When I was in the second grade, I entered a new Catholic school that was built four blocks from my home. Having never experienced nuns as teachers before, I was given instructions from my mother on how to conduct myself. “You will call them, ‘Sister,'” she told me, “and you will be called, ‘Theresa’ (up until 2nd grade, everybody called me Terry).”
New name, new school, and new rules – at the age of only 7 years olds, I was given practically a whole new life. Walking down the halls early in the year, one nun walked toward me. Other students were walking to their classrooms too, so I didn’t really pay much attention to her. I knew she was a nun, because she was wearing a habit, but I didn’t know her name at the time, because she was not my teacher. Why she singled me out among all of the other students walking down the hall that day, I will never know, but the memory of that moment has never left my mind.
“Good morning, Theresa,” she said, peering down at me with her arms folded under her beak.
Oh, floor, please swallow me. SHE KNEW MY NAME! She must have a direct link to God – how else would she know my name? And now, I was being watched!
From that moment until the day I graduated, I was terrified of “Mother” St. Carolyn. To make matters worse, I had to disobey my mother. These nuns wanted to be called, “Mother;” not “Sister.” But if I called them Mother, I disobeyed my own mother. And if I called them Sister, I disobeyed the nuns. What a terrible burden for a child of 7 to carry!
After second grade, I was fortunate not to have Mother St. Carolyn as my teacher until the 7th grade when she raised her head and pointed the beak of her habit toward me. She practically taunted me just with her look. I thought she must have been waiting for this moment since she first saw me in the hallway back when I was in 2nd grade and demanded of Mother Superior that I be in her class.
Her squinty eyes popped open and I saw her eyeballs roll toward me, ready to push me into the pits of Hell. Despite her treatment of me, I was finally rid of her when I entered 8th grade – until I discovered that she was now teaching 8th grade – and I got her – again. I just knew I was being punished for transgressions made in a former life.
To explain all the times she treated me unfairly might take a book, so I’ll give you one example. She had the class perform one of her plays and my job was to place the needle on the record player in the EXACT spot she wanted it. Yes, we had record players, and yes, I’m that old.
Putting the needle BETWEEN songs was no problem, but having to place the needle EXACTLY where she wanted me to put in WITHIN the song was nearly impossible, and though I tried repeatedly to get it just right, I couldn’t. Mother St. Carolyn made sure the whole class knew how inept I was, and I hated her for it.
I knew better than to show my rage at this – woman – though, so I seized the opportunity one time, after having been abused by the wicked nun for two years, to be a little passive-aggressive. Mother St. Carolyn stood in front of me, lecturing me, and I saw a spider crawl into her habit just above her face. I remember thinking that if she had treated me with more respect over the past two years, I might have told her about it. I didn’t. And then later, being the good little Catholic girl I was, I knew I’d forever be condemned to Hell for committing that unforgivable sin.
Anyway, the next time we had reading, I made sure to bring along the book I bought just for the next book-reading occasion. Though I trembled in my seat, afraid she might actually look at the title (she never did), I defiantly read, “Murder in a Nunnery” right in front of her.
Afterword: Fortunately for any potential future students, Mother St. Carolyn left the convent after I graduated from grammar school.
Photo credit: For obvious reasons, author doesn’t want to take credit.
Previously Published on BubbleWS as School Days With Mother St. Carolyn here.
I was scared of the other kids in school, because I was shy to the point of being pathological. The nuns didn’t scare me so much, though. It was just that some of them annoyed me more than the others.
There was a public school within easy walking distance of our house, but my family dutifully sent us via an old, broken down schoolbus all the way to the next town so we could go to Catholic school.
We called all the nuns “Sister,” which usually morphed into “Str.”