I Baptized My Kid, But I Kind of Regret It
A few weeks ago, my husband and I had our second son, Rocco, baptized in the Catholic Church. My worries for the day stretched beyond what I would wear, though that worry was very real. (Who decides, four months postpartum, that she will book her child's baptism for 72 hours after Thanksgiving dinner and just improvise an outfit from her pre-baby closet? Me. I do.) The thought that kept running through my head as the ceremony approached was: Do I actually want to do this?
On paper, the answer was simple: No. I often feel as though I disagree with far more about Catholicism than I accept. Just off the top of my head: There's the archaic way the Catholic Church treats divorce. There's their rejection of anyone who isn't straight. Their dogged, exhausting fixation on abortion. Their condescension to women on everything from birth control to the priesthood. (Never mind that a woman birthed the actual savior, in a barn, with an intact hymen-we could never handle wearing bright robes and singing acapella on the altar.) And, of course, there's the century-sized pile of sexual abuse that kicked the moral high ground right out from under the Church. Our relatively chill Pope has been a literal PR godsend, but it's hard for one man, even an anointed one, to put a good spin on eons of entrenched disdain and hypocrisy.
But I went through with the baptism. Even though it made my heart pound with irritation when, during our prep class, the deacon took a shot at the Jews for "letting their children choose the faith as young adults" rather than locking salvation down at the infant stage. Even though I had to stop myself from rolling my eyes when, at the end of the ceremony, a rep from a Catholic organization handed each mother a plastic rose and pointedly thanked her for "choosing life." As I have many times before-when, at funerals, the lector would begin by welcoming the crowd to a "pro-life parish," or when, at my own wedding, we had to beg my childhood church to take down blaring abortion-stats signs-I thought to myself, Can't we have one day where it's not about abortion? Then I went to the luncheon and spaced out, stirring my drink as I stared at Rocco and wondered how I would explain this choice to him if he turns out to be gay.
Even if I mostly associated church with the "nice coats" my mother made me wear, religion was shaping my little mind and heart in mostly positive ways.
Why did I do it? I know what you're thinking: the grandparents. Isn't that why everyone does it? My parents and in-laws are Catholic; yes, they would have been surprised if we decided not to baptize our sons. But I think they would have understood-it's an intensely private decision. Or maybe you think that we were just falling in line; having baptized the first, it would seem weird to not baptize the second. Or maybe you imagine that even if I'm pretty far from a fire-and-brimstone view of the world, a little inoculation for the afterlife couldn't hurt. All of these things are at least a little bit true. But the real reason I went ahead was: While I feel sure that I'll sometimes regret dragging my kids into Catholicism with me, I couldn't imagine them growing up without religion, because I couldn't imagine myself having grown up without it.
Religion is in no way cool when you're a kid. I don't remember anyone coming to school on Monday and announcing that they had seen Home Alone 2 on Saturday and Father Graf had given the raddest sermon on Sunday. But even if I mostly associated church with the "nice coats" I hated that my mother made me wear, religion was shaping my little mind and heart in mostly positive ways. The idea of heaven comforted me when the concept of death settled in at age four, knocking the wind out of me. In my Catholic elementary school, time was set aside each day to learn religion-and when you're ten years old, that mostly means time is set aside each day to remind you, firmly, that it is your job to be nice to people. At my Catholic college, religion turned into something else altogether-a theory to be parsed for purpose, a jumping-off point for larger discussions about what we owe each other as citizens of the world. My professors talked passionately about liberation theology-which hypothesizes that we have an obligation to work to free oppressed people-and signed off emails with "Pax Christi," signaling their loyalty to the Catholic peace activist moment. For the first time, religion seemed kind of badass.
Then came adult life, when it was time to for me to decide, without the instruction of my parents or teachers, what shape my faith would take. My relationship with religion has become something full of unanswered questions and realities that don't coexist seamlessly. I do not go to church every Sunday; I don't feel the need. But when I do go, I close my eyes and feel strangely close to my grandparents, remembering the jacket my Pop used to wear to Mass and the way my Gram used to say her prayers rapid-fire, perplexed as to why everyone else chanted them at a barge-like pace.
Practicing a faith as an adult, and deciding to adopt it on behalf of my children, before they have much say in the matter, has meant having to reconcile the uncomfortable aspect of religion with the comforting ones. I couldn't stand the dogmatic overtones of parts of Rocco's baptism but I still found myself overcome with nostalgia and affection, two weeks later, when I toured the same church's preschool for our older son, Mac. (I have this theory that all Catholic schools have the same enigmatic smell. It is not necessarily a good smell-I detect notes of bleach and pencil shavings-but it does make you feel cozy and safe.) It turns out that even when you have complicated feelings about something you grew up with, the idea of your children having it, too, can be powerfully reassuring.
All Catholic schools have the same enigmatic smell. I detect notes of bleach and pencil shavings.
And there's something else I do that I would like to see them do: I pray. I've prayed my whole life, big prayers about keeping people I love safe and little prayers about, for instance, the cute altar boys not seeing me in my "nice coat." When I was a kid, our whole family would gather in one room before bedtime to say a couple prayers-half the time my brothers would be pelting each other with Nerf missiles throughout, but the point was that we were all together for a moment, and we were attempting to reflect. Long before yoga got trendy or smartphones interrupted anything, we were instilled with the notion that gratitude and mental quiet were good for us.
This is my way of being Catholic-choosing my own practices, defining my own benefits, ignoring the ideas I don't subscribe to. It's not religion as advertised. But perhaps this is what I'm hoping most to pass on to my children: a way of being faithful that is zealously ambivalent, a relationship they will never quite finish figuring out. I am more at peace with my choice to make my children Catholic now that I understand that it can be for them what it became for me: something you can find solace in but also learn to disagree with, a starting point for beliefs rather than a prescription for them.
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