Faith and Family in New Memoir of Queer Motherhood

The tension between religion and LGBTQ identities is often portrayed in black and white—but a new memoir shows us the many nuances in one woman’s journey to reconcile her Catholic faith with her love for another woman as they fall in love, have children, and navigate parenthood.

Erin White’s Given Up for You: A Memoir of Love, Belonging, and Belief opens as the 23-year-old White is meeting her future spouse, Chris, the first woman with whom she had had a romantic relationship. Their romance is complicated, however, by White’s newfound Catholic faith. When White was a child, she had attended “a few years of Sunday school” at a local Methodist church, enrolled by her lapsed-Catholic parents, but little had resonated. Then, in her 20s, searching for meaning in her life and struggling with a failing relationship, she had had a vision of Jesus sitting next to her—a vision that led her to “the consuming magic of the Catholic Church.” She knew of the Church’s attitudes towards homosexuality and reproductive rights, but “what I loved about Catholicism was on an entirely different plane from the hatred and prejudice of the institution,” she tells us.

Still, she tries to have it all, saying, “I wanted everything: to love a woman yet avail myself of the opportunities and status of straight culture; to break the rules of the Church but still feel myself beloved by it…. I was engaged in some serious magical thinking then, having decided I would marry Chris but still hold tight to my straight privilege.” As someone who “passed” in straight culture—an identity she would later understand as “femme,” she could make this work to some extent, but as her relationship with Chris deepens, however, she discovers it is not always so easy. She eventually stops going to Mass, partly because of the Church’s politics, and partly because of messages from earlier in her life that told her she could not have both God and Chris.

Once she and Chris are married, the narrative moves largely from this tension into an exploration of human relationships and two-woman ones in particular, to explorations of what makes two people compatible and how they negotiate the many decisions and responsibilities of planning for and raising children. God is not gone entirely from this part of the book, although he has stepped back into the role of a “long-distance benefactor.” White offers us a portrait of a two-woman relationship that goes beyond platitudes about equitable two-mom households and looks thoughtfully at the ups and downs of how we split financial support, household tasks, and parenting roles. While she and Chris divided their roles in ways that may have echoed traditional mom-dad households, friends of theirs did not, offering White the chance to look at various possibilities and how they sometimes play out.

Faith is never too far away, though, even as White drifts away from observance into the domestic details of motherhood. But she evolves as both a mother and a member of the queer community, and ultimately understands, “What I had lost was my sense of entitlement to belief, my place in the world of religion,” she tells us. “It was easier for me to live without God that it was to admit my gayness, my otherness, and the way it had ushered me out of the world of ease and privilege I had been born into.” Even as she realizes “the Catholic Church could not be mine. I could not raise my children in it,” she finds another faith community that might now provide her with a spiritual home, a place for her children, and a way for her to be her fullest self.

Given Up for You is a spiritual journey, a parenting journey, and a coming-out journey that shows us how each of these paths really intertwines. Even readers who are not themselves Catholic (observant or lapsed) or religious at all will find much to reflect on here.

Those interested in other queer parenting memoirs that also explore religious faith should also check out Michelle Theall’s Teaching the Cat to Sit: A Memoir and Waiting for the Call: From Preacher’s Daughter to Lesbian Mom, by Jacqueline Taylor.