When it became clear, a couple of years ago, that we were moving to our current Southern city for the foreseeable future, I was a little concerned. We had a two and a half year old daughter and a brand new son, and needed urgently to make sure that their early lives and education were provided for appropriately in this new place. So I spent my daughter's dwindling nap-times calling pre-schools in our new area, trying to find one that suited her learning needs and our family.

Soon, I developed a script from which I dutifully read off questions to whoever at the pre-school picked up the phone. There were, of course, questions about nap-times and snack policies, pre-reading activities and outdoor playground facilities. Like any parent, I wanted to know about staffing and teacher-student ratios. Yet quickly, all these question became secondary to the one that eliminated one reputedly excellent place after another. "Is this a secular program?" I would ask. It seemed, to me, to be a simple question. And yet, the answers I got proved that I was about to get in over my head.

Almost invariably, except for church-sponsored Mother's Day Out programs, the answer to my question would be "yes."  "Great" I would think yet again, puffing with a new gust of hope, right before being deflated with "we say grace at mealtimes, of course, but we rarely go to chapel" or "the children do read Bible stories, of course, and we do encourage them to meditate on the sacrifice of Jesus and their Salvation!" While I do not have any objection to these activities in private pre-schools, it confused me that they could be thought of as secular. We finally did find a wonderful preschool which appeared to be entirely religiously unaffiliated, only to find my daughter chanting Grace at the school Thanksgiving feast.

I am agnostic, and have been content with this belief system for as long as I can remember. It is not, as some of my new neighbors assume, that I am anti-religious. It's just that I had never encountered any reason to be interested in one, one way or the other, until our latest moves. Like peanut butter, another acquired American taste, it seemed to be working really well for most people, causing allergies in some, and be of zero use to me, lacking any reference in my cultural or personal history.

Growing up in the last years of the USSR did not prepare me for understanding religion on the American scale. What I knew about religion I gathered from historical novels, visits to museums, and pithy catchphrases. I had been told in school that Marx had called religion "the opium of the people," but at 11, had only a very vague sense of what opium might be. I had attempted, and failed, to read Dostoyevsky's "The Grand Inquisitor," but came away only with a murky sort of sense of adult angst that need not have concerned me. I knew about religion in the same way that I knew about mangoes -- I could classify them as a delicious fruit, but had never tasted, smelled, seen, or touched one. If they were real, they had so far had no implications in my life.

A move to an immigrant enclave in the Northeast did little to clear up my muddled understanding of religion. Even after spending two years in a tiny yeshiva I could not imagine that the girls who swayed in prayer around me every morning understood or meant the words literally. I excelled in the study of religious books, because they were either interesting stories or convoluted and involved legal arguments, all of which I enjoyed immensely. Unreasonable though it sounds, it truly never occurred to me that the serious rabbis and wigged married ladies who taught us these things could possibly mean any of it as anything other than cultural anthropology.

And so here we were, completely unequipped to deal with our neighbors' and new friends' assumptions about religion, morality, and us. Afer the pre-school challenges, I was faced with honing appropriate responses to the well-meaning questions of whether we had found ourselves a "church home" and which summer Bible camp my children would be attending. Strangers in the supermarket ask me whether I am saved. People offer to pray for me for everything from hayfever to a death in the family. They ask for my prayers in return. It is a culture I am still learning to navigate, and one in which I feel confused and off-balance almost all of the time.

The friends I have made so far have been kind and gracious, though my churchlessness seems to confuse and trouble them. We seem to have agreed tacitly that we will talk only about those topics that concern us mutually, like our children, our homes, our dinners, our weekend plans... This is clearly a kindness on their part, a concession I appreciate on the one hand and chafe against on the other. I have grown very fond of these women -- I wish we could share a depth of relationship that is simply not possible. I am sure I shock them daily. I know they shock me.

As my daughter rises to kindergarten and goes to our wonderful local elementary school, my concerns only multiply. Less sheltered and away from her tiny and ultimately accommodating pre-school, will she be ostracized? Mocked? Will she feel left out? Will she know what other kids mean when they make assumptions about beliefs they think are shared by everyone? How do I reconcile my desperate wish for her happiness and inclusion with my strong belief that we have as much right to our absence of belief as others have to the presence of theirs?

If I prayed, this is probably something that I would pray about. And so I think of my constant rehashing of these thoughts as a sort of secular prayer. I must be one of those people who helps themselves. I will learn to listen better. I will try not to judge. I will seek to understandthe need for belief. And in return, I will hope and ask for the understanding to raise our children as wel see fit, until such time as they can decide for themselves. And then it will be time for another secular prayer.