Cari Donaldson - Pope Awesome and Other Stories

Cari Donaldson

Pope Awesome
and Other Stories

How I Found God, Had Kids,
and Lived to Tell the Tale

SOPHIA INSTITUTE PRESS
Manchester, New Hampshire

Copyright 2013 Cari Donaldson

Printed in the United States of America

All rights reserved

Cover design by Carolyn McKinney

Cover art by Ted Schluenderfritz

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

Sophia Institute Press
Box 5284, Manchester, NH 03108
1-800-888-9344

www.SophiaInstitute.com

Sophia Institute Press is a registered trademark of Sophia Institute.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Donaldson, Cari.

Pope awesome and other stories : how I found God, had kids, and lived to tell the tale / Cari Donaldson.

pages cm

ISBN 978-1-622821-56-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ePub ISBN 978-1-622821-57-0 1. Donaldson, Cari.
2. Catholic converts United States Biography. I. Title.

BX4668.D58A3 2013

282.092 dc23

[B]

2013031759

For Ken,
the kids,
and my guardian angel,
who have all, at some point,
saved my life

Contents

Part 1: Michigan

Part 2: Mississippi

Part 3: Connecticut

Authors Note

Gabriel, my five-year-old, pops his head into the kitchen.

Gravity, Mommy, he says simply.

Whats gravity? I ask, a little suspicious.

He sighs. Gravity is a force that pulls objects to the center of the earth.

I stare at him. Why is he going on about gravity?

He explains a little more: It also pulled all of Judes toys out his window and into the pool.

What?

I jump up and run to the kitchen window. Sure enough, Gabriels four-year-old brother, Jude, in protest against being sent to bed, has opened his bedroom window upstairs and flung every single toy from his room into the kiddie pool on the deck below.

Trying to control my temper, I decide to deal with the toys later and make this a teachable moment. That was a good explanation of gravity, Gabriel. Can you tell me what letter gravity starts with?

He looks at me blankly for a moment.

Blue?

This is our home. Its not the one we planned.

On August 6, 1999, my high school sweetheart and I were married in a twenty-minute Presbyterian ceremony that I insisted must be scrubbed clean of all references to Jesus. We were young and secular. We had a dual income and two dogs that stood in for the kids we swore we were never going to have.

It is now fourteen years, thousands of miles, and two conversions later. Not only are there kids six of them but they are kids with baptized, curious, and deep imaginations. They love Coke and sports and computer games, and they playact as knights, popes, princesses, superheroes, and saints.

Like their parents, they are firmly in the world, but not of it. Like children, they embody perfect dignity and perfect comedy.

This book is about how our lives worked out differently from the way my husband and I planned, in every way.

And why.

C.D .

Part 1

Michigan

In the Beginning

The world is a big place. Reading the news, its easy to imagine that geography, politics, and selfishness divide us from each other so deeply that we can never be truly united to another person. And that God, if He is there, does not have the time or the energy to get involved with our lives. If youre someone with minimal religious devotion, these thoughts can swallow you whole.

But when you take the leap to look at the world through the eyes of faith, you start seeing Gods fingerprints everywhere, creating connections so subtle, so delicate, they might pass unseen.

My husband, Ken, was born in Germany, in a military hospital on a U.S. Air Force base. His mother, a nineteen-year-old Texan, always said that in the Air Force, even maternity wards are run like the military, with babies and mothers expected to follow strict schedules.

Three and a half years later and an ocean away, I was born in a civilian hospital outside Detroit, Michigan. By that time, Kens father had left the air force, and his family of three began a long period of frequent moves, taking them to California, Nebraska, and Texas. Ken started the first grade four times in a single year.

While he was being taken on his tour of the West, I was growing up in Michigan, living in the same house where my mom had grown up. My childhood bedroom had been hers. Her kindergarten teacher still worked at my elementary school.

Whereas Kens family was like tumbleweed, never settling in one place for long, my family put down roots deeper than dandelions.

Then one day, the tumbleweeds boarded a plane, blew into Detroit Metro Airport, and touched down in Michigan. Kens family moved into the same town I was growing up in, attended the same school system I was moving through, and became members of the same Presbyterian church I went to (like my mother before me). With a touch so light that nothing stirred in its wake, God brought Ken to me. I met him when I was thirteen. At fourteen, I knew I would marry him.

Kens sister, Debra, was my age, and we got to know each other at school and at our churchs youth group. Thats where I first saw him.

October 15, 1989, marked our first date. I was a nervous freshman; Ken, a nervous senior. It was our high schools Homecoming Dance and my first date ever. I had spent weeks with my mom at stores, hunting down the perfect dress (an electric-blue, taffeta-and-black-velvet Jessica McClintock dress viva los 80s! ).

The date almost got derailed when, half an hour before Ken was due to arrive, my mom brought home a black kitten.

Mom and I had been trying to convince my dad that getting a cat would be a great idea, and he kept trying to convince us that it would be a spectacularly stupid one. We had been at that stalemate for a while when my mom, who was a visiting nurse, was offered the pick of the litter from a barn cat owned by one of her patients. Looking at the heap of cuteness there, Mom made her choice. On the way home, she called my dad and asked, Would you divorce me if I brought a cat home?

What? Divorce you? No.

Good. Because Im bringing a cat home.

I meant to hold that bundle of black fuzz for only a moment, as I had a dance to primp for, but as I looked down at the kitten, plans changed.

Why is the cats fur moving ? I asked my mom. I was now holding the tiny animal far away from my body.

My mom peered closely at the kitten, while my dad stood in the kitchen doorway, making harrumphing noises. My mom and I came to the same realization at the same time.

Fleas.

This tiny kitten was so infested with fleas, you could see them writhing on its small body in numbers so huge it made them clearly visible even against the cats black fur.

We knew that if we surrendered to the horror and disgust that such a sight clearly warranted (All those fleas! In my hands !), my dad would banish the cat forever. Mom and I went into damage-control mode. She dug up a bottle of flea shampoo from the depths of the house, and I rolled up my sleeves and got elbow deep in lather and dying parasites.

By the time the kitty was sufficiently defleaed, I had only ten minutes to get ready for my date. Either out of a sincere desire to buy time for me or for the sake of sheer mischief, my younger brother, wearing a rubber Ronald Reagan mask, answered the door for Ken. While Ken stood in momentary confusion, I frantically toweled the remaining dead fleas off my arms, threw on my dress, and went out to meet my date.

And so our love affair was born.

Dramatics