Betko Changed My Life

My goodness, all of the strange sensations those hormones were making me feel during my first pregnancy.  It frightened me so much at first, because until I found out it was a baby, I actually thought I was being posessed by a demon.  Nobody warned me about this.  I had no education on sex--what was I to think when one day in 1945,  I lost all control of bodily functions such as urination?  I didn't enjoy those feelings at all.   Nobody alive on the planet Earth likes wet panties.  How in the world was I supposed to excel into a life of Motherhood that nobody had prepared me for?

I was vomiting daily, and Mother didn't speak enough English to be of any real importance in my life except to embarass me.  Then again, anytime I  yelled at Walter and got him to agree with me at the end of one of our fights, she baked me an apple pie, and of course I loved apple pie.   I trusted Aunt Sabina, but couldn't talk to her either due to the language barrier.  My girlfriends and contemporaries all felt like we were in competition with one another and our husbands and babies, so I dared not ever reveal what was true and in my heart to any of them.  And a demure woman would never admit that she had tasted the pleasures of reproduction.  In the confessional, I weekly declared an intense dislike for impure thoughts, and except for two children, remained steadfast in a repeated denial of my own instincts and longings for sex.

Early in our marriage I was having a recurrent fantasy about my Walter and me procuring nakedly in a lush Hawai'ian waterfall, but the Lord in Heaven put everything into place.  When I confided the dream to our beloved Parish Priest Father Olexy,  none of those fantasies happened.  I had to put all of my faith and trust in what Father Olexy told all the girls.  He was very strict in his teachings on the sins of the flesh.  Father Olexy's approval meant everything to us all, and because I remained faithful to those promises, his Holiness is with me to this day. 

And, thank Goodness for Catholic purity.  Walter and I waited to consummate our love until after marriage, as all good Catholics were instructed. As you may note by the dates I provided that our firstborn Betko was indeed conceived AFTER the sacrament of Holy wedlock so as not to risk a sullied reputation amongst my family or church community.  I was an honors student, and was later voted Most Devout 1961 and 1962, and there were standards to uphold in order to bring pride to the family.

So we baptized our lil Elizabeth and nicknamed her Betko and warned her of the sins of the flesh at a very early age, mostly upon the urgings of Fr. Richard Baublitz, a trusted co-Priest of Father Olexy's.  The two lived with Monsignor Wasilewski at the Rectory back in the 1940's and counseled all of us when we needed it.  Preventative maintenance is what these gentlemen of the cloth suggested for our children and their budding sexuality.

I do wonder if we made mistakes in handling our little Betko.  Aunt Sabina was incredibly cold and distant. I was so busy with the new challenges of motherhood that I never quite bonded with my infant daughter the way I bonded with my infant son the next year.  Do priests still counsel young mothers to reject their children for being born immoral?  There's a lot of people talking about gay this and gay that lately, and I have to tell you it makes me nervous, simply because I don't like thinking about sex.  My late husband Walter was often a close-binding, overly possessive, puritanically domineering father, and I believe that is what triggered the emotional and psychological conditions that produced her lesbianism.  Such a hard life my daughter has chosen for herself, when so many people hate her for it!  Why would she pick this?!

All the stereotypes Father Baublitz told me about those homosensuals must be wrong. For my Betko is certainly not identifiable as one. With her neatly trimmed manicure and all the lipstick she uses, I am forced to conclude that if all Homosexuals turned green tomorrow, we'd have neighbors, mailmen, grocers, ministers, kid sisters, best friends, policemen and others lighting up like St. Patrick's day, and I'd say, "There goes another one! Foiled again!"

Yours in the Love of Christ,
Mrs. Watler J. Katsellas, Jr.