By Emma Bouthillette 

Staff Writer

“When did I first learn to hold in those feelings I couldn’t name, build a wall around my heart,” Helen Rousseau reads from her poem “Bottled Up,” sitting on her couch in her quiet condo tucked off of York Street in Kennebunk. “I was led to believe the right thing to do was bottle up more, think the walls, deny my simplest wants, forget about love and comfort – what might please me – and strive to please a wrathful God instead. Then I’d be happy.”

“Bottled Up” is the prologue to “Early Childhood Education” – Rousseau’s recently self-published memoir in verse.

At 66-years-old, Rousseau has spent time reflecting on her childhood and dealing with many of her “life’s issues” through writing poetry.

Raised by Franco-American Catholic parents in Massachusetts, Rousseau attended a Catholic all-girls school through 12^th grade, and says it was her childhood that formed her decisions throughout life. 

Taught by nuns at school, she says the daily religious classes were like a “mini-convent,” and by the time she finished high school she had decided to enter the sisterhood. 

“I always wanted to do the best, and [becoming a nun] was the best you could do at the time to please God,” Rousseau says. 

“Early Childhood Education” is the first of a series Rousseau is working on, and focuses mostly on the time leading up to when she entered the convent -– reflecting on her education, relationship with her parents and other specific memories of her younger years. 

“The first issue I began to address was with my mother,” Rousseau says. “I thought our relationship was fine, but I’m trying to understand who she was and how it was not what I wanted.”

As she began to write poems addressed to her mother, Rousseau says she realized her writing got to her “core of truth,” revealing the feelings she had bottled up as well as reasons for some of her actions.

In her poems about school, Rousseau conveys discipline she experienced in school and her impression of the nuns that taught her. 

“We didn’t find it strange to admire as well as fear them for that is how we viewed God and our place in this world,” Rousseau reads. 

As Rousseau entered the convent and spent 20 years serving God, she says she remembered her fear and made sure she was a “friendly nun” students would like. 

During her time in a Massachusetts convent community called the Grey Nuns, Rousseau says she started teaching at the age of 19 and later was invited to work with children in Louisiana helping them retain their Cajun culture and French language. 

“I think I would have left my community earlier if I had not gone to Louisiana,” Rousseau says. 

She says she left the convent because of “huge changes” occurring within the church during the 1970s. At the same time, Boston University was offering scholarships for women to attend, so she enrolled in their school of theology.

“There I met people from all religions, and it just amazed me that people weren’t Catholic but they were still holy,” she says. “My education there was the people I met.”

After theology school, Rousseau began a “new age” community with people from different religions, which she stayed with for 10 years before moving to Maine. 

Having vacationed here before, Rousseau says she moved to Maine for the same reason a lot of others have – the ocean – and she began working at York County Community Action. 

While her job has evolved over the years, Rousseau now works as a legal advocate in family law, helping people file court documents and legal paperwork. Having taken courses to earn her paralegal degree, she says the court system is “very daunting” and with most people unable to afford an attorney, she’s helped many navigate the complicated system. 

Besides her full time job, Rousseau spends much of her time writing.

“As I write, I’m continually delving into who I am and what I am. I’m really reflecting on my life,” Rousseau says. 

Now that she has her first chapbook published, she’s working through her years as a nun. The year after she left, many other nuns also left, and they still keep connected, reuniting at least once a year. They call themselves the Grey Girls.

“There’s something unique to being a nun,” Rousseau says. “You have a different experience. When I’m with the Grey Girls, it’s like being home.”

All the women who left the convent are still living their lives with “intent,” and Rousseau plans on spending more time with her former sisters and writing about all their experiences and how it has shaped their views of the world today. 

After spending the majority of her life attending church regularly, Rousseau says she hasn’t been to church in many years. 

“I understood early on in my religious life that the divine is within us as we are in the divine,” Rousseau says. “That presence of the divine is still very real to me though my understanding of it grows and develops all the time. It is fluid and not static, opening me to truth which reveals itself anew as each generation matures.”

Two years ago, Rousseau started a women’s circle as an outlet for women to gather together, read and share each other’s thoughts and experiences. 

“It’s very powerful and fulfilling. I’ve come to terms with my own divinity,” Rousseau says. 

She gathers inspiration from the women around her and what she reads, quoting many excerpts from Natalie Goldberg’s “Writing Down the Bones” and Alice Sebold’s “Lucky.”

“One of the strongest quotes I’ve read is from “Lucky” – ‘No one call pull anyone out of anywhere. You save yourself or you remain unsaved,’” Rousseau says. “That saved my life. It’s all up to me to make my own path.”

“Early Childhood Education” can be purchased for $8 at the Kennebunk Book Port as well as the Nonesuch Books in Saco.