22

My experiment of living by the Church’s moral code was going amazingly well. An entire week had passed, and I had not murdered anyone or started a single unjust war. I hadn’t even gossiped (though, truth be told, that one probably had less to do with virtue and more to do with the fact that I didn’t have enough of a social life to hear anything worth gossiping about). So far, the main result of the experiment was that I felt like a pretty great person.

On a Friday afternoon, ten days into the experiment, I slid into my bed to take a much-needed nap. For one thing, I had to get off my feet: That pain in my right leg was back and had gotten so bad that I now had a limp when I walked. The main problem, though, was that I was tired—terribly, terribly tired.

At almost eighteen months old, Donald was still waking up at least twice, sometimes more, every night. It was as if he was just so thrilled to be alive that he resented the entire concept of being unconscious for hours at a time. Joe was willing to help, but we both agreed that getting sued for malpractice because he made a mistake from being tired wasn’t worth my having a little extra rest. The result was that I rarely got more than four consecutive hours of sleep.

The night before had been particularly abysmal. Irma called in sick on Thursday morning, and that afternoon I’d let Donald drink an entire bottle of a lemon-lime soda while I finished a new contact form for the law firm website. I was in the middle of typing out the last lines of code when a horrifying thought occurred to me. With great trepidation, I picked up the empty bottle from the floor and turned it in my hand until I found the ingredients list. My face probably looked like the woman’s from the shower scene in Psycho when my eyes set on the third ingredient: Caffeine.

The evening played out exactly as I feared it would. Donald’s eyes flashed open at two o’clock in the morning, and he didn’t shut them again until five-thirty. I spent the hours in between sitting with him on the couch while he excitedly inventoried the entire living room, thrusting his chubby index finger in various directions as he exclaimed, “Chair! Table! Sink! Figh-oh place!”

I somehow managed to make it through the morning and past lunch-time, wondering all the while if I might be the first mother who actually died from sleep deprivation, and now I needed a nap like I had never needed a nap in my life. It was two o’clock in the afternoon, and I figured I could count on Donald sleeping until five-thirty. As I settled into bed, my pillow felt twice as soft as it normally did, and our cheap sheets had somehow transformed into a substance as soft as warm butter. That pain in my leg that had plagued me all day faded away now that I was lying down. If heaven did exist, I was sure that it must feel something like this.

As an extra treat, I pulled a printout off my bedside table. Normally I didn’t have time for reading when I was trying to sneak in an afternoon nap, but since Donald would sleep for a long time today, I could indulge myself this time.

The three sheets of stapled paper were from a blog post about a nineteenth-century American slave named Augustine Tolton, who had gone on to become a Catholic priest. I’d begun reading Catholic blogs, and they were all buzzing about this man’s story because his biography was being released soon. Everyone said he was a model of Christlike love—specifically, he was a shining example of what true humility looks like. There were whispers that he might be declared a saint one day.

I was finding that reading about the lives of the saints—as well as saintly people who might not have been canonized yet, like Father Augustine—was far more helpful in my quest to seek goodness than reading the Catechism alone. The Catechism might tell me to put others before myself, and I’d make a mental note to try to do that at some point. Then I would read of Maximilian Kolbe volunteering to die in place of a young father when they were both prisoners at Auschwitz, and I would realize just how feeble my recent efforts at selfless love had been. My heart would be aflame with a desire to serve others, in a deeper and more vibrant way than when I was simply reading theology. Instead of an intellectual decision, it would be more of a movement of the soul, something powerful within me yearning for more of the pure goodness that had touched me through Maximilian’s story. And so I turned to Father Augustine, eager to see what he might be able to tell me about being good. I pressed my papers flat on the bed and began reading.

Father Augustine was freed from slavery when he was a child and then attended a Catholic school in Illinois at the invitation of a priest. This was the 1860s, and some parishioners became apoplectic when they saw a black child in their school, but the priest didn’t back down. After high school, Augustine was not allowed to attend his local American seminary, so he went to Rome, where he became fluent in Italian, studied Latin and Greek, and earned respect among the hierarchy.

After he was ordained a priest in Rome, he went back to the United States to begin his ministry. He was returning to the place where he’d been enslaved, the country where he had been listed among another man’s possessions, alongside furniture and cattle.

A noise interrupted my reading. I tried to tell myself that it was a cat mewling in the neighbor’s yard, but I knew better. It wasn’t coming from outside the window. It was coming from the wall in front of me. And it was getting louder.

That was no cat. It was Donald. He was awake.

I hobbled over to his room, the discomfort in my leg returning as soon as I stood. By the time I opened the door, he’d ratcheted up to a full-scale scream. The poor kid was so wired from our crazy night that he couldn’t nap. I felt bad for him, but I felt worse for me. In a more clear-headed state, I would have realized that this wasn’t the catastrophe it seemed to be. Even Donald had to sleep at some point, so it would only be a matter of rocking him for another hour to get him to drift off. Unfortunately, I was not in a clear-headed state. My assessment of the situation was that he was never going back to sleep—not today, not ever—and that not just my day but my entire life was now ruined.

His crying was like a flame under the pressure-cooker of my frustration—the louder it got, the closer I got to exploding. The eardrum-rattling noise made adrenaline pour into my bloodstream. I yanked him out of the crib and begged him to please stop yelling as I carried him into the kitchen. Did he want a cracker? No. Did he want some galletitas (the word for cookies that he’d learned from Irma)? No. I pulled a box of cereal from the pantry as an offering. He arched his back and began to flail in protest of my terrible idea, and accidentally knocked the container out of my hand. I looked down to see the mess that resulted. It was as if the box had vomited corn flakes all over my shoes.

I managed to swallow the volcanic rage the resulted from crunching across the floor to get the broom, and by the time I dumped the last dustpan of cereal into the trash can Donald had finally quieted down. I could tell by his red, glassy eyes that the reprieve from his tantrum was only temporary, and I braced myself for the next outburst. In my mind was a chorus of self-pity that got worse by the minute. When Donald first woke up it was, I never get to nap. Now it had become, I HATE EVERYTHING ABOUT MY LIFE!

My mom breezed in through the garage door, back from having lunch with a friend. I didn’t say hello, but threw the broom into a corner instead. My body language evidently hadn’t sent the signal that trying to interact with me right now was the worst idea in the world, and my mom made the mistake of talking to me.

“Hey, I’ve been meaning to tell you—you put my bowl in the bottom rack again,” she said. She walked over to the dishwasher to pull out the evidence, a teal plastic bowl that was a favorite for storing leftovers.

“That wasn’t me,” I said as I kicked the dustpan back into the pantry.

“You did the dishes last night,” she said. Now I remembered: I’d been trying to load the dishwasher while a caffeine-crazy Donald went about removing everything I’d just put in. Joe was working late and my mom was out, so I had no help. It was a wonder that I stuck with the task at all, considering that I was fantasizing about ripping the thing out of the cabinet and throwing it through the window.

“I’ve told you about this before,” Mom continued. “This is not the kind of plastic that can stand up to the bottom rack. . .”

I stopped listening. My eyeballs actually ached from lack of sleep. Even thinking felt painful, as if some lubricant had evaporated from my brain and now the gears were grinding together. My mom kept talking about that bowl. Finally, I exploded. “Stop! Just stop!” I shouted. “I don’t care about your stupid bowl! Leave me alone!”

I grabbed Donald, went back into my room, and slammed the door. My leg now felt like it had been injected with molten lava, so I flopped down on top of the covers. To my great relief, Donald agreed to lie next to me. I stared at the wall in front of us, ready to fume about my plight. No sooner had I revved up my self-pity engine than a reminder about my stupid moral code experiment popped into my mind instead: Am I trying to be good?

I huffed. I didn’t need the Catechism to tell me the answer to that one. Obviously, you weren’t supposed to yell at your mom. However, the “buts” started rolling in immediately: But she shouldn’t have gotten on my case about a stupid bowl! But she didn’t appreciate my loading the dishwasher! But I was tired! I was a font of rationalizations, and if it weren’t for this experiment of doing what the Church says, it would have taken me about five and a half seconds to think my way out of any inconvenient convictions. As it was, I found that all my excuses splattered against the immovable brick wall of a moral code external to myself.

Once I began to admit that I had disrespected my mother, other convictions pushed in behind it. Not only had I been rude, but my rudeness was particularly undeserved by her. We had promised her that we would pay her rent when we first moved in, but we hadn’t been able to for months. This Jaworski case had been sucking the firm’s resources, and Joe was only able to pull out enough to make his student loan payments. My mom had allowed us to take over her three extra bedrooms, leaving only the master for herself. We’d scratched up her walls with our decorations, Donald had added countless stains to her carpet, and we regularly borrowed her car. When we wanted to watch a different TV show than she did, she always volunteered to go back to her room so that we could use the big television in the living room. She even let us choose the heat and air conditioner settings, even though it made her electricity bill 40 percent higher than it used to be.

My gaze drifted from the wall down to my bedside table, where the printout about Father Augustine lay. At the top of the page, in the grainy rendering of my printer, there was a picture of him. Something about it caught my attention. I picked up the papers to look more closely. In his eyes there was a certain essence, something so strong and captivating that it almost seemed as if the picture was not a collection of pixels, but a living thing.

In addition to the virulent racism that was a part of his daily life, Father Augustine also faced anti-Catholic prejudices. And yet he never reacted with anger. He never expressed hatred for his enemies, or even condemned them at all.

When I first came across his story, I thought of the priest as a saintly robot who didn’t have the same emotions the rest of us did. In the back of my mind, I assumed that he found forgiving enemies to be a pleasant experience. It was easier that way, to imagine that it came naturally to him to meet scorn with peace. Looking at his picture made me realize how wrong I was.

He had been hurt. Of course he had. And every time he chose forgiveness instead of bitterness, it was a moment of chipping away at his own ego—and it’s only when our egos are out of the way that we’re truly able to love. What I saw in Father Augustine’s eyes was a glow—a glow of something supernatural, the source of goodness itself—which can only come through when our egos don’t get in the way. Gazing at his picture, it occurred to me that the secret to being good is to be humble. And the secret to being humble is to be so focused on how you can make other people’s lives better that you don’t care who’s right or wrong.

Still holding the paper, I drifted to sleep, the image of the priest who grew up a slave floating in my dreams like a hologram. I woke an hour later. My exhaustion had abated, and my brain was no longer stuck in frustration overdrive. Donald was sleeping next to me, flat on his back, his mouth wide open, as if he’d been standing on the bed and passed out.

I eased onto my feet and moved silently into the living area. My mom was on a phone call in her office, and I went into the kitchen to look for something sugary to help me wake up. On the counter next to the sink was her bowl, its lid lying next to it. She was right. The bowl was ruined. Its once-circular shape was now like an oval drawn by a young child. The lid no longer sat flat, one of its edges twisted upward by the heat. I tried to place it atop the bowl, but it wouldn’t fit.

It was just a bowl—plastic, at that—but my mom loved it. My mom treasured even her smallest possessions, especially those that were given as gifts. My aunt once bought her a coaster on a beach vacation that occurred before I was born; my mom still had it and knew exactly where it was at any given moment. Perhaps because she moved around so much with my dad’s job, her possessions were a source of stability when the world outside her home was ever-changing. This plastic bowl had been a gift, given to her by a dear friend with whom she’d long since lost touch.

I walked back to my office, ignoring the pulsing heat in my leg, and logged in to my computer. I clicked around a few times, printed a page, and carried it back into the main part of the house. My mom got off her phone call just as I reached her office.

“Did you need something?” she asked. Her tone was pleasant, as if she’d already forgotten about my behavior.

“Yeah. I just . . . I wanted to say . . .” I hated apologizing. I’d always noticed that it caused me terrible internal pain, almost to the point of being agony. And now I realized: It was the pain of my ego colliding with an attempt at love.

I thrust the paper toward her. “I bought you a new bowl, and it’ll arrive in a few days. Here’s the description of it. It looks really nice.” I’d done some research to find the one that got the best customer reviews. It seemed expensive for a plastic container, but I got it anyway.

“This looks just great.” My mom looked at the paper with delight. “You really didn’t have to do that. It was just a bowl.”

It was clear that she’d already forgiven me for my outburst. Technically, I didn’t need to apologize. Part of me wanted to tell her to have a nice day and run back to the room like the coward I was. But as soon as I considered that option, Father Augustine’s face appeared before me. More than the details of his features, I saw that haunting glow of the kind of love that can only be bought with great self-sacrifice. I might not be the saint that he was, but I could at least do this one small thing.

I looked my mother in the eyes and forced the words: “I’m sorry.” I took a breath and continued, “I’m sorry about the bowl. I’m even more sorry about how I reacted when you brought it up. I’ve been really ungrateful—not just with that, but since we’ve lived here—and I’m going to start working on that.”

She accepted my apology, but assured me that she was happy to have us living with her. Normally, apologizing exhausted me. On the (all-too-rare) occasions that I forced myself to admit wrongdoing, I felt lingering irritation mixed with only mild relief afterward. This time, everything was different. I was filled with something—something good, and pure, and warm. It was love, certainly, but it didn’t come from me. It was as if it had been poured into me by someone else.