So, did you get him the shoes like I told you? my mother asks. Where on earth did he learn that? The rain is God’s spit, honestly. I can’t wait to see that little booger, my mom says. I nod to her and shrug, mouthing the words, I know but . . . My mother will be here in five days for Connor’s baptism, and I’m too afraid to tell her it’s been canceled.Īs I retrieve the phone, my partner, Jill, edges by me with Connor’s plate of pancakes in one hand and his sippy cup in the other, calls our son to the table, and taps her watch at me-a reminder that we’re going to be late for school. At almost four years old, he’s already learning to navigate her sharp corners.
Before Grandy can get out another word, he drops the phone on the kitchen counter, tucks his chin to his chest, and bolts from the kitchen.
With equal parts amusement and disapproval, she says, Oh, Connor, I’m sure God doesn’t spit. My mom’s sandpaper ex-smoker’s laugh bursts through the speaker like a spray of gravel from a semitruck. He turns his head sideways and puts his right eye close to the screen, as if she might be trapped inside it. RAIN IS GOD’S SPIT, Connor tells his grandmother through my iPhone. Teaching the Cat to Sit examines the modern roles of motherhood and religion and demonstrates that our infinite capacity to love has the power to shape us all. And she realizes that in order to be a good mother, she may have to be a bad daughter. Her quest to have her son accepted into the Church leads to a battle with Sacred Heart and with her mother that leaves her questioning everything she thought she knew about the bonds of family and faith. There, she made her home on an elk migration path facing the Continental Divide, speaking to God every day, but rarely seeing another human being.Īt forty-three years of age and seemingly settled in her decision to live life openly as a gay woman, Theall and her partner attempt to have their son baptized into the Sacred Heart of Jesus Catholic Church in the liberal town of Boulder, Colorado. Shame and her longing for her mother’s acceptance led her to deny her feelings and eventually run away to a remote stretch of mountains in Colorado. Coming of age in the Texas Bible Belt, a place where it was unacceptable to be gay, Theall found herself at odds with her strict Roman Catholic parents, bullied by her classmates, abandoned by her evangelical best friend whose mother spoke in tongues, and kicked out of Christian organizations that claimed to embrace her-all before she’d ever held a girl’s hand. A compelling memoir of a gay Catholic woman struggling to find balance between being a daughter and a mother raising her son with a loving partner in the face of discrimination.įrom the time she was born, Michelle Theall knew she was different.
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