Last week, I told my therapist about a defining childhood moment that has had my brain churning ever since.

I went to Catholic schools for eleven and a half years. Mass was a regular feature. During elementary school, the entire school attended Mass together at least once a month. I can still remember being a first and second grader, watching all the big kids lining up to receive the wafer that the priest had turned into the body of Jesus and yearning to be a part of that exclusive club. It just seemed so grownup!

In the second grade, we had a special book to teach us everything we needed to learn in order to be ready to receive communion. This felt very important. In the spring, at a special Mass, the second graders would celebrate their First Communion. (In this case, “special” means very, very long.) The girls would wear fancy white dresses, and the boys were wear suits. Then there would be cake and donuts and everyone would go home and have a party with their family and get presents. All this pomp and circumstance seemed like a big deal.

Except on the big day, I would just be an onlooker.

According to the Catholic Church, I was not even eligible to take communion because I had never been baptized. (The horror! The scandal!) My dad had been raised Catholic; my mom was Jewish; and they were not religious. They sent me to public school for kindergarten and the first half of first grade. Then they switched me to my cousins’ Catholic school because long story short, I was tutoring kids older than me and the older kids were tormenting me with sexual jokes. (That’s a whole other post!)

At first, I was actually okay with not receiving First Communion. Sure I would miss out on a party and presents but I still got Hannukah and latkes.

But then.

Oh, this is the part that makes my inner child hurt.

My second grade class was at our weekly music class. We had to learn songs for the special First Communion Mass. The principal, an Irish nun, arrived unannounced. She remained standing by the door so all had to swivel around in our desks to give her our full attention. We all got quiet and turned around in our desks so we could give our full attention to the principal. In her no-nonsense voice, she asked for a handful of students to come to the front of the room.

Theo.

Mei.

Courtney. (That would be me.)

I went to stand by the principal, not knowing what to expect. Was I getting an award? A prize? I felt so special.

Sr. Stella gestured at me and the other kids standing at the front of the room. In a loud, crisp voice, she announced, “These children are not receiving First Communion.” Then she gestured magnanimously toward the twenty-five seated children. “Everyone else is.”

My stomach flipped. My heart pounded. I felt a bit dizzy. I was special, but from the principal’s tone of voice I knew it was not a good sort of special.

After that music class incident, my friends liked to tease me that they were having parties. They would receive gifts. I would not get a party. I would not get any gifts. To add insult to injury, I still had to go to the First Communion Mass and watch my cousin Julie celebrate her first communion and then go to the family party where presents would be heaped on Julie and I’d receive a big heap of nothing.

This sucked. Why should my cousin and friends get parties and fancy dresses and presents and the right to receive communion with all the big kids and not me? I was studying all the same stuff in class. I was a good student. What was wrong with me? Why was I being left out?

I no longer felt special for having a Jewish mom. I felt ashamed that the principal thought less of me. Now, as a forty-one year old woman, I can look back and say, Hey, what was that bitch nun thinking? How dare she ostracize eight year olds that way?! How dare she use shame to push her religious agenda?! And then, a more compassionate part of me thinks, Wow, how sad for the principal. If she was that cruel to children, how cruel was she to herself?

But at the time this all happened, I was eight years old. I did not have the experience to process my feelings. Instead, I shoved them away and then told my parents that I wanted First Communion. When they refused, I sulked and pouted until they relented.

I received a shotgun baptism one month before First Communion.

And then, I received First Communion with my classmates, feeling proud and victorious. But also, hollow. Even when I was eight years old, my body knew that changing who I was for the sake of fitting in did not feel right.

Whew! It feels good to write that story. After sharing that incident with my therapist, I have been wondering about what other messages I internalized during my Catholic school years. For example, my therapist mentioned the concept of “original sin.” According to what I learned at Catholic school, a baby who dies and has not been baptized goes to hell. Holy shit! When my therapist mentioned that, I felt my entire body writhe uncomfortably.

I think I need to do a Catholic school detox.

I don’t like writing that because I know a lot of good Catholics. I am related to a lot of Catholics who love their faith and religion. But we can all have different experiences with the same thing. Just because Catholicism works for some of my friends and family does not mean it was a safe experience for me. I have a right to detox from a damaging experience just as much as they have a right to continue embracing a religion that works for them.

I want to dig into this work. Examine the things I learned in Catholic school and question them. I am forty-one years old. I get to keep the ideas that work for me and abandon the rest. But I will not know what internalized subconscious ideas are holding me back until I take a closer look.