I recently got a remote job and though it’s only 20-25 hours a week it’s requiring a fair amount of organizing and adjustment. I’m writing but have a little less time, so will repost earlier essays to fill in the gap. This is a repost of the May 2023 essay that officially launched Glorious Ordinary.

My middle name is Miriam, meaning "bitter" (from Hebrew marah "bitterness"); and "beloved" (from the Egyptian root mr).” It holds more meaning for me than my first name, Valerie.

Miriam, is my Confirmation name. Catholics choose a name when receiving the sacrament of Confirmation, preferably the name of a saint who will guide them to “grow in the faith.”

My apostasy began in elementary school when I refused to believe Eve was at fault in the creation story, but I ldid seriously love the sensuous aspects of Catholicism: the sound of the Latin mass, the smell of incense, and the visual pageantry of vestments and banners on holy days. There were many opportunities to practice being a “spiritual bride” and wear a stiff white dress and veil, including May Day or Mary’s Day, and receiving First Holy Communion.

But Confirmation was different. It was a chance to choose a name that was mine. So at age seven, the age you are confirmed, I chose a name that meant bitter, as well as beloved.

It was the name of a favorite aunt. Aunt Miriam was a thin, intelligent, energetic woman, with an explosive laugh, who galloped up and down stairs two at a time. Her mother, my grandmother, Ruth, marched her to a convent school at thirteen with the hope she would become a Sister of the Blessed Sacrament, a missionary order of Catholic nuns. Miriam did indeed become a nun but left the order decades later, eventually becoming a Mormon because they took her into their community when our family disowned her.

Aunt Miriam became a Mormon, married a Mormon, and with poignant earnestness regularly sent Mormon materials to my grandmother who just as earnestly tossed them in the trash. 

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The final Miriam in my pantheon is the sister of Aaron and Moses, a priestess, who with Aaron, complained against Moses during the Exodus, but for some reason God only punished Miriam for that transgression. He struck her with leprosy. Moses interceded but she was forced to leave the camp for seven days to purify herself before she could return to the people, free of disease.

Miriam the heretic.

I embraced this Miriam. Her story of banishment by men in authority was my core experience of Catholicism. Parish priests, representatives of a patriarchal church, stood in my way at almost every turn, from my desire to serve on the altar to reading passages from the bible during mass. I came of age when Vatican II, led by Pope John 23rd, threw open the doors to reform, but local parish priests that I knew resisted change. However, those reforms gave my aunt a glimpse of life beyond convent walls, setting her on a path toward something more aligned with her galloping free spirit. And even though it angered my grandmother, my aunt never seemed anything but happy in her chosen Mormon life.

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Bitter is a taste receptor in the mouth, and one of five taste modalities: sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and savory, also known as umami. Like so many tastes and odors, bitter connects us to memory. The bitter herbs of Passover, symbolizing the harshness of the Hebrews’ slavery in Egypt. Sorrow and bondage, grief and loss. 

Bitter medicinal herbs are tonic and astringent, good for digestion. Digestion starts in the mouth and bitter constituents stimulate the secretion of saliva, and increase secretion of gastric juices and bile. Bitterness as a flavor is almost unknown in the standard American diet, known by the acronym SAD. Sad indeed. We are overwhelmed with the cloying and the saccharine, in pop culture as well as food, making us sick and tired.

Bitter gives depth and balance.

Bitter is a feeling: aggrieved, dissatisfied, spiteful, splenetic, peevish. Bitterness is rooted deeply on both sides of my family—in people hardened by the Depression, who persisted in adversity and were not strangers to the bottom of the barrel, to scraping and patching and innovating fixes, never expecting help from outside the family and sometimes not even from inside it.

Bitter is not pleasant but it’s familiar. Dark and grainy, well worn like pews in a church where the smell of incense is embedded in walls and wood.

As a child, I sometimes caught a sense of bitterness from my grandmothers as they peeled potatoes, folded laundry and did whatever tasks came to their hands. Sometimes they slipped into revery, but when they stopped looking at whatever things they would not, or could not, name—when their eyes rested on me—they smiled.