Take Care

an essay

Photo by Viktor Talashuk on Unsplash

Today I’m self-publishing one of my formal essays here. I wrote Take Care in early 2024, before and during my separation, and it was a finalist for both the Tusculum Review Chapbook Prize and the 58th New Millennium Prize. It feels apt here and now because it speaks to the moment I’m currently living and because it is all about remembering.

***

“I look like a nun!” My 7-year-old laughs. She’s looking in the mirror, holding a pillowcase tightly over her hair to frame her face. We’re allegedly tidying her room. 

“Mom, do you have to believe in God to be a nun?” she catches my eye in the mirror.

I’ve armchair diagnosed her with sphenisciphobia, the irrational fear of nuns. She’s never talked to one in real life, though there’s a small convent on an island neighboring ours and from time to time we spot two women in matching habits on the ferry or at the grocery store. She’ll grab my hand, hide behind me a little. I guess “irrational” isn’t totally fair—I know it all started with stern Mother Abbess in The Sound of Music and grew from there. 

I say yes, though honestly I don't know that much about nuns. They practice a religion called Catholicism, I tell her—actually there are Buddhist nuns, too. Women committed to a simple life in a convent serving God something something. Maybe they’re considered brides of God—or Jesus? I’m often hazy on the difference. Who exactly is The Lord?

“Well, I guess I’ll never be that,” she says. Yeah, no shit. 

“I don’t believe in God,” she says firmly. This is news to me. Not that I thought she did, but I’m surprised by the confident opposition. I ask how she knows. She says she doesn’t believe in things she can’t see. I guess fairies are the exception. 

“What about feelings?” I try, proud of myself. “You can’t see feelings. Or ideas, or air.”

She looks at me like I’m only slightly idiotic. “Oh yeah, I believe in those things. I mean, of course I believe in magic.”

She’s right about the pillowcase. It looks exactly like a wimple, the white cloth that hugs a nun’s cheeks and neck. Its shape even imitates the veil, the hood-like piece overtop that’s usually black (sphenisciphobia also means fear of penguins). Wimples were standard for all women in medieval Europe until trends evolved, started including braids and uncovered hair. Catholic nuns continued to embrace the wimple for its modesty. The headcoverings differ across the globe and according to vows, but the combined cloth usually represents some variation of purity, chastity, and devotion to God. 

I.

God wasn’t that complicated for me growing up. In my home, we said prayers before bed and grace before meals. We celebrated Christian holidays with reverence and candy. The church we attended was solemn but peaceful, lauded itself as a “Movement for Religious Renewal.” Since its inception, men and women have entered the priesthood as equals. During the short children’s service, the priest addressed each child individually, saying, “The spirit of God will be with you when you seek Him.” My child ears mostly heard, “I’m right here if you need anything.” 

My devotion was to summer camp. It was probably no accident that camp, hosted by the same church, was a totally spiritual experience. There was little mention of God, but each night after dinner the bell rang and we’d file into the assembly hall, youngest groups filling the benches up front, older ones in back. The camp director told a chapter of a story that would spread out over 17 days, oral epics like Joan of Arc and A Story Like the Wind. There were morning assemblies, too, but mornings don’t have sunset and candlelight. Evening songs were about whippoorwills and the descending sun and starlight. They were mostly rounds, voices gathered in harmony to mark the end of a day. At camp, in a world completely divorced from normal life, where our clocks and watches were confiscated, we formed deep human bonds in days. There the seeds were planted for transcendence, for reverence, a rich inner life. I never thought about what it was called.

My grandparents’ version of God had more rules. I was six when my dad and I moved in with them and certain dinnertime words remain cemented after decades of unuse: Bless us, O Lord, for these Thy gifts . . . Oma and Grandpa’s portrait hung in the hall of their Catholic church with all the other devoted parishioners. I went with them a few times, mostly Christmases, in a velvet dress, confused by all the kneeling, mortified I couldn’t keep up. I didn’t love it, but most of my judgments of Catholicism came as I grew older, saw the carnage of the psychological and physical traumas inflicted on friends and strangers by members of the church. 

Late in life, Oma frequented a restaurant near her assisted living home. It might have been a sushi place. We’d go there when other family was in town. I don’t remember the owner’s name or face, but I do remember him pulling my aunt aside to say, “You know, your mother, she’s a very spiritual person.” I did kinda know, could see it in her eyes, the twinkle. Whenever I was within two feet of her, I’d feel a warm tickle down my spine. To this day, I take special note when I come close to someone who triggers the same response. They know something.

I lived in San Francisco at the time, about an hour north of Oma. I’d take the train to visit her at regular intervals. We’d go to lunch, play a couple rounds of Uno. Grandpa had died a few years before, after 64 years of marriage. I remember writing in my journal on the train, then in my early 20s, wondering whether or not she’d ever longed for another life. She always said she had a good one, and by any outside metric it was true. Grandpa had had a prestigious military career, Oma in charge of hosting literal kings and queens. I also remember my dad saying his dad had always made him feel like anything was possible in life, and his mom was a pessimist. How she’d say cruel things to Grandpa when they drank too much. How as a teenager he’d asked his dad why he was still married to his mom.

When Oma married Grandpa, what did she give up?

***

I turned my back on God the day I moved in with my partner Ken. He’d never had a Christmas tree before we lived together. He was pretty defiant about the whole holiday, partly because in 40 years he’d seen a lot he deemed too heavy on Jesus or too seeped in excessive commercialism. Also he’s Jewish. It’s annoying when the world assumes we’re all into the same stuff.

He doesn’t practice Judaism, isn’t religious, doesn’t care for “one transcendent God.” His experience at Temple growing up felt oppressive and repetitive. God seemed to have a pretty big ego.

Our first year cohabitating, he laid out his Christmas conditions: “No Jesus and no God.” I didn’t care at first, didn’t have much attachment to the idea of either. I’d gleaned my own associations over the years of a male human in the sky, surveillance and a fuck ton of rules. The word on billboards or covers of books always made me uncomfortable. I found it aesthetically off-putting, and maybe I just have something against capital G, but the nausea was probably more due to the fact that I never knew what it was supposed to mean. I still don’t. I’m not alone. While the United States still has the largest Christian population in the world, roughly a third of Americans currently consider themselves “religiously unaffiliated.” Many cite discontent with the structures of organized religion, others full-on trauma. Some say it doesn’t reflect the variation in modern life, feels synonymous with restriction.

That December, we cut down a tiny tree on our property and sat it on a table in the corner, decorated mostly with my mom’s old straw ornaments. She’d died a few years earlier and the majority of my attachment to Christmas was about traditions she and I had shared. Maybe I was fine doing away with the god of it all. I might have wondered if strong reactions against God give us a pass from figuring out what we do believe. But relationships are about compromise. 

Ken had been my close friend for a couple years before it turned “romantic.” Not long before, at 25, living alone for the first time in my life, I’d sat in my kitchen and enthusiastically described a new understanding to my friend Ken. I’d decided it was okay I’d never finished an undergraduate degree—I never had to. I didn’t have to get through some thick slog to the life I actually wanted to live. I could just start living it. This was especially true of my love life. “I don’t want a partner,” I told him. “Singlehood is me, not a means to an end.” Without the trope of find-partner-settle-down, my whole future could be endless possibility. I wasn’t talking about a monastic life, just no one to care how I did or didn’t live. 

I wanted to commit my life to magic. Over the years, magic has held up as the best substitute for god. It’s cute. Inherently feminine, free of judgment or suffering. It is total devotion to source, to muse, more about art than religion. I started believing in magic when I was about 20, learned about it from Lisa. We were sprites when we met working as hosts at a restaurant in the Mission, and Lisa was unlike anyone I’d met. She was good at solitude, emanated permission to be how you are. She quickly became my patron saint of play. Magic was our metric for assessing new people. “But does he believe in magic?” was really asking if we could agree there are invisible forces always ready to conspire toward divine things.

It’s easy to think of the words of a single woman in her mid-20s as rosy-colored and naive. But at 25, I was the most spiritually sound I’ve ever been. My mother had died two years prior, ideally and naturally in her best friend’s living room. I’d witnessed the grace of surrender at the end of life. I’d been to two silent Vipassana meditation retreats and had the space to integrate the experience with lots of solitude. I was paying little in rent, spending my days journaling and drawing and connecting with friends. As Julia Cameron, author of The Artist’s Way, says, “God is creativity.”

Months after my declaration to Ken he said we’re in love and I said I know because I knew what we were feeling. I didn’t know what “in love” actually meant, but I felt the magic circling us. I let that moment birth a whole new life. With two small words, I traded my newly discovered god for a human man. 

I’d moved, by the way, since naming my devotion to autonomy. To an even more amazing apartment. It sat on a hill, had a whole wall of old windows facing east, white bricks in the fireplace, a sloped kitchen floor, embossed wallpaper and the crown jewel: a clawfoot tub. When a friend came to visit from the Bay Area she asked me if I constantly masturbated in the bath, said she would with a tub like that, and I wondered for about the billionth time if I was a prude. That apartment was the epitome of Parisian-artist-singlehood. I knew not to give it up, but I did anyway.

II.

In 2020, British actor Emma Watson made headlines by declaring herself “self-partnered.” She admitted she hadn’t fully believed people in the past when they claimed to be happily single. Cited the incredible anxiety that went along with not having a husband or child at her age. Yet here she was, complete without another and enjoying her own company. Turning toward herself. 

In some Greek translations, the word virgin is defined as “one unto herself,” meant only to describe an unmarried maiden, free from the explicit sexual connotations it carries today. In ancient Rome, every meal began and ended with an offering to Vesta, virgin goddess of the hearth (and sister of Juno, goddess of marriage). Vestals, or Vestal Virgins, were priestesses in charge of maintaining the sacred fire that represented the hearth of Vesta. Hand selected in childhood by the chief high priest, Vestal Virgins took a 30-year vow of chastity to fully devote themselves to the religious rituals of Rome. The House of the Vestals was a sacred space, off-limits to ordinary citizens. A retreat from the world. 

Vestal Virgins were the most powerful women in Rome, the only full-time clergy of a Roman deity assigned salaries from the public treasury. Unlike other women in society, whose life trajectory included two phases (virgin bride, then matrona when married or widowed), the Vestals were granted emancipation from their fathers’ rule, the right to handle their own property, to vote and write a will. Their word was trusted without question in court, their very touch said to grant a condemned prisoner their freedom. 

Maybe the only reason for the chastity vow was straight up ritual purity. Any situation where a man is determining the future of a woman’s life or body before she turns ten certainly can’t be called enlightened. But freedom from family life and access to unprecedented individual rights? It’s almost like society understood that a woman shouldn’t be asked to devote herself fully to the world and also to a single family. Like she wasn’t being asked to compromise. I know the Vestals didn’t choose the role, but the vast majority of them, when their 30 years were up, remained. They’d already vowed themselves as brides of Vesta, of the eternal flame. How could being some man’s wife possibly be worth giving that up? 

We talk about partnership as the ultimate gesture of love and support, proof no one has to die alone. This is flawed for countless reasons: it’s tragic to live an entire life for a future moment; one of you is going to die first; we have absolutely no control over how and when we die or who is beside us. Oma, my grandmother, died praying. At 94, kneeling beside her bed, rosary in hand. A Hail Mary is a prayer not to Christ, but to his mother. It asks Mary to pray for us all now and at the hour of our death. After a life including 64 years of devoted marriage, my grandmother died with no one beside her. It did not look remotely lonely.

***

After a recent reading of an essay about a 2-year sex-timout I was in the middle of, a male acquaintance approached me. He’d read my words first on paper, then heard me say them aloud. “I’m hearing you talk about all this stuff and I’m like, ‘Why don’t you just do what you want?’” The entire thing was about stepping back to figure out what I really want. Did he mean he didn’t understand why I don’t just go out and do the things he wants? I couldn’t understand why he gave one single shit about what I do or don’t do. Maybe a virgin doesn’t have to be someone who’s never had sex, just someone whose sex life is no one else’s business. 

We regularly throw around the words “chastity” and “celibacy” like they’re extremist approaches to controlling or brainwashing women. Giant sacrifices a woman makes, withholding pleasure, fighting her raging carnal desire to have penises inside her. But do these knee-jerk reactions to “conservative” ideas give us a pass from figuring out what we do believe, what each of us actually wants? We are living in a time (still? again?) when virgin means “no vaginal sex with a penis” to millions of people, where women are stripped of their reproductive freedom. In this society that seems to have no problem asking a woman to devote herself entirely to the world and entirely to her own family, a monastic life can seem pretty enticing. Let’s not forget the von Trapps escaped Austria because of the badassery of a couple of nuns. 

There is no explicit mention of sex with other women in the accounts I’ve read about the Vestals. Masturbation is also missing. I’ll never know exactly what being chaste meant to them, but ask any teenager in a fundamentalist community today how many sex acts allow you to keep your virginity intact. Chastity for the Vestals might not have been much more complicated than a select handful of women who very much appreciated not being expected to fuck men or get pregnant. 

III.

In 2010, NPR’s All Things Considered ran a story, For These Young Nuns, Habits Are The New Radical. Barbara Bradley Hagerty went to Nashville to visit the Dominican Sisters of St. Cecelia, a convent where the average sister’s age is 36. The young nuns were resisting modern trends toward casual uniforms by embracing the traditional habit. “It's beautiful,” said Sister Mara Rose McDonnell. “It's a reminder that you are a spouse of Christ.” 

St. Cecilia was something of a radical herself. Born in Rome to pagan parents, she developed a deep relationship to Christianity early in life. A marriage was arranged for her, but Cecilia had already vowed her virginity to God. On her wedding night, she somehow transformed her betrothed’s anger into an equally undying faith, and the two went on to live a life defiantly dedicated to a Christian God. She was arrested—and eventually executed—for her religious devotion, but her faith never wavered. 

St. Cecilia is often called “the virgin-martyr,” not exactly words associated with subversion. But in its purest form, martyrdom means giving your life for what you believe. We talk about it as a willingness to die, assuming life is more important than the chosen path. A true martyr finds a talk they must walk and does so until their final day. Jesus didn’t “die for our sins.” Jesus lived an uncompromising life of loving-kindness and fearful people killed him for it. When we link martyrdom to sacrifices made for other humans, we load the burden of those sacrifices on another’s shoulders. We blame them for a percentage of our unhappiness. This begrudging sacrifice disguised as martyrdom (so common in marriage) is not about literal death, but the death of happiness. Of honoring the self. 

Glorifying the nobility of sacrifice and the honor of compromise is getting tedious. Once we’re making choices in part to satisfy and please another (a significant ingredient in partnership) we become susceptible to self-betrayal. In that void, where we once stood, it’s easy to let another stand in for center, for source. It’s not intentional, not really us. It’s a legacy foisted upon us by those who made God in their image in the first place. We sanctify women, too, of course, hold them on a pedestal as divinely nurturing and patient, born with some infinite well of motherly love. Nurturing does not beget nurturing, it comes from somewhere. When I agreed to no Jesus and no God, a part of my life force went with it. 

This is barely about gender roles. Any way you flip it, it’s continued to be acceptable to expect heavenly things from our fellow humans. I get the most from those who remind me what I already contain. Friends with a similar brand of inquiry and care. Call it prudence. I would never “devote myself” to my friend Lisa. That would be asking her to be my life force, a violation of her very core.

Years ago, when I didn’t feel like having sex for the umpteenth time and was trying to articulate to Ken how I wanted arousal to come from within, he sighed. “Does sex always have to be this deep, spiritual thing?” I said no, of course sex could be fun and not that deep. Being a prude has been one of my worst fears for as long as I can remember. We’re all familiar with the double standard: a woman is either excessively frigid or excessively loose. We’re reclaiming the sluts, but prude still means shame on you for being probably bad at sex and a buzzkill and definitely a bitch. Nevermind that the label is externally christened, imposed by the world around us. We internalize it. 

I should have said yes. There’s no reason sex can’t be sacred and silly, but without source sex is never worth it to me. I leave depleted.

Lisa adores astrology and I adore her. I don’t retain anything she tells me and she doesn’t mind. She explains that Vesta’s placement in a chart is about what we hold sacred, says devotion is a really good Vesta word. This sends me down a rabbit hole looking for more about sexuality. I know nothing about the Provisional Institute of Astroshamanism, but that’s where I find words articulating something I’ve been trying to for years. Chastity here was not absolute . . . The Vesta archetype relates to sexuality as an initiatory rite . . . which does not ask any relationship commitment in return. The Vesta archetype is not against relationships or sex. She simply does not want partners or lovers hanging around and ruining her sacred space. 

We treat disinterest in sex like an illness, spend untold resources trying to find ways to make people who don’t feel like having sex feel like having sex. Sex drive, while certainly varied amongst humans like everything else, is not a thing to be fixed. It’s a symptom—life force is waning. The solution isn’t to double down on sex. 

What if we separate sex entirely from marriage, from the agreements of relationship? I’ve only ever had the kind of sex I want the first handful of times I’ve slept with someone new. For a fleeting time I remain whole, offer up things that are mine in a mutual exchange. Within weeks I begin to turn my back on magic, spend time with another when I should be alone, muck up my sacred space or move out of it entirely. We talk about those early stages with such fondness, but we’re also dismissive. Just wait, we say, for the honeymoon to be over, for reality to set in. We assume relationships are the goal and anything else is a fleeting fantasy. If we looked from the perspective of the sex—of sexual liberation—we’d see a thing that was once untethered morphing into something that asks everything of us in return.

In spite of my fears of being labeled frigid, I’ve always valued prudence. Deep consideration is my jam. I’m capable of reckless behavior, but I love putting a lot of thought into the choices I make. We tend to frame purity as prude as Puritan—someone living under strict human command masquerading as something godly. But nothing externally imposed can be pure. What is pure comes truly from source. From a place no one else can touch. Prudishness or purity—pure sexuality—really just means applying deep care to what lives inside. Doing what you want to when you actually want to and never compromising on that. 

***

I went to my first 10-day silent Vipassana meditation retreat at 24, six months after my Mom died. All the young hippie farmers were doing it and it seemed like a perfect place for me to grieve or figure out what I was doing. On campus, everyone lives by certain rules, or precepts. Abstain from all killing, from all sexual activity, all intoxicants. Take great care that your actions do not disturb anyone. Take no notice of distractions caused by others. 

After days of self-cruelty and thought-related hell, I began to actually meditate. Each evening as we closed with, “May all beings be happy,” the vibration moving throughout my body was unlike anything ever. I was devoted. In a letter after I got home, I spelled out my experience. As I was walking in the field, I stopped myself. “Hey. Thanks for bringing me here.” I stood there and cried because I realized I was totally enjoying my own company—all the layers of what that means. I’d discovered solitude. 

They warn about craving the “high” of meditation, sitting for the express purpose of getting to that feeling. Everything in Vipassana is about aversion and craving. Not judging, just noticing. Each thought, every reaction, is something we’re longing for or something we wish would go away. Either way, not reality. During my first retreat, body aglow with sensation, I started having exquisite sexual fantasies. I told myself to observe them, to “let them arise and pass away.” Before long I’d fled to my room to masturbate. How could I not? But also, how could I? We’d essentially vowed ourselves to chastity at the beginning of the ten days and I’d broken my vows. But I wanted to consider myself a sexually liberated person, and doesn’t that mean shamelessness? 

The last time I went to a retreat was a year into my partnership with Ken. It all came flooding back, the loving-kindness, solitude, erasure of self. After I returned, we went straight into a baby-making road trip down the west coast. Sex was already becoming fraught, I was already resistant to generating arousal I wasn't feeling. Now I had a tool. If I meditated I’d want to have sex. Ken noticed, said meditation was obviously good for me, made me softer and kinder. It was true. I also distorted it to please him. Meditation, my conduit to the divine, became something I did for a partner. 

It’s common in meditation—kind of the point—to experience a loss of subjective identity or self. Ego dissolution. People might understand an expansive truth of reality, a state where longings cease. Attachment and wanting are all wrapped up with ego and its dissolution offers relief. What even is “I?”

When I first heard the nuns’ positive associations with being a “spouse of Christ,” I was conflicted. Man-in-the-sky imagery dominated. Through the lens of ego dissolution, it takes on new meaning. Can we even be dedicated to a self we’ve melted away? Not through compromise and sacrifice but through presence, through true listening. I’m not sure there’s much difference between belonging to self and belonging to the divine.

In 2015, Huffpost published, Why These Nuns Say The Vow Of Chastity Isn’t Primarily About Sex. "For me, chastity is the total freedom to have my heart open to everyone,” said Sister Simone Campbell. "It's about having a heart for the hold, and that is a rewarding, graced gift that is beyond measure."

Being in a romantic partnership robs me of that kind of heart. That heart is formed and stoked in solitude, a sacred place no one can touch. Marriage threatens that sanctity, or worse, deems it selfish. Do we think Buddhist monks and Catholic nuns, people who live in the name of selflessness, are the most selfish of all? Because they are deeply devoted to source above any human? Maybe our expectations of romantic relationships have increased as enthusiasm for God has waned. In our collective search for more and more spiritual freedom, maybe we’ve become so consumed by the ideals of partnership and marriage that we’ve allowed—encouraged, even—our own spiritual atrophy. 

My daughter and I have 29 years between us, nearly a Vestal’s whole career. In ancient Rome, she could be taking chastity vows just as mine lapse. When she told me she believes in magic, I heard that she has a firm spiritual core, has had enough experiences in her short life to form a belief—a knowing. That is pure. I don’t ever want her to lose that.

To contemplate, and to give to others the fruits of our contemplation. Dominican Sisters in the United States live under this motto. It sounds like being a writer. I’d always thought of nuns as living a life of restriction, of rules, of limits and sacrifice. But if a vow of chastity, a monastic life, is about devotion to source, not obedience to some man-god in the sky, maybe it just means they get to be spiritually free. Maybe nuns are the ultimate artists.