“I’m not—” I set my glass down and mirror her air quotes back at her “—‘complicating’ my way into anything. I know this looks reckless to you. Maybe it is. But I’m not a child, Kelsey. I’ve spent my entire adult life being careful. Being responsible. Doing what was expected of me.” I pause. “I’m not saying I have answers. I don’t. But I need you to trust that I’m not going to blow up my life without thinking about it first.”
“That’s exactly what I’m afraid of, Dad. The thinking.” She shakes her head. “You’ll think yourself in circles until you’ve rationalized staying in the Church, and then you’ll spend another fifteen years being careful and responsible and alone.”
The words land harder than I expected. Fifteen years. Has she noticed more than I thought?
“I’m not going to hurt Victor,” I say quietly. “Whatever else happens, I promise you that.”
“What about hurting yourself?”
I don’t have an answer for that.
Kelsey sighs and takes a long sip of her whiskey. The fight seems to drain out of her. “I’m sorry. I didn’t come here to yell at you.”
“Could have fooled me.”
She huffs something that’s almost a laugh. “Yeah, well. This is a really weird, fucked-up situation, Dad.”
“I know, hon. Believe me, it’s not how I expected this week to go, either.”
Kelsey shoots me a look, but there’s less fear and anger in it. We sit in silence for a moment, watching the birds resettle on the railing.
“Can I ask you something?” I finally say.
“Sure, Dad.”
“When did you decide to leave the Church? I mean, was there a specific point where you decided, or did you just start slacking off on attending Sunday Mass and suddenly realize how long it had been since you went?”
She looks sideways at me, but I keep my eyes on the birds. I’m sure she knows why I’m asking—or why I’m asking now—but I’m also genuinely curious.
She looks out across the clearing for a minute. “It was a conscious decision, Dad. But I think it was a long time coming, actually. There was this day—I don’t even remember when, but it was probably during Lent, it must have been Holy Week. And I was maybe fourteen or so? We were sitting in a pew together, waiting to go to confession, and I was so annoyed. Like, just seething with anger and irritation. You must have noticed, I guess, because you asked me what was wrong.”
Kelsey, at fourteen, spent a lot of time seething with anger and irritation, so I can’t say that this particular incident rings any bells for me.
“I figured I’d go ahead and tell you—you asked, right? So I told you exactly how I felt. That I hated going to confession. That I found it humiliating to list off for some old, male priest things the Church considered sins. That half the time, I didn’t remember specifics about any sins anyway, so I’d make things up just to have something to confess, and isn’t that lying? And that even when I thought of something to confess, I didn’t find the experience of confession helpful or soothing or comforting or anything else confession is supposed to give someone. Plus, if I were sorry for something bad I’d done, wouldn’t God know that already and forgive me? Why did I need to tell a priest my sins to get God’s forgiveness?”
“How very Lutheran of you,” I say with a smile.
Kelsey snorts. “I don’t think fourteen-year-old me would have been happier in a Lutheran church.”
I take the last sip of my whiskey and Kelsey pours us both more from the bottle. “What happened? What did I say after that little speech?”
Kelsey smiles, a faraway, distant look in her eyes. “You sort of looked at me for a minute and I was afraid I was going to get a lecture on the importance of the Sacrament of Reconciliation. But then you said, ‘Okay. You don’t have to go, then.’”
I don’t remember telling her this, but I definitely would have remembered a fight the likes of which we’d have had if I’d tried to force Kelsey to go to confession. What would be the benefit of forcing her in the first place?
“I said, ‘Really?’ and you said, ‘Well, if it doesn’t mean anything to you, then there’s no point to doing it, is there?’” Kelsey shakes her head. “Dad, you have no idea how relieved I was. I mean, you, of all people, giving me the okay to not participate in one of the major sacraments of the Church…it was, I don’t know, like a turning point, I guess? Like, I started to question other things about the Church, and I gradually realized that I didn’t need to be a practicing Catholic to be a good person.”
She pauses, swirling the whiskey in her glass. “But I guess to answer your question: I left the Church when I realized that I’m a lesbian and the Church doesn’t love me the way Jesus would have loved me.” She sips her whiskey, then looks sideways at me again. “The Church rejected me first, Dad.”
“Yeah,” I sigh. “I know.”
“You didn’t, though.” She’s not looking at me now. Her eyes are on the tanagers squabbling over the last tiny bits of banana. “You never made me feel like there was something wrong with me. Even when I came out to you and I was sure you were going to give me a lecture about the Church, you just…let me be who I was.”
“You’re my daughter. I love you exactly the way you are.”
“I know.” Her voice is quieter now. “That’s why this is so hard to watch. You gave me permission to question everything. To figure out who I was on my own terms.” She finally looks at me. “Why can’t you give yourself the same permission?”
The question sits between us. I don’t have an answer. Or rather, I have too many answers, none of which I can say out loud. Because I’m not brave enough. Because I’ve spent too long being who everyone expects me to be. Because I’m terrified that if I let myself want this, I’ll lose everything else.
