When we returned in May 2015 from a semester of living abroad, my husband and I were imbued with a new sense of commitment and gratitude for where we lived. I was never so glad for our little brick house, our neighborhood, and our shrinking parish as when we came back from Madrid. Even the St. Louis humidity felt like a gift. Our time in Madrid had been glorious—the rich food, daily life centered around public spaces, a culture that valued leisure. But we felt returned to ourselves in our city, in our church, among the routines and people we loved. At our first Mass after arriving home, the liturgy settled me like a newborn in a swaddle. I found calm in the music, the priest’s unvarying intonations, the worn pews and squeaky kneelers. I hadn’t realized how unsettled I had been. In the spirit of our renewed commitment, we decided it was time to baptize our girls.

Part of me wanted to wait until I myself was baptized, but I had no idea when that would be. I worried about scheduling their initiations before mine. What kind of a guide would that make me? Our pastoral associate, Sr. M, had warned me I should not wait too long for their sacraments. If my oldest turned seven unbaptized, she would have to go through the same year-long process of entering the Church as an adult convert. When I told a friend about my hesitations, she said she wasn’t raising her kids with any religion because they should be free to choose for themselves. I thought about her choice and later realized my friend and I wanted the same things for our kids. Baptizing our girls wouldn’t take away our daughters’ choice. It would give them something to choose instead of leaving them to do all the seeking on their own. We wanted our girls to have life in the Church fully available to them since this was the spiritual home we were offering. Which meant receiving a sacrament they didn’t yet understand or choose for themselves. They could choose later, of course, not to stay. They could certainly become alienated, angry, or indifferent, or find another faith. If they did, at least they would know exactly what they were rejecting. We scheduled their baptism for September.

For Catholics, Baptism, Confirmation, and the Eucharist (Communion) are the sacraments of initiation, through which you become a member of the Church. Those who are born and raised in the Church receive all three by the time they are in middle school. Those like me, who join later, undergo the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA). Initiation conjures an ancient, tribal world. In our culture that prizes individualism, initiation gets saddled with negative, painful, and even humiliating associations. The word connotes cliques, cults, gangs, hazing, being broken down and brought low before we can belong. Usually, there is some gatekeeper deciding whether you are accepted or outcast. These negative and nearly all-male connotations colored my view of RCIA.

The writer Michael Meade calls anything like this a “deteriorated” form of initiation, carried out because society’s elders have failed to show young people what real, communal, life-giving initiation should be. Meade defines initiation as stepping into a new self, which “requires that aspects of the old sense of identity be sacrificed and left behind,” and which involves a process of “entering life, facing death in some form, and finding renewal.” His archetype of initiation has three stages: “First, some event separates us from what is familiar; then, some struggle or ordeal ensues. If we survive, we return with new knowledge and a greater sense of life.” Separation-ordeal-return is Meade’s basic structure of how we gain knowledge and move into a new phase of life. Initiations, he writes, were how societies “consciously assisted and enhanced life’s essential patterns of change.” Meade continues, “Rites of initiation were created to interrupt a person’s life and arrest their vision, to stop their habitual ways of seeing life and open the psyche to a greater view of the world and their place in it.”

I knew separation and ordeal but never return. My elders, because they were denied meaningful initiations themselves and because they were torn from their culture and not fluent in America’s, did not hold rites of passage for my generation. My family’s immigration is a kind of incomplete initiation—unending separation compounded with the absence of a society to return to. Meade describes what happens when initiation is begun but left unfinished: “What could have changed a person altogether and revealed something essential in their life becomes buried in the shadowy areas of the psyche…. There remains an incompleteness, a sense that something could have happened but did not.” I saw this incompleteness, this languishing and melancholy, in both my parents and my grandfather, in the way they remained isolated from community and were at a loss to help the next generations create new selves.

For one, my grandfather never left the restaurant, except to pick up supplies in Chinatown on Wednesdays. When I was small and spending all my days at the restaurant, I sometimes tagged along in our wood-paneled station wagon, crammed between crates of celery and boxes of thirty dozen eggs. But for the exceptionally rare occasions we would stop at McDonald’s after a long afternoon of shopping, it was always a given that he did not eat in other people’s restaurants. In one watery memory, my grandfather, in dark, grease-stained corduroy pants and a plaid button-down shirt, unwraps a Big Mac while I drench Chicken McNuggets in barbeque sauce. No words ever pass between us, but I do remember him eating away the dry edges of his burger until a perfect, juicy, crustless bite juts from the center like a jigsaw piece, which he offers to me. It crunches with pickle and onion, but I finish it with obedience and awe.

Birthdays, anniversaries, graduations, and holidays passed, and we knew my grandfather would not acknowledge them or attend the occasional small gathering. Once, when my parents’ car broke down at the restaurant, my grandfather drove us home after closing, and I was shocked to learn that he knew the way. He didn’t come in, and he never traveled to our home again. I think about him landing in a new country at age twelve, right when one would expect several initiations into manhood to begin. But he’d had no mentors or even caregivers as he drifted among Chinatown restaurant backdoors, scraping by on leftovers and sheer will. How disoriented he must have been, and must have stayed, even past finding that first shelter, food, and fitful sleep. Despite years of trauma and isolation, my grandfather learned to cook, got married, and had four children, for whom he provided a comfortable life, but in whose American lives he did not participate. All four graduated from high school (three from college, one with an advanced degree, and one with military service), married, and had children themselves. My grandfather trusted others to help the next generation navigate systems of education, work, and government.

My parents likewise deferred to the authority of my school, piano teachers, coaches, and driver’s-ed instructors. They depended on other Americans to lead me across thresholds, from one stage of life to another, because they did not feel fully part of the culture themselves. Despite their trust and dependence on others for my American education, they bristled at the changes brought on. For initiation doesn’t just change the individual who is separated and returned; it calls for a shift in the whole community, which must, Meade writes, “truly recognize the changes and offer healing” so the initiated one is “welcomed back as a changed person with new knowledge of both life and death.” The interruption and change of a proper initiation precede one’s return to the society from which one was temporarily separated. But what about a life interrupted, not by ritual, but by war, famine, and exile? What about a life after immigration that remains a permanent interruption? 

My family did not change with me. Having endured so much upheaval and loss, they clung to the familiar, to steadiness and routine—from which deviations felt like a betrayal. The roles of children and parents weren’t meant to evolve. Children should remain deferential, obedient, and nearby, while parents remain financially supportive decision-makers. When roles remain locked, Michael Meade cautions, “the loss of meaningful rites of passage often leaves an ambivalence between parents and children, as childhood has no clear ending.” Even after college, marriage, and babies of our own, at no point are children seen as fellow adults, but continue to live a half-life of adulthood under parental expectations, influence, pressure, and financial support. The idea that parents would partake in, let alone celebrate, their children belonging more fully to the world was absurd.

And so, I marked milestones outside my family. I hosted my own college graduation party, inviting most of my mom’s Sacramento family—her two brothers, one sister, and all their spouses, children, and grandchildren, along with several of my friends. Unfamiliar with the city I had been living in for the past four years, as they only ever came to drop me off and bring me home for the first summer, my parents left the planning to me. Four years before, I had arranged my high-school graduation party for my dad’s much smaller family. Dinner had been at the Chinese restaurant near our house, where we gathered for almost every occasion, and everyone had felt comfortable and casual. At my university’s convocation for English majors, everyone looked august in their regalia. Every name called rang with possibility. From the stage, draped in a beautiful blue-and-white lei my friend in the stands had bought for me, I felt myself passing through a door held open by our professors, changed and ready to be sent forth. I worried that my family was uncomfortable on the outdoor cement stadium seating, but mostly I surged with the thrill of leaving to buy my first car, move to New Mexico, and start graduate school.

I found everyone after the ceremony, and we stood in the shade for pictures before heading to dinner at a Chinese restaurant I had chosen, a twenty-minute drive across two freeways. I could only explain that because parking was a nightmare in Berkeley, I had chosen a restaurant in an East Bay strip mall with a huge lot. As we walked across the parking lot, my mom said, “I don’t see everyone. Why is this place so far? Maybe people got lost.” We all had cell phones, and everyone found their way eventually. Our group took up four tables, immediate families together, me with my friends. The flavors were a little different from what we were used to; our favorite eggplant in garlic sauce and shrimp and walnuts tasted heavier and sweeter here.

A few minutes into the meal, my mom crouched over my chair. “There isn’t enough food,” she whispered sharply.

Agitated, she gestured to the tables. Plates were emptying fast, some already scraped clean. Soda cups sat drained. But people were talking and laughing and taking pictures.

“I thought I ordered enough,” I said, my teeth gritted.

“You know your cousins all have big appetites! You should have ordered more. People are hungry.”

“No, I didn’t know that,” I snapped, thrusting my chair back. “I’ll get some more,” I muttered.

I ordered each table three more dishes plus white rice, aflame with embarrassment and envy of all my friends who had parties waiting for them at home or in restaurants where their parents had made reservations and were probably giving toasts. Furious and alone, I wished to be invited to my celebration instead of overseeing it. I should have known churned in me. But I didn’t know my cousins on my mom’s side, or their eating habits. It shouldn’t have been my job to guess. And the dinner hadn’t been for them. But my cousins, who graciously and gratefully polished off the extra dishes, had never said a word about the food. They pressed cards with generous checks into my hands and politely accepted the leftovers.

My parents had been anxious witnesses at every one of my initiations, big or small. Through no fault of their own, they had missed walking across their own thresholds and so could not meet me on the other side of mine. How could they welcome me into a society that didn’t always see them as full or legitimate members? To complete an initiation, Michael Meade concludes, “a small death must come between parents and their child. Something of the entanglement between parents and child must die in order for the tree of life to continue to grow.” But for parents with immigration trauma, who already lived separated from themselves and society, any kind of loss is intolerable, even if imperative for growth and thriving, even if it meant the birth of something more vibrant and lasting.

Physician and writer Rachel Naomi Remen recalls in her essay collection My Grandfather’s Blessings, “I believe I know the very moment that I became an adult, when my relationship to my mother as a child was complete.” In Remen’s long career as a doctor, counselor, and speaker, she had not invited her mother to one of her lectures until nearly the end of her mother’s life. Speaking to a full auditorium with her mother present for the first time, Remen noticed that “suddenly people began to applaud and slowly many even stood up. Only one person in the tenth row remained seated. Her arms were crossed and there was a very tiny smile on her face. As we continued to look at each other, her eyes narrowed and she nodded, slowly, twice. No other acknowledgment I have ever received has equaled it.” Her mother’s acknowledgment was, to be sure, of Remen’s accomplishment, but it was also of her belonging to this crowd, to her patients, to her vocation. Her mother’s nod, which brought childhood to a close at last, was approval, admiration. It said: I am sharing you now.

After the last graduation guests had gone, my parents and I headed to collect my things from the dorm. The next day, we would drive six hours to their home, where I would promptly pack again and head eight hundred miles east in the Jeep Wrangler I had planned to buy from the used car dealership near my grandfather’s restaurant. I’m not sure when I mentioned finally saving enough for a down payment on my dream car, but when we arrived at their house, the white Volvo sedan that they had picked out for me was waiting in the driveway. When they handed me the thick key fob, they said, “A safe car. Safer than most.” I would drive it toward the high desert, far away and indeed safe within its compact frame.

Since I’ve lived apart from them, my parents have presented me with many more things to replace what I already had: a pressure cooker; a blender; cleaning supplies; art; a jewelry box. In recent years, they have offered to install a doorbell security system because they hear crime is rising in my city, and solar panels on our roof to offset the increased cooling they believe our daughters need to be comfortable upstairs. I know they just want to feel useful, that without the markers of their old role, they feel unmoored. I know their only framework for being in my life is as the parents of a child. But when every initiation stands contrary to their idea of filial piety, my only choices feel like stay or go, belong or don’t. Unable to support or participate in my initiation hungers, my parents have given me what they can in objects they think I need to be an adult.

The urgency for my own sacraments arose as soon as Paul and I decided to baptize our daughters. I wanted to have at least something figured out before I initiated them into our faith. But, despite a lifetime of initiation hunger, I didn’t want to go through RCIA, not according to the program our pastoral associate, Sr. M, insisted on. Something about the rigidity, from the start date to holding precisely six inquiry sessions, to the Easter Vigil being the only day I could receive the sacraments, felt amiss, exactly opposite to the calm and settledness I felt at Mass. I kept going every week and I read feverishly that summer—Scripture, Pope Francis, theology, spiritual reflections. I signed up for an eleven-week Bible study, and I attended a day-long retreat. But the new fall semester was fast approaching, and I was nowhere near closer to an answer. I didn’t know what I wanted. I didn’t know why I didn’t know.

“You sound like,” Paul offered, “you could use a spiritual director.” I was uneasy about sharing my doubts and hesitations about RCIA with a priest, but he told me spiritual directors can be women religious or laypeople. When Paul briefly considered joining a religious order, he was told to find a spiritual director and do some serious discernment work about his desires, motivations, and life situation. “They help you listen for God and discern,” he said. “They wouldn’t push you one way or another about Baptism, or any decision, but just help you figure out what you really want.” The idea filled me with relief, even consolation. I was grateful for Paul’s knowledge and suggestion, and for the new project of finding a spiritual director. 

I found a directory on the Aquinas Institute of Theology’s website. The institute, a Dominican graduate school in theology and ministry, kept a list of active directors who specialized in discernment, grief, addiction, recovery, and many other areas. I chose Sr. V because her listed address was five minutes from home. A vowed religious sister also appealed to me because she would be someone who had made a choice and commitment. In response to my email, she wrote that she was open to new directees, but she had moved to her order’s home about thirty minutes south. Her email contained an inordinate number of exclamation points. But her response had been quick and enthusiastic. The inner yes I was learning to listen to signaled. I realized it had always been with me, a quiet, firm kind of whisper: this. I rearranged my office hours on Sr. V’s first available day, which was three days before my girls’ baptism.

Sr. V’s home, a former Boy Scout lodge tucked behind a cemetery, housed the order of sisters she belonged to. I had no framework for spiritual direction, so I used what I was familiar with: school. I headed into my first meeting ready to study my way to an answer about Baptism. Sr. V, I decided, would help me make a well-informed decision. I arrived at our first meeting promptly, in slacks and a blazer, straight from teaching. She came to the door before I rang the bell, in a modern white habit, knee-length and short-sleeved. A black headpiece trimmed in white revealed a few inches of sandy hair. Her smile was broad and she said, “Well, hello there!” with her hands on her hips, as if she’d spent the day impatient over my arrival. I offered a handshake, and she took it, looking entirely amused. She released my hand but didn’t move.

“I’m just,” she said, scrunching up her shoulders, “going to give you a little hug.”

I laughed and accepted, immediately disarmed.

After a tour of the house, we settled into plush cobalt rockers in the living room. I told her about my family and work, how I had come to the Church and my husband had returned. I framed my seeking as a question of whether I could abide by the Church’s teachings, whether I could tolerate the RCIA process. Receiving the sacraments was posed as an intellectual problem about rule following. No high stakes. No risk of heartbreak. Sr. V listened intently. She offered no workaround to my problem, no quick way to make peace with the Church’s rules. “Let’s start with what you want at this moment,” she said. “God speaks to us through our desires. It’s then that we have to discern God’s voice from all the other voices, all the noise.”

“I don’t know what I want,” I replied, which felt dreadful and freeing to say.

In my family, denying your desires showed deference, loyalty, and sacrifice. “Doesn’t matter to me” and “anything is fine” were my parents’ answers to every question. They staunchly refused to impose themselves on anyone. Except of course they did, with hints about “what’s best” or declarations about what so-and-so needs. The way we chose where to eat out on my mom’s day off was for my dad to say, “Mom hasn’t had a burger in a long time…” or for my mom to offer, “The place with the salad bar is healthy for Dad…” I, then, couldn’t dare suggest otherwise without undermining these demonstrations of care. Their roles would be fulfilled, one sacrificing and the other absolved of any want. It always left me guessing and unable to receive anything without the shame of someone else’s self-denial, which still sometimes paralyzes me. But telling Sr. V “I don’t know” was a relief. It was the reason I had come. I wasn’t letting her down by not having an answer.

I continued, “Until recently, I’d been fine with the way things were. I was part of the parish. I didn’t feel like anything was missing. Then, the way to get baptized became an obstacle for me. I can’t actually tell if it’s something I desire, or if it’s just that I’m mad because I was told no.”

I explained what Sr. M had said about my not being included in the Liturgy of the Eucharist, and that the RCIA timeline and requirements were my only option for Baptism. I held my breath, afraid that Sr. V would agree, which would mean taking Sr. M’s side. Instead, Sr. V rolled her eyes and groaned.

“Okay, well, yes,” she sighed. “The Church does teach that the baptized are invited to the Eucharist.” Turning very serious, she continued, “But the Holy Spirit and the incarnation of Christ are present to us all.”

I had needed this affirmation more than I realized, for that familiar Catholic refrain, “all are welcome,” to feel true, as it had when the priest at that college Mass had waved and winked to include us all.

“So then,” Sr. V noted, “you weren’t told no about your Baptism, exactly?”

“I guess?” I stammered.

“Well, you were told there is one way to do RCIA at your parish.” 

“Right.”

“Could you find another parish? Another priest who might be willing to work with you?”

“I’ve probably already missed the window to start RCIA this year too,” I sighed, before I caught what her question implied. “Wait, are you saying that I can get baptized without going through RCIA?”

“People do it all the time,” Sr. V replied. My mouth must have dropped because she emphasized, “You do not have to do RCIA in order to be baptized. The process exists for a reason, and there are many benefits to completing it. But it’s not the only way.”

I never imagined variation in the process, that I could have just asked our pastor, or a Jesuit friend, or anyone for, essentially, a second opinion. How was I to know that Sr. M’s insistence had been for her way and not the only way? Fresh anger burned behind my eyes. For not being shown, or entrusted with, the whole picture. For not knowing, yet again, what I didn’t know.

Sr. V waited while I wrangled my feelings. It would be a while before I allowed myself to process them with her instead of believing I needed to get ahold of myself before we could talk.

“I don’t know when I’ll be ready, but I do want to be baptized in my parish,” I said eventually. “I guess it means I’ll have to wait some more.”

“There’s plenty to discern in the meantime.” Sr. V smiled. 

“Well, I may not know about me yet, but my daughters are getting baptized this Saturday,” I shared.

“Congratulations! What a blessing.” Sr. V glowed.

“I feel like I should be better prepared as their mom.” 

“They’re how old?”

“Four and almost two,” I replied, laughing at her arched eyebrows. “I know they’re not going to be asking me big theological questions just yet. But I feel like I should be doing more than just...throwing a party.”

“A party is exactly what this should be. You will all grow in your understanding of Baptism together. But for now, this is a big reason to celebrate.”

I felt okay for the first time in a year. Stuck, unsure, angry, and okay. I didn’t know why a door still felt shut when I thought about my own Baptism, but I no longer needed to kick it in. I felt softer somehow, almost ready, as the French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin advised, to “accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.”

Sr. V smiled broadly. “You know this is wonderful news, right? You’re baptizing your daughters out of love. Whatever decision you make for yourself, it will be out of love, too.”

Three days later, on a warm September Saturday, my girls were baptized in our church by Paul’s friend and former teacher from his Jesuit high school. I was aware that most Baptisms happened during Sunday Mass, so the parish could reflect on their own first sacrament. At the time, we still knew more people outside the parish than in and wanted to be surrounded by those who had known us the longest. I went to the secondhand clothing store to pick out white dresses that could be happily wrecked by the end of the day. We held our daughters over the font while they scissor-kicked and tried to wriggle out from under the stream of water but never cried. Their godparents, two of Paul’s brothers and their wives, lit their Baptismal candles and promised to walk with us all in this new light. The bittersweet spice of chrism, the consecrated anointing oil, lasted all day, and I sniffed their foreheads every chance I got. We catered a picnic in the park with fried chicken and an enormous cake. Paul’s family and my parents came, along with parish friends, the beloved women of our daycare, and colleagues from both our schools who had known us for years before our turn to the Church. A feeling of fullness, which I experienced during Mass when the right elixir of sleep, morning light on the stained glass, hymns, and gratitude opened me to the Spirit and people all around, enveloped our little party that afternoon. We could not—would not have wanted to—initiate our girls without this family of witnesses, not all worshippers nor baptized, but each one a holy story within ours. Unlike my eldest’s red egg party, I did not ask anyone else to plan the ceremony. Paul and I stood with our girls before their sacrament and, along with our community, received them afterward.

That night, we tucked away their candles, each bearing the smallest indent in the wax from their first soft minutes of light.

This is an excerpt from We Carry Smoke and Paper ©2024 by Melody S. Gee. Used with permission of the University of Iowa Press.