Choosing His Religion
I'm Catholic. My husband's Jewish. What does that make our son?
by Erin K. Blakeley
April 23, 2007
In our marriage, my husband and I have already discovered this dynamic at work. Our Sunday dinners are rarely the home-cooked meals I remember, because in my husband's childhood, Sundays meant take-out from Uncle Cheung's. And my husband the Red Sox fan never thought he'd share an apartment, let alone a bed, with a Yankees fan. But every day, he walks by the autographed Derek Jeter ball lying on my desk and manages not to throw it at me.
When we put the religion question in these terms — as one of the infinite number of compromises that marriage asks of us and not as a question of spiritual meaning — the path to making a decision became clear to us. We needed to figure out, for ourselves, exactly which traditions it was most important to each of us that we keep, and why. So for weeks, we went about doing this so the only way we knew how — by telling and re-telling our favorite family stories to each other.
My husband recalled that his mother took him to a different museum every Friday after school. He remembered summer weekends on Cape Cod with his grandparents, and winter trips to Florida. He laughed as he described sitting down together, as a family, to watch Married With Children every Sunday night. While he also described lighting candles on Friday nights and searching for the afikomen during Passover, the memories he singled out were, for the most part, separate from his religion.
For me, the opposite was true. While I cherish the memories of our family vacations and of playing board games on Saturday nights, my fondest memories revolve around And just like that, our decision was made.the holidays — making Advent wreaths, keeping secrets about Christmas presents, painting Easter eggs with my father's acrylic paint set and trying to guess each day at school which egg I would find waiting for me in my lunchbox. And I came to realize that of all the things I could bargain away in our marriage, recreating these moments for our children just wasn't one of them.
And just like that, our decision was made. My husband will remain a Jew, but we will raise our child as a Catholic, and we'll all attend church and sing Christmas carols together as a family. My husband feels some loss in this decision, as he reflects on Torah that won't be learned and Bar Mitvah parties that won't be planned. And I feel sad for him, knowing how hard it is to give up parts of your life that you never thought you'd surrender. But at the same time, we're happy with our choice, and even happier with path that we took in getting there.
Sometime this summer, we will baptize our child, and instead of throwing a formal lunch reception, we'll celebrate by catching a Sox game and eating vegetable lo mein. In the details, it isn't what either of us imagined. But in our hearts, it's exactly what we yearned for.
©2007 Erin K. Blakeley and Nerve Media
About the Author
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Erin Blakeley is a freelance writer and journalist whose work has appeared in the Star Ledger, NYC24, and Tiempo, among other publications. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband and son.
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