Sable Monroe

One of the strangest parts of attending Alvernia Preparatory School was realizing that I somehow attended a Catholic school without actually belonging to the Catholic world surrounding it.

Up until then, I knew very little about Catholicism.

My family was not religious in any organized way. We were not churchgoing people. My parents had never baptized me or my younger brother. Religion existed more as background noise than structure in our household.

But suddenly I found myself inside a school where Catholic rituals shaped the atmosphere.

The principal, Sister Alma Roberts, wore a full nun’s habit every day. Priests visited the school regularly for services and communion. Religion was not treated as occasional there. It was woven into the school culture itself.

And I quickly realized I was standing slightly outside of it.

Every so often, the priest would come and the students would line up for communion.

Only baptized Catholic children could participate fully.

I couldn’t.

So I watched.

As a child, I didn’t fully understand the theology behind any of it. I only understood that some children naturally belonged to the ritual and some of us did not.

I remember being curious more than anything else.

What did the wafers taste like?

Why did everyone suddenly become so quiet and serious during service?

Why did they all seem to instinctively know what to do while I felt like I was learning an invisible social script in real time?

At that age, I didn’t feel angry about it.

Just separate.

And honestly, that feeling described much of my childhood.

I was often physically present in spaces where I never fully felt rooted:
my parents’ household,
certain schools,
certain family dynamics,
certain social classes,
certain religious environments.

Close enough to observe everything clearly.

But never fully inside the experience myself.

Even now, when I think about Alvernia Prep, I still picture the communion lines, the blue ties, the white uniforms, and the strange feeling of watching everyone participate in something I could see but not enter.

As a child, I thought belonging was something other people naturally understood.

I did not yet realize how many children quietly grow up feeling like observers inside their own lives.

The Thumb-Sucking Terror of Alvernia Prep—>