Journals

I flipped through an old journal today and parts made me laugh while other bits made me want to beat my head on something. I've gained much distance from the girl I was then, but it was so real at the time.

July 23, 1991  Sunday night I asked Momma about perfume—I’d like to start wearing it, not as an allurement, but simply because, well, “perfume rejoices the heart”. Momma didn’t say no, she gave me the go-ahead to choose a kind and let her smell it!

July 24  Our septic was repaired and our phone line went out of commission. We did some baking, the cleaning, and some laundry, and carried on an active social life (Mrs. E----t, Mr. H----h, invitation to Doyle B---’s for dinner on Sunday…). A--- and I went with Dad to the church business meeting. I was grieved and distressed by some intentions the Board made known at the meeting—more signs of a lukewarm church.

July 25
I sense I haven’t been too wonderful in my attitudes at home lately. Lord, give me grace. Change my heart—take my will and make it Thine!

July 26  This morning I rose early to do some work on my skirt before work. I worked at Jo-Ann Fabrics for five hours, earning $21.25. Not bad! This evening I read part of the Russian alphabet book I got from the library last week. I’m finding it really helpful. 

July 27  I finished my denim skirt. This evening we got pizza and watched The Hiding Place video—a great combination for a fun evening! We picked some sweet corn from across the road for lunch. It was SO tender and sweet! The Lord really provides the best for us!

July 28  This morning some of us were ill, so only us four oldest went with Dad to church. We had to leave before the sermon again [we walked out to protest rock music]. Only the Lord Jesus knows what a struggle that is! I am committed to God’s will, but it’s certainly not easy.

July 29  We made donuts, I studied some Russian.

July 30  This afternoon Dad took me to Gaylord to help him get some data. This evening Dad mentioned that I had some pay coming—I had totally forgotten about that aspect! He insisted on paying more than I really earned, too! Truly God is good. Once again, He’s providing.

July 31  I worked on some correspondence and helped clean the kitchen (cabinet-organizing cleaning). The babies went to the doctor, Momma and Dad brought home pasties. Many of us have miserable colds. Lord Jesus, I’ll need Your strength for tomorrow! Thank You for making it available to me!

Aug. 1  A tiring day. Five of us are on antibiotics now. I slept in, helped some with meals and babies, and read and laid around feeling miserable. I did plan many projects to work on when I’m feeling better, however! Lord, please work to perfect my attitudes! I want to be a crown of glory in Your hand!

Aug. 2  This morning we cleaned, this afternoon most of us laid around in the living room feeling miserable and watching videos. It was pretty much fun. 

Aug. 3  I wrote to Becky and the others cleaned the shed. I did some ironing and experimented with spray starch and sizing. I nursed my cold and this afternoon Dad took five of us to the library—I found The Tempting of America by Robert Bork and an introduction to Russia.

Aug. 4  Right now I am in my room playing with [two-year-old] Timothy. We’re having fun singing up the scale and playing with a white feather that he discovered on the floor from my pillow.

Aug. 5  Today was reasonably pleasant and enjoyable. Also, my cold is improving.

Aug. 6  A full day—work in the morning and play in the afternoon. For some unexplainable reason I felt strangely thoughtful and even almost sad as I worked by myself. I’m afraid my joy in the Lord is ebbing—guess I need more time in the Word, or maybe I just need to throw my whole heart, my whole life, into making Momma successful. That’s it. I know that’s what I need to do. I must work to make my parents, my family a success. This is not easy or natural for me! I forget often.

Aug. 7  I am still having occasional pain in my toe (the one I possibly broke a few weeks ago) so I soaked it in mallow water for a while today while I worked cross-stitching a bib for Beth’s baby shower tomorrow.

If I could speak to my fifteen-year-old self, I'd tell her that her heart is beautiful.
That she is allowed to rest.
That even if she wasn't as kind and diligent and inquisitive as she is, she deserves just as much care as the friends and family she wants so much to serve.

And I think, if she heard that, she would cry.

Racism & Middle School

When I pick up my middle-schoolers at the end of the day, I park on the north side of the school. Because I park on the north side, nearly every child who walks past my car is African-American. If I parked on the south street, or the east, or the west, where the houses are bigger, most of the kids walking home would have different complexions. But I park here and this is Wichita.

Despite the downtown sculpture commemorating one of the first lunch counter sit-ins for civil rights, Wichita still has ghetto neighborhoods. The word sounds pejorative, politically incorrect, but the dictionary assures me it is the correct choice: “a quarter of the city in which members of a minority group live especially because of social, legal, or economic pressure”. Wichita definitely has ghettos and one of them is north of our school. We’ve talked about it in the car. You don’t have to be a sociologist to notice that all the kids clustered at the crosswalk heading north are black.

Diversity is one of the things we love most about our middle school. It was certainly one of the first things I noticed. One in four students is black. Similar to our elementary school, fewer than half the students are white, and the school has strong Hispanic and Asian representation. Many of my kids’ classmates are bilingual. When my kids spend time with them, they are introduced to other languages and customs, unfamiliar foods and religious traditions. I’ve come to see that building these connections is not merely enriching, but essential for a healthy community.

Even so, I was unprepared for our middle school’s cultural showcase family night last month. My sixth-grader had interviewed an elderly relative, gathered photos, and researched the history of her Kansas heritage, while my son had created a presentation around a family recipe from Pennsylvania, complete with samples to share. Our calendar was a jigsaw puzzle of assignments, schedules, and places to be, so it wasn’t till I delivered my children on time that night and began to look around that I realized hundreds of other students had done the same things.

In one room students exhibited colorful posters depicting their heritage, values, family traditions, religious symbols, hobbies and allegiances. As we milled through the crowd of other families, the posters forming a collage on the floor, I paid extra attention to the diversity of religions—Jewish, Catholic, Muslim, Hindu, Protestant, maybe others I’ve forgotten—and appreciated the creativity that went into each poster’s design, revealing hints about the personality of the student presenting it.

The school's lunch room was transformed into a crowded international food court, each student’s booth offering a taste of a dish important to his/her family. Next to midwestern staples like apple pie, monkey bread, and—my favorite—“funeral potatoes”, sat traditional homemade tortillas, Mexican mole, South American ceviche. There were dishes from Norway and Lebanon, Germany and Japan. Parents and children jostled elbows past platters of hummus, fish, sticky rice, two versions of lumpia, and plenty of recipes I didn’t recognize. I sampled the layered Vietnamese coffee-coconut-&-pandan jelly and a syrupy golden dessert made with semolina.

Some children had compiled websites to present information from their family heritage. Others had typewritten reports based on interviews with family members. We skimmed stories about people who’d grown up in Beirut, in India, in Bangladesh, in Vietnam, on the Korean Peninsula. Each story (and I only read a sample of the dozens arranged on cafeteria tables) connected to one of my child’s classmates, made the places on the news feel a little closer.

It wasn’t until we got home that I felt something had been missing. Some place. Some one.

Africa! And not African stories or African cuisine, but Africa’s people. While the rest of us celebrated the families and lands we hailed from, Earth’s second most populous continent had been absent from the school that night. I hadn’t seen any soul food, no interviews that mentioned Martin Luther King or Jim Crow, no posters by African immigrants. Had I overlooked them?

At elementary school enrollment, at middle school concerts, at high school project fairs, I always rub shoulders with black families, many of them. How had I overlooked them on this night? The next day I quizzed three other parents who’d attended. Had they noticed any African-American students or parents? They couldn’t remember seeing any, either..

That’s when it hit me that the culture fair was only for students, like mine, enrolled in the academically rigorous pre-IB program. The first time I heard of it was when a teacher recommended it during 5^th-grade conferences. Parents have to submit complex applications with multiple teacher endorsements and students have to achieve high enough scores on special weekend testing days.

Only one Wichita school offers the pre-IB program and space is limited. It’s a fantastic program for my children, keeping them challenged while preparing them for success in high school, where grades count for scholarships. But in a school that’s 25% black (drawing students from elementary schools that range from 12% to 52% black) the pre-IB program, as far as I can tell, no more than 5% black, at most. African-American males are almost non-existent in pre-IB.

When I tagged along with my daughter on my first middle school field trip, I was startled to see that the black boys she’d had as elementary classmates had disappeared, along with most of the black girls. In their place were more white kids, more kids from all over Asia and the Middle East. And though its presence was subtle at first, their families had more money. Here, my kids learn alongside their African-American peers only in their elective classes and in P.E., where expectations are lower, discipline laxer, and the students my kids now breezily refer to as “Reg. Ed.” suffer considerably less performance anxiety.

It pains me to consider that much of my kids’ middle school experience is, for all practical purposes, segregated. It pains me because when people are segregated, both sides lose. And it pains me because as I sit at the curb in my late-model SUV watching obviously “Reg. Ed.” kids walk home across Central Avenue, I wonder how pre-IB adolescents can avoid developing a sense of elitism.

I put my kids in public school because I wanted them to be part of the mixed-up circus that is the human family. I wanted to throw my lot in with that of the whole community, give my kids a common experience with their peers, sharing the same rules and opportunities, neither fearing nor feeling superior to people with different backgrounds. And yet, if African-American kids aren’t getting into competitive classes, can we call our education system equal?

Are black students failing the required testing? Or are their parents not applying for the program? Does it sound too stressful or intimidating? Is pre-IB an elite secret? Are teachers recommending the program as an option for black students? If not, why not? Are black students falling behind their peers in elementary school? If they are, how can we help? It surely wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact that from the beginning of their education, perhaps the only black adult male they see at school is the custodian?

Representation matters. It matters for the population represented, and it matters for those who observe. Kids aren’t stupid. Every morning they hear words like “one nation”, “indivisible”, “justice for all”, but at the end of the day the black kids walk north. Because in Wichita, we’re not all equal. Not yet.

Wichita ceased mandatory busing for school integration years ago, and today many of our schools are once again predominantly one race or another. And it’s no secret that the black elementary school in the neighborhood to the north and the Hispanic elementary school to the west are made up almost entirely of low-income students, while the mostly white school to the south is considerably better off. Those kids come together to share a building for the middle school grades, but they do not share the same experience.

We need more diversity; we need more equality. We need better funding for ALL elementary schools, especially those in low-income areas. We need more black teachers. We need better pay for those teachers. And we need to address the socio-economic factors that allow ghettos to exist at all. In 21^st-century Kansas, one’s chance of survival to school age should not be dependent on one’s race, or one’s zip code.

I ponder these things and drum on the steering wheel. And then my kids climb in. They squeeze in their backpacks, their instruments, their lunch pouches. They buckle their seat-belts. I turn the car east and ask about homework. We talk about snacks, and what’s for dinner.

Pamela's Prayer and Purity Culture

Do you ever find yourself at a loss to describe "purity culture"?

To explain how it supplants individual agency, conscience, and boundaries in favor of ignorant obedience?

How it sets young people up for abusive relationships?

How it equates innocence with virtue?

How it demeans women by claiming to "protect" them as precious jewels?

Well, you are in luck, my friend, because the 1998 independent evangelical film Pamela's Prayer is now available on Amazon Prime. And there is nothing subtle about it.

Even ChristianFilms.com struggles to describe this highly unusual irregular story, which not only lays out the most rigorous principles of so-called sexual "purity" but includes an unforgettable example of emotional incest as a bonus. Yes, that's Pamela's dad on her bed in the picture.

I will admit to shedding a few tears when I watched this movie as a 20-something in the IBLP cult. As extreme as the story was, it still seemed sweet and romantic. Its very existence was an acknowledgement of my yearning for heterosexual companionship. And I was already older than the bride in the story.

I didn't yet have the vocabulary to discuss the characters' psychology. It would be another decade or more before I began to grasp concepts such as: grief, attachment, trauma, self-care, sexual repression, bounded choice, emotional incest, emotional abuse and control, intimacy, boundaries, autonomy, enmeshment, differentiation...

Pamela's Prayer has come to mind occasionally over the years, so when my sister told me it is now available online, I was curious. Surely it wasn't as unhealthy and gag-worthy as I remembered? I hit play, then dragged the marker to the last ten minutes to find out.

No, it was worse.

My kids won't be watching this movie, but if they did we would talk about...

• How Pamela's widowed father could have cared for his own emotional needs by investing in healthy peer relationships. 
• How a person's worth is not measured by sexual experience or lack of it. 
• Developing healthy independence from parents.
• What qualities to look for in a romantic or sexual partner. 
• In what ways parent-child relationships are different from partner-spouse relationships. 
• How each couple negotiates the boundaries of their relationship.
• Dating as self-discovery.
• How the goal is not a wedding, but mutual trust, pleasure, and growth.
• And so on...

In many ways, my courtship experience paralleled Pamela's in the movie. Some would look at my marriage today and consider it proof that "purity" works. But I beg to differ. I'm not proud of avoiding intimacy so long, and I believe our relationship owes its success to other factors.

More about leaving "purity" behind in an upcoming post!

Paczki, Thanksgiving, Gingerbread

A couple of weeks ago, our Kroger was selling pazcki--a rich Polish Fat Tuesday treat that evoked numerous memories of "fasting" from pleasures during Lent.

Losing our religion meant losing plenty of rituals, too. I tried to salvage what I could, but holidays--etched as they are with emotional baggage, cultural expectations, and sometimes religious history--had been rough for me for years, even as a devout theist. It's not as if I wanted to spend every Christmas Day tearful and depressed, but over decades, it had become my tradition!


Thanksgiving
I keep trying to jettison those Norman Rockwell expectations. It was a big deal the year we didn't have a single guest for Thanksgiving. I closed the kitchen and we ate our favorite snacks instead. And lots of pie. It's not that the holiday was so tied to religion (it's based more on American mythology, after all), but here in the Midwest, it encapsulates so many tropes about family and culture.

I love turkey, so I roasted one the week before and had leftovers for turkey sandwiches. We watched the Macy's parade and played games and read books. There were hardly any dirty dishes and everyone was happy! (The next year I tried to duplicate my success, but ended up sobbing in my room. Disney magic to the rescue--"Moana" and popcorn at the theater were just the diversion I needed.)

Christmas
I can't lie; Christmas is still hard. But according to my journals, it always has been. The first holiday season after my faith in the "Virgin Birth" dissolved, I felt truly unmoored and the only song that felt comforting was Faith Hill's "Where Are You, Christmas?"

Some of my family's traditions survived the transition with us: secular advent calendars are easy to find. Some years we light count-down candles on an evergreen wreath centerpiece. We still hang garlands and lights or tinsel, put up a tree, bake holiday treats. We still watch The Muppets' Christmas Carol. I made a new playlist of holiday tunes that aren't triggering. One Christmas, we watched reruns of Leave It To Beaver all day. Another year, we enjoyed the company of a friend visiting from Colorado and played with our new puppy. Sometimes we see family; other years it is just us.

We talk a lot about the meaning of the Santa myth and older customs that sprang up around the darkest part of the year. Last year we hosted our first Winter Solstice party! I steered away from the colors I associated with Christmas and focused on other seasonal elements. As the door closed on the last friend that night, the evening felt like a great success. When we opened Christmas presents a few days later, my emotions were still buoyed by the warmth of that night.

Easter

At first after deconversion, I felt like Easter had been stolen from me. But I dug a little deeper, checked out some library books, and connected with the ancient celebrations of spring, water, life, and rebirth. Some years we color eggs, or bake cookies. We've had egg hunts; we've invited guests for a fancy brunch. Last year we kept it simple with real flowers and chocolate bunnies.



Of course, new traditions have a way of growing all on their own.

Meals
My menus have always celebrated the seasons: the first rhubarb coffeecake in spring, mandatory annual asparagus, the sweet peak of berry season, a box of ripe peaches, pasta tossed with garden-fresh pesto, warm and fragrant applesauce, roasted butternut squash, hot mulled cranberry juice in front of the fireplace, citrus biscotti making bleak January mornings more bearable...

Bedtime
Where my family read missionary stories aloud and closed the evening with prayers, our kids love to wrap up the day with an episode of Phineas and Ferb, Star Trek: The Next Generation, or M*A*S*H before heading upstairs for quiet reading followed by hugs, kisses, and lights-out. Right now, we're enjoying the last season of Avatar: The Last Airbender.

Towel Day 
On May 25, like fans worldwide, we made time to celebrate the life of Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. We curled up on the couch with snacks and, of course, towels, to watch the movie together. We sang the opening song along with the dolphins. We laughed. We pointed out our favorite scenes and actors. We celebrated the brilliance of the late Alan Rickman even as we mourned his passing. We watched the deleted scenes. By bedtime everyone felt warm and cozy and good about life, whatever its meaning. It was as close to a happy holiday experience as we'd ever had.


It's too soon to say what other family rituals our kids will remember as traditions.

Pi Day?
Winter Solstice?
Star Wars "May the Fourth"?
Beach vacations?
Afternoons spent in the backyard Tardis?
Watching fireworks?
Meteor showers?
Or maybe something spontaneous--like the innocent gingerbread that turned into a jolly family bikini-drawing contest. :-)

On Seeing and Being Seen

Seated on my therapist's couch a few weeks after the election, the words tumbled out recounting both my successes and the rumblings of fresh anxiety now threatening my progress. As I waited for the elevator after our session, just one of her observations echoed in my head. Since then, it has etched itself on the walls of my mind in burning gold.

"You weren't seen. You need others to see you. Maybe someday you'll be able to see yourself."

The election shook me, for sure. It left me questioning,

"Can anyone hear me? Hear us? Don't they see us out here? Are they BLIND, or am I invisible? Do my tweets fall into a void? Does anyone notice my pins and posts and likes and upvotes? Do I make any difference?"

The new children's film A Monster Calls captures the emotion of feeling infuriatingly invisible.

"Do you know what I see when I look at you, O'Malley? I see nothing."

And then one day the invisible man decided, I will make them see me.

These blog posts document years of attempts to "make them see me". By their very nature, abuse and neglect have the effect of making victims feel invisible. So I've written about women erased from their own stories. About feeling hidden, and trapped. About learning to speak up, to take up space, to hold my ground, to live out loud.

Watching the Golden Globes, I was caught off guard by the powerful compliment Viola Davis paid to Meryl Streep:

"She sees you."

Davis went on, telling Streep: 

"You make me feel that what I have in me--my body, my face, my age--is enough."

Could that be what my counselor meant?

Maybe seeing myself is what I've been trying to do all along.

As if the selfies, status updates, blog posts, dates, marches, and performances on stage will somehow prove that I was here. 

I appreciate the people who can make me feel seen. For now, I still look to them for clues about how to see myself. Because despite my intention, I'm not there yet.

But maybe, someday, I'll be able to see myself.

Shedding My Skin

One day perhaps I'll pick up Our Courtship Story again, but for now, I have to jump to to the end and write an epilogue. 

Wedding shower my parents' church held for us.

When I worked for IBLP in Oklahoma, my roommate and I once perused bridal magazines and selected our favorite dresses. I was conservative, of course: the gown I chose was appropriate for a much older woman, rich with textures of silk and lace.

Sometime after Chris delivered an engagement ring to the southern Philippines, I began browsing for dress patterns over SIL's tenuous Internet connection. Believing I'd have to sew much of it myself, I looked for simplicity and lines that would easily skim the figure I considered "curvy". (These days, a few pounds heavier and many scruples lighter, I dress myself two sizes smaller.)

The ivory raw silk came from a textile bazaar in Manila. I adored its natural texture, not satiny like lingerie I'd never owned, but nubby and matte. I'd warned my parents that I would not be wearing snow white, but I don't recall that they expressed any alarm. I was still as sexually ignorant as they could have hoped, but years with IBLP had given me an aversion to white.

The zipper and darling oval buttons we bought at a fabric store in Wichita, where Chris's mom did most of the sewing for me three weeks before the wedding. Fearful that my mom would find fault with the dress (the bust too tight? the neckline too scooped? the hips too hugged?) I left it in Kansas, revealing it to Mama just days before the ceremony, with my outspoken aunt present to deter any negative remarks.

Minimize cleavage!

I did feel slightly princess-like in the dress, in a medieval sort of way, but it was far from the image I'd always carried of what a wedding gown should be. Its lack of sparkle, detail, and embellishment was a great disappointment to one of my baby sisters, who reassured herself and me with, "Well, I guess you're just having a cheap wedding..." It was true. The simple nylon slip underneath--necessary to hide the full-coverage bra and granny panties--cost more than the dress itself.

Bless my maid-of-honor, she tried. She took me to Victoria's Secret herself and bought me a black lace bra, which she declared every married woman ought to have. But like David walking around in Saul's armor, I was not used to such accoutrements. So for my wedding day, I stuck to the familiar.

By the time I exchanged the bridal gown for a honeymoon travel dress a few hours later, I'd acquired a new ring, a new name, a new status. Not to mention my first kiss.

The cleaned silk hung in the back of our closet for years, coming out on rare occasions: A church Valentine's banquet. Our wedding anniversary between pregnancies. When I was finished breastfeeding, to see if it still zipped! And then, last year, when I again withdrew the dress from its vinyl sheath.  

My sentiment for the gown had diminished, representing as it did too much of the life we'd repudiated. We'd taken the wedding photos off the living room wall years earlier and hidden them in the spare room closet. I'd found it healing to recount the unwritten portion of our courtship saga to another lover. I was mourning my first romantic break-up. And I had an idea for a costume for my first Halloween party, and it involved repurposing my wedding gown.

On that September day, I slid the silk off the hanger and eyed it anxiously, scissors in hand. Isn't a bride's dress sacred, in some way? Yet here I was, ready to do some permanent damage.

Pulling out my wedding gown again was more triggering than either of us expected. So many emotions and flashbacks! Then I remembered that the guarded girl who donned that dress one October morning fourteen years ago has vanished. Out of that silken chrysalis has emerged a stronger vibrant woman carrying all the old memories but possessing new powers and a hell of a lot more wisdom.

I didn't end up using the dress for Halloween, but Chris did agree to help bring another artistic vision to life that day. He also finally told me that he'd never found this dress sexy. Ahem! Well, at least he was smart enough not to judge the cake by its austere frosting!

Those yards of silk were more symbolic in the backyard that day than they ever had been. I was as if I had at last shrugged off a skin that no longer fit, fought out of a cocoon to enjoy a winged new life.

In the year since, I've been aware of rapidly increasing distance between my past and my present, and most of the time, I'm completely comfortable with that.

I have finally created the life I want, and how many people can say that?

Activist

MI Right to Life oratorical contest

As a teenager raised in the Religious Right, I was passionate about politics, state and local government, and activism for the causes we supported, though I struggled with cognitive dissonance regarding the biblical role of women! 

After I married and moved to Kansas, for a host of reasons, my community involvement waned. The passion was still alive, but life was broadening my experience and my adult values were evolving. 

Midsummer last year, I decided to attend an ACLU meeting held at a local church. I was uncomfortable walking into a church building to listen to a man named after an Old Testament prophet, but was relieved to see some familiar faces around me. As the speaker talked and answered questions, I began to feel that I belonged, after all. 

A friend who witnessed my almost giddy afterglow that night said I ought to get more involved in activism--it animated me so. I took his observations to heart and weeks later, I volunteered at an abortion clinic for the first time. Turns out, that was only a beginning!

Since then, I've met so many brave and amazing people. 

I've been trusted with so many personal stories. 

     I've cried and cried. 

     I've felt fear, and even hate.

     I've been angry to my core. 

     I've given and received the best hugs.

     My compassion and courage have grown.

I've been yelled at by Christians who take down my license plate number.

I've learned how to treat myself more kindly.

My values have become crystal clear. 

Distributing condoms at Kansas State Fair

Representing Wichita NOW
in the Wichita Pride Parade

Campaign to rally feminist votes

Honk if you like safe sex!

Post-election rally for equality and justice
(Wichita State University)

Whether I'm speaking up loudly or quietly supporting people exercising their rights, whether I can measure it or not, I know my involvement makes a difference. 

I want the world my kids live in to be more fair, more equal, and more kind. I'll keep doing what I can to make that happen.