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Priests aren’t allowed to reveal a word about what’s said in the confessional, but the confessees are not so bound. Pull up a kneeler.
Listen, I told you I’ve been pissy. And I mean piss-y. Josh The Pilot is summarily creeped out whenever I say this, but I’m an empath, a highly obnoxious emotional sponge who serves as the mood barometer of the surrounding territory: It is physically impossible for me to remain calm if the rest of the room is falling apart. (Okay, unless it’s 2004 and I really, really hate my job.) I would suck as a POW.
This extends locally and even nationally. Therefore, as you can imagine, these past few weeks have been one little stormcloud of Fun. If there’s stress around me, even just my own stress, I will suck it in, process it poorly, and send it back out amonst the universe in the form of a Swiffer hurled across the kitchen hallway. I’m not talking the airy little Swiffer rag you stuff up into the sweeper here, people: I mean the entire Swiffer, pole and all.
That’s not acceptable adult behavior, of course; anger is normal and human, Swiffer javelining is not. Christ threw out the moneychangers, but He did not hurl about cleaning implements because He was pissed that it was cleaning day again and there was still a stack of essays left ungraded. That plus a multitude of less Procter and Gamble-sponsored outbursts (“I’m SORRY, I guess I’m just too INCOMPETENT, FAT and UGLY to hear you POLITELY ASK ME TO PACK YOU A SANDWICH FOR LUNCH”) landed me in the Confessional.
Now, the Church teaches that if Confession is done properly, it’s not a drive-thru sort of situation. It doesn’t work if you swing by to pick up a little penance on the way to the orgy. You have to go in there truly repentant, all “No seriously, I’m not going to sit around radiating little furor waves at that cop anymore.” (Please note that I’m not including this to start a big ol’ religious argument fest down in the Tasting Room, so any attempts to start one won’t get out of approval mode. I’m just explaining where my faith is here for narrative purposes, so if you have Confession-related catechismal issues, please direct them to this address. The recipient will be more than happy to help you out with that.)
So on Monday I plopped down behind the screen (if you’re lucky, your church will still have a screen with a highly uncomfortable kneeler, instead of the church I grew up in, which stocked the confessionals, Oprah-style, with two armchairs and a potted plant.) And the priest, as good priests do, made the event a spiritual counselling session rather than ten seconds of “Wow, sucks married to you. Five Hail Marys, see next week, same sin-time, same sin-channel.”
I threw the whole mess down at the screen and the priest said, “Have you tried praying for healing? I can tell you have much anger in your heart. And when you are angry, you cannot move forward. But you’re worse than stuck. You are moving backwards.”
Which… true. Even though I hadn’t gone into the Olive Garden details there in the box, I sit here a despairing newlywed, because I have been pulling *#&@ that I would never have considered during the dating phase. And– yeah, the marriage and the toilet scrubbing arrives, the roses and the “When you.. I feel” statements go. Because you get tired and you get impatient, and the furor flashes up and you don’t want to have a twenty-minute sob-encrusted wrenching conversation when two second’s worth of a hurled Swiffer will say exactly the same thing.
No, I don’t cheat and I don’t hit and I don’t name-call. The Great Swiffer Toss was aimed well in the opposite direction of my husband. When I scream, the vitriol is aimed exactly where it belongs: At me. But that isn’t how a woman who wants her husband to date her for another fifty years or so behaves. Not when the husband greets me at the door in my perpetual exhaustion and says “I have a present for you!” and the present is a freshly-made bed, complete with stuffed animal to keep me company while he unsticks the hinges on the front storm door.
So, yeah: He maintains, even steps it up, as I move backwards. Backwards in my marriage and backwards in my career, because when the economy went cliffdiving, so did many of my freelancing contacts, which meant I had to start putting on a bra to make a living again. That’s translated to many, many minutes of staring at the back wall over my students’ scowling, bored heads: “Why can’t you be a nice long line at a book signing?”
And so I left the confessional sniffling, and lay down on the bed with my husband, and we did my penance together, which was to pray over Scripture about Christ as a healer. Then I drove to my classroom and went around the room with my students’ latest essays. And in front of the whole entire class, I praised each and every one of them on one good thing they’d done with the assignment, even if the thing was “You remembered to put your name on it!” Only two of them fell asleep.
And then I got in my car and I saw the two following bumper stickers during my drive home:
1) Hand lettered, black cutout furor on a white background: BLAME THE REPUBLICANS
2) Professionally produced, and all the more heinous for it: WHY COULDN’T HILLARY HAVE MARRIED O.J.?
Backwards, all of us.
be cool at: mbe@drinktothelasses.com
