166/365 No Man's Woman

I don't wanna be no man's woman
I've other work I want to get done
I haven't traveled this far to become
No man's woman

She told me, sort of off-hand:

It was my senior year of high school and Rosie and I went down to her family's place to look after it, make sure it was ready for summer. We were almost about to graduate. The house was fine, musty, but just how we remembered. We stopped by the chapel, the one we used to have in central Illinois, and after mass that Sunday, I told her, "I think, this is where I have to be."

"Good," she told me, "because I'm coming here in July. You can go with me."

I wrote to the sisters, here at Clyde, and I asked them to please write to me via Rosie's family. You see, my sister had left for the Dominicans already, and they'd sent her home that Christmas. She was too nervous, they said. And my father had just had a stroke a few months before that. Fell in a ditch on the way home from work and people walked right past him. By the time they got him to the hospital, it looked hopeless. So I was supposed to stay home after I graduated and take care of him. My life's work. My sister was going to get a second try somewhere else. But she was recuperating, my mother was barely holding all together, my father was an invalid, and I was sneaking around trying to figure out how to become a Benedictine.

Of course the sisters sent a letter home to my house, with their return address plain as day. I walked into the kitchen that evening and my mother was frying hamburgers on the stove. She waved that envelope at me and demanded to know what the hell I thought I was doing to my family.

I told her: "Did you ever have to do something, even if it was crazy, but out of love?"

She turned to me with the frying pan in her hand and gave me a look like I have never seen. I'm surprised she didn't hit me with it. I took my letter, which gave all the directions and information I needed. She and I didn't talk the rest of the month, and in July, Rosie's dad pulled his car up in our driveway and I walked out of the house with my suitcase. My mother was weeding in the front yard and didn't look up when we drove away.

"I'll go around the block," Rosie's dad said. "She'll be standing on the driveway when we come back around." But she wasn't. She'd gone inside.

I didn't go home for 5 years. They never answered letters. Then, finally, I went home to visit. My father had gotten out of his sickbed. He was back at work, halftime. When I left, friends came out of the woodwork to get him back on his feet. He lived another 20 years. But my mother died without ever forgiving me.

My sister, by the way, married a man who dropped out of the seminary and they have 7 kids. I spend a week with her every summer and come back here glad to be back.

Would I have done it this way again, knowing what I know? I don't know. It helps that Rosie's still here--she's Sr. Lioba now, of course--but it was a costly decision for me.