The Last Generation of Nuns

I grew up around nuns. My mother had left the convent five years before I was born, but all through my childhood our home was often visited by her “convent buddies,” a dozen or so women who had formed enduring friendships as novices or professed sisters of the Roman Catholic religious orders they had joined as teenagers. Daughters of immigrants from Irish and Italian enclaves, many of them had become sisters for reasons not just of faith, but of education and opportunity. The convent to them had been an unlikely part of the American dream.  
 
By the time I met them, some of these women had left religious life, having shed their habits in the late 1960s, as my mother had, as if to feel more of the breeze blowing after Vatican II famously “opened the windows of the Church.” Others left not long after, to marry or to work jobs of their choosing, while a few have kept their vows to this day. I could usually tell the nuns from the ex-nuns by their shoes: blue canvas sneakers for the former sisters turned actual mothers, sturdy black leather for the lifelong nuns they might have been.