On Being a Bad Catholic
I’m a bad Catholic. Do you know how I know? I took my Christmas trees down before Epiphany. That’s right. By January 2 I couldn’t stand the clutter anymore and we took them down. I did leave the Nativity scene up, but the trees are gone.
I’ve never done the Liturgy of the Hours. Never.
I have gobs of kids (10 to be exact) that I don’t know what to do with. I love them, yes, and I am grateful for them all, but it’s utter chaos here everyday. Every corner of the bedrooms is taken up with clothes and toys and books.
I don’t love homeschooling. That’s right. I don’t love it. I do it because I feel it’s what God has called me to do but I do it with a bit of kicking and screaming on my part. There’s no nature walks or classical music playing in the background. There are workbooks. Yep, workbooks.
My marriage is, well, gosh. I hope it’s normal with its hills and valleys (and lately it seems like mostly hills). I’m not so good at the whole humility thing and my pride (the worst of the deadly sins) is the size of the state of Texas. I haven’t cooked a meal for a new mom in probably two years. I *do* send gift cards but usually about 2 months late.
I signed up to do the online payment thing through our parish for our weekly contribution and it worked for a good long time and then I think my credit card number got stolen and I never fixed it over at the church. I need to do that. We do morning prayer as a family every morning, but there’s a fair amount of me yelling involved. There’s also a lot of crying and yelling at the dinner table where we gather each night to eat whatever I’ve managed to throw together that day.
My kids take music lessons but don’t really practice that much. My young teens have Facebook accounts. I listen to all Catholic radio and Christian rock, but some of the kids don’t and my husband definitely doesn’t. I don’t go to daily mass or even more than Sunday mass anymore. With four kids under five years old I am lucky to get to Sunday mass (and HDO’s) and I am almost always in some back room nursing and supervising the 2 year old while she cleans out my diaper bag.
I aspire to do great things – celebrate feast days with the appropriate foods, have All Saint’s Parties, and fast on Fridays. But really we celebrate Halloween (usually wearing Saint costumes, at least), sometimes attend parties that others give, and have decided our Friday sacrifice will be no meat all year instead of just at Lent.
I don’t give up Facebook for Lent (speaking of Lent). The kids do begrudgingly give up video games, however. Yes, we have video games. We don’t have cable but we do have our share of mainstream DVD’s that have nothing to do with God. We attend confession frequently, I think, once per month (except when I give birth then I usually go longer). But, we don’t go weekly which is my ideal.
And, yes, I feel a tremendous amount of guilt over all of the above mentioned things. I feel that it is my duty, along with my husband, to lead our children in the Faith that we have chosen. And every day I feel that I have failed at this. You see, I started behind. WAY behind. I was a victim of the times, so to speak, and was poorly catechized until I was around 26 years old. Now I’m playing a mad game of catch up. Not only in my catechesis but also learning about Saints, Doctrine, Theology, sexuality and, oh yes, learning how to be a homeschooling mother to TEN children. Did I mention four of them are under five years old? Each day pushes me to the limits and each night I go to bed wondering two things – 1) How have I failed God today ? 2) How have I failed my children today?
I rarely hear Catholic moms talking about these things. I see a lot of butterflies and rainbows (I do that on my blog as well). Those butterflies and rainbows, while they can be inspiring, also make me feel worse about the reality of who I am as a mother, wife, and daughter of God. I wonder how other mothers of large families manage. I mean, really, how do they manage? Do they cry like I do? Or are they always at peace? If they are always at peace then how do they make that happen? I know, pray more, worry less. A favorite Saint of mine, Padre Pio, said “pray, hope, and don’t worry”. I wonder how he did that? Only with the closest relationship with Jesus Christ, I imagine.
Very recently my life started crumbling around me. Teens and young adults made some questionable decisions and shattered my confidence as a parent. My marriage went back to it’s old, pre Catholic, ways, and I was yelling a lot. I may have thrown something. I cried. I felt completely unqualified to guide my own soul toward God much less the 10 others that He has seen fit to give me.
This funk went on for nearly 6 weeks. Frustration, anger, and sadness that everything I have poured my heart and life into for the past 20 years seemed to be meaningless. As a stay at home mother my “payment,” I thought, was a happy, healthy, holy family. But I was getting an unhappy, dysfunctional family that was making me crazy.
I must start again. I must not listen to Satan on my shoulder telling me to give up. I would be lying if I didn’t admit to still being a bit irked with what has come to light in the last couple of months. I will have to honestly look at myself and see what my role was in all of it and work on the beam in my eye while fumbling my way through mounds of laundry, sinks full of dishes, diapers, babies, teens, and a husband. And I’ll try to remember that leaving my Christmas tree up until Epiphany isn’t what makes or breaks my loyalty to Holy Mother Church.
What makes me loyal, I think, is that I don’t give up. I will get up, dust myself off, and God willing, I will begin again.
