kaitie st. jean

A Secret Coven

Three weeks before the Supreme Court Justice overturned Roe v. Wade, I sat in a pew at the Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul in Lewiston, Maine. I was watching my nine-year-old son Michael receive his first Holy communion. In that moment, I felt so proud of him. He had worked tirelessly on the lessons for three years through the pandemic: in person, online, and in workbooks at home to learn the Mass rituals, Holy Sacraments, and memorize prayers to Saints Michael and Mary. He attended retreats to learn the process of examining one’s conscience, doing penance, and receiving the Eucharist. He deserved this. He’d earned this, the right in the eyes of The Church to now receive communion with the rest of the family. My eyes were wispy with tears and my heart swelled enormously as I watched him walk up to the priest for the first time and bow his head. I whispered with him as he said, “Amen.” Though I couldn’t really hear his words, I knew when he said them. 

As the first tear fell onto my cheek I was reminded of my first time in a Catholic church, a little more than five years prior, with my now-husband and his family, attending the Easter Mass. While the priest gave his homily, I cried at the beauty of the ritual, the endlessly tall stone ceilings and brightly colored stained glass windows, the pipe organ and its soul-shattering hymnal notes that reverberated through my body. I cried for the happy togetherness I felt in that moment, then I cried some more out of embarrassment for crying in front of my boyfriend and his family who were trying not to look over at me, wondering why this twenty-eight year old woman was sobbing in the pew next to them––they did this every Sunday––it was an old feeling for them, opposite of the new feelings taking over me. 

For what had seemed like my whole life, I’d searched for a religious home. Upon reflection and many an epiphany conversation with my grad school mentor, I came to realize this wasn’t because I was ever overly religious. It was a patriarchal figurehead I was looking for, to fill the Father-shaped hole left in my existence when my biological father walked out of my life at eighteen months old, not necessarily a church. Who else but the “ultimate” father? God must have seemed like a good stand-in. My mother had christened me Episcopalian as a baby, but we rarely went to church. I was curious as a child about the books and Bibles she had stowed away on the shelves in our little trailer-house; the hand-stitched and lace-tatted, long white gown I’d worn in the old photos; and the stories my mom told me when she was a little girl attending church with her parents in Maryland. 

I searched. I got my mom and stepdad to bring me to the church in town, a Congregational church that had Sunday school and a small choir. We went every once in a while, but not enough for me to get much out of the Sunday school classes because I was missing so much in between times. In high school, I reconnected with an old friend, Paige, from my childhood. I started going to a Baptist church with her and her family, a half an hour away from home every Sunday. We went to youth group on Thursdays; I joined the worship band and went to practices on Wednesdays; and I even went to Soul Fest with them one summer to see a bunch of Christian rock bands perform. I thought I’d found a home there. I had friends and people who I felt loved me. I prayed and sang and worshipped my little heart out. 

But one fine Saturday, after a sleepover at Paige’s house, I dressed myself to go out shopping with Paige when her mother stopped me dead in my tracks and asked, “What in God’s name do you think you’re wearing?” It was a skirt and baby tee, popular attire in 2006. The skirt came just below my fingertips and the shirt covered my breasts and belly, which abided by my school and mother’s dress code. Susan and Paige were tall and thin and dressed more like twin sisters than mother and daughter. They wore skirts that fell below their knees or crisply ironed pants with button down shirts and, always, a sweater that covered their rear ends. They wore flat mules or kitten heels in subdued neutral colors, and each had a strand of pearls that adorned their bony necks. No, I’m not joking. I could see how in Susan’s eyes I was perhaps dressed as a harlot, or a slut, in her words, but it stung nonetheless. I’d never even had sex before!! Hell, I’d only just had my first kiss as a sophomore. Standing in her living room, a virginal slut, I cried as her harsh words hit me, knowing I would never be up to their godly standard, no matter how much I pretended I was. 

So that was the end of my time with the Baptists. My mother held me as I cried again in our Victorian farmhouse kitchen and told me that she was going to give that Susan the talking to of her life, and who the hell does she think she is? I couldn’t think of anything to say as I leaned my head against her shoulder. I could only look up through my tear-soaked eyelashes and stare at the painted tin ceiling. I didn’t know then what I’d done wrong or why Susan’s scolding affected me so badly. I took a long break from religion after that: a whole decade. But the yearning was still there under the soured spirit I held inside of me. I shied away from people who were overly religious for fear of another scolding, over some anti-religious thing about me that I wasn’t aware of, some un-godly way I was living my life. 

So when I met my future parents-in-law, pious Catholics who’d had nine children,I felt bamboozled and terrified that I’d end up crucified in the yard for daring to date their son. Here I was: twenty-eight, divorced, tattooed, a single mother of two awesome kids, unemployed, a college student. Not a great candidate for a Catholic dude who, though he rarely went to Mass and had some cool tattoos of his own, had parents who went and worshipped the Lord almost every day. 

But I’d been wrong. His parents and siblings were welcoming and friendly, curious about my life and my kids, happy to meet me and happy I was dating their Zach. Nearly every weekend I came to visit Zach and nearly every weekend he’d mention that he’d seen his mother and she’d asked when we were coming to mass. After a month or so of this, we finally gave in and went on Easter Sunday, 2016. My kids were with their biological father for the weekend, so I had nothing else to do and figured, Well, why not?

Zach and I arrived at the great, airy Basilica and as we kneeled to pray, I was painfully aware that my peach-colored lace sundress was too short and my strappy wedge sandals were too tall. I’d realized just how short the dress was as I was putting it on back at Zach’s house, but it was the only thing I’d brought with me to wear that day, so it was either the too-short dress or muddy jeans from going four-wheeling the day before. I’m still not sure if I chose that outfit as a subconscious rebellion against going to a service at an organized religion or if I’d really just thought it was cute. Maybe a little bit of me was thinking Fuck off, Susan, I can wear what I want, even though it had been twelve years since the incident. I braced myself for most of the Mass against judging eyes to fall upon the vast expanse of bare leg that was showing, but they didn’t come that day. I’d later come to realize that the judging eyes were there, but they’d been practiced at judging quietly, opposite to their Baptist counterparts. 

It didn’t take long for me to make the decision to convert to Catholicism. I wanted to be a part of the beautiful ritual and gain the secret knowledge that those who were a part of it seemed to have. Living a life dedicated to Christ through becoming Catholic was the way, and what better sect of Christianity than the biggest one? They had an air about them, a special eliteness, that they were better, more righteous, more gracious, more charitable. I wanted that. I craved it and longed for it. Shortly after Zach proposed, I signed up for the religious classes and went through the conversion to Catholicism. We were going to have a big ol’ Catholic wedding. I took classes, Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults (or RCIA), and had undergone the same basic steps that Michael had to take his first communion, but more in depth. The classes, as it turned out, were great. There was none of the judgment I feared, none of the outright sexism––our teacher even said that Adam was just as responsible for “The Fall of Man” as Eve was!! My mind was blown. I learned more about the Bible in those months than I had in my entire life. My future husband even went through them again alongside me. 

By 2019, I’d finished the religious classes, confessed my sins, and received my first holy communion at the Easter Vigil. My one hang up was The Church’s views on being pro-choice. I was pro-choice then, and I’m pro-choice now. That, thankfully, never changed during those years in the Catholic community. I knew going in that they didn’t approve of abortion, and I’d had one many years before, when I was nineteen. But I knew I wasn’t planning on having another one, so I figured I’d be fine.

I wasn’t fine, though. I wasn’t healed or done grieving my abortion and, in those coming months after I received my first communion, I had a giant Sinner and Murderer label placed across my heart, made by the very Church I thought would help heal, protect, and support me. After a year of going to church every Sunday as a Catholic, the Covid Pandemic happened. I don’t know that I ever thought I’d be thankful for those scary months that we were home, masking constantly, and only able to buy toilet paper one roll at a time, but it turned out to have a silver lining for our family. No more Mass. By the time spring of 2022 came around, Zach and I could be called “Cafeteria Catholics” at best. We said a simple grace at dinner and were doing the at-home catechism classes with Michael, but that was it. In our community circles, though, those “Sinner and Murderer” labels had been ramping up in the three weeks before the Supreme Court decision was made––flung around carelessly by fellow Catholics––and I’d begun feeling worse and worse about my past.

When the news came out on Friday, June 24th, 2022, that protection for safe abortion was no more, I sat outside of the Harraseeket Inn, where I was attending my second residency for an MFA in creative writing. I sat outside on a stone bench surrounded by flourishing flora and allowed the horrifying realization to numb me from the inside out. I didn’t think I was going to need another abortion, but what about all of the other women (and, let’s face it, girls) who needed a safe abortion? I took off my shoes and let my feet feel the warm granite underneath me. Who was going to take care of them? It was a gorgeous setting for a grim nightmare. 

My fellow students at the Stonecoast residency had varying reactions to the news, ranging from angry outbursts to outwardly sobbing in the middle of writing workshops. I felt all of those emotions but kept them bottled deep inside. They washed over me in great waves throughout the day, and it allowed for the gravity of the situation to set in. I moved through the rest of the day in a zombie-like state because, if I let myself start crying, I didn’t know if I’d be able to stop. 

The next day, Saturday, there was an evening gathering to watch some short one-act plays and soliloquies that one of our faculty members had written. There was one, the third to be performed, that was just too much for me. It was a young woman, talking about how she’d been taken advantage of and pushed into a sexual relationship with an older man, her superior, by her mother in order to secure a good marriage. When she fell pregnant, her mother told her to keep it a secret until it was too late to have an abortion so she could trap him in the relationship. When he denied the baby was his and she launched into a tirade of despairing words, What would I do? This was my baby, everything started to blur at the edges and my center of gravity tilted on its axis. Her words, the lights on the ceiling, my classmates who were lounging around me in cushioned chairs and sofas. Tears started to accumulate on the lower lids of my eyes, and I knew I had to escape before I disrupted the performance. 

I walked as quietly as I could across the carpeted ballroom, my face down to avoid anyone seeing it crumple as I left. I allowed my body weight to push into the door of the public bathroom and gasped as I let myself fall against the line of sinks, finally allowing my tears to fall freely. I’d been holding my breath as if it would hold myself together, an invisible glue, thick within the deep cracks in my soul. Every memory came crashing forward from behind the great wall I’d built to keep them at bay. My baby repeated in my head over and over as I relived the lines turning pink, the waiting room, the feeling of the cold table beneath my back as I made my choice, the too-hot recovery room as I grieved. 

The door opened behind me and Kelly, the book saleswoman, and Robin, our assistant director, walked in to find me. They held me as my mother had fifteen years before after my abortion, a sobbing, shaking mess, letting out guttural noises that quaked through the echoey bathroom stalls, as I prayed the rest of the group couldn’t hear me. But I couldn’t stay quiet any longer. I couldn’t hold it in anymore. 

“I wanted my baby.” I confessed for the first time. Relief washed over me in that moment, a feeling I wasn’t expecting. It was as if a weight had lifted away from my chest, my stomach, my uterus. New tears fell, not of fear or grief, but quiet tears of love. 

Robin took me outside where I gulped breaths of fresh air and recounted my story to her. She listened to me quietly and respectfully, hugging me again when I needed to take a break and cry. We sat that way for close to an hour, and it was one of the most intimate moments of my life. Until that moment, only four people knew I’d had an abortion––my mother, my now husband, and two very close, trusted friends––and now this woman who I barely knew, who was letting me bare my soul to her, no questions asked, no judgements made. I was liberated from my shame. She left me that night with the agreement that I was to go back to my room and watch some trashy TV, eat some chocolate, and get a good night’s sleep. 

Sunday brought a day of rest. I attended the bare minimum activities and seminars. I lounged in my underwear around the hotel room and took a long, hot shower, continued my trashy TV binge, and ordered out for dinner––laying in my bed to eat, not caring about the crumbs that fell amidst the gorgeously soft, white Egyptian cotton sheets. It all seemed so insignificant compared to what women would soon face in their hours of need. I felt helpless but not alone anymore. When the sun began to fall behind the trees outside my window, I dressed myself again and wandered outside to be in the cool night air.

I found a group of women from my writing program just outside of the Inn, and they welcomed me into their conversation as I approached. We ranged in age from around 23 to 65, women represented in nearly every stage of life––graying hair and wrinkles to shining eyes and cheeks––from all walks and from all over the country. 

We sat in a circle around the round stone fireplace, twelve in all, a secret coven, draped over the arms and seats of Adirondack chairs and told our stories. We told stories of our own abortions, our mother’s and sister’s abortions, miscarriages, and traumatic births. We talked about our struggles with PCOS and medical injustices by doctors who didn’t believe in our pain because of our gender. We discussed misogyny and stereotypes and grieved and joked to ease the pain. We sipped wine and the firelight danced across our faces as we cried and laughed, bonded by our spoken truths, though we barely knew one another. Twice in two days I had spoken freely about my abortion, without shame or fear. Accepted. Free.