‘Who knows the dreams that lie buried here.’ Epitaph in a graveyard, William Michaelian
When I was a child, before I turned fourteen and decided on the life of social work to help others from families like mine, my dreams featured one of two alternatives. I could be like my mother. Marry a Dutch man with blond hair and blue eyes and have at least nine children. Or alternatively, I could enter the convent to join my favourite nun and dedicate my life to prayer and Jesus. The only appeal of this life was proximity to Sister Sheila whose presence in my early adolescence and well into my final years of school thrilled me in ways that many people describe as being in love.
But love is fickle when you’re young and as soon as I moved out of the convent and entered the university with its diverse peoples, most young like me, and tasted the presence of folks on a broader horizon, my love faded like a wilting flower.
My elder sister visited the convent during the months my younger sister and I boarded there when I was fifteen and one day responded to my gushing praise of Sister Shelia by warming me away from her. ‘She’s a lesbian,’ my sister said as if she was dangerous, like a contagious disease I might catch. I scoffed.
Turns out Sheila was a lesbian, or so I’ve been told, but who cares now. At least she escaped the convent before it was too late for her and before I ever allowed myself to join her so all is well, there.
She might well have managed to fulfill some of her dreams, but I shall never know.
When I shared the same school grounds we wrote letters to one another. Mine must have been syrupy sweet, though I doubt I ever declared my love, while I often questioned hers.
One day she wrote a letter including the words of some Catholic dignitary on the nature of love, the pure celibate type which she claimed to possess in contrast to the love between a man and woman in marriage.
Relationships were restricted in those days and anything that veered away from the hegemony of the heterosexual bond was banned, especially in the church. Here she was a nun surrounded by hosts of other women and none of them were allowed to get to close to one another for fear of the passions that might get aroused and yet they were also required to travel everywhere in twos. She sometimes paired up with some ancient crone whose temperament might have appalled her. But perhaps this was the strategy, keep those who with similar inclinations apart so as not to infuse too much ardour among these women who had married one man only. They gold ring on their wedding finger to prove it.
The Faithful Companions of Jesus. They covered their heads in black veils and walked the streets like their foundress from the mid 1800s Marie Madelein De Bonnault D’Houet, a woman who had once been married in France. She even had a child. But after her husband died and she was left widowed and appalled by conditions for the poor in her country she decided to set up a group of women to carry on God’s work in education their children.
It was a noble enterprise and although my occasional dreams of entering the convent including prayer to God and getting closer to my favourite nun I did not see myself as a teacher.
If I could live my life again, I imagine two other appealing careers. One to become a journalist, though when I took part in a Professional Writing and Editing course at the CAE many years ago and Barry Watts took a unit on journalism, I disliked the rule bound nature of the enterprise. The way we had to gather so-called facts and express them in order of significance.
It seemed far too ordered for my creative impulses which was to dive in anywhere and go who knows where.
Teaching might come next on my list of skills to learn. Teachers have ways of commanding a class, of ordering the curriculum, of presenting work and ideas that hold the attention of their students.
On those rare occasions, in later years when I have been tasked with teaching creative writing and autobiography at the university, my skills felt lacking, to me at least. I do not have the patience needed to teach.
So, I settle for the life I chose as a fourteen-year-old. The life of a helper without the religious trimmings of the convent. A secular life that follows in the footsteps of Freud and his cohort, steeped in notions of the unconscious and the human mind’s ability to survive in face of trauma and all the ordinary small trials that await us all before we too lie buried in a grave. Or reduced to ashes.