When she was in her teens, retired Newhall Elementary School teacher Kerry Dashnaw joined an order of conservative Catholic nuns to get close to God. Dashnaw’s recent memoir chronicles how life behind those convent walls wasn’t what she’d hoped for or what she expected.
It’d take her 14 years to get out of that place and find the faith she’d originally sought. She found a husband who helped and a passion for teaching elementary school students in the Santa Clarita Valley, and after a bout with cancer during the COVID-19 pandemic, she finished her book, “Yearning to Be Free,” which she said had been in the works for eight years.
“I wrote about 50% of it and I put it down,” Dashnaw said during a recent telephone interview. “It was too painful to relive the memories. I put it down for two years, picked it up two years later and wrote 25% more, put it down during the pandemic, got cancer, and decided I need to get serious about it.”
Dashnaw, 71, was a longtime Valencia resident. She’s currently retired and living with her husband of over 35 years in Georgetown, Texas. Between 1988 and 2016, she taught at Newhall Elementary — mostly first grade — and she had nothing but fond memories of the work, the students, her colleagues and the place. She was even once named Teacher of the Year there.
“I love Newhall Elementary,” Dashnaw said. “I love the student population. I love my English-language learners. It was an amazing place to teach.”
When she retired in 2016, she said she and her husband were looking for a new adventure and found a place called Georgetown in what she described as the “hill country of Texas.” The couple moved into a 55-plus retirement community there and have been enjoying retirement since.
“Everybody who comes to these places is very — you get to reinvent yourself,” she said. “I reinvented myself as an artist, and I started exploring my artistic side, illustrating a children’s book. And my husband joined the wood shop. We did the line dancing — we did the whole thing.”
Then the pandemic hit, she said, and she got hit with thyroid cancer. When someone gets a serious illness like that, she said, it makes the person rethink everything. Dashnaw said she knew then that it was time to get her experiences as a nun out there.
“I was a Catholic nun for 14 years,” she said. “People always go, ‘Oh, my goodness, wow, you must be so holy. All must have been so serene and beautiful.’ I thought, well, I really need to pull back the curtain and talk about what life was like in a Catholic conservative convent when I was there.”
Dashnaw was a nun from 1971 to 1985. In her book, she writes about the manipulation, the abuse and the cultish behaviors she experienced. She doesn’t name the place or say where it was. She also changed the names of the people.
“Yearning to Be Free” tells Dashnaw’s story through multiple journeys, including her faith journey and her journey to find purpose in life.
“Every several chapters at the beginning start with a psychotherapy session,” she said. “Because that’s how I got the help and the courage to leave. And then I had to navigate life out in the world, and the book shows that. And that’s the love story of meeting my husband. Ultimately, I was looking for God, and I didn’t find Him in the convent, but I did outside after I met my husband.”
Patti Rasmussen, a member of the city of Santa Clarita Arts Commission, said her two sons were at Newhall Elementary School when Dashnaw was a teacher there.
“Many of the parents knew of Kerry’s background, that she was once a nun,” Rasmussen said in an email. “Being raised Catholic myself, I was always fascinated by the lives of the nuns and had thoughts of joining a convent myself. Reading Kerry’s book was an eye opener. So glad she was able to tell her story.”
Dashnaw said her book is available at Barnes and Noble in Valencia, and also on Amazon. Since publishing it, she said she’s received many good reviews and opportunities to speak with book groups and library groups about the memoir and her experiences. While it might sound like a “negative book” or a “put-down book,” Dashnaw says it actually has a very positive message.
