Potato Chips and Jesus

How my atheist mother forced me to go to church

My mother was an atheist. She never publicly admitted it, but, for some reason, she admitted it to me several times. Despite her atheism, she insisted that all of us children go to church. She came from a Roman Catholic family, my father came from a Roman Catholic family, and they were married in a Roman Catholic Church. As befitting her, she ignored her own deep instincts and feelings, and did what she thought was the “proper” thing to do. She raised us as Roman Catholics, but at the same time she never once set foot inside the church herself.

Each Sunday, she would make sure that we were dressed in our finest, give each of us three pennies to put in the collection plate then send us on our way. Although my father drove us to church, he merely dropped us off. He only attended on the most sacred of holidays.

Many years later it dawned on me that those two hours each Sunday — one hour of Sunday School and one hour of church services — were the only two hours of the week my parents spent alone together without kids around.

It was becoming a pattern that I do whatever my older brother did. He joined the cub scouts, and so did I. He played little league baseball and so did I. He joined the school band and so did I. He became an altar boy, and the…