Free Dedicated to God by Abbie Reese

her sense of self. Beyond the enclosure and the grille, in the chaotic world she inhabited until the age of seventeen, she was regarded as upright, a model student, daughter, and sister. “I think the novitiate was awful hard—being young, partly, being in a new culture entirely,” Sister Joan Marie says. “Everybody’s praising me out there. Before Vatican II, it was like coming to a completely different milieu. Well, when I got here, it seemed like everybody was on me for doing the wrong thing at the wrong time. So it was hard to adjust. In fact I don’t know if I ever did. I got sick, mostly. Instead of adjusting, I got sick, the one way to adjust. I didn’t do it on purpose, but God works it out.”
    She had endured much in her youth, upended by her family’s many moves, jostled by her father’s mental instability and the needs of her mother and siblings; she worked to protect her family from self-destructing. Before her parents married, her maternal grandparents predicted doom for the couple. She learned from her parents that they met when her father eyed her mother, a sorority girl in college, at a social. “I’ll take that Kansas girl,” he said. They married in a civil union; Sister Joan Marie’s maternal grandparents were mortified by their quick pairing. Another daughter had married her high school sweetheart, and they “didn’t think this could turn out.”
    Virginia’s early years were sweet enough. She remembers visiting her father’s office building in Detroit and looking down on the city below. “He would show me these little cars, and I thought they were toy cars. I soon learned it was because we were high up. I was just a baby,” she says. She smiles at the memory and her juvenile mind’s attempts to consolidate her perceptions and interpret her world. As a youngster, she and her older brother played the Lone Ranger and Tonto. Virginia always wanted to be the Lone Ranger and say, “Hi-yo, Silver!” Her brother relegated her to the role of Tonto. She aspired to become a “cowboy.” The family vacationed at their beach house in Canada, and her father took her into the water to teach her how to “ride the waves.” To Virginia, the phrase was married to the world of horseback riding; she tried to mount a wave, as if it were a horse. Her father laughed. Her family was “well off,” Sister Joan Marie says, and each year she was proud to add one new doll to her collection, a gift from her parents.
    If her grandparents’ undisguised displeasure at her parents’ union was not an omen, an ill-conceived object lesson at Christmas foreshadowed impending turmoil. A toddler at the time, Virginia watched her mother set the holiday cookies on the kitchen table, out of the child’s reach. Virginia realized, though, that if she yanked on the tablecloth, she could get at the cookies. At first, her parents laughed at her cleverness, but they tried to stop it soon enough. “Well, Mother didn’t like that because all the dishes came down,” she says. “But I kept doing that because I got the cookie.” Weeks shy of Christmas, her parents informed Virginia that she would not receive any presents if she kept pulling the cookies and dishes off the table; she would get switches, for spankings, instead. Her mischievous efforts continued to be rewarded, with cookies obtained. So Virginia persisted. And she wreaked havoc on her mother’s dishware. On Christmas morning, Virginia watched her father hand presents to her older sister and her older brother. Then he reached behind the tree for a package, swaddled in newspaper, for Virginia. Inside the wrapping were switches. “Mother said she would never do that again to any kid because I was crying all day,” Sister Joan Marie says. “Mostly, I was crying because Santa knew my sins. Santa knew how bad I was. I didn’t mind the family knowing what was going on because they know me. But a stranger—Santa of all people—knew.” Her mother tried to