially since the baptisms I had seen were always babies in special dresses that weren't real clothes, who had a little water put on their heads. While all of that was odd to me, really I just had a weird sense of foreboding that they'd close the lid and lock the guy in there. I don't know why I had that feeling, perhaps it was the trapped feeling of the basement.
Needless to say, besides my parents always fighting over religion, putting my sister and I in the middle, I was finally free of having to go to dad's church and fights over religion pretty much ceased. But, I was finding it difficult to fit in at the Catholic church. I was a questioner and I spoke my questions aloud, which was probably not ideal. I became a disruption in Sunday school, when really I just didn't understand what they were talking about. Things like how they show you physical and very separate representations of God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit, but then say they're all the same thing; that they're one. That didn't make sense to me at all. How can they be the same thing and yet different things at they same time? Because in the Catholic church they are just that, but overall they're always one thing. Was it something like a Transformer? The Sunday school teachers did not like me at all, I can tell you that. But I wasn't trying to be flippant, I was completely serious. But I challenged too much.
Then things went from bad to worse. The other Catholic church in town was older and was also connected to a school. The two friends from my church had been going there since they stared school. I had wanted to go to school with them. I didn't understand or think these things out. We were in the same Sunday school class up until fourth grade when I got shoved into the next level up. I just assumed we'd be in the same class at that school. My mom applied, but there was a long waiting list. By the time I was accepted, I was no longer friends with one of the girls, and I had already realized that the other friend and I would never be in the same class. Also, I had forgotten all about that school. I was just excited about fifth grade because I'd be leaving the elementary and going across the street to a new school!
Too late. My fifth and sixth grade years would be spent somewhere I didn't want to be. My mom was hell bent on getting me in there. I'd been accepted, so I was going and that was it. People always say that public school is horrendous and terrible. It was like waking up on Christmas morning compared to the private one. For one, I think it had to do with the fact that those kids had been together in their same small class for six years already. I was on their turf now and apparently they didn't like outlanders very much. But, also I found them far more conniving and cruel compared to their public school counterparts. I'd never had someone pretend to be my friend before, to so thoroughly win my trust, all those months and time and effort, to just turn around and smash it in my face and laugh. I was like a fly in a spiders web. They were just toying with me. They hadn't even started yet. Public school kids are not so calculating. If they don't like you, you know it. If they want to destroy you they simply start a rumour. But this was an entirely different battleground.
Everyday for two years, the boys would pants me and push me over. Sometimes once, sometimes up to four times in a day. Once I was over they would laugh and laugh. Most days that was enough. Other days, were a special treat, I suppose, and they would either throw dirt on me, kick me, spit on me or all three.
In the bathroom, the girls would stand on the toilets to look at me over the stalls. Then there'd be class announcements to the other kids or what underwear I was wearing or what body function I had just preformed or any other "vital" bathroom news they felt like sharing about me. If I was on my period, that was announced as well.
They would lie to the teachers about anything and everything under the sun to get me into trouble. They would steal my things and then plant their items in my desk and say I had stolen from them. My hair was pulled. My hair was cut. They tied my shoelaces together to watch me trip and fall... and you guessed it, they'd laugh like freaking hyena's! I had rotten food thrown at me, though thankfully that one didn't get past a few times before they felt it was no longer fun.
Girls wore a dress shirt and shorts with a jump over that. In gym, you took the jumper off. Sometimes girls forgot their shorts. It was never a problem. They'd just participate in their jumpers. The gym teacher, however, would single me out as being retarded and stupid for forgetting my shorts, when five other girls on that day forgot there's as well. And woe be it unto me to forget my shorts because all the kids would gang up on me to lift my jumper skirt over my head to expose my underwear and laugh violently. In gym they would kick me, trip me, and again kick me when I was down. Once we were running relays outside. It was my turn to run, I started running, tripped (surprisingly, not their fault), & skidded a few yards on rock asphalt. I was bleeding and scuffed up really badly and all the kids laughed or, the one's on my team they berated me severely. Even the gym teacher was mad at me. Mad at me. Mad! I'm cut up and bloody and thankfully had enough sense to cover my face or my eyeball would be hanging out and she's mad!?!
Honestly, I thought I could write more, but I can't bring myself to type up all the bile inducing memories. You get the picture though, right? If I haven't conveyed it properly, it was THE worst two years of my life. Basically I was so completely miserable and abused that I was a scatter brain, I was always late for school and I started having weird ticks; like OCD ticks. One was that I constantly had to check on my elbow bends. Just back and forth, back and forth, looking at the bends of my elbows until I felt better. I'm sure that was just fuel for them to beat up more on the 'retarded' girl.
I rejoiced at the prospect to return to the wonderful and happy by comparison, public school system. But my mother had other plans for me. She was mad with Catholic school power. It was insane. Her grand idea was to move out of our house, to leave dad and my sister behind. The two of us would rent out an apartment on the coast so that I could attend one of their private Catholic schools, because by damn I was going to live her life!
It was seriously starting to mess with me. I was literally losing my shit. Thankfully, the money would have to come from my grandmother, since she's the one who paid the previous tuition. She was smart. She could see I was miserable, so she flat out refused. My mother was furious, but my grandmother had put her foot down and without money, my mothers plans died out.
People don't understand why I enjoyed high school so much. It's not that it was perfect and I had my share of teenage trauma and bitchy girls, etc. But seriously I just can not convey precisely how much more WONDERFUL public school was compared to the private one. It was like a freaking vacation in Hawaii compared to being stranded in Mordor. I think I'm over reaching here, but not by too much.
Needless to say this was the straw that broke the camels back concerning me and Catholicism. My mom still forced me to attend church and Sunday school. But I barely remember any of it because I could have cared less about being there. I was excited for Confirmation though. I'd been told my entire life that Confirmation is YOU deciding you want to be Catholic and going through the process. So, I thought I'd be skipping that last year of Sunday school (which was Confirmation class) and I'd be done with the whole thing.
Nope, my mom decided that I was on a quick trip to hell and even if it killed her she'd see me be Confirmed. Why? What would it matter? If I didn't want it, wasn't that a lie? Isn't lying something that lands you in hell? And you want me to publicly lie in a church in front of God and the tabernacle and all those people? And you see nothing wrong with this? *sigh*
So, since I was under eighteen, she had every right to force me to continue going to church and to be Confirmed. Though the then current priest sided with me, he couldn't force my mom to not make me go through Confirmation, so it didn't really matter. She refused to let me drive myself to the classes, knowing that I would go somewhere else instead. So, she drove me there and picked me up afterwards. I barely remember that class except that I couldn't find anything in the bible, while all the other kids found each thing in about two seconds. That we were told to write something religious in glitter on construction paper. It was around Christmas time. All of them wrote Peace, or The Good News or some other such non Christmas, Catholic thing. I wrote Shalom. They were not impressed. Or the time the midway was in town. They used to always set up in the parking lot across from the church. I took some girls wristband off her and put it on myself and spent the entire hour whirling around on rides. It was the best day of Confirmation class in the history of ever!
But per my mothers agreement, I was an adult as soon as I was Confirmed, which meant I could do whatever the hell I wanted to do, religiously. I was Confirmed on Palm Sunday. My first choice of insurrection was to get up early on Easter Morning, stay in my pyjama's, and start watching Tales of the Crypt that I'd gotten from a friend. She came downstairs and made beady, angry bird eyes at me, but I wasn't moving and she couldn't make me.
My life got a whole lot easier from that day forward. And right now I'm actually smiling and sighing a huge sigh of relief that that is all in the past and has been in the past for awhile now. Today seems like a much better day already.
Religion was already weird in my family by the time I was born, or even by the time I attended the aforementioned school. Everyone had different religions or no religion or had switched religions. Some could find a common foothold with someone else, but most times there were a lot of arguments.
My mother attended a private Catholic boarding high school and on Halloween 1978 she converted to Catholicism from her childhood religion of Presbyterian. My father and his sister, unbeknownst to each other in the moment, converted from non practicing Baptists to Mormons; he while at college & she while in Germany, where her then husband was stationed. Even my mothers sister converted to Anglicanism in her twenties. My sister was baptized Presbyterian and then followed over with my mom to the Catholic church and finished her religious childhood duties there of Sunday school, First Communion, and Confirmation.
I, however, was born after all of the change overs. I was baptized in the Catholic church and spent time with fellow Catholic childhood friends attending Sunday school. Around the time of my First Communion things became weird, religiously speaking, for me.
First Communion is basically when you are allowed to receive the Eucharist. You're about eight and you start preparing for this elaborate ceremony that will happen in the spring time. It looks like a wedding for children. The boys wear clothing a little whiter than normal Sunday wear. The girls wear what resemble wedding dresses and veils. You have to practice for your big walk down the isle to partake in the holy ceremony for eating the for real remains of your lord and savior. It really is just table wine and thin round wafers with a cross imprinted in them, but you are SUPPOSED to believe that it is really the blood and body of Jesus Christ. There are even ghost stories about how if you don't, the stuff will turn into rotting flesh and pellets of blood, "For swears, it really happened to a priest that my sisters cousins half brothers babysitters moms uncles sisters daughter knew once."
So, needless to say I was the only eight year old in my class who thought it was a bit strange. I went with it though, because I was told it was a special day, that I was special and something about receiving a lot of attention. I was sorely lacking in the attention department so of course I decided to be excited.
Also, my dad decided, around that time that I should go to his church. My impressions of his church, when I was a child, were not very favourable. The church was surrounded by a fence and I wondered what they were keeping locked inside. The church, itself, was dark, and at the front sat very aged and stern people. When we got to the portion of the Salem Witch Trials in history later, I would recall this and find an oddly uncomforting parallel. They were all in black robes with weird hats on and their gazes could have melted the flesh from your bones. They were very judging, I felt, up there on their pedestals. I felt like if I put one toe out of line they'd hang me and fillet me right there in front of everyone.
I was a little excited though about what I thought was snack time. Later I would find out that my sister did the very same thing before me. They were passing out water and cubes of sandwich bread in paper cups. I audibly exclaimed, "We get snacks?!?" It was loud. I didn't mean to be loud. I felt vultures staring me down and turned to find the witch hunter people scowling at me with very disapproving looks. My father was hunched down in his seat with his hand over his face, trying to hide.
The other memories are less scary, but also further proved my resoluteness to try and get out of going to church with him any way that I could. The Sunday school classrooms taught weird things that I couldn't quite wrap my head around, but that wasn't anything remotely new, since it was the same at the Catholic church. But what bothered me the most is that they locked the doors and you couldn't leave until they said that you could. That was something I couldn't get on board with. Also the kids were rather mean compared to the Catholic kids I was used to. Sure I had the Fertito brothers to contend with, but they were a walk in the park compared to these kids.
And there was a weird baptism in the fake pool in the basement. The basement was all cement with hardly any lighting. I was rather nervous about our basement at home, but this one put it to shame in the creepsville department. Sure there were no dead beetles, but in it's blandness and conformity, I felt completely trapped. The fake pool looked like a large, above ground hot tub with a lid. The opened the lid on a hinge and an old person walked up some steps and submerged himself in the water with his clothes on. Really he was probably 18, but that might as well have been old to my child self, especially since the baptisms I had seen were always babies in special dresses that weren't real clothes, who had a little water put on their heads. While all of that was odd to me, really I just had a weird sense of foreboding that they'd close the lid and lock the guy in there. I don't know why I had that feeling, perhaps it was the trapped feeling of the basement.
Needless to say, besides my parents always fighting over religion, putting my sister and I in the middle, I was finally free of having to go to dad's church and fights over religion pretty much ceased. But, I was finding it difficult to fit in at the Catholic church. I was a questioner and I spoke my questions aloud, which was probably not ideal. I became a disruption in Sunday school, when really I just didn't understand what they were talking about. Things like how they show you physical and very separate representations of God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit, but then say they're all the same thing; that they're one. That didn't make sense to me at all. How can they be the same thing and yet different things at they same time? Because in the Catholic church they are just that, but overall they're always one thing. Was it something like a Transformer? The Sunday school teachers did not like me at all, I can tell you that. But I wasn't trying to be flippant, I was completely serious. But I challenged too much.
Then things went from bad to worse. The other Catholic church in town was older and was also connected to a school. The two friends from my church had been going there since they stared school. I had wanted to go to school with them. I didn't understand or think these things out. We were in the same Sunday school class up until fourth grade when I got shoved into the next level up. I just assumed we'd be in the same class at that school. My mom applied, but there was a long waiting list. By the time I was accepted, I was no longer friends with one of the girls, and I had already realized that the other friend and I would never be in the same class. Also, I had forgotten all about that school. I was just excited about fifth grade because I'd be leaving the elementary and going across the street to a new school!
Too late. My fifth and sixth grade years would be spent somewhere I didn't want to be. My mom was hell bent on getting me in there. I'd been accepted, so I was going and that was it. People always say that public school is horrendous and terrible. It was like waking up on Christmas morning compared to the private one. For one, I think it had to do with the fact that those kids had been together in their same small class for six years already. I was on their turf now and apparently they didn't like outlanders very much. But, also I found them far more conniving and cruel compared to their public school counterparts. I'd never had someone pretend to be my friend before, to so thoroughly win my trust, all those months and time and effort, to just turn around and smash it in my face and laugh. I was like a fly in a spiders web. They were just toying with me. They hadn't even started yet. Public school kids are not so calculating. If they don't like you, you know it. If they want to destroy you they simply start a rumour. But this was an entirely different battleground.
Everyday for two years, the boys would pants me and push me over. Sometimes once, sometimes up to four times in a day. Once I was over they would laugh and laugh. Most days that was enough. Other days, were a special treat, I suppose, and they would either throw dirt on me, kick me, spit on me or all three.
In the bathroom, the girls would stand on the toilets to look at me over the stalls. Then there'd be class announcements to the other kids or what underwear I was wearing or what body function I had just preformed or any other "vital" bathroom news they felt like sharing about me. If I was on my period, that was announced as well.
They would lie to the teachers about anything and everything under the sun to get me into trouble. They would steal my things and then plant their items in my desk and say I had stolen from them. My hair was pulled. My hair was cut. They tied my shoelaces together to watch me trip and fall... and you guessed it, they'd laugh like freaking hyena's! I had rotten food thrown at me, though thankfully that one didn't get past a few times before they felt it was no longer fun.
Girls wore a dress shirt and shorts with a jump over that. In gym, you took the jumper off. Sometimes girls forgot their shorts. It was never a problem. They'd just participate in their jumpers. The gym teacher, however, would single me out as being retarded and stupid for forgetting my shorts, when five other girls on that day forgot there's as well. And woe be it unto me to forget my shorts because all the kids would gang up on me to lift my jumper skirt over my head to expose my underwear and laugh violently. In gym they would kick me, trip me, and again kick me when I was down. Once we were running relays outside. It was my turn to run, I started running, tripped (surprisingly, not their fault), & skidded a few yards on rock asphalt. I was bleeding and scuffed up really badly and all the kids laughed or, the one's on my team they berated me severely. Even the gym teacher was mad at me. Mad at me. Mad! I'm cut up and bloody and thankfully had enough sense to cover my face or my eyeball would be hanging out and she's mad!?!
Honestly, I thought I could write more, but I can't bring myself to type up all the bile inducing memories. You get the picture though, right? If I haven't conveyed it properly, it was THE worst two years of my life. Basically I was so completely miserable and abused that I was a scatter brain, I was always late for school and I started having weird ticks; like OCD ticks. One was that I constantly had to check on my elbow bends. Just back and forth, back and forth, looking at the bends of my elbows until I felt better. I'm sure that was just fuel for them to beat up more on the 'retarded' girl.
I rejoiced at the prospect to return to the wonderful and happy by comparison, public school system. But my mother had other plans for me. She was mad with Catholic school power. It was insane. Her grand idea was to move out of our house, to leave dad and my sister behind. The two of us would rent out an apartment on the coast so that I could attend one of their private Catholic schools, because by damn I was going to live her life!
It was seriously starting to mess with me. I was literally losing my shit. Thankfully, the money would have to come from my grandmother, since she's the one who paid the previous tuition. She was smart. She could see I was miserable, so she flat out refused. My mother was furious, but my grandmother had put her foot down and without money, my mothers plans died out.
People don't understand why I enjoyed high school so much. It's not that it was perfect and I had my share of teenage trauma and bitchy girls, etc. But seriously I just can not convey precisely how much more WONDERFUL public school was compared to the private one. It was like a freaking vacation in Hawaii compared to being stranded in Mordor. I think I'm over reaching here, but not by too much.
Needless to say this was the straw that broke the camels back concerning me and Catholicism. My mom still forced me to attend church and Sunday school. But I barely remember any of it because I could have cared less about being there. I was excited for Confirmation though. I'd been told my entire life that Confirmation is YOU deciding you want to be Catholic and going through the process. So, I thought I'd be skipping that last year of Sunday school (which was Confirmation class) and I'd be done with the whole thing.
Nope, my mom decided that I was on a quick trip to hell and even if it killed her she'd see me be Confirmed. Why? What would it matter? If I didn't want it, wasn't that a lie? Isn't lying something that lands you in hell? And you want me to publicly lie in a church in front of God and the tabernacle and all those people? And you see nothing wrong with this? *sigh*
So, since I was under eighteen, she had every right to force me to continue going to church and to be Confirmed. Though the then current priest sided with me, he couldn't force my mom to not make me go through Confirmation, so it didn't really matter. She refused to let me drive myself to the classes, knowing that I would go somewhere else instead. So, she drove me there and picked me up afterwards. I barely remember that class except that I couldn't find anything in the bible, while all the other kids found each thing in about two seconds. That we were told to write something religious in glitter on construction paper. It was around Christmas time. All of them wrote Peace, or The Good News or some other such non Christmas, Catholic thing. I wrote Shalom. They were not impressed. Or the time the midway was in town. They used to always set up in the parking lot across from the church. I took some girls wristband off her and put it on myself and spent the entire hour whirling around on rides. It was the best day of Confirmation class in the history of ever!
But per my mothers agreement, I was an adult as soon as I was Confirmed, which meant I could do whatever the hell I wanted to do, religiously. I was Confirmed on Palm Sunday. My first choice of insurrection was to get up early on Easter Morning, stay in my pyjama's, and start watching Tales of the Crypt that I'd gotten from a friend. She came downstairs and made beady, angry bird eyes at me, but I wasn't moving and she couldn't make me.
My life got a whole lot easier from that day forward. And right now I'm actually smiling and sighing a huge sigh of relief that that is all in the past and has been in the past for awhile now. Today seems like a much better day already.
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