I attended Catholic school for my entire life. My parents tried putting me in a secular school for kindergarten, but I freaked out. The kids were crazy and unruly. I spent most of the time underneath a table, hiding from the barrage of flying blocks and leaping bodies.
I only came out at nap time, at which time I was pummeled mercilessly, forcing me to take the last, yellow and orange shag, urine-smelling rug to nap on.
My brown eyes would mist over and well up, but no one seemed to notice. I remember that kindergarten like being in a nightmare. I think I was only there for a few weeks.
From that time forward, I was treated to the solid, perhaps rigid, but predictable discipline of St. Bartholomew's Catholic School. Later, I attended Benilde-St. Margaret's Catholic high school. I liked private school. I always knew what to expect, from both the teachers and the kids I went to school with.
Every Wednesday at 10 AM, the teachers lined us up in straight, alphabetically ordered lines, and marched us over to St. Bartholomew’s Catholic Church, which was right next door. I sat through mass, as I also did every Sunday, thinking about what I was going to eat for lunch, and trying not to gag on the patchouli-scented incense Father Nathan insisted on using during the mass, even though most American churches had stopped the constant barrage of incense by the 1980s.
At St. Bart’s, all the girls wore a red, white, and navy blue checked pinafore. The pinafore had two pieces of material going across the breast area on each side connected to a stiffly pleated skirt. In most cases, girls wore their skirts just to their knees. There were a few who convinced their mothers to hem them higher or some girls even invested in a container of safety pins and went to work. These efforts were shot down by the teacher. The girls were required to make a trip to the bathroom to remove the pins or take a trip home to get the skirt fixed.
We were allowed to wear white, button-down blouses underneath, short-sleeve for summer and long-sleeve for winter, and a navy blue sweater. When people started monogramming their sweaters, a fashion that was very ‘80s, some of the parents complained, but in the end we all were allowed to have monogrammed sweaters. My monogram said “NAD.” I didn’t think it made sense to have your last initial in the middle and your middle initial at the end, but the lady at the posh Depot department store on Lake Minnetonka said that’s the way everybody did it. When I started to argue, my mom glared at me and pursed her lips tight in a sign of disapproval. I decided not to press the issue since the monogramming was an extra expense I spent hours talking her into.
To me, Catholic school
was all about conforming, being like everyone else so you didn’t
get noticed or singled out of the crowd. Everyone complained about having
to wear the uniform, but I didn’t. I would have had a lot of work
keeping up with the clothes of the wealthy girls I went to school with.
This way, all I had to do was get a monogram at the right store, and I
was in.