For a few seconds after my mother said she could not congratulate me for “defying God’s will,” no one moved.

naming me, but everyone knew. She wrote about “modern women confusing technology with miracles” and “children conceived through rebellion.” Women commented with praying hands. Men I had known since childhood wrote things like, “Hard truth, Sister Elena.” One person wrote, “Sometimes the womb rejects what the spirit knows is wrong.”

I threw up in the continue reading …