Fairies At The Bottom Of The Garden

The only good thing about the amount of driving kids around I do is that sometimes I have a meaningful conversation with one of the kids in the car.  Today, it was Thing One.  I had to drive him to and from a friend's bar mitzvah, so he had lots of questions about the Jewish faith.  Not that I'm any kind of expert on that, but I tried to explain at least on a general level.  That led to him asking how interfaith marriages work for reasons I don't remember offhand.  Told him that there are probably as many answers to that question as there are interfaith couples.  

I know of one in which the mother never converted but her kids took her husband's religion and they all attend his church now.  In another, the older daughter took the father's faith and the younger the mother's, so they split down the middle every Sunday.  In one of the sadder stories I've ever heard, one man I know who was raised Orthodox Jewish married a Catholic woman against the wishes of his parents and they actually sat shiva for him.  He was dead to them until they died decades later.  He and his wife had one child and raised her as an atheist.  Can't say as I blame them.  Thing One couldn't begin to wrap his head around the concept of being so upset with your adult child's choices that you'd rather pretend that he is dead for the rest of your life than accept them, and I have to say I'm glad about that.  There's enough misery in the world already.