38/365 History: Finding a Niche

It's hard to find a place. Once you find a place, it's hard to find your way into the place. Having spent most of my childhood packing and unpacking boxes, I knew there was a lot of "finding my way" that was on back order. I would talk about this with Fr. Bill over the first few years we were at the parish. How I was always leaving and really didn't want to. Not just the parish, but everything: marriage, friendship, neighborhood, jobs, commitments. He would challenge me to stick it out. For all his faults (and mine, being a damned liar that I am) he saw that yearning for stability writ large in my life.

Our first year there, out of the blue, he asks the two of us to join a committee to bring a prayer group project to the parish. Based on a program my mother had been involved in back when I was a child, this one was adding the futuristic "2000" to the name. Renew 2000, like the "Fridge-O-Matic 5000" or some other silly faux product. At our first meeting, I don't remember who else might have been there, but Dawn Armstrong was. By the end of that meeting, she had appointed herself and my husband as co-chairs and I decided I didn't like her very much.

Before the program even got launched, she realized this about me. I don't, well, I don't hide my feelings with much success. She confronted me on the phone and brought up three instances that made her wonder what the hell my problem was. Those weren't her words. But that was the tone. I was terrified. She asked if she could come over to talk about it. She was there the following night and I had to explain, basically, what a flake I was.

I think about this when I have trouble with Lynn or, for a time, with Dolores. Or Yvonne or wonder where I screwed up with Judy and her husband. I think about how it is to be in a parish and try to really be in it. How personalities clash, people get offended, and then people walk away. How brave (and terrifying) Dawn was to show up at my house and ask for an explanation for my jerk behavior. And how, in the end, it made me a better person. She wasn't going to walk away from our parish. It would have had to have been me if it had come to blows. Obviously it did not.

That would be later, and it wouldn't be with Dawn.