What She Was Given

The second book is taking shape. I sat down with my editor, Ian — face to face, unhurried. He asked questions I hadn't thought to ask myself. He pushed into corners I'd left unexamined. It wasn't always comfortable sitting. But it was exactly what the work needed.

I found myself returning to the people who made me — the experiences that lit something up, and the ones that left a hollow. Ian has a way of drawing you back to what's foundational. We kept returning to my mother. Catholic. Traditional. A woman of fixed horizons — shaped by the catechism like stone is shaped by water, slowly and completely. She had grown up in a world where faith was not a choice but a climate, where the Church set the rhythm of the week and the architecture of right and wrong. She wore her beliefs the way she wore her good coat — with care, with intention, with no apology. Doubt was not something she entertained. The boundaries of her world were clear, and she lived entirely within them.

And yet. Her love had a quality that defied all of that — expansive where she was narrowly formed, enduring where everything else shifted. She could hold you with a warmth that bore no conditions, even as her theology insisted otherwise. That contradiction never resolved itself in her, and she never seemed to notice it. Perhaps that was its own kind of grace.

She was born in 1941. She had six of us in eight years. Think about what that means — not just the physical fact of it, though that alone asks something enormous of a body and a life. Think about what it means to be that woman, shaped by a post-war Catholic household, by a faith that was not separate from daily life but woven into it completely. The rosary. The Mass. The priest who knew your name. The understanding that you were accountable — not just to your family or your neighbours, but to something infinite and watchful.

That world gave her extraordinary things. It gave her a gentle, wise and steadfast husband. Parents who fought to keep her broken body whole. A framework that held her through losses that would have undone a lesser person. A sense of purpose that didn't waver when circumstances became difficult, and they sometimes did.

But it also gave her a map. And for a long time, one of her children was not on it.

I don't think she knew, when she was sitting in those pews, when she was building a life around that faith and that framework, that she was also being handed a set of conclusions she hadn't reached herself. That the Church she followed — the one that had sustained and named and ordered her world — had already decided certain things. About what was natural and what was not. About what love looked like, and what it didn't. About the kind of child that was possible and the kind that, in its careful and devastating language, was simply disordered.

She didn't write those words. She simply inherited them.

And then one of her children turned out to be one of the things the map said couldn't exist.

My mother’s initial struggle was not a failure of love. It was the evidence of how deeply she had been formed by something she never had reason to question. The parents who don't struggle, who don't lie awake, who don't carry the weight of trying to reconcile what they feel with what they were told to believe — they are not loving more wisely.

The ones who wrestle are the ones for whom it matters.

She wrestled.

And then, in the way that I believe was entirely characteristic of her, she reasoned her way through it. Not loudly. Not in a single declared moment. But with a deliberate logic.

It went something like this.

My son is gay. I love my son. If I reject who my son is, I lose my son.

That was it. Three steps. The falling of dominoes, one after another, each one inevitable once the first had tipped. There was no fourth step that pulled back toward the doctrine, no asterisk, no condition attached. The logic ran clean and it ran all the way, and when it arrived at its conclusion my mother arrived with it — completely, without half measures, in the way that only a person of genuine and unsentimental love can manage.

From that point, she didn't just tolerate. She didn't manage or accommodate or make the best of it. She embraced — her son, and his partner, with the same wholehearted and uncomplicated fire she brought to everything she had ever decided to love. It was not a compromise with her faith. It was, I have come to believe, an expression of its deepest impulse. Love God, love your neighbour, love your child. The rest is commentary.

She did not create a wrong child. She never had. She had raised someone who was exactly who he was, and when the moment of reckoning came, she chose — with a clarity that still moves me — not the map she had been given, but the person standing in front of her.

I write about the space between who we are and who the world expects us to be because I know that space intimately. But I have also watched someone I love cross it — not in a single moment of revelation, but in the clean fall of one clear thought after another, each one honest, each one braver than it perhaps looked from the outside.

The Church gave her a container. Her love turned out to be larger than it.

It always was.