After
leaving the convent on Saturday, December 24, 1966, at age 30, I collapsed in
my parents’ living room in front of the television. There I sat—all day and
through the night, unmoving, my mouth gaping. Staring. I later learned that my
mother considered having me admitted to the mental ward at the Sanitarium
Hospital in Independence because she was so concerned about my inability to
communicate.
On
Tuesday, December 27, I got a call from Washington, D.C. Sister Mary Dennis, a convent
friend teaching at Catholic University, had recently met the owner of Pflaum
Publishing. He’d asked if she knew anyone with a background in teaching and
theology who could also write and edit.
She
asked if I’d be interested. I had no idea what editing was. The term was new to
me. But I was so lost in a sea of malaise that I mumbled, in a voice that
hadn’t been used for three days, “I guess.” She then called Bill Pflaum and set
up an interview for the following day in Dayton, Ohio.
For
the trip, my pregnant sister-in-law loaned me three winter skirts and sweaters.
Mom and I visited Jones Store to purchase underwear and a coat, shoes, purse,
and hat. Mom bought the last item because at that time all well-dressed women
wore hats when they traveled. So, wearing my black, brimmed, felt hat, my
green, nubby winter coat, and my high-heeled leather pumps, I flew on a TWA jet
to Dayton on Wednesday, December 28.
In
1966, passengers alighted the plane out on the tarmac and then walked across it
to the terminal. On that day, the wind gusted so insistently across the barren
airfield that the lower half of my coat and my skirt flapped up against my
thighs. For eight years, my lower legs had been covered by a black serge habit
and simply showing them made me self-conscious.
Now,
to have my thighs revealed almost shamed me and so I stumbled across the tarmac
trying to hold onto a bulky purse while pressing one hand across my thighs to hold down the coat and skirt and the other hand on my head to keep the wayward hat on. I was bent
over like a doddering, arthritic alien. And everything did seem foreign to me—the
clothes, the makeup, the plane, the legs that looked liked debarked sticks
below my knobby knees.
Joe
Kneeland, managing editor at Pflaum Publishing, met me in the terminal. As he
approached, I let go of despair, lassitude, passivity and turned on the
spotlight within so that I began to act. I knew what normal was. I also knew
that I was nowhere near normal at that time. But I could act, and so for the
next two days I did.
I
acted all through the interviews. I acted as I wrote the children’s stories
they wanted. I acted as I met each new editor at the publishing house. I
laughed at the appropriate times. The truth was I charmed them—or so they
told me later.
The University of Dayton in Dayton, Ohio,
USA.
But
then Joe drove me out to the University of Dayton to take the MMPI—the Minnesota
Multiphasic Personality Inventory. According to Wikipedia it is “the most widely used and
researched standardized psychometric test of adult personality and
psychopathology. Psychologists and other mental health professionals use
various versions of the MMPI to develop treatment plans [and] assist with
differential diagnosis . . . .”
I
couldn’t “charm” this inventory or “ace” it. I’m quite sure that the reason
Pflaum took three weeks to decide to hire me is because I came across as mentally
unhealthy—imbalanced—on the MMPI. And so I sat for over twenty days, gaping at the television. Then, in late January the publisher called and offered me a job as an editor on My
Little Messenger for grades one and two. I would earn $6,500 a year.
And
so a new era in my life began. Peace.
Photographs
from Wikipedia.
