For almost two decades, I scrambled to get my kids in a pew and looking presentable and awake on Sunday mornings.

This didn't always work so well, as any church-going mother can attest. One Sunday, we got halfway to church before I noticed that one of my three children was safely strapped in his car seat, but still in his pajamas. Another Sunday, my then pre-schooler headed down the aisle in front of the entire congregation, as his pants, abandoned by a forgotten belt, fell down around his ankles.

I was nonetheless determined to do the right thing by my upbringing, by my own mother, who drove me and my three sisters to Catholic school — and hence Mass, six days a week — when she and my father could barely afford the car to drive us. We were cultural Catholics who lived and breathed the mystery of faith. Ours was not to question. Ours was to believe.

Like a lot of young adults, I took a hiatus from regular church attendance during college and into my late 20s, returning full force only when I had children. I returned to the religion of my youth, albeit the Episcopal denomination, because I'd been taught church is what good people do on Sunday mornings. I returned because I wanted my children to be in community with tolerance, gratitude, love and giving back. I returned because I hungered for spiritual sustenance.

Apparently, this was not enough to hold me. I stayed the course for 20 years, ultimately becoming a leader in my church. I read the great masters of the world religions and participated in intensive theological study groups. I occasioned different churches and different denominations and even worked at some point with a spiritual counselor.

But try as I might, I couldn't resolve certain questions of faith.

When infighting broke out in the national Episcopal church over the consecration of a gay bishop, the ugly name-calling and self-righteous accusations in the name of God were more than I could reconcile emotionally and spiritually.

And so I quit.

As an adult, I know I'm not alone: The modern American church is undergoing a historic decline in attendance partly because of disillusioned and wounded "refugees" like me. According to the American Church Research Project, regular attendance is down to an unprecedented 18 percent.

But I am not just an adult. I am a mother.

I watch my children go off to church now with their father — but only occasionally, as he suffers his own disillusionment — and I wonder if maybe I shouldn't suck it up in the name of family.

I worry that my absence from church undermines their own spiritual quest and that my not going to church dilutes the importance of the values the church has helped me uphold.

Maybe this is the case.

Or, maybe by watching me live into one of the most wrenching decisions of my life, my children will have the courage of their convictions when a similarly difficult decision befalls them. Maybe because of my actions, my children will learn the value of spiritual discernment. Maybe, even, they will become change agents for the institution and the religion, which every denomination, every theologian from the most evangelical to the most progressive, is calling for.

Of course, I can't know the answers to this conflict, any more than I can know whether I will ever find the appropriate home for my spiritual longing.

I can't know whether the research about youth church attendance is dead-on, that active church participation in and of itself reduces binge drinking in college, dramatically lowers the risk of young suicide and improves a child's odds for a "very happy life" — or whether kids who go to church are already from good families that automatically lower those risk factors.

All I can know is that by deciding not to go to church at this point in my life, I am finally being authentic to the deepest parts of myself.

And that can't help but serve my children well, too.