Trans/plant/portation

A garden variety therapist will tell you, the earliest messages absorbed are often the most powerful. Having gone through 12 years of Catholic school, it follows that my most powerful messages revolve around avoiding Hell. I was preoccupied as a child with the rather significant difference between white lies and worse offenses. “That dress looks nice” might be a non-truth, but in response to someone asking about their fashion, it appeared that Saint Peter would let it go as an infraction.

One of our earliest lessons, at least that I can remember, was the proclamation that if the world ended tomorrow, all of us Catholic kids would be okay because we’d been baptized. This was obviously a step up from getting corralled with the thieves and unrepentant pillagers of the earth, but it caused me to worry about all of the poor innocent babes who’d never crossed paths with a squirt of holy water and a proxy refusal to follow Satan.

So now that the birth of our baby is pretty much imminent, guess which dusty messages have crawled out of my memory’s woodwork? Read More…