It’s Sunday and I’ve had a slow start to my day. I’m planning my week while siping a cup of iced coffee. While doing this I am reminded of how my Sundays were when I was a child. They were anything but relaxed. My mother was often very stressed on Sunday morning. She rushed around the house trying to get both of us ready. While doing this she often talked about how she felt people in the church didn’t like her but she made herself go anyway because she didn’t want to anger God. This was not the best way to start a long day of church. We didn’t just go to church in the morning but we also attended an evening service. When I was young there was usually a fight in-between as she tried to get me to hurry up and eat my lunch so we could both get a nap in before returning to church for the evening.
Age 4
Being at church with my mother was never a good time. She was always worried about what people were thinking and who was talking behind her back. She did not tolerate any silliness during the service and would often pinch me if she felt I wasn’t paying attention. She allowed me to bring a toy with me, usually a doll when I was very small but even then I was expected to be quiet and pay attention. Because my mother preferred hell-fire churches the sermons usually scared me enough to keep me inline without her having to do much. I was always happy during the worship portion because I loved to sing but when that other part rolled around I wanted to be anywhere but church. After church my mother would run down who said what to her adding up her hurts one by one. I usually just quietly listened because I had my own worries to unpack. Was the pastor right about hell and what happens if you miss the rapture? Was it true that God and Satan were always watching? One to count my sins and the other trying to tempt me?
As I grew older and my mother stopped attending church as much, but I still stayed faithful. I attended Sunday morning and evening and also Thursday night midweek service. There was never any question about whether I would be in church on Sunday. People even looked for a UPC church to attend when they traveled. It was better to be safe than sorry. My Sunday morning started very early. I had to get ready and then to the church to hop on the Sunday school bus. I helped pick up kids along with the bus captain. There was often no heat or air conditioning on the bus. I remember my toes being very cold in the winter. Once we arrived at church and all of the kids were seen to their classes then I’d go to my own Sunday school class. By the time that class started I was already exhausted. Sunday school was either super boring or we were being raked over the coals by the youth leader for “something I’ve been noticing lately” or whatever. After Sunday school I raced back to the bus and made sure all of the kids made it on. We dropped them off one by one and then doled out candy as they disembarked. Once back at the church I was free for a few hours before heading back for prayer time. I tried to make the most of this in-between time because I knew Monday often meant going back to school and the grind of the week.
Sunday night started with pre-service prayer time. I tried to attended this as often as I could. It wasn’t considered required but most of the adults I admired went and as with most things it seemed better to be safe than sorry. During this time I would pray for missionaries, my family, and lastly myself. I tried to turn it all over to God but my worries were never lifted. I thought that was my fault because I just didn’t have enough faith. One thing I did enjoy about Sunday was being able to see and sit with my friends. Once the service started I would lose myself in the worship and singing. This was the one thing that uplifted me. During the time I was being abused Sunday meant I saw my abuser. I watched him pass as a good Christian man all the while knowing his secret. The sermon came next and that either drove me to the altar to recommit myself to God or I left feel guilty about not having enough faith. No matter what the topic was I never felt good about myself. I may have felt good about God but I always walked away feeling hopelessly broken. The next day whatever good I gained from church washed away in the reality of my family and church life.
During my childhood church never felt like a choice. It was always a requirement if you wanted to make it to heaven and escape hell. It was always stressful and a reminder that I would never measure up and that God was the ultimate scorekeeper. I never experienced grace or comfort. My family was stressed about it and they passed that down to me. There was always the question of whether or not we were going to the right church to add to the mix. Even as a young child there was a seriousness to being at church. The Sunday school stories seemed harsh and so did the teachers. When heaven and hell hang in the balance you really can’t afford to enjoy life.
Lucky for me that has all changed now. I feel like I can breathe on Sunday morning. I can rest, get little chores done, and plan my week. No one is reminding me of how flawed I am and I can lay my head down at the end of the day without worrying about hell. I do take time on Sundays to focus on the spirituality I practice now. The difference it my current experience fills my cup and I walk away feeling at peace. Being required to go to church so much might seem mild compared to much of my story but don’t let that fool you. A childhood of Sundays served to keep me trapped in a belief system that hurt me. After all those years I’m still unwinding that damage. Sunday church was the mechanism that kept me in the pews taking in all of the toxic messaging. Sunday church ensured that my abuser had access to me at least once a week. I went to church sick because I always believed that my illness wasn’t a good enough reason to miss even one chance to go to God’s house. The underlying reason was fear. No matter what stress was happening in my life it was never a good enough reason to step off the treadmill of Sundays.
If you’re trying to step off this treadmill please feel free to reach out to me. I’d be happy to listen and help in any way I can. Remember you’re worthy of rest, time to care for your needs, and time to heal.
While all of this was going on with SD I was going through many other transitions. We moved to a new rented house. My mother felt it was an upgrade but I did not. It was old and always dark due to our lack of lighting. My bedroom was on the second floor. There was a third bedroom on the same level as mine and also a full bathroom. The third bedroom served as a sort of catch-all junk room. This is when my mother started to acquire more dogs. Muffy had passed away after being lost in a snowstorm and then hit by a car. I was heartbroken. My mother brought home a puppy to try to cheer me up. His name was Billy and I loved him. She also added another male named Star and a female named Sheba. My mother had a big heart for animals, sort of. She would give them a home but then not take them to the vet regularly. We never had money so I don’t really understand why she thought adding more mouths to feed was a good idea. At times the dogs would go to the bathroom in the spare room. It smelled so bad and I would go in and clean it up because neither my mother nor Jim seemed inclined to do it. My room was always fairly clean because I had almost no possessions. The items I held dear were my cassette player, my tiny radio shaped like a grand piano, and my books.
At some point during the time that SD was abusing me, I started to receive Harlequin Romances every month. I never signed up or paid for them and so now I have to wonder if SD had them sent to me as part of the grooming process. My mother didn’t seem to care so I gobbled them up. I loved reading and could finish a book every day during the summer months. When I was bored I would stand on my bed and sing into my hairbrush pretending to be on stage. There was a big mirror on top of my dresser and so I would look into that and sing Amy Grant. Every night before bed I would write in my diary. It was a white Precious Moments diary with a little gold lock. The pages had gold edging on them and I thought it was so pretty. That diary was the only place I had to really express what I was going through. When my mother picked the lock and read it I was so betrayed. It makes me sad to think that she did not see the abuse that happened to me. She didn’t seem capable of showing compassion. She just saw that I was writing about sex and “dirty things”. I cataloged each experience with SD as they happened and how I felt about it. Sometimes I would write messages to God asking for help or forgiveness. Eventually, my mother caught me experimenting with my own body and she hit the roof. It makes me so angry when I look back at it all. It is normal for kids to experiment at that age and when they have been abused it is even more likely. She was angry and she ridiculed me and even brought Jim into the conversation. For weeks afterward, they would make jokes about me and because of this, it was finally driven home that I could not trust my mom and that she no longer cared for me. I was embarrassed and felt exposed just like I did when she showed my father my bloody underwear when I got my period. She did not value my privacy or the bonds between a mother and child. She did not seem to understand boundaries. My mom and Jim fought a lot and at times that spilled over to them ganging up on me.
When I needed to escape I would jump on my bike and ride all over the neighborhood. My bike always symbolized freedom and speed. When I was feeling angry I would ride as fast as I could just to get the rage energy out. One day I hit an uneven piece of sidewalk and flew face-first into a tree. My forehead, nose, and chin were very bloody. I don’t remember if anyone was home and I also don’t remember anyone helping me tend to it. I was really embarrassed about it when I went to church the next Sunday. People kept asking me what happened but they seemed more amused than concerned. It took forever for the scabs to be totally gone. When I wasn’t riding my bike I would walk through the green space behind our house and over to the shopping center. The shopping center had a library and a Pharmacy. Before I went to the library I would walk through the pharmacy and see what new candy and doodads they had. Then I would go over to the library and sink into my corner
During this time when I went on the road with SD he always left me in the car when he went in to see clients. All of his clients were churches and so I would hang out in the car, usually parked on the street, and wait for him. Sometimes I would be out there for a very long time. I always brought my library books with me so I had something to do while he was gone. Sometimes I would listen to my tape recorder if I had enough batteries. It didn’t bother me much because I was so accustomed to being alone. I was afraid sometimes when it would start to get dark and I was out in the car in a strange place by myself. Before long SD would breeze back in and we would be on the road again. When we arrived back in Madison SD would always park a block or so away from my house so he could kiss me and say his goodbyes. At times we would talk about my mom and my home situation. He would tell me that someday I would be grown and I would not have to live there anymore. He would tell me that it would only be another 7 years or so and then I could move out, proving he understood exactly how old I was. Other times he would speak to me about the condition of my clothing. One particular day he commented on how much dog hair was on my clothing. I told him that I did my best to look nice, he said he knew that but I could tell he was frustrated by my appearance. It was also during one of these goodbye talks that he told me that I would be perfect if I just lost some of my belly weight. I wasn’t even 100lbs at this point. I have never had a flat stomach even when I was a size 3. I have never forgotten that conversation. I can see us clearly in my mind’s eye. I know exactly where we were and I remember what I was wearing. That small comment marked me and made feel bad about my body. After saying his goodbyes he would pull into my mother’s driveway and let me out reminding me not to let on that there was anything going on between us. Often my cheeks were red from his stubble and my clothes were shifted around all weird. If my mother was awake we might chat a minute and say goodnight. She never asked me much but did comment once on how red my cheeks were. I was shocked! It never occurred to me that they were red and I told SD about it. I made up some excuse to my mother and hurried off to bed. She never asked about it again. Stepping out of his car and into my house was like moving from sunlight into the night in one moment. Yes, I was being abused, but at least he talked with me and we laughed. When I walked through my front door the house was usually dark and silent. I would grab my oil lamp and slowly and quietly make my way up the stairs to my bedroom. Once in my room, I would fall to my knees to pray. One night my mother knocked on my door and asked me through the door why I cried and prayed so much. I had just returned from a Sunday night service and I was feeling pretty heavy-hearted. I told her I had a lot on my mind and she seemed satisfied with that. I don’t think it ever occurred to her that she was my example. She taught me that through all those nights I waited for her by her bedroom door. I would pray for her and my father to come back to church, I would pray for SD, and I would pray for forgiveness. I worried about my mother’s salvation and I worried about all the fighting I heard between her and Jim. Even as she became meaner and made me the butt of her and Jim’s jokes I continued to hope that we could repair our closeness and I hoped maybe one day she would leave Jim like she left my father. She did eventually leave him but not in the way I wanted her too.
I started the 6th grade in public school and then partway through the year, I transitioned over to the Christian school. Sixth grade was difficult because we moved away from the kids I had known all the way through elementary school and so I started middle school not knowing anyone. I believe that I am very lucky to have had a good foundational public school education. I was ok with the move. I was ready for change. In elementary school, I had a few friends but I was also frequently bullied. I was picked on for being poor and for wearing worn clothing or generic cheap clothing. After my boobs came in I was picked on by the boys incessantly. There was a lot of bra snapping and one boy, in particular, was fond of calling me titties. I was more than ready for a fresh start. I liked middle school. I played the clarinet and I enjoyed all of the electives I was allowed to choose. I felt like a big kid and that was pretty cool. The downside was racism. All during my elementary school days people both children and adults would ask me, “What are you?” Meaning you don’t look totally white. Usually, they would start guessing and no one ever guessed right. They would often guess mulatto (their word not mine), mixed, Hawaiian was another popular guess, but never Mexican. It became a game for me. I would collect all of their guesses and then tell them, Mexican! I enjoyed seeing the looks of confusion and bewilderment on their faces. Madison did not have many Mexicans and so no one suspected that. I never endured racism during elementary school but I did watch my father deal with it. I remember one day we went into a men’s store to purchase a new suit. I stood with him fidgeting and trying to be patient. He knew what he wanted and was looking around trying to get someone’s attention. The store was fairly empty and yet no one came to help us. Finally, he was able to rope someone into talking with him. I watched as he pulled wads of cash out of his pocket and told the man how he had money and he was sick of people assuming he did not. The salesperson seemed nervous and unsure of how to deal with this angry customer. We slowly walked out, my dad mumbling the whole way, we had no suit in hand. My dad had a chip on his shoulder but who could blame him? He would often tell me how no one expected him to be capable of anything but he was going to show them all what he could do. He would recount how he came here alone from Mexico and how he taught himself to read and write English. At this point I’d listen and feel sad for him, by the time I was a teen and hearing these tales for the 1000th time my eyes would glaze over.
Sixth-grade girls can be incredibly cruel. My new school placed me in a bilingual class because my maiden name is Rodriquez. This is kind of funny because I spoke zero Spanish except for what I had learned on Sesame Street. Uno, dos, tres…My father wanted to forget his life in Mexico and so he only spoke English around me. I kept pleading my case to the teachers but they did not immediately believe me. After about two weeks they pulled me from that class and put me into an English speaking homeroom. The Mexican girls would taunt me and call me half-breed and they claimed that I thought I was better than them because I was placed with the white girls. The white girls also called me half-breed and just kind of shunned me. I was dealing with it ok until the Mexican girls turned violent. One day on the playground one of the girls told me she was going to beat me up. All-day at school my stomach churned and I would have done anything to not have to ride the bus home from school. About five girls got off the bus a stop earlier than they usually did so they could beat me up. They chased me from the bus into an empty lot. The bus driver yelled at them from his window but then just drove away leaving me to endure the blows and kicks. I curled up in a ball on the gravel and just waited for it to be over. My mother had views on fighting. She told me I should not get into fights and to be the bigger person and I was more afraid of her than I was of these girls. My father would have said to fight back because we are fighters. He was an ex-boxer and had taught me to swing my fists. In the hierarchy of my family, my mother ruled overall so I was more worried about her feelings on the matter. As a side note, my mother was a violent person. She and my father got physical and she was always the one to instigate. She also got into plenty of fights when she was a kid but she wanted me to be different. I managed to get up and start to flee the couple of houses distance to my home. They chased me and Jim just so happened to walk out of the house and see what was going on. He yelled at them and they ran away. I was humiliated and covered in dirt, gravel, and spit. I went inside and cleaned myself up. My mother was not home and waiting for her was partly scary and partly I just wanted my mom. When she arrived Jim told her what he saw and she called me down from my bedroom to talk. She wasn’t too angry with me and agreed to go to the school tomorrow to talk with the principal. She did not get too much satisfaction from that meeting. They explained that they could only help if it happened at school. My mother was frustrated but she understood and she came up with another solution. Her solution involved me taking the city bus every day. I hated this! It took me twice as long to get there and did not save me from the bullying behavior at school. Once it got around that there had been a fight and that I had not won things became much harder.
I told some kids and adults at church about what was happening. I asked them to pray for me that things would get better. They had an even better solution, they had their own school and I could go there. No one gets bullied there (a lie) and I would no longer have to be around worldly kids. That last part sounded appealing. One thing I was teased about was how little I knew about pop culture. Because I was trying to be godly I had stopped listening to the radio and watching tv for the most part. I had nothing to talk to these kids about. I floated the idea to my mother and at first, she was not too excited about it. It wasn’t cheap. But hey the church could solve that problem too, they had scholarships available! This seemed like exactly what I needed. My mother found someone to make me the uniforms and I was ready to go. I had NO idea what I was getting into and to this day I view this as one of the worst decisions I ever made. All of my church friends were super excited for me to be joining them at school. Calvary Christian Academy was one of the most boring places you could ever spend time, so the excitement of having a new student was extreme. I received so much positive feedback. The message I received was that I was finally taking my Christianity seriously, I was finally fully committing to the church, I was finally in!
I think they might have viewed this all differently had they known what was about to happen with SD. At the time the church would have said that they had the school to protect their children from the world. I believe the truth is that they had the school to exert complete control over their offspring. Cults in general do not like their members to have any outside influences and Calvary Gospel is no different. Thinking outside of the church’s beliefs was not allowed and you were expected to reside in lockstep with the pastor at all times. Opening the school made it even easier to train children to fall in line with the absolute control of the church and then one day they would be adult followers who would never even think of leaving. If you are born into a family within the Calvary Gospel, and then you attend the school, by the time you are an adult you have almost no contacts outside the church. It makes leaving really hard. The church is the entirety of your community.
This is the point in my life when my light was almost completely snuffed out. Long gone was the little girl making dandelion crowns and in her place was left an empty shell. My mother worked hard but there was never enough. You can only eat so much baloney. Jim could never keep a job and so he was not bringing any real income into the house. He did like toys and my mother did what she could to buy him what he wanted much like she had done with me when I was a child. There was always money for another dog or a new gun but not enough to pay the light bill. In the space of one year, my world had become unrecognizable. I was ten when I was baptized and by age eleven there was almost nothing left of who I was before. In a childhood punctuated by loneliness, being saved actually made things much worse. I stopped wearing pants and cutting my hair. This only served to make me stand out even more once I started middle school. I only had three outfits for public school that fit within the UPC standards and so I rotated them. My 6th-grade homeroom teacher started to keep track of how many days in a row I wore a dress. He was a little weird. He looked like grizzly Adams and all the girls really liked him. This was the most pious time of my life. I tried to not watch television and almost never listened to “worldly music.” That being said, pop culture would always be my weakness. At times when we had electricity and cable, I would sneak and watch television and even MTV. I have spoken so much about our poverty but there were times when we were able to keep our heads above water and even have little luxuries like cable. During these good times, I would struggle to keep myself holy and away from the evils of Madonna and HBO. The United Pentecostal Church has very strict holiness standards and I tried to follow them all. Those standards served to further alienate me from my peers and family. My mother never embraced the UPC standards and so she swung from telling me they were too strict to feeling enormous guilt and beating herself up. She cut her hair, wore pants, watched television, and listened to the radio because she was not brought up to feel those things were entirely wrong. I spent time alone in my room to avoid the tv. When we had electricity the tv was always on and I always had this inner fight about it. I wanted to be with my family but I was afraid that if Jesus returned while I was watching I would miss the rapture. Escaping the guillotine was a strong motivator. So I sat in my room alone. My non-church friends drifted away because I could no longer do most of the things young kids like to do. Some of them even told me that their parents said I was in a cult. One might think at least I had the church kids but that did not pan out the way I expected either. There was a hierarchy and I was near the bottom. It went something like this: pastor’s kids at the top, any minister’s child, elder’s children, and then whoever gave the most money, the poor, and last those of a race other than white. I was very poor and my parents did not give the church tons of money, I was also of mixed heritage and that was a problem. The only kids worse off than I were the kids who were black or even worse half-black. I was able to elevate myself with some of the adults because of all of the work I did for the church, bus ministry, nursing home ministry, campus ministry, and being the Bible quiz captain. As I got older and adults learned I could sing they would allow me to sing duets with other adults but never a solo. The kids didn’t care about any of that. They saw my race, my class, and that our parents did not associate with each other. Plus I also suspect that I was a little socially awkward. I had been alone so much and really only hung out with adults. I never knew how to connect with kids my own age.
Even with my extreme fear of hell, I would sneak contraband from time to time. I wish I had a better memory of exactly what was happening in our family financially. We had times where we went out to dinner every payday and even had cable and there were times when we had nothing. My mother worked at a laundry for much of my young childhood and occasionally Pizza Pit as a side gig. Eventually, she landed a job driving a city bus and things became better for a time. She wanted to be a police officer and almost made it but she was unable to pass the fitness test. My mother suffered from pretty severe asthma for most of my childhood and it kept her from making her dream a reality. That being said, a city job was a city job and she was happy to be hired to drive busses. This job came with good health insurance and a free bus pass for all family members. She had cable installed and then it became much harder for me to resist the television. In particular MTV and HBO. I loved music and I was drawn in early by music videos. Madonna was the biggest draw and I just couldn’t get enough of her. I tried to dress like her which is hard when you can’t wear jewelry, makeup, or pants. I wore lacey bows in my hair to be like her and I think as a small act of rebellion. Don’t let all of this make you think I was less afraid of hell, I wasn’t, but it was becoming harder and harder to resist normal popular culture. At church, they would bring in speakers to talk about the evils of rock music and they always scared the heck out of me. They played recordings of records played backward (backmasking) and told us what the hidden messages were. “Here’s to my sweet Satan” was the real message of Led Zeppelin’s Stairway To Heaven. “It’s fun to smoke marijuana” is what Freddy Mercury was really trying to tell me in Another One Bites The Dust. As ridiculous as it sounds, I was scared of many rock bands because I really believed that they worshipped Satan and they wanted to infiltrate my mind with their demonic messages. Even Falco was in league with the devil when he spoke about, “…no plastic money anymore…” because he was talking about the mark of the beast and glorifying the antichrist. Rock Me Amadeus wasn’t even evil backward; it was right there in plain English, well mostly German. The Beatles thought they were more popular than Jesus, Ozzy Osbourne was always biting the head off of some bird or bat, and I mean just look at Alice Cooper. The problem with all of their efforts to steer us away from the evils of this music is it was the 1980’s and that is not what we wanted to sneak and listen to. I wanted Madonna, Pat Benatar (They did eventually get to her after all she sang “Hell Is For Children”), and all the new wave English bands. All this scary rhetoric would cause young people to throw out all of their music and come crying to the altar to ask for forgiveness.
I think all this fear mongering is why I never heard or understood about grace. The goal always seemed to be to scare us down to that altar and then keep us in line by reminding us about hell and the rapture. God was not loving and he did not seem to want to help me, he was a scorekeeper and was waiting with glee to exact his revenge on anyone who did not fall in line.
So much of the approved music was so boring and repetitive. This is part of the reason I loved Bible camp so much. The music we were exposed to there was of a much higher quality than the music we heard in our home church. I always sang in the choir at church camp. The music would make me feel like I could float to the rooftop on the joy of it all. Then I would have to return home and it was back to the dull and uninspired. When Roy was our youth pastor it wasn’t so bad but when John took over he held much stricter views about music. He would say if the choice is to listen to “Christian Rock” or real rock and roll then he would prefer we listen to Christian rock. On the other hand, he held the opinion that if it is Christian then it is not rock. I remember standing in the vestibule one night after church watching John, our youth pastor rake a young man over the coals for listening to some kind of rock music. I felt bad for him because anyone walking by could see what was happening. My heart ached for what must have been an embarrassing experience for this kid. He was a friend of mine and I felt protective of him. Why not have this conversation somewhere private? My guess is straight up lack of compassion. No thought was given to how this may have made this kid feel? Pre-teens and teens are so easily embaressed by adults. Sometimes it seemed that those in charge of the teens were just lying in wait to catch us doing something wrong. Add to that the general negative attitudes towards us kids and lack of pats and the back and you can see it was a pretty toxic and unloving environment.
The same thing happened with makeup. I loved to think about makeup, and dream of makeup, and if you know me now you know none of that has changed. Makeup was a big big no no. You don’t want to be like the evil Jezebel or Delilah do you? Evil temptresses who lead men to hell with their eyelids and lips.
Proverbs 6: 24-26 “To keep thee from the evil woman, from the flattery of the tongue of a strange woman. Lust not after her beauty in thine heart; neither let her take you with her eyelids. For by means of a whorish woman a man is brought to a piece of bread: and the adulteress will hunt for the precious life.
Proverbs 5:3-5 “For the lips of a strange woman drop as an honeycomb, and her mouth is smoother than oil: But her end is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword. Her feet go down to death; her steps take hold in hell.”
At Bible camp they would preach on the evil’s of makeup and all of the girls would bring their hidden stashes up to the altar. More tears, more repentance, and all for that cherry Lip Smacker that made your lips ever so slightly more red than what they naturally were.
While writing this my mind keeps returning to the idea of joy. When I was a young person the church really was a thief of joy. We were not supposed to take joy in clothing or things of the world, we were only supposed to take joy in Christ. After raising four children of my own I can see how unnatural this is. Young people take joy in so many things. I loved to see my children discover a new author or musician and then become totally enthralled with it. I watched them try on new styles and identities as they matured and it brought me happiness to see them embrace the freedom they did not know they had. I believe the idea that everything is a sin can stunt the growth of young people. It keeps them from experimenting in life and that can close so many doors. I mourn my childhood and all that could have been had I had the freedom to choose.
Part 7 ***Trigger Warning*** Some discussion of end times material and suicidal tendencies.
One afternoon my mother was standing in the kitchen talking on the phone attached to the wall. She seemed scared. I had no idea what was going on but I understood that it wasn’t good. With tears in her eyes she explained that my father was in the hospital. He had taken some pills and we rushed to be at his side. When we arrived my mother was hysterical with worry. She asked to see him and after a minute they told her she could go in. Because they would not allow children into the emergency psychiatric rooms I waited alone. It was all very institutional looking. Sterile green, hard plastic chairs filled the room. In the ’70s hospitals were not very inviting. No one spoke to me as I waited, it wasn’t very long until I saw my mother. She flew through the doors crying and yelling. My father had asked for his girlfriend and did not want to see my mother. This is where things went very wrong. She grabbed my hand pulling me through the halls of the hospital and out to the car. Tears rolled down her cheeks as she wailed and yanked me into the car. She was in no condition to drive but that didn’t matter. We drove around for what seemed like hours. She cried and recounted the story to me. At times she was driving on the sidewalk. “I have no one who cares about me!” “I’m all alone in the world.” “I wish I were dead,” she said. “But you have me and grandpa and grandma!” I tried to comfort her. Finally, after what seemed like forever I convinced her to go over to a friend’s house. She barreled into his driveway startling him. He was sitting in a lawn chair having a drink. John, a friend of both my parents, would sometimes watch me if they had to go out at night. My dad had done some work for him and through that they became friends. John listened to my mother’s story and did his best to calm her down. I stood at the end of the driveway frozen, not recognizing my mother. She had been upset before but nothing like this. She sat in the chair next to him crying and talking about dying. She wailed and screamed. At some point, he went inside and called an ambulance. When they arrived my mother started to yell. He had betrayed her by calling them and there was no way she was going to get into that ambulance. By this point, random neighbors had stopped to watch and John had to try to explain why there was a crazed woman wailing in his driveway. When the ambulance arrived somehow they convinced her to get in and I rode along clutching her purse in my tiny hands. I felt kind of guilty. I was ashamed of her behavior, scared about what would happen next, and also excited about riding in an ambulance. No one talked to me because they were too busy trying to keep my mother in check. She fought them and refused to lay down, finally they sedated her. She was much quieter by the time we got to the hospital. She told me to hang onto her purse and I immediately spilled it all over the emergency room floor. Tampons and money went flying. I was mortified. I wasn’t sure what tampons were but I knew she wouldn’t want everyone to see hers. That day is one of the saddest of my life. When I left the hospital she was calm and cuffed to the gurney. I went and stayed with John. He brought Muffy over to keep my company. Eventually, my aunt, Wanda, and Uncle Mike came to get me. They tried to comfort me but neither of them knew how. They were childless and everything in their house was white. It was not a kid-friendly environment. For the few weeks my mother was in the hospital they took me to see her and made sure I got to school. The hospital would let my mother out for a couple of hours to have lunch with us. I hated to see her go back. Living with my mother was hard but living with my aunt Wanda was worse. My aunt Wanda had money but she was a very cold person. I knew her and my mother did not get along and so I could never really let my guard down around her. I also knew, because my mother had no filter, that my aunt Wanda strongly disliked my father. There were many reasons to dislike my dad but one of hers was his race. Knowing I was half Mexican made me wonder if she hated me too? Soon my mother and I were back in our little apartment but nothing would ever be the same. Abandonment is one of the worst things a kid can experience. I almost lost both my parents on the same day. The dangers of the world became very clear to me. I understood that there are so many ways to lose your parents. You can lose them due to something like the rapture, or suicide, you can lose them through divorce or depression. Loss doesn’t always have to be physical, it can be emotional or mental. To this day I’m not sure which is worse. I felt guilty for being embarrassed by my mother’s behavior. I felt anger towards my father for hurting her so badly but I also wondered why he was so sad he wanted to end his life. Later he would tell me it was an accident. Neither of them ever wanted to talk about it even as the years passed and I could have better understood. All the adults around me, teachers, and neighbors looked at me with pity in their eyes but no one said a word. I could tell things were different now.
Sometime around age 7 or 8, we moved to Vera Count. It was just a couple of blocks away from School Rd. We now had a bigger place but it was definitely a step-down. We lived at the top of a circle and next to our building was a big field and wooded area. There was plenty of room to play outside and the school playground was just behind the building across the street. Just a couple of blocks can make a big difference. I could feel our poverty and the poverty of our neighbors after we moved. My mother would point out to me the good buildings and the bad buildings within our low income block. “At least we don’t live over there” she would say.
The older I got the more scared I became. During this time my mother was also becoming more and more unhinged. After her suicide attempt, she was at least being treated for depression. Later we would find out that she was bi-polar. My dad was in and out of our home, as usual, and stability was nowhere to be found. My mother was upset with her pastor because she felt he did not help her enough when she was in the hospital. She called some other pastors around town and wasn’t happy with their response either. This left us without a church and that was uncomfortable for her. She had gone to church every Sunday for her entire life and she feared for what would happen to her salvation if she wasn’t going somewhere. My aunt and uncle would invite her to go to church with them and we did for a while. That church was tiny and it reminded me of the church in the Thief in the Night series. The one they were taken to when they were about to be executed. Behind that church was a movie theater that my dad would often take me to. The theater let the church members park in its lot. When getting out of our car I always wished we were going to the theater instead. When we returned after the Sunday morning service you could smell the movie popcorn drifting through the air.
My mother used God, the rapture, and hell a lot when she was upset at me. I remember one incident when she turned the shower on for me and I was complaining that it was too hot. “It will be a lot hotter in hell if you don’t get in that shower and start listening to me! Any normal childhood sassiness or conflict could warrant a warning about missing the rapture or burning for eternity. God was her enforcer. She and my grandparents talked often about how he could see and hear everything I did and thought. Not only could my actions send me to hell but my thoughts. It’s weird to grow up having no privacy, not even within your own head. I felt like God and the devil were following me everywhere all the time. God with his book of life ready to scratch me out or write me back in and the devil just seeing if he could trip me up.
When I think of the 4 years we lived on Vera Court what stands out the most to me is how unsafe I felt all the time. The older you get the more you understand why the world is dangerous. My mom would go over the rules with me all the time, don’t answer the door unless you know the person knocking, lock the door, and deadbolt the door whenever you are in the apartment. When you are inside make sure to use the chain lock. My mother had some OCD tendencies so she would have to check the door multiple times, along with the windows, and lights. Bedtime could take awhile. After that man broke into my room she was always worried it would happen again. I was more worried about other monsters. No amount of locking things would keep Satan or God out for that matter.
When I was around 4 years old my father took me to see Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. We went to see it in the theater near my aunt’s church, the one that always tempted me with the smell of popcorn. It was pretty magical. The old theater had twinkle lights in the ceiling and I was impressed! The seats felt scratchy and heavy curtains hung down in front of the screen. Now that venue is mostly used for music and comedy performances. Whenever I go there I feel the warm memory of that first movie outing with my dad. It is still just as magical as it was in 1974. I loved the movie but the evil queen really terrified me. Soon after someone bought me this lovely gold edged Disney storybook and on the back cover was the old scary witch from Disney’s Snow White. Every night I would have to make sure the back cover was facing away from me so her evil eyes would not stare at me as I slept. Really she was the least of my worries.
In the darkness, I could never be certain that the devil would not grab me. He could be anywhere. Under my bed, in the closet, or under a pile of clothing. I would worry about men coming to get me and chop off my head or make me take the mark of the beast. I always slept with my face and right hand covered in hopes of keeping someone from giving me the mark when I wasn’t awake. Silly really but it was kid logic. All these fears fed into other unrelated fears, or maybe regular childhood fears. I was afraid of this character on Sesame Street and to a greater level Mr. Yuck. Whenever the character came on or the Mr. Yuck commercial came on PBS I would hide under our coffee table until it was over. All kids go through these things but I had no adult around to talk me through it so the fears got bigger and stronger. I can still remember how my heart pounded. My mother was oblivious to it all until she was home on vacation one week and witnessed me cowering under the coffee table. We talked about it but I don’t know if it made me feel any better. I was very fearful of UPC symbols on products because I had been taught that the mark of the beast would be just like those symbols. Each UPC symbol already had 666 embedded in it just waiting to be activated when the Antichrist came into power. Add to that all of the things that had Mr. Yuck stickers on them and even things like cleaning products under the sink became diabolical. I would turn the labels in the refrigerator and cupboards so the UPC symbol was facing away and if I was in the bathtub or shower I would do the same. As I write this my thoughts are that I sound nuts, and then I remember that I need to show compassion to myself. Children should be taught healthy fear of some things because otherwise, they may not survive childhood. The problem is my childhood was awash in all sorts of unhealthy fears.
Not long after we moved to Vera Ct we were invited to ride the Sunday school bus to a new Church. At first, when the Sunday school folks would knock on the door my mother would hide. She did this whenever someone came to the door unexpectedly. She hated when people would try to sell her something or the Jehovah’s Witnesses would stop by to chat. She would pull the shades and put her finger to her lips to signal to me to be quiet. She would peek through the shades in order to judge when they had left the building. Only then would she tell me it was clear. These new unexpected guests were from the United Pentecostal Church. At first, my mother was reluctant. She did not agree with how they baptized people, but after a while, she gave in. She was a church hopper and I think she was tired of trying to find the right place. She also really enjoyed their worship style and I think that kind of grabbed her. My mother loved music more than almost anything and if there was one thing she hated it was dry worship services. Calvary Gospel United Pentecostal Church did not have dry worship services, in fact, it was quite the opposite. It was not unusual to see people loudly speaking in tongues, dancing in the spirit, or running through the aisles. It could be pretty entertaining for a kid to watch, it certainly wasn’t dull. It seemed a lot like the Jimmy Swaggart services my mother would watch on television. He would sing and speak in tongues. He sometimes danced on stage a little. It wasn’t that foreign. I liked the church at first. The people seemed friendly and the church itself was a nice facility. As an adult, I can look back and see there was a fair amount of love bombing going on. These people appeared friendly on the surface but there was an edge there. I enjoyed the worship services along with my mother. The clapping and upbeat music were fun to sing along to. At this point, I was too young to really understand what we were becoming involved with. There is no way I could have known that there was no room for childhood within this church just like there was no room for childhood in my regular day to day life. I was a stressed-out kid and this was about to get much worse. They say His burden is light but the burden of his church almost killed me.
Before I go any further I feel I should say that I believe The United Pentecostal Church to be a cult. I believe that they engage in brainwashing and use cultish means to keep people in line. I know that not everyone who reads this will agree with me. I can only speak from my experience and from what I hear from fellow survivors.
I liked riding the Sunday school bus! We would sing and when they dropped us at home I would get to pick a piece of candy. Sometimes my mom did not want to go and she would force me to hide with her. It never mattered if I wanted to go or not. My grandparents were very unhappy to hear she was attending a “Jesus Only” church. They gave her a lot of grief about it. They did not live in town and the church people saw her more, I think in the end the church won due to proximity and persistence. My aunt Wanda did not approve either. She would tell my mother any chance she got which drove them further apart.
In reality skipping church was not that bad. The Sunday school bus was fun but my Sunday School class was another story. When we skipped church my mother would make homemade cinnamon rolls with me and she would watch some television preacher while I did whatever I wanted. I thought she was an amazing baker, she wasn’t, but she could turn that dough into something so delicious!.
My parents and my grandparents taught me from the cradle that giving money to the church was very important. My mom would press coins into my hand before leaving me at Sunday school so I would always have something for the offering plate. Weirdly my mother did not feel that tithing was important, she would always say God understands and so we give what we can. Calvary Gospel Church did not agree with that. God may understand but Pastor Grant did not. Sunday school was ok. I really did not enjoy being around other kids that much so I just tried to get through it mostly for the cookie and juice. I’d much rather be upstairs where the action was happening. We would hear the same stories over and over again all told with little felt people on a felt board. We had two older ladies who taught our class of 7 and 8-year-olds. One would tell the stories and the other would glare at us so we would not get too squirrely. Whenever we were allowed to be in the adult service, usually during the holidays, it was so interesting. All of those ladies in their fancy dresses and big hair. Part of me wanted to be just like them and another part of me wanted to be like the pastor. Whenever I played church at home I was always the pastor and I didn’t know yet that women couldn’t be pastors. I wondered how they chose which verses to read? Do they practice a lot? Maybe when I was a grown-up it would all come to me. I made little hymnals out of paper and handed them out to all of my stuffies. When I got older I would have my Barbies dress up in their best dresses and there might even be someone dancing in the aisle. I created a little church using books and blocks. Lots of Barbie weddings happened there. I believe what drew me to the idea of being a pastor was a desire to care for others. I knew that the adults in my life placed great importance on the church and so if I wanted to impress them, and I did, the church would be the best way to accomplish that.
I made a few friends when we started to go to more than just the Sunday morning service. I always felt a little on the outside of things because we were attending but not officially “saved” and therefore not totally in. My mother eventually gave in and got rebaptized so she would be considered saved by their standards. This only made the pressure on me greater. Adults would always ask, “When are you going to get the Holy Ghost?” The United Pentecostal Church only believes you have the Holy Ghost if you speak in tongues. I have spoken to many adults who grew up within the UPC church who fully admit to faking speaking in tongues just to get the pressure off. Of course, this doesn’t remove the pressure of worrying about going to hell. The UPC believes that you must repent, be baptized in Jesus’s name by immersion, and then speak in tongues to be saved. If any part of this formula is missing you will not be allowed into heaven. It can be heartbreaking to watch people struggle through waiting to be filled with the Holy Ghost. They would often repent and get baptized and then not speak in tongues for a long time all the while their salvation hangs in the balance. Our pastor taught a hell where you would burn forever but never die. It is a terrible idea for most adults to grapple with and for children it is the stuff of nightmares. Being separated from God is sad but for a child to be separated from every adult in your life is even scarier. Abandonment is a huge worry for all children. They ask the question, “Am I safe?” “Can I depend on the adults in my life to be there?” The church I grew up in would answer, maybe not. Children are exposed to these messages long before they can handle the content and are expected to make decisions about faith long before they can really comprehend the message. My childhood understanding of salvation went something like…I’m bad, Jesus is the only one who can save me so I have to do what he says, or His father will send me to hell if I don’t comply. Not really much of a salvation message.
My favorite part of church was the worship portion. I loved to sing and when I sang I felt close to God. If the worship service was really hot we might not even have a preaching portion. It all depended on how the “spirit moved.” I loved those services, all-singing, and no scary parts. Once the preaching started, who knew what you might get.
My mother had a hard time making friends even after they considered her saved. She never thought she was good enough and always thought people were gossiping about her. She just seemed to lack the ability to trust. In the end, there were a few kind souls who tried to be friends with her and for a while, this church looked like it might be a good thing in our lives. She still had her good pal Gail and my mother even invited her to church. Gail did not seem as impressed as my mother was but she would still come from time to time. She always came if they were showing the “Thief in the Night” films. Yep, this church showed them too. No matter where we went I couldn’t get away from them. Strangely, my mother never had trouble making friends outside the church. It is only within the church that she struggled.
As a side note, it turns out there was a lot of gossip going on within the church so my mother wasn’t totally off in her concern. She would have never fit in there for the long haul. She was too working-class poor and eventually divorced. Plus they considered her marriage to my father to be interracial and that was a big no-no. The church taught that if you were in an interracial marriage when you became saved you should stay in that marriage. Over the years I watched how people in interracial marriages were treated and it was racist. My mother can be difficult to understand. As much as she was worried about missing the rapture she was also a bit of a free spirit. I think those parts of her core personality were always at odds with each other. She never gave up her pants or stopped cutting her hair even though the church taught strongly against these things. Compliance was not strictly necessary for salvation but then it kind of was. If you sinned by not following God’s word about your hair then you might miss the rapture or lose your salvation. Salvation was something we were always fighting for and it could slip through your fingers in a moment. I felt like I was always one mistake away from being lost. As a teen, I would envision what it would be like to be in heaven if my mother ended up in hell. I could never figure out how I could be happy knowing she was suffering forever, how could that be heaven? The church would say that God and heaven would be so wonderful and pure and therefore you would have no concern for such things.
During kindergarten and first grade, we were lucky enough to live only two buildings away from the elementary school. It was a great place to live because I could walk to school easily and it created a cozy environment. Our block was mostly middle-class homes mixed with apartments. About a block and a half from our building was a tiny store where I bought ice cream and popsicles. I learned to jump rope and ride a two-wheeler when we lived there. When everyone had gone home for the day and the parking lot was empty I would go and hit tennis balls off the school building. I got pretty good at returning the ball with my huge adult man-size tennis racquet. Even at the age of 5, I was already a free-range kid. I played by myself and most of the milestones of that age like getting the chickenpox or learning to ride a two-wheeler I experienced alone. Jerome was my one friend. He lived next door and would often come over to play in the backyard. He was kind of an odd duck and he was bullied at school. We got along ok even though he would never let me play Spock when we played Star Trek. Spock was a boy and I was a girl so that was a no go for Jerome. I always admired Spock because to me he seemed to be the most intelligent. He is still my favorite.
My parents bought me a red bicycle. It came with training wheels and I kept asking my dad to put them on for me. Of course he did not do it and one day I got tired of waiting. I drug my bike out to the driveway/parking lot of our building determined to teach myself to ride. Because it was the middle of a work day there were no cars in the lot, thank goodness for small blessings. I hopped on my bike and attempted to balance and move the pedals at the same time. I spent the whole afternoon trying to bike up and down the long driveway. I fell often and my pants now had holes in the knees. By the end of the day both of my knees were skinned and blood ran down my chins and into my socks but on the other hand I was riding my bike! I was so excited to show my mom and dad when they returned home at the end of the day. My mom was really upset when she saw my knees and her and my father started to argue about how he was supposed to put the training wheels on my bike. On this day their fighting could not dampen my spirits. I could ride my bike and I learned all by myself. For many years, really up until young adulthood, riding my bike was an escape for me. I loved the speed of it all and how far it could take me from home and my everyday hell.
Before I learned to ride my bike I wanted a Big Wheel! Other kids had them and I was glued to the commercial every time it came on the television. My parents eventually bought me one, but not really. They purchased a knock off version that was actually better made and more sturdy but it was just not the same. It was rusty brown in color and had real tires. It left me longing for the red, yellow, and blue plastic that the other kids had. Fitting in was hard. I just wanted what the other kids in my neighborhood had.
My father is Mexican and that created some hurdles. We did not know any other Mexicans and no one really looked like me. Poverty and religion did nothing to help. We were dirt poor for much of the time we lived there. The cracks in my parent’s marriage were already starting to show. I have always wondered why at times we had no money but then at other times we seemed to be doing pretty well. I can remember times when we would go out to dinner on Friday nights and my mother would take crafting classes. Neither of my parents could really manage money but the swings in our fortune seems to swing too wildly for money management to be the only cause.
My father came home one day with a brand new red Firebird with black leather seats. I have no idea how he was able to afford this car. When he first brought it home my mother was not pleased but eventually she made peace with it. Once in a while, my mother would drive his car when we would travel to see my grandparents. She learned to love the car and received many speeding tickets while driving it. I know there were times living in that apartment when we had no food, so I’m not sure where the money came from. After infidelity, money was always the hot topic of my parents’ disagreements. We were often one bad week away from having our lights turned off or having no food. At this point, my dad was still mostly living with us at home but before long that would all change. My father was a bit like a feral cat. He wanted to be able to come and go with the assurance that he would be welcomed back with open arms when he needed a place to come home to. Even in his happiest relationships he cheated. He couldn’t bear to live the sedate life of a middle class married man. He wanted to mix it up with different people. He craved novelty and despised feeling caged. I think he had a deep hole inside of him that he could never fill. He was always seeking women and praise and no matter how much he received it was never enough. He was always on the make and I’m sure his red Firebird helped him feel more confident when out looking for women. I have no doubt that my father loved my mother, I’m sure he loved me too in his own twisted way, but he loved himself more. He felt entitled to be unfaithful and resented being questioned. He led two lives, one where he was married and had a child and then another where he was single and had no responsibilities. When he was feeling beat up by the world he would come crawling home to my mother but when he was feeling high on life we were on our own.
After he and my mother split I took her place. I would see him when he was between women and then not when he was dating someone. I grew up resenting this and always seeing myself as second place in his affections. I felt disposable. I have always believed that one of the biggest issues between myself and parents is the fact that I could really see them from an early age. I think I made them uneasy. They never hid anything from me so I couldn’t help but see it all. I tried to hide from what I saw. I wanted to believe the best about them. I needed to be able to trust them. It was easy to see that they did not understand each other. At this point I still wanted them to stay together, but it would not be long before that opinion changed.
Several major things happened while we lived on School Rd. First, a man broke into my bedroom while I was asleep and my dad had to chase him off. The man managed to get one whole leg and the top portion of his body through my window. I can still remember my dad standing in the doorway of my room holding a flashlight and yelling. He is wearing a white T-shirt and boxers. The wind was slightly blowing and the curtains on my window moved in the breeze. By the light of the flashlight, I could see a figure with one leg dangling over my windowsill. Before I could really register what was happening he was gone. My parents called the police and I remember the cops trying to get prints off my windowsill. They also looked for footprints outside but it was raining and so nothing could really be found. This event made my sleep issues even worse. I think it also fed into my mother’s fears and may have triggered her worries about locked doors and windows. It gave my father something to brag about. My dad was a golden gloves fighter in his youth and he always saw himself as tough. Now he could tell people how he scared this guy away and saved his little girl. Experiencing this made it even harder to be a kid home alone. There were periods when I had a sitter and then periods when I did not. Just like with the money issues I have no real grasp as to what caused the lack of childcare.
I started kindergarten when we lived on School Rd. As usual, something that should have been focused on me was focused on my parent’s drama. My mother couldn’t or maybe wouldn’t take off work to take me. When I think of my own little ones going to kindergarten it fills me with bittersweet memories. As a mom, you are both proud and sad. I think I cried with all four of mine making sure to do it once I was in the car so they couldn’t see. I do not remember it being much of a big deal for my parents. My father had his own business and so it wasn’t hard for him to take me. I was so excited because he told me we were going to go out to breakfast beforehand! This was a big deal! I was such a daddy’s girl. He took me downtown to eat which was kinda far from my school and when we arrived at the restaurant my dad introduced me to a woman. She sat down and had breakfast with us and much to my surprise, she and my dad had a long conversation in a language I did not understand. I knew my father could speak Spanish but I had no idea he could speak French. So what I thought was going to be a special first day of school breakfast with my dad became the day I realized he was cheating on my mom. At this age I had heard them fight about his infidelity but I did not really understand what it all meant. I did not have the language for it but I knew something was off. After breakfast he took me to school very early, I was the first one there, and I had to sit there with this awful feeling in the pit of my stomach. I feel some part of me thought I had done something wrong, somehow participated in his wrong simply by being there. After school, my mom and I talked about the highlights of the day. I finally broached the subject with my mom. She was mortified and more than that she was furious. I told her everything I knew, which wasn’t much. I did know the woman’s name, it was Jennifer and she was a French professor. Of course, my father tried to pass her off as just a friend but my mother wasn’t buying it. After that things were never the same, she always suspected him and he always gave her a reason to. Jennifer had an apartment on the lake and my father took me to visit with her. She was nice enough but I just couldn’t feel comfortable around her because I knew the pain my mother was going through. My mother would cry and tell me that men are dogs who cannot control themselves. It made it hard to love my father. I felt guilty for wanting to see and spend time with him. She would call him a “dirty Mexican” which made me feel bad about the part of me that was Mexican. I was old enough now to understand that my father and I were different from most of the people around us. Over time my mother would become more and more unstable when the topic of my father’s infidelity came up. Once she took me with her when she went out looking for him. At this time they both worked at the same place and mother suspected my father was carrying on with a co-worker. My mother drove over to her house with me in tow. Like Karen from Goodfellas, my mother called to my father’s mistress through the door. She banged on the apartment door and finally, the woman answered. She only opened the door a crack but that was all we needed to see my father sitting in a chair in his boxers. My mother did not have the foresight to leave me in the car so I bore witness to her calling to my father and him shaking his head refusing to come to the door. I don’t remember what happened after this. I have since learned that this often happens around traumatic memory. You remember the event but maybe not what happened just before or after. This is because when in a state of trauma your brain doesn’t make a memory in the same fashion as it does when just experiencing life normally. I only imagine how humiliated my mother must have been. When she was in that state of upset she would drive like a lunatic all the while crying and screaming. I can only imagine how scared I was. To this day I know exactly where that apartment building is and which unit she lived in. It remains a landmark representing pain and the ghosts of the past.
The last major thing I can recall from School Rd is hunger. I don’t think my father was around much at this point. He had a key and would come and go as he pleased. Home or not he couldn’t really be relied on for financial help. When I was in grade school we had the option to walk home during our lunch hour and have our lunch at home. I never made this choice unless I had no other option. It was a warm spring day when I dashed home over my school lunch break. Feeling for the key around my neck and using all of my strength to turn the deadbolt. I didn’t have much time and so I raced to the kitchen and found the peanut butter and a butter knife. I didn’t bother to sit down but instead scooped as much peanut butter as I could onto my knife. Grinning, I licked a huge chunk off and felt the emptiness of my stomach subside. I continued scraping and scooping the almost bare jar until it was time to go back to school. Hunger was with me for much of my childhood and the peanut butter was all we had on that day. No bread, no jelly, and no milk to wash it down. At this age I really loved peanut butter so at least I really enjoyed the one food we had available. There was some shame with this act. It felt wrong to only be eating this one thing for lunch and it felt wrong to be licking it off the butter knife. We had learned all about a balanced diet at school and I knew this wasn’t going to cut it. One day our next-door neighbor asked me why I was home in the middle of the day. When I told her I had nothing to take for lunch she took pity on us. She met my mother at the door later with groceries. My mother smiled tightly and said thank you. Once we were safely inside our unit she let me have it. I learned that day that I was never allowed to talk about being hungry or anything else with other adults. My mother warned me about this thing called social services and how they could take me away if I complained too much. She also talked about God and how we should always look to him and not the government for help. Very early on she instilled in me a fear, fear of other people, fear of the government, fear of the rapture, fear of God, and lastly she taught me to fear her. There were other times when we had enough food and I would end up in conflicts mostly with my father. It seemed to me I had no control over what I put in my body. Much of the time there was very little to choose from in our house. It wasn’t very often that my mother would let me pick things from the store because we were always on a budget. This meant there wasn’t much variety to choose from at home and then my father had very strong ideas about food. One night after sitting at the table taking too long to eat my peas my father decided he would force-feed me. I was about five years old. He held my mouth open and made me eat all of the peas on my plate. I was out of control sobbing and almost immediately ran to the bathroom and threw up all of my dinner including the peas. This involuntary action earned me a spanking. From then on I almost never felt good about food, either because we didn’t have enough or because I felt judged for what I did and didn’t like. My father liked to preach to me about eating and exercise. Every choice I made equaled me being good or bad, the stakes were always so high in my family. Both my parents were very judgemental but my father was more judgemental about food. I am much more relaxed about food now but I feel like it has taken me a lifetime to overcome my anxieties around food. I cannot bring myself to put a pea into my mouth.
As I grew older I questioned why God did not provide for us and then I would remember that to suffer was to be like Christ so I should be happy to have this struggle. When I would ask people at church about why bad things happened to us they would always say so that we can help others later on. They would remind me that God has a plan for all of us and his ways are not our ways. My child mind was too little to understand the ways of the almighty God. Through all of this, I developed the idea that money was bad and wanting it was worse. There were higher things to be concerned about. Focus on heaven and maybe you will forget being hungry or being bullied for being poor. I had one horrible tormentor who was worse than the rest. One day she and her lackey discovered me riding my bike after school. I was wearing a new off brand puffer vest my mother had purchased for me. It was ugly. Lime green and yellow. It wasn’t a cool color like the other kids had, but my mother had tried and so I wore it. My bully stepped out in front of my bike so I would have to stop or hit her. When I stopped she spit all over my vest. Then she and her lackey laughed and made fun of me as I cried. I biked home to clean up my vest. I felt terrible because my mother was home and she would see the mess. But yeah, focus on heaven and forget being worried about your off-brand clothes and no food.
“And Jesus said unto them, Because of your unbelief: for verily I say unto you, If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible for you.” Matthew 17:20.
I was not moving any mountains which meant I did not even have faith the size of a mustard seed. My mind was failing me. I could not believe hard enough to save my family and I couldn’t control my doubts. Doubting God was a big no-no and I was failing big time in that department. At this point, I never put any blame on God but took all of the blame on myself. I must be doing something wrong if I could only figure out what it is! I wish that I understood why I took on so many adult ideas when I was so little. I suspect it was because I was never allowed to be a child and my parents always spoke to me like I was an adult. Oversharing caused me to consider things only an adult should worry about.
Around age five is when many of my worries and fears really kicked into high gear. I worried about my keys and setting my alarm and on top of that, I wasn’t really sleeping. I don’t think I was ready for this responsibility so it took a lot out of my 5-year-old brain. I would lay awake at night thinking about the rapture and the ticking of the clock would remind me of the beginning of “A Thief In The Night.” As a side note, to this day a ticking clock can trigger me. I will start to feel like I cannot catch my breath and my fight or flight reflex will kick in.
I wore two keys around my neck. One for the outside apartment building door and one for our unit lock. I can remember struggling hard at times to turn the key in the lock and I remember asking adults in the complex to help me if they were passing by. Not the safest plan. If my mother was running late for some reason I would worry. I would often get to school very early because I was worried about being late. Before leaving the house I would check my lunch box multiple times to be sure my lunch was in there. Through all of this I learned to be very responsible and also a little neurotic. When scary things happened, no matter how big or small, there was usually no adult around to help.
Sometimes when my parents fought it was just screaming and yelling. My mother would get in my father’s face and he would shut down. Often it felt like violence could break out at any moment. I know pushing and shoving happened between them. My mother would make some pretty scary threats and I believed she was capable of carrying them out. Now I am not saying that my dad was innocent. He was awful with money and his source of income was not always the most reliable. He left my mother to pay all of the bills and carry all of the stress of working and raising me. Add onto that all of the cheating and it is easy to understand why she would get upset. She would cry and rage and I would be in charge of comforting her and helping her to cope. This was a big job for a little girl. This job would often leave my stomach in knots. So much to be concerned about. Money, cheating, my mother’s mental health and then just regular kids stuff. I was made fun of throughout my young childhood. I never had the “right” clothing. My mother would shop for me at Prange Way and fashion was not the consideration. Her concern was getting the most bang for her buck. I begged for Garanimals when I was really small but I don’t recall her buying them often. She once bought me these knock off Nike’s and for the rest of the school year this one boy named Mike called me “Polish Nike’s.” My mother tried to get me what I wanted but it was always a little off and so I was often the butt of the joke at school. My mother was a very hard worker and I don’t fault her for not having money, at least not when I was young. Her work ethic was stellar, it was just her mothering that needed some work.
One fight I remember very clearly involved my mother raging at my father after finding evidence of his cheating in their car. I crouched in the lowest part of the hall closet and watched through the barely cracked door. She was pushing and shoving him and he was raising his arms to defend himself. Her words rang out through our apartment, “If you ever do this again I will string you like sausage from the trees!” At the time I couldn’t really understand what her words meant but once I became old enough to understand, her words chilled me to the bone. She even went so far as to grab a sharp kitchen knife. As she brandished it at him my father looked like a little boy. He never forgave her for those moments and would bring it up often as an excuse for why he left her. Hiding in the closet I cried and wished that they could figure out how to get along. In those moments I tried to make myself as small as possible, something I still do today when I’m confronted with very angry outbursts. They both seemed unaware of how their fights impacted me. They never attempted to hide any disagreements from me. My father would always leave and tell me to watch over mom. When I would go off to spend time with my father my mother would tell me to love him and be kind. No matter what they did to each other and no matter how they spoke about each other to me, at the end of it all would come the admonition to love the other parent. They both reminded me it was my duty to honor my father and my mother. It was like they could not love each other properly so they used me as a surrogate. My father knew my mother needed watching over so he tasked me with that. She knew he needed acceptance and love, so she tasked me with that. No thought was really given to what I needed. When he wasn’t staying with us he would arrange to see me. My mother would dress me up and I would wait by our big picture window for his car to pull up. Sometimes he wouldn’t show. He would later tell me they had been fighting and he did not want to risk my mother coming out and making a scene. This left me standing at the window for hours. Each hour washing more and more of my hope away. I needed a break from her and I missed him so much. She never pulled me away from the window. I remember one day he was supposed to come to get me at lunchtime and I waited for him by the window until my mother forced me into bed. I was in the second grade.
I could never understand how my father could leave me with her. He always claimed to be afraid of her and the violence she threatened but then felt fine not only leaving me with her but tasking me with caring for her. As I got older I would challenge him on this topic and he would always say he never believed she would hurt me, but how could he be so sure? In my father’s narrative everything was my mother’s fault. He cheated because she was mean and he left because she was violent. He couldn’t come around to help with finances because he did not want to fight with her. In other words, in his mind he bore no responsibility. I suspect my father was fighting demons no one knew about. He never wanted to talk about his past and when he did his stories never added up. I always felt like he was hiding something from me. They were just really bad for each other. While I was still in elementary school they both tried to commit suicide on the same day. I stayed with a family friend and then my aunt until my mother was able to leave the hospital. It was on that day I decided I just wanted them as far away from each other as possible.
My parents were married around 1968. They appear miserable in all of the photos from their wedding day. In each one, they stare back at the camera with somber expressions made all the more depressing by the black and white color. They don’t appear to be at church. It’s just the two of them standing by a Formica table. Some of the photos include a small cake. My father is wearing a suit and my mother is wearing a simple white dress. They both appear to be there against their will as if someone is holding a gun to their backs just outside of the frame. My father, Amando, seems steely and looks to be clenching his jaw tightly. My mother, Marla, seems sad and resigned. Neither of them ever talked about their wedding day or courtship but they did seem to love each other even if that love was toxic and almost killed them. It may have been the time period. There are photos of my aunt from the same time and she appears equally unfriendly and gloomy. My aunt is probably not the best example because she is gloomy and unfriendly by nature. I was born in June of 1970 and luckily there are some photos of my parents smiling with me. My favorite photo from that time period features my mother in a summer dress, hair wrapped in rollers, cradling me in her arms. She looks relaxed and happy. My father remains serious in most of the photos from that year but there are a few from time to time where he looks like his guard might be down, in those moments a smile creeps in. Like many little girls, I adored my father. I think I spent most of my childhood chasing after his love, time, and acceptance. I loved my mother too but I saw her as fragile and in need of someone to look out for her. I could never really be a child around either of them.
I have lived in the Madison Wisconsin area all my life. It hasn’t been until the last couple of years that I could really imagine living anywhere else. Now I dream of Colorado or somewhere in the desert. There is a lot to love about Wisconsin. There are beautiful parks and lakes. I am a nature lover and so I would miss this for sure if I ever relocated. I am an empty nester and it almost feels like I’m starting a new life filled with all sorts of possibilities. I have a love-hate relationship with my home town. While it is a great place to live it also holds some truly awful memories for me. Part of me knows that these memories will follow me wherever I go because they live inside of me, the other part just wishes to not be reminded every day of my past. For now, most of my children are here and so this is where I intend to remain. In the wee hours of the morning when I’m staring at the ceiling, I have to wonder if the ghosts would continue to haunt me if I slipped away in the middle of the night. Madison has and always will be a haunted place for me, filled with the monsters of my childhood.
When I was very little my parents lived on Main St. I can see the street in my mind’s eye but I couldn’t tell you which house we lived in. My earliest memory is from the time when we lived there. I was sitting in a highchair. I’m in the kitchen and people are bustling around me. I am watching the dust fly around in a sunbeam streaming through the window. This memory, although brief, is warm and vivid. When I think of that memory it makes me feel peaceful inside. When I close my eyes I can still see it.
The next memory is shrouded in darkness. My father is quickly carrying me out of the church sanctuary. I’m around toddler age. I am crying hard and he is trying to quiet me. The noise coming from the sanctuary is loud and there is screaming. Our little Assemblies of God church is screening a movie and the congregation is emotional. The screaming could have been from a congregant or from the film. The film was “A Thief in the Night.” I remember looking down through my tears to my black patent leather shoes. That church had a soundproof glass viewing window and a speaker out in the vestibule. This way parents could take their children out if they needed to without missing any of the services. So even though my father took me out I could still hear the scary sounds coming from the sanctuary. To this day whenever I think of that church it sends chills down my spine. Now, as far as I know, I have no other reason to be scared by that church other than the spanking I might get if I wasn’t quiet during the services. Even now when I drive by the building something in the pit of my stomach clenches. In my mind, it represents the rapture, being left behind, and everything that comes with that. My parents thought the whole incident was humorous. They liked to brag about how I never cried or misbehaved in church. My father would brag about spanking me until I learned to be quiet. “We never put our child in the nursery”, they would boast. That one night was seen as an oddity when I cried so hard they had to take me out. Thankfully they did not spank me for being scared. My parents loved that church but before long they felt they had to leave. Their beloved pastor left and they did not like the new pastor.
In 1972 A Thief In The Night was released. It is the granddaddy of many of my childhood nightmares. It is also the first in a long line of rapture themed films. I see it as the scarier, more traumatizing version of the Left Behind films. It has not waned in popularity over time probably due to how effectively it delivers its message. A Thief In The Night was never shown in theaters but it was passed around from church to church. This made it possible for the film to skirt the rating system. It has been shown all over the world but it is best known in the American south and midwest. You could find it at Sunday night church services, youth groups, Bible camps, and Sunday school classes. Because it was shown in churches parents could expose their children to it’s dangerous message with no oversight. From what I’ve heard it seems that many churches used these films to target teens in particular. I am so glad streaming from the internet was not a thing when I was a child. Now parents do not have to wait for their church to gain access to this series, they can stream it from the internet for free and bring its horrors right into their living rooms. I have C-PTSD for multiple reasons but I believe the seeds of it all lie within this series of films.
This film series was written by Russell S. Doughten Jr. and directed by Donald W. Thompson. Russell S. Doughten also worked on “The Blob” in the 1950s and has a producer credit. The original film was made in Des Moines Iowa and snaked its way through the Bible belt. The imagery and the theme song created an unforgettable experience. To this day the theme song of that film lives in my head. All I need to do is read a snippet of the lyrics or hear a tiny part of the melody to have it stuck in my head for days. Even as I’m writing this it is playing in my mind and I will have to try to do something to dig it out so that I’m not riddled with anxiety later. My mother liked the theme song, “I Wish We’d All Been Ready” and would play it on her accordion. She would sing it over and over. I was surprised to learn that song was really popular at the time and a big part of the Jesus movement. For me, it is like hearing the chimes of hell.
There are four films in the series, A Thief In The Night, A Distant Thunder, Image of the Beast, and The Prodigal Planet. The first was released in 1972 and the last in 1983. I saw the first one when I was a toddler, probably around age 3. All of the churches we attended following that first church showed these films. My mother would sit on the bed and sing that song not understanding the trauma she was causing in my young mind. Every year following our viewing of these films I would go through a period of time when I could not sleep alone. I would have nightmares about government officials coming to get me to be beheaded. I would go through periods when I was afraid to be alone and that was a problem because I was almost always alone. If you watch the films now having had no experience with them they might seem dated, campy, and just plain weird. If you see them as a young child and all of the people in your life believe that these things are actually going to happen you will most likely be traumatized. The internet is full of people who were traumatized during childhood because they were made to watch these films in school, church, camp, or at home on video. Many horror fans embrace them as true horror films and consider them to be classic B movies. I have also seen people write about them being a gateway to their love of the horror genre. I experienced them as truth and a certain future.
As horror films, they might be fine but as tools to scare children into salvation, they become something much more sinister. As a side note, these films are often still used for evangelism but I feel their true purpose is to keep people who are already Christians in line. Patty the main character is a Christian throughout the whole film but she isn’t the right kind of Christian. She believes in god’s love but not all of the rapture theology people keep trying to tell her about. Its message doesn’t focus on God’s love, it focuses on fear and keeping yourself on the right side of an angry vengeful god. Being a Christian is not enough. That lesson followed me through my whole childhood. The reach of these films is greater than you might think. It has been estimated that over 300,000,000 people have viewed these films. It can be a hard thing to get good estimates about because they are not shown in theaters but in church basements. One thing is for sure the memory of this series haunts the dreams of many adults who grew up in the ’70s and ’80s to this day.
My mother believed the message introduced in these films wholeheartedly. It bled into every part of my life. Believing her heart was never quite right with god she would spend hours shut away in her bedroom crying and speaking in tongues. I would stand by the door and worry about whether or not she was going to be ok. She didn’t want me to make a lot of noise while she was praying so I couldn’t even use the television to drown out her wailing. I recall those nights as being very lonely. If she came home and couldn’t immediately locate me she would worry that I had been raptured leaving her behind. One day I was playing with my plastic sled and I fell asleep under it. She came home and searched the apartment high and low for me and when she couldn’t find me at home or at the neighbors she started screaming and that woke me up. I jumped up from under the sled and saw our neighbors and my mother standing there looking down at me. She grabbed me and held me tight to her chest. I could feel her heart racing and her face was wet with tears. On that day I got a very clear idea of how real all of this was to her, and it became even more real for me. From that day on the thought of being left behind haunted my dreams and my waking hours. I worried about what small sin or act of childhood would keep me from flying up to heaven with my mother. I constantly asked Jesus to forgive my sins even asking him to forgive sins I might have forgotten about. In my mind, Jesus was a scorekeeper. He was keeping track of every thought and action, and he had no problem at all with sending a little girl to the guillotine.
Even after my parents moved on to other churches we lived within eyesight of the little Assemblies of God Church until about 1979. For much of my early childhood, I could see it from our front picture window. We had neighbors who attended there and my mother was close with them. Whenever they showed the “Thief in the Night” film my mother and I would go to service with them. My mother had a weird fascination or maybe obsession with the film. She and her best friend Gail were always excited to see that it would be showing again and they would pack up us kids and drag us to it. Afterward, we would all enjoy a meal together and my mother and her friend would recount everything that happened in the movie and talk about how close to the end times we were. I have never been able to understand how someone who feared the rapture so much would want to torture themselves by volunteering to watch that movie. As sequels came out we went to see all of those as well. My mother would complain about my fears, my fear of the dark, of being alone, and especially of sleeping alone but she never seemed to really get what she and my father had done by exposing me to that series of films. There were so many nights when I would lay awake worried about missing the rapture. I would dream about being chased by soldiers and being beheaded. I would flee to my mother’s bed and she would let me sleep with her but not without being pretty grumpy about it. Over the years these fears grew. I feared loud noises, especially anything that sounded like it might be a horn, white vans (because of the movie), bar codes, and men in uniforms. Later when I was older that fear would spread to credit cards, computers, and anything automated. I even grew to fear the television. My mother and her family would talk about how someday the government would be able to watch us through our television set and even see-through walls. They would talk about how after the rapture there would be no place to hide. Even as a very young child, I took their words very seriously. I would lay awake at night making sure that my right hand and forehead were covered by the blankets at all times.
Revelation 13:16-17 King James Version (KJV)
16 And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads:
17 And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.
I am sure this all sounds very strange to you if you have never encountered these beliefs before. I am also sure that some of you have shivers running down your spine right now because you know exactly what I’m talking about. The fears caused by all of this would only get louder as I got older. It wasn’t until I was in my 40’s that I figured out how to deal with them. Even then I can only deal with them, the CPTSD makes sure they are never far away.
Both of my parents were checked out much of the time. I was raised by television. Many of us who grew up in the ’70s had this experience. I lived my day according to what show was on next. The people on television were my friends and they kept me company while my mother was away. I would build tents out of the dining room chairs and blankets from my bed.. My dog Muffy and I would hunker down inside and eat snacks while watching Gilligan’s Island. I loved building those tents. Once inside it felt like I was in a different world. Under my blankets with my furry companion felt safe and warm. I can still feel the softness of Muffy’s fur and the way she smelled. Muffy was my only company when my mother was away. She was a beautiful white Samoyed dog with happy brown eyes. She was very easy going and always willing to play tea party with me or even dress up. To this day I love dogs and I feel I owe a debt of gratitude to Muffy for taking care of me. For the first ten years of my life, she was there. There were times when she was the only being around to comfort me and she was often the only really dependable thing in my life. She was like a second mother to me and many of the good memories I have from the first 10 years feature her.
In the morning my alarm clock would go off and I would hear Bugs Bunny say “Eh What’s Up Dock?” I loved my Bugs clock! Alone I would get up, eat, and get myself ready for school. I knew when “Leave It To Beaver” came on it was time to go. At the end of the day when I returned home, I would watch “Bugs Bunny” and “Gilligan’s Island”. Most of the time the television was just on as background noise to keep me from feeling alone. I would bring art projects out into the living room and work on them in front of the television. When there was nothing on tv I wanted to watch I would go play in my room or I would play outside. Sometimes I would play with friends but I felt guilty about leaving Muffy alone if she had been alone all day. I wonder if she saw my being out of the house as a break, much like a young mother might relish nap time. For a little bit she would not have to be my Dressy Bessie.
In the evenings my mother and I would watch “Sonny and Cher”, “The Love Boat”, “Fantasy Island”, and “Charlie’s Angels”. I enjoyed all of these shows. When my mother was home we would often sit on the floor, in the dark, and she would bring out a big bag of nuts from the kitchen. It was like being in a movie theater. She would crack the nuts open for me and we would have them as a treat. Sometimes we would have a generic soda too. My mother loved orange, grape, and root beer flavors so that is what we had to choose from. When I think of these times with my mother it warms my heart. It calls to mind the physical closeness I so needed and that could be hard to come by. I lived for these moments. The person I loved best in the world was finally there beside me and she wasn’t crying or screaming, she was laughing. In the dark it did not matter that we had no sofa to cuddle on or that the devil might be hiding in the closet, all that mattered was that we were together.
I really loved Cher! She was one of the only people on television who looked like me. Certainly, she was the only woman I was aware of. She had long black hair and olive skin just like mine. I loved seeing all of her glamorous Bob Maki dresses. She was both beautiful and talented. She gave me the impression that she ran her own life and maybe Sonny’s too. She was confident and I wanted to be like her. Another woman I admired from television was Lucille Ball. I thought she was beautiful as well and so funny. Lastly, there was Carol Burnett. I did not see her as a great beauty but as the funniest woman ever! I loved her show and couldn’t wait for it every week. When it went into syndication, I could watch it in the afternoon. I never missed a show. These women helped me to develop my sense of humor. Cher was sharp and kind of dry, Carol and Lucy perfected physical comedy. When my mother would go into one of her depressive moods I would act out scenes from these shows to try to make her laugh. If that didn’t work I would dig into my candy stash to find something to make her smile. My mother loved candy so the combination of my best Carol Burnett impersonation and a Snickers bar could go a long long way.
On the action side, I could not get enough of “Charlie’s Angels”, “The Bionic Woman”, and “Wonder Woman”! These women inspired me to be strong and athletic. I would run through the woods pretending to be Wonder Woman! I love those memories. I had a fort in the trees and I would perch on a branch and pretend to be in my invisible plane. I saw myself in these characters. They were tough, confident, and dependable, all things I hoped to be. I tried and tried to make my hair do the 70’s flip or feather, no matter what I did it never worked.
To this day I love female comedians, especially if they embrace physical comedy. I enjoy female cop shows and superhero characters. When I get lost and I can’t find my way they help me to get back to myself. They remind me of who I was at the beginning, who I am at my core. They remind me of my mother, which can be both good and bad. They remind me of how far I’ve traveled to get to where I am now. They continue to provide comfort and inspiration!
Television offered me predictability and comfort. Shows were almost always on when you thought they would be. I could see this extended family whenever I wanted and they would always be the same. The sounds of their voices coming down the hall from the living room made our apartment feel like it was full and not so empty. I feel the shows helped me to become more socially confident. My mother and father were socially awkward and so they did not provide good examples of how to fit in. I have always felt odd in the world but it could have been much worse. I watched these shows and learned how to interact with people and it showed me how adults should be with kids. Television helped me see the inappropriateness of my parent’s behavior. Television also helped to keep the things I was afraid of at bay.
When I wasn’t watching television I played outside. We had a small wooded area next to our apartment along with a large hill and field. On the other side of the field was my elementary school and playground. When the weather was nice I would play in my “fort”. Wonder Woman was my favorite scenario. Those woods had the potential to be so much. They could be my invisible plane when I climbed the tree and sat on a branch that overlooked our street and the low brush was my fort or secret lair. The large rocks made great chairs and an easy to move low hanging tree branch served as a secret invisible door. In the summer it wasn’t
unusual for me to waste the afternoon running through the tall grass having spectacular adventures. Even in these happy times fear followed me around lurking behind every tree and waiting for me at home. When I think of that fear now I can feel it in my chest. I can imagine it is not unlike what a rabbit feels when it senses danger. You become still and hope you can’t be seen.
My dog Muffy liked to be outside when it wasn’t too hot. She made a pretty good playmate. Even though she was a big dog I managed her fine. She never ran away even when I dropped her leash. Even though I don’t think she enjoyed it much, she would climb in the sled with me and go down the hill. Well, truth be told she only made it half way down the hill before jumping out of the sled and running to the bottom to meet me. Once at the bottom of the hill she would chase after me to get to the top and do it all over again. When the weather was warmer she would play kickball with me. Which meant I would kick my small red rubber ball and she would chase after me as I pretended to run the bases. When we grew tired we would plop down in the grassy field and I would make dandelion jewelry and crowns. I was very allergic to both the grass and the dandelions so it didn’t take long for us to be driven back into the apartment to cool off. Once inside I would grab a popsicle and arrange my dandelion creations so that I could show my mother when she returned home. Often by the time my mother arrived they were very wilted. It made me sad that I could not figure out how to keep them pretty for her.
On other days I would slip through a small trail in the treeline behind our apartment that opened onto some railroad tracks. I would follow those tracks all the way to the beach. When I think about it now it seems so dangerous. I would bring a towel, some beach toys, and whatever change I could gather so that I could buy some ice cream once I got there. I would play in the sand and water all day without any adult supervision. To this day I am not the strongest swimmer and I recognize how lucky I am that I never got hurt. Even though it was dangerous I can’t help but think of these days warmly. My childhood was not safe by any stretch of the imagination but it was filled with childish adventure. I had so much unstructured time to explore the world around me and these days at the beach are the best example of this. All I need is to hear the sound of the waves hitting the shore and I’m instantly taken back to those days sitting on the beach eating a popsicle with my toes buried in the wet sand. By the end of the summer, my skin would be a deep brick-brown making me stick out like a sore thumb. Adults and children alike seemed confused and interested in my appearance. They would often ask me about my ethnicity and when I was young I thought it was kind of a game. Later it would make me feel bad about being different.
When I wasn’t outside I loved to create little art projects. My mother saw early on that I was a blooming artist and so she made sure I always had paint, markers, and clay to play with. My mother was an accomplished artist. Part of my desire to create was driven by wanting to be as skilled as my mother. She liked to draw nature scenes and especially animals. My mother grew up around horses. I could tell by the stories that she told me about her childhood that she loved her horses. I would ask her over and over to tell me about Dolly and the others. She would tell me each horse’s name and then describe what they look like. She would include details like which horse liked to get into mischief and which ones liked apples. I would try my best to draw them as my mother had described. I also drew my dream horse over and over again. He had a black tail and mane and was a deep chocolate color. I could never match my mother’s sketching talent and this distressed me. She bought me this large oversized book about how to draw horses and I spent many hours trying my best to follow the instructions. I became pretty good at it! But sadly never as good as my mother. It really bothered me. It took me until well into adulthood to be able to create art for art’s sake and to not be still comparing myself to my mother in my head.
After my horse drawing stage I moved onto my fancy lady stage. I was fascinated with dresses from the 1800s and I would draw what I called “fancy ladies”. Some would have parasols and others would have very elaborate hats. I dreamed of being like them. This led me to be obsessed with the “Gibson Girl”. I loved to draw elaborate updos from that trend and I would practice them over and over. I think this phase was more enjoyable to me compared with the horse phase. My mother did not draw these “fancy ladies” and so I was not constantly comparing myself with her. I could just draw for the love of drawing. For a long time Snoopy was a subject I would sketch over and over. I always looked forward to the Charlie Brown specials mostly for the scenes that featured Snoopy.
I tried many other crafts and it was easy because my mother had a closet full of half-finished projects. I spent hours playing with my spin art toy. It was one of those toys where you put the paper in the tray and then drop bits of paint onto it while it spins. I also learned to finger crochet and latch hook. I was not a big fan of finger crocheting but I loved to latch hook. I would sit side by side with my mother and we would make latch hook projects together. She also taught me to make little potholders with a plastic loom. When she was creating she was smiling. Right from the start, it was clear to me that she became bored much faster than I did. She would start a project and then get bored, it would go to live in her bedroom closet and maybe one day I would pick it up and finish it. This is one way in which my mother and I are very different. I hate having unfinished projects laying around. This goes for books too. I will finish the most boring books just because I can’t seem to allow myself to just not like something and then put it down. I really have no idea where this comes from.
I possessed a big imagination and it showed through in my playtime and art. I believe that my imagination is what got me through all of those long hours of being alone. When I think of this time it brings a smile to my face. I was a vibrant child so full of promise. When I think about it a little longer my smile turns to sadness for all of the hours I spent alone. It wasn’t safe and I never felt safe.
Hi everyone! I have been in a writing slump for a long time. I am back on the horse for the time being and I intend to share some of my pages here. I’m open to feedback either in the comments or better yet at my email survivingchurchandchildhood@gmail.com Please be kind, memoir is really hard.
This morning I find myself sitting with my coffee at my lonely laptop. I am banging away at the keys trying to pound my story out onto the page. This feels like just another new start. It is filled with hope, maybe this time will be the time when everything gels together. Fall always feels like the right time to write. There is something about the cool mornings that drives me to try again. I have been away from this work for a long time and then suddenly there it is in my face beckoning me back to this lonely task. On days like this the words burn through my fingertips, they cannot escape my brain fast enough. Being a Gemini part of my brain just wants to put words to page and part of my brain wants to craft the perfect memoir. These two parts are always at odds and through this struggle, I push this work into existence.
I have been seeking to make sense of my childhood for as long as I can remember. Even though I recognize that there are some things I will never understand I feel compelled to keep searching for truth. Truth is wobbly when you are talking about others’ motivations and when they are no longer around to ask your questions to. I am a quintessential gen-Xer born in 1970. I was a latch-key kid with my house keys always around my neck. I grew up in Madison Wisconsin and I’m still in the area. I wonder how many others are out there like me. Wounded souls trying to make sense of their childhoods through writing memoirs. Looking back all I see is trauma, fear, and sadness. When I look a little harder I can see moments of creativity, freedom, and joy. Those moments are much harder to reach for. I can guarantee that there will be times when my story overwhelms you, just know as you continue on with me that I am okay now, I’m a survivor.
Throughout my childhood fear was my constant companion. It hung in the air like a thick cloud around me and its friend sadness clung to me like an old thread worn sweater. Fear was brewed first at home followed by my church and school. My mother was a very fearful woman and she passed her fear onto me the same way she gave me my freckles and my smile. She was tough but at the same time, it seemed like she was always scanning the landscape looking for danger. On the other side of the coin, my father insisted that I be strong and fearless. He has zero tolerance for weakness unless he was the one being weak. He and my mother were like the sun and the moon. How they ever got together is beyond me. At this moment I cannot think of one way in which they were alike other than their tendency towards being fixed on themselves. My mother suffered from severe depression and her childhood was pretty dysfunctional. My grandmother was a severe parent and my mother always felt like an outsider within her family. My father has always been a mystery to me. His accounts of his origin story seemed to vary and there were many topics he had no interest in talking about. My parents never seemed happy although they did seem to really love each other. They certainly were ill-suited for the long haul and could barely take care of themselves let alone each other. Looking back on it now, I think they loved each other more than they loved me.
My mother was pretty in a tomboy sort of way. She was dark-haired and covered from head to toe in freckles. Her green eyes were the prettiest eyes I’ve ever seen. She was not the most domestic woman in the world. She viewed housekeeping as a chore and not something to be enjoyed. She wasn’t much of a cook and had no interest in learning to be better at it. She was all about comfort food and she did that well. She felt the most at ease in nature and preferred the company of dogs and horses to being around people. When my mother was around people she could be very charming and those who knew her liked her more than she could ever acknowledge to herself. She was an artist and could draw almost anything. Her family valued music and so she learned multiple instruments and she was a gifted singer. Marla, my mother, loved to laugh and her playfulness created some of the only happy memories of my childhood. When I was in elementary school we did not have much furniture in our living room but it did not matter. She and I would snuggle on the floor, backs against the wall, and enjoy one of our favorite shows. No TV night would be complete without a bowl of hazelnuts, a nutcracker, and generic grape soda. Those nights were my favorite. In those moments we laughed together and I could breathe a sigh of relief.
My father was short and his skin a chocolate brown color. He always seemed to have something to prove. He was a boxer and fairly ambitious. Armando, my father had a boyish smile and an impish sense of humor. He was a whistler and sang along to the radio even if he often got the lyrics wrong. People liked him and he liked them back. Depression could come knocking at his door if he spent too much time alone. My athleticism and tenaciousness come from him. He was a wanderer and philanderer and often these tendencies took him away from me. I chased his affection long after it became clear to me that he only wanted mine when he could not get it other places. I was a consolation prize, a toaster when what he really wanted was a boat.
I loved my parents fiercely! My love for them was strong but this does not mean they were good parents. They were flawed as all of us are and they were tortured by personal demons. My mother came from a strict religious home and her upbringing informed much of her parenting style. Growing up outside of her family’s love and acceptance made it so she never felt accepted or loved. I believe this crippled her and made it hard for her to give love and acceptance. She was deeply lonely even when friends tried to be there for her. It was never enough or she just couldn’t believe that they “really” liked her. She had a dark deep hole inside and it seemed it could never be filled. Her sadness and fear permeated every part of our lives. Even the material objects within our home seemed to take on her personality. Heavy and oppressive miasma clung to everything. She could go from being jovial and childlike one minute to screaming and violent the next. I learned very early on to be careful what I said to her. If something was going to get me into trouble it would most likely be my mouth. Often her anger came from unexpected places. She always seemed to believe I understood why she was raging even when I often did not. When in a loving mood she would pour out affection on me and when in an angry mood she could be petty and mean. She would spank me but also pinch me, pull my hair, and twist my wrists. It was as if all of these little acts of violence lanced some painful wound within her. People who cut themselves sometimes say that when you do it it releases some of your pain, I think her hurting me did the same thing. It’s like it kept her from doing something worse.
My father often spoke of being emotionally and physically abused as a child. He was generally mellow in personality but at times his anger would flare. Both my parents spanked me with a belt but my father was the one most likely to take it too far. If I did not meet his high expectations he could be cruel with his words. Weakness seemed to send him into anger faster than anything else. My mother played by God’s rules as she understood them and my father played by no one’s rules but his own. He was very unconventional and independent. At times I miss them and my inner child longs for my mother. At other times the flames of anger burn within me so brightly I could set the world ablaze. It is all very complicated and I have had to come to terms with many truths about my childhood. If this book were about my parents it might be written from a place of more understanding and questioning what led them to be who they were, but this story is not their story it is mine. There was a time when I went through my life seeking to make excuses for their choices but I can no longer do that. I have to put myself first in a way that neither of them ever could. I find myself shouting to them from across the years, “Can’t you see how your choices are affecting me? Please get some help for yourself and for me!”
When I speak with survivors one topic comes up over and over again. The people in their lives who love them cannot understand why they continue to suffer from trauma and pain from the past. Friends, co-workers, and people they interact with online often seem to want to give them the same advice. They want to offer you a quick fix and often that fix comes with a warning about not forgiving or holding onto negativity for too long. What they don’t realize is that the process for working through trauma can take a lifetime. Forgiving and “moving on” is not going to resolve the trauma responses coming from the survivor’s body. It can seem like someone has moved on but if you’re not inside their head and their body you can’t really understand. Triggers can make it hard to not think about things and can effect the body in some very real ways.
When first leaving an abusive group you’re probably in survivor mode. You’re trying to figure out how to get away and then how to live without the community you may have been in since birth. People who have known you all your life might shun you or feel the need to warn you about hell and the coming end times. You may lose family and will most certainly lose friends in the process. Often you end up feeling much more alone than you could have ever imagined. You may not have the social skills needed to maneuver in the new world you find yourself apart of and you may lack job skills or be poorly educated. Add to this a fear of hell and the rapture and you can see why just getting out and acclimating to the world can be a very tall order. Once you’re out you may find yourself dealing with depression, anxiety, insomnia, and loneliness. I consider this to be phase one of three phases.
When I started phase one I was a teenager. I went from a very insular community out into a big world that I was not ready for. When I left the church no one came looking for me. I struggled through the realization that they didn’t care. I always suspected that but when it became a reality it hit me hard. I went to public school for a year and found I had nothing to talk to my peers about. When I was in the church I felt weird like I did not fit in and then when I went into public school I felt the same way. Everyone was planning for their future. I thought I had good grades and could have gotten into college but I had no one to help me navigate that journey. Neither of my parents attended college. By this time my mother was already pretty sick and preoccupied with raising my bother and dealing with her abusive husband. My father’s attitude was that if I had a husband I did not need an education. He felt the same way about driving which meant I did not learn to drive until I was much older. I discovered that I had missed many of the milestones that my peers had experienced and would continue to miss them because I had no way to know what was normal and how to get those experiences for myself. Over time I came to realize that my Christian school had supplied me with a subpar education. If I had someone to help me navigate the gaps I could have taken classes to fill in what was missing, the issue is I did not know what I did not know. I worked in restaurants for a long time and got a little apartment for myself. I did what I had to to survive and tried to tell myself that I had time and everything would be ok. I was always afraid of a wrathful god. When I cut my hair and pierced my ears there was this moment where I was just waiting for lightening to strike. This new world was both exciting and scary.
The next phase comes when you finally feel free from the group and you try to convince yourself that you can live without them and just get on with things. Many people I speak to can be stuck in this place for decades. They convince themselves they are doing great and have just left it all behind. Reality is usually much different. Sometimes during this period addictions will show up as a coping mechanism. Many survivors try to fill their lives with activities, family and work in an attempt to forget about the trauma, but the unresolved trauma is still there like a ticking time bomb. During this time if you talk about your trauma or pain people will often slap you on the back and say something like, “But you’re away from them now so life must be good!” This is phase two.
I left my abusive group and then jumped right into another one. I hear that is not uncommon. I only stayed in that group for a couple of years before leaving. During this phase, I reveled in my freedom and filled my life with having children and experiencing as much as I could after a life of real restriction. The pain of my past never went away. It was always lurking in the background with it’s best friend fear. I tried to listen to what pop psychology told me. I tried to release the past and I tried to forgive. I tried to get on with my new life. Now I’m not saying those are bad ideas, all I’m saying is that they are a very simple answer for an extremely complex problem. They did nothing to address my C-PTSD and in the end, I just ended up feeling more broken because I couldn’t just get over it. Over time I got more and more sick. I have always had insomnia but as I’ve aged it has become much more constant. The underlying stress and anxiety brewing within me caused me to have severe stomach issues that I am still trying to heal. I also have asthma which I do not think came from the trauma but it is well documented that mental health has a big role to play in how severe asthmatic symptoms are. My body was trying to send me messages and I just kept turning the music up louder and trying to convince myself I was ok.
Phase three is what I like to call the “wake up” phase. Sometimes it happens suddenly and sometimes in little things that add up to a creeping realization. By this time the addictions are at a breaking point or maybe you just don’t sleep anymore. However it displays, you reach a point where you can no longer ignore the toll the unresolved trauma has put on your body. Things will pop into your head that you just can’t shake and you can no longer make excuses for. I feel people often reach this stage when they are in midlife and things slow down a little. They have age and experience which causes them to view the world differently. They are fully adults now and are in a better position to judge where they came from. This is usually a crisis breaking point. Illusions fall away and the past you have been hiding from is waiting there for you.
My phase three went on for a very long time. Over the years the creeping realizations would make it hard for me to ignore what happened in the past. When my oldest child reached the age I was when I was molested I realized how little she was. I could see how sweet and innocent she was and I had a bit of a crisis. These things would happen from time to time over the years. As I matured I could see clearly the past decisions that the adults made around me during my childhood as monsterous and cruel. For a long time I would make excuses for them and try to find ways to not face up to how bad things really were. Once I started writing this blog I started to really wake up. It felt like blindfold after blindfold was ripped from my eyes forcing me to look at the trauma I suffered and get real with myself about the repercussions of it. This can be really hard, when you get to the point where you can’t look away. You can no longer deny the truth in front of you or make excuses for people’s bad choices. It forces you to change the way you think and can really change your life in profound ways. Some people lose what remaining family they have, some people just realize the depth of what was done to them in childhood. With all of that comes fresh waves of grief, anger, anxiety, fear, and so on.
Once you can see the trauma you suffered clearly then you have to get to work on healing yourself and figuring out how to live in your new reality. This is where I am right now. I left the UPC when I was 16, I’m now 49, that’s 33 years to get to this point. I am one of those people who is always working on myself, I’m introspective and I’m always seeking self improvement and it still took me 33 years. This is not a quick process and I suspect I will be healing from it forever. I am ok with that and I hope that you can be too. One of the hardest things is when the people you love or just the people you want to like you seem annoyed that “you’re still dealing with that?” They question why you can’t just forget and be happy. If you love me or even just like me some the best thing you can do for me is accept me where I’m at. Understand that this isn’t something that is just going to go away. It is something I’m working on all the time. Sit with me when I’m sad and don’t try to fix it, just let me know you’re there. Take me out for coffee and listen even if you’ve heard it a million times. Lastly try to remember that I’m doing my best.
I am one of the walking wounded. I have been attempting to write a book. Even though the process of writing can at times make me feel all alone I know that there are so many others like me. I just finished listening to the NPR podcast “Believed.” This podcast covers the story of Larry Nassar and his many victims. Although their story takes place in the world of competitive gymnastics there are so many similarities. Last week was an awful week for me. I battled my demons daily as I continued to write and try to unwind the story of my childhood. ITunes helpfully suggested this podcast to me and I’m so glad I took a chance on it. Now if you are like so many people in my life you might ask why would I put myself through that? Well because listening to other victims tell their story makes me feel less alone and strange in the world. The podcast was hard to listen to. I could relate to many of the women and their experiences. They inspired me to keep going and their journey gave me hope that maybe my story can have a better ending than it has had so far.
My friends and family worry about me. People tell me to take breaks and to take care of myself. They worry that telling this story might hurt me more than it helps me. I’m grateful for everyone in my life who has reached out to check in and give me advice. The thing is I cannot quit. I carried this trauma inside me for decades and now is the time to give it a voice. I cannot sit back and do nothing when I know that young people are continuing to be abused in the church I grew up in and others like it. My abuser is still out there doing god knows what. This isn’t about revenge but about justice. Justice for myself and all of the others like me.
Right now I will speak anywhere I am asked to speak and share my story anywhere I can get a platform. I am afraid because I don’t know if I have the skills to make my book a reality and I know for a fact that I am not a public speaker but the time for fear is over. Fear can be really hard to let go of, especially when you are raised on fear and it is what you know best. When you are told to keep yourself small and to go unnoticed it can be hard to step into the sunshine. So I keep going. I do it for myself and all of the survivors of Calvary Gospel and the UPC organization. Most importantly I do it for her…
During the process of writing about my childhood I’m finding more questions than answers. Opening the door to my past has caused me to remember things I have not thought about for a long time. Many of these events seemed weird at the time and now through my adult eyes they seem inappropriate. As these memories bubble up into the now I have asked people if they remember and if it all seems odd to them as well. In a recent conversation a friend and I discussed how we remember two things from our childhood growing up in the church, fear and sex.
For the lips of a strange woman drop as a honeycomb, and her mouth is smoother than oil. Proverbs 5:3
I started attending Calvary Christian Academy when I was 11 years old and in the 6th grade. We started attending the church when I was about 8. I was excited about starting a new school and finally being a part of the in-group. The principal at that point was Brother Rutherford. He seemed nice enough but had some strange quirks about him. Every morning we would read a passage together as a group. The goal was to memorize the verses and be able to repeat them back by the end of the month. If you wanted any extra freedoms or honor roll you had to have those verses memorized and signed off on. The thing is the verses we studied seem really strange when I look back on them now. The Bible is a long book and full of topics to focus on so why these verses were chosen is beyond me.
Drink waters out of thine own cistern, and running waters out of thine own well.
Let thy fountains be dispersed abroad, and rivers of waters in the streets.
Let them be only thine own, and not strangers’ with thee.
Let thy fountain be blessed: and rejoice with the wife of thy youth. Proverbs 5:15-18
Every morning we would stand and say the pledge and then read our verses. We read them as a mixed group out loud. I can remember being pretty embarrassed to read these things in front of the boys. It did not help that the older boys would tell bawdy jokes about them and snicker and laugh at my discomfort.
Let her be as the loving hind and pleasant roe; let her breasts satisfy thee at all times; and be thou ravished always with her love.
And why wilt thou, my son, be ravished with a strange woman, and embrace the bosom of a stranger? Proverbs 5:19-20
I have to ask if the men working in the school got some kind of perverse pleasure from watching teen girls recite these verses both as a group and then one on one. When we reached the end of the month either our supervisor Roy Grant or Brother Rutherford would come to our little office and listen to us recite the verses back to them. I can remember being really uncomfortable. I was very good at memorization so that wasn’t the issue, it was all of those breasts and lips.
O that thou wert as my brother, that sucked the breasts of my mother! when I should find thee without, I would kiss thee; yea, I should not be despised.
I would lead thee, and bring thee into my mother’s house, who would instruct me: I would cause thee to drink of spiced wine of the juice of my pomegranate. Song of Solomon 8:1-2
We would have a sort of chapel time and Brother Rutherford or Roy Grant would preach a mini sermon or teach a lesson. Often the subject matter would have something to do with the verses we were working on. So it isn’t that the verses were not explained, they were but I still have to ask, why was this something I needed to read/know at age 11? Why so much focus on cheating spouses and sexual love? Wouldn’t it be more beneficial for us to be studying the fruits of the spirit or maybe the sermon on the mount?
We have a little sister, and she hath no breasts: what shall we do for our sister in the day when she shall be spoken for?
If she be a wall, we will build upon her a palace of silver: and if she be a door, we will inclose her with boards of cedar.
I am a wall, and my breasts like towers: then was I in his eyes as one that found favour. Song of Solomon 8: 8-10
I have turned this over in my head time and again and I just don’t get it. Why all the verses about breasts? Of all of the topics available why this kind of thing over and over? If there is one thing I have learned in my life it is that where there is smoke there is fire. If it makes you feel uncomfortable there is a reason for that and you should listen to that inner voice. I do not know who picked those verses. It could have been Brother Rutherford or Pastor Grant but either way I think it was inappropriate. I could understand if we were older like 17 or so or if it was a class for people about to be married.
A side note, we always read from the KJV and we were taught that the Proverbs verses were about staying faithful to ones wife, and the Song of Solomon verses were about marital love. Imagine my surprise when I found that some view the Song of Solomon verses to be about Christ. That is not how it was taught to us.
Brother Rutherford and his family eventually left and I think they moved back to Texas. I do not remember why but I do remember that it seemed kind of sudden and fast. After that we had a new principal and the verses changed to more normal content.
You might ask why I am writing this entry, it is because as I try to figure out the past these things come to mind and then I can’t get them out of my mind. I comb over them over and over again trying to make sense of it all. Why did they focus so much on sexual topics? Why the pervy undertones? They had to have known that a young girl would feel uncomfortable reading those verses out loud, especially given how sheltered we were. If anyone remembers the Rutherfords and knows why they left I would love to know.
Surviving Church and Childhood 