My book, WISHFUL THINKING, is out today!

Read chapter one here. Plus a favorite picture of me with my parents.

To my parents:
I like to imagine you are together again in the afterlife, hanging out by some beautiful forever-ocean.
I hope you are. I miss you always.

Chapter 1: I discover I’m alone.

The sun is out. I am six. It’s after school and I’m sitting cross-legged on my mother’s flowered bedspread, the same one she had for most of my childhood. It’s maroon and made of a sturdy, rough-feeling cotton, with swirls of blue and white flowers, laced with a mustard color, the green of stems and branches. The light filters through the windows on two sides of the room.

My mother is folding laundry.

I can see her moving in the long, horizontal mirror on the wall above the chest of drawers where she keeps her sweaters, socks, T-shirts. Jewelry boxes and little trays with earrings and necklaces are arranged neatly on top of it. She has short curly hair, a soft bosomy body. A smile on her face as she talks to me. I watch as she picks up one thing after the other from a giant mountain of clothing on the bed, white undershirts that my father wears each day, his boxer shorts, her nightgowns, my pajamas. She keeps reaching for the pile, plucking a garment from it, holding the piece of clothing up in the light to begin folding it, bending down to press it smooth against the bedspread, to make clear creases along the fabric. Then she stacks her finished work to the side. The cycle continues. The pile diminishes and the neatly folded stacks grow taller.

We talk. About my day at school. About life. We do this all the time. Me sitting on my mother’s bed, keeping her company while she folds.

I ask her questions. A lot.

It’s a joke between her and my father, how many questions I have, how I can’t help asking things constantly, how my questions usually aren’t of the easy variety. Not the When are we going to leave? kind, or even the What makes thunder happen? ones that have straightforward, scientific explanations. I ask those, too. I always want to know when this, and how that. But my questions are more often the sort that don’t have an obvious answer. How do you know when you go to bed at night that another day will be there when you wake up? Why do people die? Why do I exist? Why do you exist?

The question on the docket for my mother today is one of the big- gest of all: about the nature of God. It swirls in my little brain as she folds and talks, and I get ready to lay it down between us, trying to find the right words to begin.

***

I remember, vividly, another conversation I had with my dad about the mind and thoughts and what it means to be a person. It’s one of those memories that’s lasted a lifetime, that’s come back to me again and again over the years, one that has formed me. One that began to form me the moment it happened.

“I am always having thoughts,” I told my father one Saturday morning. He and I were sitting on the living room floor, on one of those oval braided rugs my parents had all over the house. The television was on and playing cartoons, though my father and I weren’t paying attention. My Legos were out, and we were building. “Thoughts go through my head constantly, one after the other, when I’m awake. It’s like a voice inside my brain. Are you always having thoughts?” I asked him. “Do you have a voice inside your head that’s talking?”

“Yes,” my father answered. He seemed mountainous next to me, but the gentlest of mountains. “Our minds are always working and going. Even when we are asleep.”

“Can you hear my thoughts?”

I remember my dad stopping to look at me, putting down the Lego block in his hand “No, I can’t hear what’s happening in your mind, sweetheart. No one can.”

“I can’t hear what’s happening in anyone else’s head,” I said, as though this was up for debate. “Only in mine.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“Why can’t we hear each other’s thoughts?”

My father seemed to consider this. The light of the television shifted next to us, and shifted again, the swirl of cartoons constantly moving across the screen. The rug was littered with the primary col- ors of the plastic blocks. My father was a kind man, willing to listen to me no matter what, fielding my million questions with a patience that seemed endless. This willingness never waned, not as long as he was alive. “Well, we just can’t, sweetheart,” he said. “We’re not made that way.”

“But why? Why aren’t we made that way?”

“I don’t know,” my father said.

I remember pausing to calculate what all of this meant. I’ve always been someone who does the math, who goes from one idea to the next to try and figure out how everything adds up, to gain some understanding, conclude as much as I can from the information on hand. When I was ready to speak again, I said, “But that means you can never hear the voice in my head and my thoughts, and I can never hear the voice in your head and your thoughts. I can never be in someone else’s head to hear what they’re thinking. And no one can ever be in my head to hear what I’m thinking.”

“That is what it means, sweetheart, yes,” he confirmed.

“But doesn’t that also mean we’re all alone?”

My father watched me. For a while, he was silent.

I waited. I wanted him to tell me otherwise, that my conclusions were wrong. I didn’t want to be alone in my thoughts, alone in my head, for an entire lifetime. This idea was unbearable. I wanted to learn the method of reaching inside the mind of someone else to hear their constant stream of consciousness, I wanted to hand them the key to my own brain so they could do the same. I worried if I could never find a way to do this that some cataclysmic level of loneliness would always be mine. I wanted connection, not isolation. I wanted it even as a little girl.

What I wanted was God. At its root, that’s what this conversation with my father was about. I know this now, even if I couldn’t name it back then.

“In a way, it does mean we’re alone,” my father said eventually, and oh so carefully. “But you can tell me your thoughts, sweetheart, and I can tell you mine. That’s why we talk to each other like this. That’s why we have conversations. So we can share our thoughts and feelings. So we can connect and so we aren’t alone.”

I nodded. Yes. But then I shook my head. No.

“It still makes me feel alone,” I told him. “I think it’s strange I can never hear what’s in anyone’s head and they can never hear what’s in mine.”

I find it strange even now, decades later. I am in awe of this fact of our being. I both love and also hate it. This awe of mine, this simultaneous love and hatred for how we are constructed as humans, and my awareness about this natural state of isolation, took me down a path that turned me into a philosophy major and eventually a PhD. I was built with a fundamental desire to be known and to know others, and this desire seemed constantly active in my DNA. I wanted a work-around for this stumbling block and I would soon begin searching for it every- where. I wanted to tear down the walls between our minds, most of all my own, to make my brain porous, open, available.

I think what I’ve always wanted is to let God in.

“I suppose it is strange, sweetheart,” my father agreed.

We went back to our Legos.“

***

“Did you know there were other gods?” There I am on the bed again, with my mother folding laundry. My burning question finally out in the open.

My mother holds up one of my father’s undershirts, folds the short white sleeves inward and presses it to the bed, then looks at me. “What do you mean?”

I explain what happened in school that day. We were doing our phonics lesson, sounding out words and sentences and entire short excerpts of texts. As my classmates were struggling to articulate each syllable on the page, I was focused elsewhere, mind racing. I began to grasp not only the words we were uttering out loud, but also their meaning. Short excerpts about Greek gods. Apollo. Ath- ena. Zeus and the gang. My six-year-old brain short-circuited.

“You never told me there were other gods,” I say to my mother. “I thought there was only one god.”

My mother keeps folding, thinking about how to answer my accusation.

Because it is an accusation. I feel tricked.

“There are lots of stories about other gods,” she says. “There are lots of religions, sweetheart. But we believe in the Catholic God.”

“But why this God and not one of the others?”

“Because we believe that this is the true God.”

“But how do you know?”

“Because we have faith.”

I am doing the math in my head again and it is not adding up the way I want it to. “But what if we picked the wrong God? What if one of the other gods is the real God? How can we know if we’re right?”

My mother stops folding to look at me. “Sweetheart, we can’t. That’s what faith is. Faith is believing in your heart that something is right and true even if you can’t know for sure. Not in a way you can see or touch. You just have to believe it.”

Here’s something you need to understand about my mother:

She was a champion believer. Like, an Olympic one. My grand mother was more of a believer of convenience. Everyone else was doing it, so she did it, too. Grandma would get all gussied up, stuff her pocketbook with money for the collection basket, a packet of tissues, and her rosary, preferably a nice sparkly one, and trot off to mass on Sundays. Grandma did love her saints, and I loved the opulent way in which she loved them. Baby Jesus under a great dome of glass. Framed, golden portraits of saints. But my mother was the real deal. She glowed with belief, and it surrounded her like a halo.

As I sit there on my parents’ bed, staring up at this Olympic gold medalist in the sport of faith, I consider my mother’s lobbying for my own belief, but it’s just not adding up in my head.

“That doesn’t make sense,” I tell her. Because I cannot make sense of what she is telling me. I am staring at the floral comforter, eyes blurring, my little young heart pounding. I am really and truly traumatized by this news, by this entire day, by the knowledge it has brought. “I’m worried that we picked the wrong God,” I go on, distraught. I look up at my mother, see the expression on her face, the curiosity in her eyes as she looks down at me, her daughter. The shadows there, the concern, but also the love. “Aren’t you worried, too?” I ask her.

“No, sweetheart,” she says, surely, calmly, gently, much like my father. Then she breaks our stare, reaches for the top of the laundry pile again. “Because I have faith.”

***

I speak of that Legos conversation with my father as one of the memories that formed me—one of the memories that continues to form me. But that afternoon with my mother is, I think, the primary memory that made me who I am in terms of faith. The conversation that began my journey of faith formation, or maybe it’s better said, deformation. I don’t like that word applied to myself, but perhaps it is the truth and I need to own it. Or perhaps it’s something else and my task is to discover what. Regardless, that discussion about other gods and which God is the right God is the beginning of everything with faith and me. I know this in my gut, my heart, my brain, my soul.

But the beginning of what, exactly? A loss of faith? A planting of the seeds of so much doubt? A lifetime of it?

Sometimes I’m able to look at that faith talk with my mother another way, wonder if maybe instead of a loss, it is a gain. Instead of it beginning to unmake my faith, sending it awry, it started me on a path of my very own. That I should see it as the opening of a life-long journey that will have me continually questioning what faith is, who God is, what it means to be a believer. People go entire lifetimes without ever thinking about their faith—I know this. They just have it without worry or complication, theirs to enjoy. (Or perhaps, theirs to ignore?) But not me. I don’t get to enjoy faith. I get to search for it. Wish for it. Long for it with every breath. Every single day of my existence.

Whereas people like my mother take leaps of faith like Olympian long jumpers, I am also an Olympian of sorts, yet not the good kind.

I’m more like the athlete who keeps crumbling under pressure, walking right up to the edge of the high dive and choking, turning around and walking back, climbing down the ladder to the ground. All my life, I’ve gone back and forth, back and forth on the diving board of faith, standing there in my ugly swimsuit and bathing cap, funny goggles on my face, curling my bare toes over the edge of the rough, narrow plank, swinging my arms, trying to prepare myself to jump, then looking down. Seeing only cement. So I step away, retreat completely, until I find the courage to climb up the ladder again, walk out to the edge, and look down once more, hoping maybe this time I will see the water; that maybe this time I’ll find the courage to jump.

Maybe all this doubt of mine is God’s way of talking to me. Maybe God has been having a conversation with me ever since the day I opened my phonics book and began to read about Greek gods. I want it to be this. I want it to be God’s way of reaching for me. Through the voice, the words, the conversations I had with my mother while she was alive, with my father, too, and my most cherished teachers, and so many wonderful friends. On my best days, it is this notion that shines through all of my darkness, like sunlight.

That afternoon with my mother explaining to me about faith was the start of a back-and-forth between us about God, religion, my atheism, that continued as I grew up, as I left the house for college and eventually went to grad school. My atheism, like a possession, an affliction. My mother wanted faith for me while she was alive, more than anything. She’d throw it toward me like a lifeline because it was a lifeline for her, tossing it outward like she was on a boat and I was in the sea, drowning, even though I’d just sit there, treading water in the darkness and the swells. I always refused to take what she offered, refusing to swim toward the rope. She kept trying to reach me with it anyway. She never stopped. Then she died. More than twenty years ago.

Even after my mother’s death, I still talk to her about faith, God, all she believed. Because she gave me this, too, this notion that it is perfectly normal to talk to the dead. She did it all the time so why shouldn’t I? She talked to the saints, she talked to the people of her childhood, long gone. So now I tilt my head toward the sky and imagine her up there in all that blue. I conjure her in my head while I’m cooking in the kitchen, hear her voice giving me directions. Because I know my mother was right about this. She was right to keep trying to convince me what faith could offer a person, and sharing what it offered her during her time on this earth.

I want that lifeline, too.