The Kind of Woman I Am
“Be the kind of woman that when your feet hit the floor each morning the devil says: oh crap, she’s up.”
My grandma Vi served as the director of religious education at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in Chelsea, Iowa (pop. 267). She oversaw for decades the church’s Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, or CCD. Sunday School, as Christian kids called it. We met on Wednesdays.
Despite attending CCD from K-12th grade, I never knew what CCD stood for until I googled it just now. What I did know is that my grandma kept cookies in her desk at the school’s office. And when my cousin and friend and I walked into her office before class and yelled “Cookie Monsters” – she rewarded us with a store brand ice oatmeal cookie.
Most people in our tiny town were descendents of a handful of families who chose the banks of the Iowa River to settle after leaving Austria, Bohemia and Moravia in the 1800s. We all identified as Czechoslovakians, loving church, family, duck and dumplings, kolaches, and beer (in no particular order).
Grandma Vi wasn’t Czech. She grew up on a farm but went to school in a nearby town. When she graduated from the Iowa State Teachers College, she got a teaching assignment at the one-room schoolhouse just up the road from my Czechoslovakian grandpa’s farm. When he came back from World War 2, he started courting her.
An outsider.
His mama wasn’t too happy. Grandma Vi showed me a newspaper clipping of their wedding announcement that stated “the groom’s mother wore black.” Grandma Vi said it was definitely about sending a message.
But she loved him, and he loved her. And Grandma Vi converted to Catholicism for him.
Most people who knew my grandma would say she was a devout Catholic. I would, too. But there was more to grandma that met the eye. While most people in my life told me that being Catholic was The Way – the Only Way – to God, she had other opinions. She’s the only person who encouraged me to study history, and to understand that the religions we heard the most about on the news all had the same roots. She encouraged me to explore Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. She encouraged me to see all people, even those with no belief systems, as God’s children. She encouraged me to see the faith I was being raised in as One Way – not The Way.
My grandma is responsible for a lot of Catholic kids learning about the Catholic faith. I didn’t stick with Catholicism, for many reasons. But Grandma Vi gave me the enormous gift of teaching me there are many paths.
I think she’d be proud of the life I’m living. I imagine – just like the sign she posted in her kitchen of the quote above – she’d agree:
I’m the kind of gal that, like her, makes the devil say, AH SHIT.
