Free Saint Training by Elizabeth Fixmer

it.
    What does a vocation as a sister mean to me? Everything! Sisters are women who have devoted their lives to serving God through thevows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Sisters devote their lives to prayer and doing God’s work.
    Yuck!
    She leaned back in her father’s swivel chair. He was presenting books in Chicago schools this week and his office was, by far, the safest part of the house to get work done—especially if she snuck in without anybody seeing her. She knew she needed to be quiet if she didn’t want company, but she didn’t want to be quiet. She wanted to scream! At this rate she’d be lucky to have something to turn in tomorrow, never mind an award-winning something.
    Mary Clare could hear her mother hollering to the little kids to come inside for quiet hour, which her mother referred to as her “one salvation.” Between 2:00 and 3:00 on weekend afternoons and every day in the summer, kids under the age of twelve had to be in their rooms napping or reading. During this time her mother could read or write or sew undisturbed. Mary Clare loved quiet hour, especially for her mother, who usually came out of her bedroom with more color in her face than before.
    Mary Clare wanted to take a nap herself, or do anything but sit here writing an essay.
    The door swung open and her mom stood in the doorway with a book in her hands, which she quickly tried to hide under her sweater. She didn’t realize that Mary Clare had already seen the title.
    “I wondered where you’d gone off to,” her mother said.
    Mary Clare started to gather her things together.
    “Don’t leave,” her mother said. “I just want to sit in your father’s easy chair for a while and read. Are you working on your essay?”
    Mary Clare nodded and frowned.
    “I’ll take a peek at it if you’d like.”
    Mary Clare handed her the paragraph she’d retrieved from the trash. She watched as her mother read through it, then read through it a second time. She furrowed her eyebrows and looked up at Mary Clare.
    “Don’t just tell them what you think they want to hear, Mary Clare. Don’t get into the roles everybody expects from a woman—where your identity is what the Church tells you it should be. ‘God’s servant, and God’s bride’…that’s just all part of the feminine mystique,” she said. “Everybody knows what nuns do and the vows they take. Go inside your heart and tell them who you are.”
    Mary Clare was confused. She didn’t know what the feminine mystique was, and she was pretty sure that to win this contest she had to pretty much say what the judges wanted to hear, but she did want to be real. She watched her mother cozy into the comfortable chair and open the book to a pen that was holding her place. She watched her mother read a little bit and then underline what she had read. Mary Clare couldn’t help it.
    “Why are you reading that Freidan book?” she asked. “You know Dad doesn’t like ‘women’s libbers.’”
    “I’m reading it because finally someone is acknowledging that being a housewife and mother are not going to fulfill every woman. Women need to get meaning through things other than their husbands and families. We need to use our minds, our creativity. We need to be more than baby machines.”
    Mary Clare thought about this. For some reason it made her squirm inside.
    “Think about it! Women define themselves through men. If a man is successful, his wife gets to feel successful. If he’s not, then she’s not.”
    Mary Clare had never seen her mother this animated. She seemed like a different person. She wasn’t sure about this new version of her mother.
    “And the reason this book—this thinking—upsets your father so much is that he’s scared he’ll lose something if I look beyond him to be fulfilled.”
    “Oh,” Mary Clare said. It was all she could think of to say. She understood her dad’s fears more than her mother’s new thinking. The idea of her mother finding