The Rule of Three

It took years to build a true moral compass—one I can honestly say I live by, each and every day. 

I was raised in the Catholic church: mass every Sunday morning, followed by Sunday school. My mother was adamant about carrying her roots forward through me and my siblings. “You need to live with the fear of God. You need something to believe in,” she would say. Her own mother never missed a service and often attended more than one a week. Two of my mother’s uncles dedicated their lives to the faith as priests; one even rose to become a bishop.

Every Sunday, we’d put on our best and file into a pew—just us and her. My father stayed home. I hated going. It was too early. I didn’t like the clothes. The priest had a heavy accent I could barely follow. I didn’t understand any of it, and rather than try, I’d sit in quiet defiance—pressing both feet against the back of the pew in front of me and letting them slide slowly down, racing each other. Most of the time, I’d count the stained-glass windows. I’d do anything but listen.

I carried through all of my sacraments. Then I turned eighteen, and the choice became mine. I stopped going to church—not because I didn’t believe in God, but more because I didn’t believe in organized religion. 

My grandmother passed away when I was six months pregnant with my first child, who would have been her first great-grandchild. That’s when my mother stopped going to church. She held a grudge against God—the timing, the loss, the pain she still carries. She needed to put that anger somewhere.

Ironically, after I had my second child two years later and went through a divorce immediately following her birth, I began attending mass again, in my same childhood church, with my own daughters. Not out of any passion for the religion. It just felt like the right thing to do, the natural course of raising children. Eventually life filled up with Sunday soccer games and weekend basketball tournaments. One weekend we stopped going, and we never went back.

Raised Catholic, inside a tight Irish family, divorce was simply something that wasn’t done. I was the first. I’d been married only three short years. My husband was an abuser, and I stayed because the stigma of divorce—and the unknown of becoming a single mother—scared me more than the abuse itself. My marriage didn’t end because I left. It ended because I was discarded. 

That unknown future became my instant reality. I was left with nothing but full custody of my children—which was all I had fought for. Alone with a newborn and a toddler, I learned to build a life independent of my ex-husband. But I also learned a brutal lesson: independence doesn’t mean escape. Co-parenting with an abuser is devastating. Though the divorce gave me full physical custody, I was dragged through the family court system for more than a decade, in an ongoing war to protect my children—against him, and against the very systems meant to protect us, which too often turned their backs and left us to fight alone.

Somewhere in that war, I lost myself. PTSD, anxiety, hyper-vigilance, and anger I couldn’t name. After years of living braced for battle, braced for chaos, I knew I had to find a way out of the darkness. The systems felt inescapable—but the darkness, I believed, did not have to be. I was determined to find peace within myself, because I knew that to give it to my children, it had to start with me.

So I went looking. I studied Buddhism—drawn to its teachings on suffering: that suffering is part of being alive, and that recognizing it is the first step toward peace. That resonated deeply. Learning about the end of suffering helped me hone in on what actually mattered. I began finding peace in nature, and in the simple act of being the best person I could be—to my children, my family, to animals, to strangers. I stopped bracing for the battles on the horizon and put my faith instead into who I chose to be.

In Christianity, it’s the Golden Rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Buddhism takes a similar approach. In Wicca, the same principle becomes the Rule of Three—that whatever energy a person puts into the world, positive or negative, returns to them threefold.

I’ve never fully identified with any organized religion as an adult. But I began living with the belief in that return of energy—call it faith in the universe, God, karma. To me, it’s all the same.

So when my ex-husband filed an emergency motion for full custody of my daughters—ten years after our divorce, ten years after I had raised them alone—I could only fall back on that belief: that the universe would work it out as it should. “I am a good person. I am a good mother. My children deserve me as their constant,” I told myself. I never wavered.

My daughters were pulled into that battle too—through a Family Relations interview and a custody evaluation, exposed to a system that claimed to serve “the best interest of the children” but clearly did not. It broke my heart to watch. And then my oldest daughter, twelve at the time, said something I’ll never forget: “Mom, you always say the universe will work it out. And it will. I know we’re going to win, because it’s what’s meant to be.”

She was right. After more than a year of litigation, we won. And the year that followed brought even more peace, when my children and I finally secured full separation from the man who had abused us and consumed our lives for far too long.

I think about the nights I lay awake wondering how to make him hurt the way he’d hurt us. There were things I imagined. There were people who would have stepped in. I never acted on any of it—because by then I’d found my mantra: that the universe will make it right.

And in its own time, it has. My ex-husband’s life has slowly come apart—by no action of mine, though he’ll always find a way to blame me. He lives in a world consumed by hate and driven by ego—alone.

But us—we’ve stepped into our most promising years. Both of my daughters, now teenagers, are thriving, happy, and moving toward bright futures. My life is full of love: my daughters, my family, a man who found me when I wasn’t looking and held my hand through my journey out of the darkness, and a rescue dog who starts each of my days with a peaceful moment. In the early hours, I walk barefoot through the sand, breathe in the salt air coming off the Sound, breathe out in gratitude, and repeat a mantra I never could have imagined saying:

“I love my life.”

~Sophie

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