My own personal penance

A week or so ago I wrote about my struggles with Loren and his hesitance to attend religious education classes. This battle is nothing new, since he was about 11 his religious zest has seriously faded. I understand this as I was quite the same when I was younger. So much so that when I was ten and was supposed to have been at my after school religious classes, I was actually out at a nearby mall. After a couple of months my mother caught wind of this and asked me what the hell I was thinking. (It took her so long to figure it out because my brother, who was in ninth grade at the time, was already raising the kind of hell that involved pot and school detentions.) So I calmly informed her that although I would continue to attend church (even back then I loved the architecture and would sit in the pew gazing at the ceiling) I would never again set foot in a religious ed class. She must have been having a particularly rough day with my sibling because she simply agreed, I have never had such an easy victory. As a result I am a lousy and uneducated Catholic. My church attendance is sometimes sporadic, I don’t know the history -other than the architectural and art history part of it. So now, hypocrite that I am, I insist Loren not only attend the classes but make to his Confirmation in two more years.
I do feel quite a bit of guilt over my lack of credibility here, a Catholic trait I have in spades. Last week Kimberly emailed me and inquired about my thinking behind this. I had already been mulling the subject about in my brain and her question caught me in a Loop of Why for days. Why am I making my son doing something he hates, something I hated myself and bailed out of because I couldn’t deal with? If he hated swim lessons I wouldn’t make him take them. Same with ballet lessons or chess club.
So here is my thinking: it is more about follow through than anything else. Loren started on this path when he was five and attended a Catholic school. No, he didn’t start all of this because he was devoted to being the Best Little Catholic. Ever. I did it. Much to his father’s horror I started Loren on his path to Catholicism. It was a battle between Matt and me but I figured one of us should do it and since he told me he had been kicked out of the Mormon church at 15, I thought I was the better choice for the task. The fact of the matter is that Loren is a borderline child, he has the intelligence to great things but he has some serious things going against him. He has had a tumultuous existence as I have bounced in and out of father’s orbit. He and Matt don’t have the tightest of bonds. My brother is anything but a role model of how to be a man. My father, likely the best example of how to be an upstanding man, is gone. I try the best to provide structure and consistency for him but I have not always done the best job. I am but one mom for three kids. Now I am not saying I expect the church to provide my son with all that is lacking in his life, and I won’t even go in to the whole priest/little boy thing. But I do hope that one day he can look back on this and see how he started something, it was not easy and he completed it. He finished it. Plus, then we’ll have a big party, he’ll get some righteous gifts and he can decide whether or not he wants to pursue a Catholic lifestyle at that point. Any maybe he won’t. Or maybe, like me, he will pick it up someday and find comfort in it.
As part of my guilt over this whole thing I have agreed to teach one of the weekly religious ed classes. I would rather do just about anything other than this. I feel so inept at this position. My group consists of four kids, ages 12 to 14, who have not yet had their First Communion. I think I can make progress with the sixth grade girl and the eighth grade boy, but those freshmen girls? They are so on to me. They know I am a facade of bullshit. I saw them rolling their heavily made up eyes at my lameness; I deserve nothing less.