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anything less than an attractive figure. She also kept an immaculate home and was often frustrated by what she considered to be a lack of appreciation on everyone’s part. As good as she was at it, I don’t think my mother ever enjoyed being a homemaker. She was often angry, and, in retrospect it’s easy to see why. The Valedictorian of her high school class, this bright and capable woman must have secretly yearned for more and felt unfulfilled with the endless cycle of cooking and cleaning and childcare that made up her days. At the time, though, all I knew was that no matter how perfect she or the house looked, my mother always seemed dissatisfied. “Didn’t anyone notice . . . ” she would say in exasperation after polishing the floor or washing the drapes or performing some other thankless domestic task.
    When it came to sex, the religious, cultural, and social forces of the time converged to create a code of silence that could only be breached to issue harsh judgments and condemnations, usually aimed at women who had in some way transgressed. On one occasion my mother made it a point to note a woman in town, a former classmate of hers, who was “loose.” From the tone her voice I could tell that being loose was something very bad. Before I was even sure what it meant, I knew that I never wanted to find myself in this category of women.
    My mother couldn’t even say the word “vagina,” much less talk about anything that might go into it. To her, it was a “hoosie,” and that was only when she absolutely had to refer to it. As for sex education, or at least what passed for it at the time, they left that to the nuns and teachers at St. Mary’s Immaculate Conception Elementary School, which I entered when I was five.

    In second grade, my class started receiving training to make our first Holy Communion and preparing to make our first confession. The Baltimore Catechism served as our manual to all that was good and holy. Sometimes I was afraid to even look at this hallowed book, with its diffuse picture of Jesus and his sad, benevolent eyes staring out at the fallen world from the cover.
    We learned the difference between mortal and venial sins and I had my first introduction to the sins of impurity. We were taught that touching “down there” was one of the gravest of mortal sins. It was a particular affront to God and anyone who did it was corrupting body and soul and risking eternal damnation. This conjured up all sorts of terrible hypotheticals. What if you touched down there and then died before you could confess? Of course, you would be hell-bound. I vowed never to touch myself in an impure way. I would keep my soul pure, even as I flailed in the temporal world.
    Soon after starting school it became clear that something was different about how I learned. Much later, when I was an adult with two children, I would be diagnosed with dyslexia, but at the time my difficulty in learning how to read, write, and do math was taken as defiance, laziness, or just plain stupidity.
    My classmates learned how to put sounds together and decode words and then sentences with what seemed like barely any effort. I was stumped by one-syllable words like “dog” and “cat.”
    My mother enlisted herself in the effort to help me learn how to read. She promptly went out and purchased a series of “Dick and Jane” books and we had regular tutoring sessions after school. Each day we sat at the kitchen table and I would try to read the adventures of Dick and Jane and their dog Spot. My mother was no more enlightened about dyslexia than my teachers and less patient than some of them. I don’t know if she thought it would prompt me to learn faster, or if she was frustrated, or if she thought I was willfully misunderstanding basic concepts, but she resorted to physical punishment.
    The afternoons with her devolved into a predictable and frightening cycle: She would tell me to read a word, I would read it incorrectly. “Sound