The time between that Christmas and Easter was pretty uneventful except for a certain guest speaker who came to the school. She was a young mother from the Respect Life Office who came to speak to the seventh and eighth graders about fetal development...and abortion.
Up until this point, I had always considered myself a worldly young woman who was pro-feminism. I believed Planned Parenthood when they said they were only there for the underprivileged - to provide basic female medical care. I believed in oral contraception because why would anyone want to have a baby when they weren't ready? The pill saved women from enslavement, right? Well, that's what we were told as young girls fresh off the advent of the legalization of oral contraception and the legalization of abortion. And as horrible as I thought abortion was, I wouldn't take that right away from another woman. What if she was raped? What if it was a baby from incest? What if she was too poor to take care of the child? What if she herself was just a child. What kind of monster would make a young teen go through pregnancy and delivery and raising a child when she was just a baby herself?
That Respect Life representative had about a half hour before her presentation and I was on break. I decided to talk to her. She began giving me statistics and details about the methods of abortion. I thought there was only one method - a sort of vacuuming of a clump of cells early in the first trimester. It wasn't even a baby yet! And no one did abortions in the second and third trimesters. I didn't even think they were legal. After learning that the clump of cells was really a tiny baby...and that abortion was legal all nine months of pregnancy...and how abortions were really performed, I wanted to cry. I was devastated. How could so many young women be bamboozled into thinking abortion was a safe alternative to pregnancy? Killing babies was being pro-feminism? And oral contraceptions could induce miscarriages without the woman even knowing? It didn't make sense. At the heart of every woman's inherent feminism is a desire to carry a child, not kill one.
I thought that if every woman in America knew what I had just learned, abortions would end tomorrow. Only, what about rape, incest, and the teen pregnancy? I still wasn't sure. That day, I came home and told my husband everything I had learned. I told him, "I know my future in the Church will be in the Respect Life office... but not now. I'm not ready. I'm not quite there. Quite frankly, it scares me. It's not an easy ministry, but I feel my calling is there somehow." I knew that God would call me when the time was right.
That Easter, I was confirmed a Catholic. My journey was not over, but only beginning. I didn't know where the Church would lead me, but as I knew back when I was a teenager, the truth was lying inside this Catholic Church. It had always been there, and I was finally on the inside! I was in the loop! I was so happy to finally put to rest my inner struggles of staying protestant or becoming one with the Church...the one Church that Jesus Christ himself established two thousand years before with Peter as its first Pope - the same Peter whose very first church in Antioch I had visited just three years prior.
The Carmelites helped to shape my theological background. I learned so much from them...not only in their teachings, but in their ways. They were love. When I saw them, I saw love. There was only one thing radiating from their eyes, and that was their love for Jesus, his mother Mary, and all of humanity. I would only teach there one more year before becoming pregnant with my first son, and it was a bittersweet ending to my short-lived teaching career - or so I thought. I walked away from teaching to become a mother for the first time. I prayed a decade of the rosary every day in thanksgiving for this life that was growing in my womb. I felt very close with Mary during that time. I knew she knew what I was feeling. She was the ultimate mother. She understood.
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