I'm middle-aged. I'm standing at the door of a new life, waving goodbye to my children. One is working as an apprentice; the other has just started university.
A friend rings. He has been thinking about Easter. What did I know about the Crucifixion and Resurrection? What did Bible stories mean to me? What had I taught my children?
Here's the bald news I gave him. I was raised an atheist. I had a lot of exposure to the Bible, because I was a huge reader, and because I was sent, involuntarily, to a Methodist boarding school for three years.
I didn't tell him that, during those three years, I went to church every Sunday, in a crocodile line of submissive girls, two by two through the park in white gloves. I had scripture lessons, sat through Sunday night homilies and Bible readings, and was sometimes caught unawares in the dormitory by an earnest, proselytising girl who had the bed next to mine. She had a beautiful heart and a determination to convert me. It never worked.
I told him I hadn't read Bible stories to my children. They had been raised as atheists. Probably what I should have said was that we raised them as sceptics, or non-believers. I have a problem with some of the harder edges of atheism.
Looking back, I think it may be a pity that I didn't leave a Bible lying about the house; that my children didn't hear those stories.
In my defence, I didn't know how to do this. The Bible had been offered to me in such an unsympathetic way that I had no interest in exposing my children to the same thing. I'd experienced it less as an offering of stories and more as a weapon in a campaign to bring me to heel.
That said, I loved Aesop's fables and fairy stories as a child, however transparent the moral. And I pored over literature from the sublime to the rubbishy, fascinated by all the windows onto the world. I was dimly aware then, and am acutely aware now, of the role that stories play in addressing the three big questions: where have we come from? why are we here? what does death mean?
I can see that my exposure to the Bible, however clumsily handled, gave me several treasured things. Firstly, a store of rich and beautiful language and evocative imagery. Think of that first half-page of Genesis: 'and the spirit of God moved upon the face of the water'.
Secondly, a sense of history; I feel the pull of some long line to those ancient desert people.
Thirdly, illustrations of moral principles. I did struggle with, or downright disagree with, some of them (I was horrified by the preparedness of Abraham to kill his son, for example). However, the story of the good Samaritan, and the many instances of Jesus challenging the cruel orthodoxies of the time, were good and powerful stories.
Have I deprived my children of some richness? Some important way of seeing the world? A beautiful catalogue of references that will never reverberate for them in literature and poetry?
I have no answers. Yes, they have missed out on these things, and I am responsible. But will it ultimately matter? Each of us treasures her own cultural and moral inheritance beyond all others, and cannot conceive of a world constructed otherwise.
Does it matter that I know something of the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, come Easter, and my children only think of a holiday and family time laced with chocolate? Well, yes, but not for any logical reason I could give. My children did receive, in other ways, a sound moral education.
What I can observe is that both of them are more generous, gentle, socially able, and honest than many Christians I have met. That is not to say I have not met some extraordinary Christians — it's just that there does not seem to be any correlation between religious belief and goodness.
Given another go at parenting, I think I would make more effort to find ways to give my children the Great Stories (including those from the Bible). What my children did get from me and from the public education system seems to have turned out some fairly morally-successful human beings. But I do grieve for the lack of poetry and of a sense of handed-down wisdom in their lives.
Debi Hamilton is a Geelong psychologist who has recently taken to writing poems and short stories, some of which have been published over the past 12 months.