Love Me Tender

This Bible story haunts me. 

I thought I’d exorcised it with this art 8 years ago but lately it’s returned—when Instagram shows me shriveled children or journalists report on a godforsaken regime “intentionally preventing the entry of food, medicine, and fuel”.

Back in the 90’s, I knew the kings and chronicles of Israel like my kids know The Clone Wars. Miracles, murders, and the most badass female roles in the Bible. They even get lines!

In this story, Samaria is under siege. The Syrian army has the city surrounded, entirely cutting off the Samaritans from their supply chains, farmland, and trade routes. The Syrians wait outside the walls while the Samaritan economy collapses and the people starve. When the king is out checking on things, a woman shouts for his attention:

“Help me, my lord the king!”

“What’s wrong?”

“This woman said to me, ‘Give up your son, that we may eat him, and tomorrow we will eat my son.’ So we boiled my son and ate him, and the next day I said to her, ‘Give up your son, that we may eat him.’ But she had hidden her son.”

This was not one of Pollyanna’s “happy texts”. It was a terrifying text—also God-breathed and dutifully recorded historical fact as far as my younger self was concerned. A desperate woman so hungry that she cooked her kid and even fed him to the neighbor. Worst cooking show ever. Happy Mother’s Day.

In sharp contrast, in Jerusalem a few pages back, two sex worker moms of newborns asked their king for help after one baby died. They each claimed the surviving baby was theirs, but the king discovered the real mom by threatening to kill the live infant, causing one of the prostitutes to say, "no, please, my roommate can have it!" Because moms are like that. We hope.

But, after all, what can you expect from Samaritans? Those liberals who seceded from the kingdom God gave them (after the king started making authoritarian dick-jokes?). The Samaritans were the bad guys. Of course they would be cannibals. The writers of this history saw themselves as preservers of the true Israel, the Samaritans as faithless bastards who couldn’t help but eat their young. Hadn’t God threatened as much in Deuteronomy?  

“If you do not carefully obey all the commandments…

They will besiege all your cities…

Then you will eat the fruit of your womb, the flesh of the sons and daughters…” 

Moses goes into more gooey detail but I’ll spare you. Good book, my ass.

The Samaritans survived. They number fewer than a thousand in Israel today. They don’t recognize the kings and chronicles stories as canon. Abrahamic monotheists, they are neither Jewish nor Christian and Deuteronomy is the end of their Bible. They are Israeli citizens but some are also--because they live in the West Bank--Palestinians. In the Jesus stories, Samaritans are a punch line because they worship at the wrong mountain yet they are compassionate and giving, and still our definition of a good neighbor.

For a year and a half, the besieged inhabitants of ancient Pelistim have shouted for our attention. They’ve filmed their crushed and broken and malnourished children, preemies whose incubators were besieged, bandaged orphans, newborns literally frightened to death; fathers cradling burnt daughters; weary displaced mothers mourning lost babies, carrying maimed toddlers away from bombed tents; voices hoarse from pleading, hearts bleeding silent into the sand.

And everywhere I see hands. Reaching for each other. Comforting, supporting, healing, holding, searching, rebuilding, feeding, planting.  

When it comes to protecting and providing for our young, hard-boiled America struggles with a lack of imagination and of will. Can't do anything about guns. Died of measles? So sad! God has a plan, or a concept of one. Poverty? School lunch debt? Medical bills? Get a job, kid. The foster-home-to-homeless-encampment pipeline is real and not our problem.

Meanwhile, we keep making equipment to fry other people’s kids faster and harder.

I'm starvin', darling, let me put my lips to somethin'/Let me wrap my teeth around the world/Start carvin', darling, I want to smell the dinner cookin'/I want to feel the edges start to burn

Come and get some/Skinnin' the children for a war drum/Put in front of the table, sellin' bombs and guns/It's quicker and easier to eat your young

(Hozier, "Eat Your Young", 2024)

Cult Identity

Heavens, it’s been nearly 20 years now. 

Since Shyamalan’s The Village came out in theaters and we were never the same. 

We were spellbound. Our hearts warmed with recognition. This place, these people. How did we know them? Had we been there? Oh, we’d lived there. Shyamalan was telling our story. 

It was 2004; I don't think we were even on Facebook yet. Even so, word of the film spread on ex-IBLP social media like wildfire. The Village became our meme. It united us. We might not have school colors, yearbooks, or reunions, but we had a reference at last! The next time we were at a loss to describe our upbringing to a normal person, we could ask, “Have you seen The Village? I grew up there.” 

Metaphor? Perhaps, but also an identity. We were the courageous ones who’d crossed the boundary though terrified and thus laid bare the lies. 

That same summer, a new blog appeared: a place for the “rehabilitation” of ex-ATIers. We laughed—it was a joke, right? For years, X-ATI GUY’s posts helped us heal by naming our wounds and creating room for us to share memories, shame, disillusionment anonymously. We’d all been involved deeply enough to know Bill Gothard was a hypocrite whose popularity was, thankfully, on the decline. No way would we let the next generation experience what had happened to us. 

We began to poll each other, “Was IBLP a cult?” The verdict was still far from unanimous. The Village was still in theaters when the first Duggar special aired in September. We didn’t watch TV yet, let alone cable, so it took a while for us to hear about it through the grapevine. The Duggar name had gotten around because of Jim Bob’s election win—a badge of success for any Quiverfull father. When I actually watched an episode of the show, I found it disturbingly familiar, like watching an imprisoned former self. How were families still following Gothard? In the year of our lord 2010? Despite the internet, all the information available, all the failures and scandals, all the stories we could tell? 

I was finally healing, learning to parent without violence, catching up on my own education, reaching back to recover the girl I was before my parents adopted Gothard’s garbage. My sisters, born into a fully Gothardized home, didn’t have that luxury. And here were the Duggars, bringing ever more babies into the cruel fear-based system I’d already spent a decade disentangling from. Regular people found this entertaining? 

    * * * * * * * 

It’s been weeks since we watched the docuseries that brought a record number of new viewers to Prime Video. All five of us watched the episodes back-to-back while I kept my hands busy with a crochet hook because, after two decades out and twelve+ years of therapy, I have a pretty good idea of how my body responds to flashbacks and how to handle them. 

It was jarring to see Bill’s face again, against those godawful blue curtains, in our own living room. The man who told us to turn the hotel TV sets to the wall because “I will set no wicked thing before mine eyes…” But there he was, mumbling forth the swill that my parents drank so eagerly and then force-fed to us. We recognized faces and places, books, songs, uniforms, the old mental hospital where American homeschoolers spanked Russian orphans. 

It was strange to see our actual history packaged so that our kids or, well, anyone could see it, albeit through a screen-size window. Validating, yes. And also, as the ensuing emotional storm slowly wears itself out, profoundly sad. I've leaned hard on my friendships these weeks and utilized most of the healthy coping activities collected in my toolbox over years: dance, art, gardens, hikes, sex, fiction, yoga... 

Watching Shiny Happy People is like glimpsing Titanic’s murky wreckage through the Titan’s tiny viewport. The producers focus on one celebrity family (because ratings) but the real scope and scale of the tragedy? The broken families, the scarred hearts, the body count? The why and the how and the price tag? Scarcely comprehensible. 

It’s good to see bits of the disaster we lived through (truly the tip of the iceberg!) documented before Bill himself kicks the bucket, but when it comes to explaining and recovering from cult life, I guess it still takes a village.

 As I participate in this year's Conference on Religious Trauma, this piece has been inspiring me. 

(Like most of my trauma-inspired art pieces, it sits in the closet. No one wants to look at that every day!)

"Broken", mixed media (2018)

Full piece: 

It's been both empowering and comforting to listen to the conference sessions and remember how far I've come on this journey over the last decade. Here's to more health and heresy!

History Lessons

All the news this week (nearly forgotten already--topics move so fast--but we had a funeral and other stuff going on, too) about book banning and book burning and white people's discomfort and Whoopie Goldberg and parents getting mad about teachers using historical facts has me processing more crap from my teens.

Looking back, I find my early lessons on the Holocaust rather horrifying. And not in the way that they should be.

Anne Frank's diary being, for unspecified reasons, a banned book at my "school", I read The Hiding Place about a dozen times and almost daily imagined hiding Jews behind my afterthought of a closet which was too short for dresses. (Ok, if I'm honest, I still imagine it. That closet had a walled-off secret stairway entrance from the basement.)

I read numerous religious WWII paperback adventures about Communists, torture, boxcars, smugglers, miracles, and daring escapes when I was just a kid. Corrie ten Boom's was the only one about the plight of the Jews, and it centered...

...a Gentile Christian! Who survived the concentration camp to travel the globe telling people to forgive their abusers in the name of Jesus.

Corrie, at least the version created by Guideposts writers John & Elizabeth Sherrill, was my hero. I wanted to be strong like her, courageous, daring, smart, and famous, and sabotage a few Nazi radios in the process. I imagined visiting Haarlem just to tour her home and watch shop, the Beje, while I pondered whether God let Jesus-rejecting Jews into heaven.

Our school books gave Corrie her own history unit (Wisdom Booklet #35). They basically reworded The Hiding Place, with less emphasis on Jews and extra helpings of forgiveness for wicked deeds. You'd think it would be difficult to write a page about concentration camps without mentioning Jews, but IBLP managed it. It wasn't that they were on the side of the Nazis, just that they could adapt the story, just as they did the Jewish scriptures, to fit Bill Gothard's agenda by telling victims of violence that God willed their suffering. 

And speaking of agendas, every anti-abortion speech I ever heard included Holocaust references, which I found so offensively boilerplate I determined to write my entire Right-to-Life speech without one.

Ugh.

During my year in the Philippines, my dearest friend was a German woman. Her Wycliffe missionary peers warned me, unbidden, never to bring up the Holocaust as she didn't believe it had happened. Huh? I knew a lot of interesting people with a lot of unusual hang-ups, but this was a new one for me!

Dietlinde had created a dictionary and translated the New Testament for the Muslim Yakan people group in the southern islands. I helped her assemble evergreen boughs into a Christmas "tree" and decorate it with German ornaments and she taught me to drink coconut water and showed me a night-blooming orchid and we had lovely tea parties, but I obediently tiptoed around the Holocaust question.

I encountered Elie Wiesel in a college English assignment, and Shalom Auslander was another Jewish voice who gave me a glimmer of what it means to grow up in the shadow of massive generational trauma.

I no longer think forgiveness is going to cut it.

Anyway... these are excerpts from the homeschool curriculum my parents chose. Maybe you used it, too.

Excuse me now while I ask my kids what they've learned about anti-Semitism, past and, painfully, present.

Stories

I’m eating rhubarb pie on the patio, watching a pair of chickadees hover over the wet lawn, listening to the cool wind rustle through the tree boughs, and thinking about the stories we tell ourselves.

Our minds are fueled by story. Stories unite us, warn us, soothe us, infuse us with courage. We use them to transmit our values, to slip truth into dangerous places, to remember, to escape, to fight, to heal, to find each other.

Story is what humans do. Consciously or not, we are constantly building stories to make sense of the world around us. Stories cushion the mind--keeping the brain from breaking every time the heart does.

Over the last year, reeling as loss chased after loss, we’ve needed story as much as ever. 

My sister should have turned 25 this week.

Her ashes have been in a jar for three months.  

Painting the day after I heard.

It wasn’t like we hadn’t braced for bad news.

Still, it came out of nowhere. She’d just recovered from Covid after all. Quarantined, gone back to work. She had work, again, despite the closures, despite everything else. 

Scattered from coast to coast, what else could we siblings do but begin piecing together a story? What happened to her? When and how and why? In an instinctive expression of human grief, we shared memories, pooling our knowledge of Glory Anna's life so we would remember. We all knew her so differently; we even call her by different names.

I mostly recall her infancy—she was born into chaos and conflict. I left home the next year; we only shared a roof for two years of her first five. I listened to stories from the years after: stories that infuriated me, stories that made me proud, stories that broke my tired heart.

I could tell Glory’s story a dozen different ways, each version with a different villain to despise but always the same abrupt ending. (How does the math work? Am I still the oldest of 11? Does our baby sister move up to tenth place? What do we do with the gap?)

The true story? It’s all of them. The story that soothes me is that, though we’d never met as adults—distanced by twenty years and a thousand miles, in the weeks before her death Glory told me the stories she needed me to know. Those are the things I want most to remember. Our parents will include none of them in their stories, as they don’t fit their criteria for remembrance. We tell ourselves the stories that bring us comfort, after all. My bedtime reading is their nightmare, and vice versa.

Religions offer prepackaged story sets that remain popular in part because they claim, to varying degrees, they can keep the weight of the universe from crushing our little minds. Some achieve this by locking the mind in an airtight box while others leave room for add-on stories, or let you choose your own adventure. Stories gave me flight; stories keep my parents trapped and sad.

As a child, Glory was a storyteller. She saw power in stories, a means of escape from small minds and small hearts. When she got older, she tried other escapes.

I hesitate to speak of her death—my neighbors don’t know, nor my in-laws—because I resent hearing “I’m sorry for your loss” when news headlines remind me daily that the world doesn’t actually care. If I was a child, or poor, or black, or gay; addicted, homeless, pregnant, stalked by an ex; Asian, African, Jewish, born in Palestine? The world wouldn’t give a damn about my loss. Ohio didn’t care enough to give Glory unemployment. Michigan saddled her with medical bills. No one checked on us to be sure we were getting an education and healthcare and not just whippings and whooping cough.

When therapy is inaccessible and street drugs easier to obtain than prescription ones, “I’m sorry” feels…offensive. I resent hearing “I’m sorry” while millions of Americans mourn 600,000 Covid dead while being told we just need to “get back to normal” capitalism. People lost spouses, providers, children, teachers. Disease stole parents from 40,000 kids in this country alone. We’re losing our planet, our democracy, and our humanity, but, yeah, enjoy that normalcy. 

I resent hearing it from people who can’t grasp that my loss is just the same as hers: a safe childhood, education matched to our potential, parents who loved us more than their sadistic sex-obsessed god. I lost Glory when she was a toddler and I moved far, far away, crying at my therapist’s because I had my own kids now but still worried over the babies I’d left behind. I lost her again when she was 16, when my own escape and healing meant estrangement from our parents. I never expected it to be permanent. As my recovery progressed, I slowly reconnected with five other sisters, but I never saw Glory again.

I am angry that Glory had to fight so hard just to live in this unfair world. Her loss was far greater than mine because when I left that world at 24, I found the support to heal and build a new one, while she had to support herself however she could, forgoing the education she could have excelled at. She was winsome, brave, intelligent, resourceful, and kind. There is comfort in knowing she can’t be hurt anymore.

Glory tried so hard to live on her own terms; I wish she could still be exercising that privilege today. 

Tonight her siblings will remember her on her birthday. We will tell the best stories and stay away from the sad ones. We may comfort ourselves by weaving tales of dreams, ghosts, dandelions, or mermaids. Because Glory, who refused to be limited to a tangible world, would like that. 

Glory and me a decade ago.

A Time To Give Up As Lost

A time to throw stones and a time to gather stones;

A time to embrace and a time to shun embracing.

A time to search and a time to give up as lost...

My youngest gets her second Pfizer jab this week.

I bought her a chocolate malt to celebrate the first but the real prize was my sense of relief. 

After 14 scary months, months of loss upon loss, could we be getting back the future tense the pandemic stole from us?

For a long while last year I held hope that we could pick up where we left off. Return to school, resume activities, keep events on the calendar. But as one thing after another was canceled (graduation, vacation, book club, enrollment, music theater, holidays), I got the message. The world we knew would no longer exist when we finally caught up.

I'm ready for the losses to stop, if only to give me space to grieve all the things that aren't coming back. 

There are people I loved who didn't make it this far, people I mourned alone when I should have been celebrating them with the many who miss them. My trust is damaged; my sense of safety--carved slowly and deliberately over a decade--lies slashed and mangled. I don't know how it can be restored. 

But in the last six months my daughter has finally won me over to love Dr. Who (horror, adventure, loss, romance, socially awkward aliens--what's not to like?) and if there's anything we're good at, it's regeneration. Pretty sure I must be 600 years old by now, I've lived so many lives.

Who I'll be next it's too early to tell, but the process is starting as I begin, cautiously, to explore the new post-vaccine world. I'll have the old memories, fresh perspective, and no idea what time means anymore.

One of my first ventures out was a glass weaving class. Four of us, masked, working at separate tables in a spacious room. 

I'd never worked with glass before and the breadth of sensations suited me: smooth glass sheets, the tiny-pizza-wheel scoring tool etching a gritty trail, biting the glass between rubber-tipped running pliers, the snap of a clean break, the clink of cut glass shapes in my palm, the whirr of a motor switched on, pressing glass strips against the grinder to wear sharp edges and corners smooth. I was so engrossed I even forgot to be anxious, or hold my breath inside my mask.  

To weave the strips for my design, half of them had to soften in the kiln to create waves. Interesting, huh? 

I feel like the glass some days: strong, inflexible, sharp, brittle, translucent, slumping where my supports fall away. 

This week, when I take my daughter downtown for her shot, we'll stop by the studio to see how my art came out. I can't wait to hang it on my wall as a symbol of new starts and taking new shapes.

Look, I'm using future tenses again! Yippee!

Fantasy World

Like many people, I've spent a lot of time in my head the last year. 

It's not unlike my childhood when I pretended my home was *actually* a boarding school for the blind, our bikes were horses, and instead of parents I was surrounded by professional educators who were warm, competent, and certainly childless. 

Or like my adolescence when I spent an inordinate amount of time struggling to picture heaven from all angles: from mathematical (try dividing eternity by 2 next time you have insomnia) to optical (no sun, no night, colors that don't exist on our color wheel?) to moral (how can people be happy in heaven if their relatives are on a perpetual barbecue in hell? is ignorance bliss?)

My fantasy world these days makes NURTURING ITS YOUNG its #1 priority. I dream of a society that refuses to buy police one more tank or even rubber bullet until EVERY school is stocked with paper towels, hand soap, free lunch that smells good, and a full-time nurse. Imagine if we agreed that all children--regardless of zip code or parentage--deserve real food, clean water and air, a safe home, health care, education, protection from violence, and the right to play at recess even if they forgot their ID.

Teaching would be honored, and financially rewarded, as a noble profession, with no tolerance for adults who model bullying in the classroom. (In the same vein, cops who violate the public trust, and men who commit violence at home, would forever forfeit any right to carry firearms.)

Mental health screenings--for all kids and caregivers--would be as regular as dental ones. New parents, or abusive parents flagged by checkups, would receive mentoring. Cities would competitively invest in quality childcare to attract companies. Children would be taught from toddlerhood how to care for their bodies and their minds, how to expect respect, and how to say no. Schools would get all the resources they need to fully fund music programs AND drivers' ed. And the healthcare coverage! Funded by taxing the corporations getting fat off our consumption, helpful drugs and therapies would finally be easier to get than deadly ones, even for teens or young moms surviving on $2/hr plus tips!

We'd keep strong families, of whatever shape or immigration status, intact--never killing or jailing or deporting parents over pieces of paper. We wouldn't let fostered children simply disappear. We'd interrupt the detention-to-incarceration pipeline with targeted social support until private prisons go bankrupt and law “enforcers” have to stop using body armor manufactured by American slaves. Maybe fewer kids would grow up wanting to wear a bully’s uniform or to escape their lives by dropping bombs on other kids with a remote control and would instead find meaning in trauma-informed social science, biological research, diplomacy, the arts.

We'd cease building prisons and we'd start centers for healing, with trees and gardens and libraries where [update: *even*] Neil Gaiman's work isn't banned. Lots of sunlight. Treatment would focus on recovery, restoration, reconnection, relationships. And probably pancakes and puppies.

Maybe my fantasies are a buffer for my mental health, or maybe they're a threat to it. 

I used to imagine I was blind. 

Now imagination is the only way I can live with my eyes open.

Transition

 

According to my mom's nursing textbooks, a stage of labor. The worst part, I gathered from her friends. Tugging and stretching from the inside. "If she seems angry, or starts shaking, or says she can't do this--that's normal." Hallmarks of transition.

I was living in the Philippines while preparing for my wedding when a seasoned expatriate instructed me to attend a "transitions" workshop. I scoffed (I was young! I was resilient! I was leaving in a matter of months!) but that was decades ago and I'm still grateful. 

Having been exposed to very little research-based psychology at that point, the tools the instructors offered blew me away. I believe this was my first introduction to the concept of psychological trauma. They explained how our brains process change as loss, how we grieve even through happy transitions, and how to prepare a RAFT to ride out the rapids of inevitable change.

When they explained the importance of goodbyes, I cried. And there, under the palm trees, I began to heal from years of heart bruises sustained while working for the IBLP cult, which excelled at both facilitating deep human attachments and ripping them away.

Transitions, it turns out, are both cause for celebration and the most intense stage of creating something new. 

The following year, despite obsessively reading birth stories to prepare myself, my daughter was weeks old before I recognized the transition stage of my labor. At the time, the outside world fell away as I went deep inside myself, summoning the strength to start a brand-new life.

This summer has been one long series of transitions. I find myself obeying the same instinct, withdrawing and digging deep. It's been...intense.

Daughter to woman. Student to graduate. Child to adult. 

Shopping to pick-up. Friends to family. Travel to staycation.

Middle school to high school. School to home. Home to university. 

Quiet to loud. Inside to outside. Live to remote. Anxious to angry to hopeful and back again. 

Provider to mentor. Part-time mom to full-time to long-distance.

We moved our firstborn to campus last week, with protective masks and mixed feelings of pride, anxiety, envy. 

For us, it was the culmination of 18 years of choices in support of both our daughter and our values (albeit under circumstances we never envisioned). I confess, as the first to leave home myself, I had not fully empathized with the plight of a younger sibling losing a best friend. But parenting is ever an  emotional expansion--experiencing life through multiple proxies at once, each child needing different support.

Considering how many times I have used paint or a new hairstyle to assert autonomy when I felt otherwise helpless or out of control, I wasn't surprised when my youngest chose a radical new cut for her birthday this month. Or that she wanted to update her room. What did surprise me is that she recognized when the pace of change was too much. She knew to slow down what she could and climb aboard her own "raft", comforting herself with the familiar, digging deep, enjoying change by degrees. 

My girls give me courage to keep embracing change and as always, my partner provides steadying emotional support when I get wobbly and think "I can't do this".

We will all be adjusting to this latest transition for a few weeks, then remote high school will upend the routines we've slid into over the last 5 months of "summer" and we'll calibrate yet again, thankful for the technology that connects us to the things we need and the people we love. 

Transition: the process of changing from one state to another. 

Transitions are stages of movement and growth, and they can be intense! But to live well is to change, so I wouldn't want a life without transitions. Here's to making it through the rapids and floating out on the wide calmer waters beyond.

WOmenarche

The truck stop toilet bowl

Swirls red

Empties with a whoosh.

Why was it red, Mommy?

Mommies bleed sometimes.

Does it hurt?

Where does it come from, Mommy?

It looked like kool-aid. Giggles.

You’ll learn all about it someday.

And me?

Not you. Just mommies.

Oh.

Nine years later—

Capsized by a wave of hormones

Baptism by blood

I am the fountain

I am the flood

I am…back in diapers?

No, thank you!

This is a mutiny!

At day’s exhausted end I

Brush my teeth, brush my hair,

Scrub iron-rich stains from underwear,

So focused I forget to look in the rearview mirror,

Miss my last glimpse of carefree girlhood.

I miss my body. The one that fit.

For whom this bloody sacrifice?

Certainly not for me.

This woman’s body is cranky and clumsy

And sore and doesn’t fit.

It leaks! A terrible design.

Having lived by the sun,

I’m now chained to the moon,

A mysterious red moon somewhere in my belly

That will drip down my legs

Like melted strawberry popsicle

Thirteen times a year.

If I’m lucky.

For how long?

Forty years, maybe.

Forty!

Panties in the sink 500 times?

I didn’t sign up for this!

You look nice, he says. Is that perfume?

That shade looks unnatural, she says,

I don’t like your tone.

As if I am marooned by choice.

And you’re a lady now? pries granny.

I am.

The boys were fun, she remembers.

Nothing serious, just friends,

But we went to the beach and I couldn’t…

I dearly loved to swim.

It’s our whispered secret:

This lady business is not all grand.

Cramps—

On hikes and bikes and airplanes,

Church pews, carousels.

Bleeding through sleeping bags, guest sheets,

McDonald’s napkins in a pinch.

Crimson blotches on the soap bar.

Rolling engorged and sweaty pads into stinking snails

And burying them in the wastebasket.

I know my roommate’s blood by pungent scent

Uncowed by candles, soaps, or sprays.

She must know mine?

(Does it attract or repulse predators, I wonder?)

Discreet, we never discuss

But when we bleed we take the elevator,

A small monthly indulgence.

Undeterred by calendars

Blood intrudes on

Parties,

Vacations,

Holidays,

Honeymoon.

My lovers were never squeamish

So why,

When I long to bathe a sword in blood,

Am I too shy to ask?

At long last I am ready to put

This program that has hummed steadily

In the background so long

To its use: a portal

To communicate with the future.

Red-hot hope fixed on

A water balloon in my belly

Spills out again in

Pools of liquid disappointment.

My moon is defective,

Its tides too strong.

Are we to be forever marooned in the present?

And then it holds!

Waxes full! Its tides raise a mountain and

From a mighty crevasse bursts new life, lusty and strong.

Blood flows like lava, slows, and is replaced by yellow drops as

Golden as new motherhood.

Before the tides can resume,

Another mountain, another earthquake,

A squirming pink treasure

With squinty eyes, rosebud mouth,

And a slit that oozes pink stain in the doll-sized diaper,

Practice for when she will sync with a moon,

Twelve years hence.

Son cries against the bathroom door.

Inside, I sit over a bowl of kool-aid and clots,

Shaky with relief. I rest my hands

On my thighs as milk lets down.

Gratitude flowing.

Everything leaking at once, salty and sweet.

Twenty years down. Twenty to go.

The toilet paper is gone.

Of course it is.

  

-J. Lofland

7/8/2020

National Public Radio

When you're working in the kitchen listening to the radio, do you ever fantasize about being one of those voices? About being asked questions in front of the entire country? For the last few years, I must admit that this has been one of my common daydreams. I wonder what I would say, whether my voice would shake, how one gets that kind of platform.

And then, while my family was seeing The Rise of Skywalker and I was still emotionally recovering from Christmas, I got a surprise email. 

And then a phone call...

And, well, I kicked off the New Year by being interviewed on NPR!

The experience is still surreal, since I only found out the day before that I would be a studio guest for a whole hour of the 1A program. Listen here to our conversation about regulations on homeschooling.

Some of you have tried to contact me here, which is how I learned that the Blogspot Contact Form has been down for weeks and messages left there will unfortunately not reach me.

If you have comments, etc., kindly visit Heresy in the Heartland on Facebook.

Thanks for reading, thanks for listening, thanks for caring. I can tell this is going to be a year of new experiences and stepping up to the unexpected!

Adrenaline

I haven't always understood why anyone would want to jump out of airplanes, climb peaks, race down snowy mountainsides on sticks, or be dragged across a lake strapped to a parachute. The last time I was at a beach with my mother, she gestured at the tourists flying like kites over the bay. "Would you ever want to do that?" she wondered.

That's when I realized what we have in common. Because I love a good rush of adrenaline, too. I just don't have to dance with my own mortality to get it. Lesser risks suffice to provide me with the thrill of survival. Going on stage without notes.  Walking into a public school. Inviting a stranger to dance. Inviting a friend to dance (which can be scarier!). Grocery shopping without a bra. Exposing my soul. And--most exciting of all--what I think of as Intellectual Skydiving. 

I get a buzz from daring thoughts. Entertaining dangerous ideas. Challenging norms. Blurring black and white. Indulging imaginations with real social repercussions. Viewpoints that carry potential for rejection, that could get one shunned or branded a heretic by one group or another. Conclusions one shares guardedly, or not at all.

After decades of change and transition and challenging my former ways of thinking, I’m always afraid the adventurous part of the ride is over. I've reached the boring end of the line. Get used to it, lady, I tell myself. It's called being stable. (Go ahead and laugh.) This is where we live now, centered. Rooted and grounded. There's nowhere left to grow. 

My heart looks wistfully back, convinced I will never again experience the heady rush of flirting with heresy or peering over theoretical cliffs or chasing my curiosity into dark, twisting, forbidden caverns.

But then... I do it again. 

And it's exhilarating. 

Fear and Freedom and Fear

I listened to a bit of Michael Cohen's testimony to Congress this morning. To tell the truth, the sound of mature-looking professional men yelling at each other in public wakened long-dormant memories of observing Baptist business meetings with my dad--when I was amazed to see a mild man, whom I had only previously known behind the pulpit or shaking hands, turn red-faced and angry when someone dared question the financial priority of his beloved softball!

When I turned the livestream on again later, a Republican Congressman was forcefully explaining why he didn't care what Cohen said. Cohen's words could not be trusted, he said, because Cohen is a liar. Greedy. A bully. A narcissist. He went on.

I shut the screen off again, because, really? As I learned decades ago from Winnie-the-Pooh, "there is no real answer to 'Ho-ho!' said by a Heffalump in the voice this Heffalump was going to say it in."

I used to love irony, but it has been so sadly stretched the last few years, so turned inside out, so prolapsed as to require surgical reconstruction. It turns out that irony is a kind of inside joke that is far less enjoyable when it is hanging out 24/7 and people are cruising past pretending it isn't even there.

Whatever words are spoken in the Capitol today, they will not solve my larger question:

How do I treat individuals...

      who voted for a sneaking, grasping bully... 

             with the dignity and humanity they deserve? 

Because I sure as hell* don't trust them.

Oh, they may seem like kind, decent people--they may be my neighbors, my relations, (heaven forbid!) my dance partners?--but their ballot choice exposed them as a threat, if not to me personally, then to my children and to other children and to the planet on which my children must live with their peers long after I've taken my leave.

I can imagine that these particular individuals, some of whom I must interact with, bear no malice toward me or mine. It does, however, require the exercise of imagination. Their alignment with a cruel incompetence may stem from ignorance--an excuse which, at best, reveals a deficiency of curiosity so acute as to be actually dangerous. Dangerous to me and to the ones I care about. Dangerous to women around the globe. Dangerous to anyone categorized by powerful men as "other".

The scent of danger on the air puts me on alert. My body stiffens, my heart pumps faster.

Fear. But we are warned against fear.

"Fear is a sin. We are commanded to 'fear not'. God has not given us a spirit of fear..." Jesus! I don't even believe in sin, or god, or spirits. Yet the deep anxiety over fear is ingrained.

"Fear is the path to the dark side! Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate..." Shit, Yoda. You're no help!

"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself!" Yeah, right.

I've spent the last five years learning that it's okay to protect myself. That my fear can be a signal, that my instincts are a strength, that boundaries are my salvation, that not everyone is safe. And when people show me who they are, I believe them and take precautions accordingly.

What am I afraid of, exactly?

My life is great, after all! I have the intertwined privileges of being white, straight, married, educated, insured, Midwestern and middle-class. So what fear is set loose when I see men yelling at a New York lawyer who is on his way to prison?

Well, rational or not, I am afraid of enslavement. Not literally, though it has come to mind. Of losing my hard-won autonomy. Of having choices taken away. Of being punished for asserting my humanity. I fear coldness and narrowness. I fear losing a debate and with it, my freedom. And it does make me angry. Cages--for the body or the mind--make me angry. Injustice and inequality make me angry.

I saw the faces in Congress today. I know there are plenty of powerful people in Washington, in Kansas, in my neighborhood even, for whom I represent a threat to the fabric of society. With as much glee as they deport immigrants thirsty for a new life, they would put me back in the box where they deem I will be most "fulfilled".

Deep down, that is what frightens me. I may have anxiety about the environment, about global conflict, about economic trends, but small-mindedness scares me most of all. That is why my pulse quickens when I have to share a road or a sidewalk or a room with someone who is comfortable with a government that separates children from their parents, or a god who would barbecue me for eternity. People with an abusive and narcissistic god have grown accustomed to manipulation and abuse. We do not cherish the same values. We are not building the same future. Where I want bridges, they want walls. 

I don't want to live in fear. I want to live bravely, boldly, out in the sunshine. I also want to feel safe.

So... it's a dance.

The humans who remind me that this world is a good and beautiful place, who take risks, who expose truth, people with wise hearts and kind hands, who see with compassion and love without judgement--to them I show my truest self. Them I hold close to my heart. Them I wish well.

And those who--from ignorance or misguided zeal--empower cruelty, and greed, and lies, them I will be on guard against. Because I have known abuse. I have known narrowness. I have tasted freedom and I refuse to go back. I give myself permission to respect my fear. To use caution in the presence of people who have not earned my confidence. To jealously guard my best gifts. To be a wise serpent always, sometimes taking the shape of a dove. Because by fostering my own humanity,  I honor theirs, as well.



*Irony!

Out Loud Thoughts on Motherhood

How is motherhood "supposed" to feel?

I have suspected for a long time that the sentimentality about mother-love and maternal instinct and "you know you'd just die for them" and "my heart outside my body" is either a fantasy or more bullshit propagated to make women feel guilty.

After a decade of helping raise my baby siblings, I was very curious about how motherhood would feel different from sisterhood. I cared for my siblings: I fed them, changed them, bathed them, wiped their noses, brushed their teeth, braided their hair, played with them, cleaned their scrapes, kissed their bruises. I prayed for them, sang to them, rocked them to sleep. When Mom wasn't there, I did my best to keep them safe and happy so I could present them back to her--healthy and mostly clean. As far as I could tell at the time, the only things I didn't do were grow them in my uterus and feed them from my breasts. I looked forward to having that experience because that would make me a full-fledged woman, equal in stature to my mother and her friends, not a mere surrogate but the real thing.

Having babies was expected. I didn't particularly want babies or not want them (I had an alternate life plan should we happen to be infertile), but I believed motherhood was the surest route to feeling like a true adult, and I desperately wanted that. So I was excited when I found out that everything "worked" and we had made an embryo.

When my first baby was born, I cried over her every day for weeks. She was by far the tiniest person I'd ever held, I was amazed by all I'd just experienced, and the chemicals rushing through my sore and swollen body were a combination I'd never felt before. For the next few months, my focus was sharpened to a single point: keeping her alive at all costs. By which I meant keeping myself alive, because I was her lifeline, her energy source, her matrix. I expected the same response when my son was born, but it never happened and I wondered if this meant I was a terrible and unfit mother or simply a tired and seasoned one, non-stick like a well-used cast iron skillet.

I've always felt a strong responsibility for my kids when they are in my care. But I rarely spend much time thinking about them when they are at school or under the supervision of an adult I trust. It's as if, deep down, I still believe my responsibility is to keep my kids happy and safe until their mom gets home when I will be rewarded with, "Good job; thank you." And it turned out that having my name on three birth certificates still did not make me feel like a grown-up.

Many people have heard me speculate that my maternal "instincts" were burned out on my siblings, my first batch of children, as it were. I did worry about those children for years after I left home, fretting that I couldn't give them the care and love and protection they deserved. By comparison, I felt less attached to my own children. They were always present, of course, so there was no pull to be nearer. I didn't feel the way I expected to feel as their mother. Perhaps because they developed in a healthier atmosphere, they began to differentiate from me on a much more natural schedule. And even though they came slipping out of my vagina and their multiplying cells were fueled by food I swallowed on their behalf, they could have been another series of brother and sisters, or nieces and nephews--more small humans whose DNA resembles my own. Even today, whenever I am around my family of origin, I inevitably call my kids by my siblings' names, as if they are a continuation, rather than a new generation.

Perhaps I never had "maternal instincts" at all. I've certainly never wished that babies would stay babies; I was the one counting off how many more years till they move out of the house. The smaller the child, the more energy they required, and it seemed better for everyone when they could do more things for themselves. The most fascinating thing about babies was to watch them become increasingly responsive: when my daughter's nervous system developed enough to be ticklish, when she made eye contact, when she could mimic her grandma, when my son could be saddened by words on the radio.

Watching minds grow has always brought me joy. Feeding information to children is fun, in the same way that it was fun to feed peaches to the zoo bears when I was a kid. I must have been in second or third grade when my dad came home from a business trip and handed me a paperback with a colorful cover: The Silent Storm. I had watched enough Little House on the Prairie to grasp blindness; I'd been exposed to sign language and to braille. As I read about Helen Keller and W-A-T-E-R, I could imagine being locked in black silence with peaches and cake and toys--but no alphabet. No words. No books. No songs. No Sesame Street. To my mind, it was a fate worse than death. And tragically, no amount of parental love could bring Helen to life. Their desperation, however, led them to Annie Sullivan who slipped the key of language under the door of Helen's prison. That story gave me goosebumps. I reenacted it more than once, holding one hand under a cold spigot while spelling w-a-t-e-r with the other. Annie Sullivan was my kind of superhero; her spectacles were better than any cape. I longed for a Teacher, a companion and mentor to feed me all the knowledge I could hold. I wanted to be her. I would choose Annie Sullivan over Mrs. Keller any day.

And maybe that's who I've been.

Sometime in my mid-20's, I realized I'd grown up in a linguistics laboratory. And soon it was my turn to give my own children language. And not just language, but literacy: literature, comedy, journalism, speculation, poetry, song. They have the tools with which to experience this world and to express their sensations, as well to imagine new worlds and to communicate those images. They have inner resources I didn't have, and outlets for idea exchange that I didn't have, either. I'm thankful beyond words that they have teachers and friends and support systems outside the four walls of this house.

As a new mom, I imitated my own mom. I was a confident mother because I'd done most of it before, and the rest I'd watched her do. Every good memory from my childhood I tried to recreate for my own kids. But my own childhood ended by the time I was a tween, from then on I was more of a mother's helper than a daughter. I had years of practice raising young children...but now that my kids are teenagers? I'm winging it. It's all uncharted territory now.

Their lives are so different from my own at their age that we might have grown up on different planets. When I speak in the language of my first twenty-five years, only my husband understands the words. I feel lucky to live with someone who still remembers the world we came from, while my kids stare and ask, "What did you say? What does that even mean?" Sometimes we translate it for them, sometimes we let the words evaporate in the space that will always be between our children and us.

So I don't know how motherhood is "supposed" to feel. But when I listen to my children today, I feel pride mixed with awe. I enjoy their company. It's a treat to share new experiences with them. To introduce them to people and places and activities that hold meaning for me. To watch their personalities bloom. Watching them be themselves, I continually learn new things about my self. Now I find myself imitating them. I admire their courage, their discipline, their soft hearts, their creativity, and their wisdom.

They are, unexpectedly, becoming my favorite people and my best friends.

ATI's Many, Many Programs

And while we're at it, a quick and dirty overview of ATI's programs for kids enrolled in Gothard's homeschool curriculum.  ATI was less a curriculum and more of a collection of Gothard's hobbies and his staff's passions. Most of these programs required cross-country travel and were not inexpensive, especially for large [Quiverfull] families.

Please let me know what programs I've missed! Again, this will probably show up better if you click on the image itself.

How many did you participate in? And which ones did you wish you could do, but it never worked out?

IBLP Locations

While we're at it, here is my attempt to represent the geographical spread of IBLP. At its peak, the Institute had staffed centers at these locations. Most of these were active in the early 2000's.

Blue: international centers.
Yellow: never quite got off the ground.
Green: residential campuses that Gothard staffed primarily with children and young adults from his homeschool program. (Some paid for the privilege; some worked for free; others received minimum wage.)
Gray: miscellaneous buildings. Some were used to re-program youth sent by the courts or by their parents.
Red: offices of IBLP's correspondence law school, though it was partly run from other locations.


(Clicking on the image should make it clearer.)

What Was That Cult Called?

After snacking on after-school cookies and milk, my teenage daughter casually asked, "What was the cult called?"

"The cult we were in? Um, it had a lot of names. Why?"

"'Cause I mentioned in history class that my parents were in a cult, and some people wanted to know which one, and I didn't know its name."

"Ooohhh...yeah, it's confusing."

So I grabbed a marker from the board (I grew up with a chalkboard in the kitchen and my kids will think it's normal to have a markerboard--I mean, I ask you, where else do you post chore lists, make menus, work math problems, or diagram sentences for the edification of all?) and began sketching and explaining until I ran out of space, my daughter had a decent understanding of the IBLP structures we had been part of, and I had drawn something like a new constellation.

My daughter snapped a photo of my sloppy writing and disappeared to her computer to turn it into a proper diagram. I tweaked and added to it and present it here, gratefully, as her work.

As IBLP ages and Gothard's potency is diluted, I think it is important not to lose the scent of his ideas as they reach corners that would otherwise seem safe from his noxious influence. When prisoners are given "character booklets" from Strata Leadership, for example, they have no way of distinguishing which concepts were actually the grooming techniques of a sexual predator and con man.

I'm proud that Gothard's name is not familiar to my children. But I trust they'll be able to spot his poisonous manipulation and authoritarianism anywhere.

NOTE: I've revised the image to include more programs. (1/16/19)

For Whose Pleasure?

You are doubtless aware that Facebook has this sometimes harrowing feature that dredges up historical posts so that while I'm waking up and sipping my coffee I can also wander through a kind of digital wrack line (TIL that is the official name for the debris deposited on the beach at high tide--you're welcome!) and hunt for forgotten treasures while stepping over the decaying fish.

This morning's wrack line included a treasure of a TED talk by Sofia Jawed-Wessel called The Lies We Tell Pregnant Women. The whole piece is wonderful, but this was the paragraph that arrested my attention a couple of years ago:

Every time a woman has sex simply because it feels good, it is revolutionary. She is revolutionary. She is pushing back against society's insistence that she exist simply for men's pleasure or for reproduction. A woman who prioritizes her sexual needs is scary, because a woman who prioritizes her sexual needs prioritizes herself.

--Sofia Jawed-Wessel 

That quote alone deserves to be its own post. So feel free to stop reading here.

Seriously. 

But when those words resurfaced on my pre-dawn Facebook, a weird phrase also danced out of a dusty corner of my groggy brain:

“For His Pleasure”

His? Huh?

I couldn’t quite recall where I first encountered these words, but they somehow seemed so familiar.

Thinking it may have been a book title, I consulted the omniscient google, which offered both an erotica series AND a book from Moody Press. Naturally. 😂

Of course! All things were made for God’s pleasure. He took pleasure in those who fear Him. Without faith it was impossible to please Him. He was pleased with a broken, contrite heart. He worked in me "to will and to do His good pleasure".

I never questioned it in my decades as a Christian. My body was His temple. I was His blood-bathed bride. (Anyone else feel like they need a shower yet?) And I was told He had opinions on what I should eat, what I should wear, how long I should sleep, in short, what I did with every body part, especially my vagina. 

And while I spent hours and hours pondering how I could please Jesus, my parents--indeed, all my authorities--as a happy and obedient handmaid (a word I applied to myself decades before I'd heard of Margaret Atwood), from my teens on I spent no time plotting how to experience pleasure myself.

Our own pleasure was expressly forbidden, in fact, and twice on Sundays!

• "He who loves pleasure will become a poor man"
• "...enjoy pleasure...this also is vanity"
• "Call the sabbath a delight, the holy of the LORD...not doing thine own ways, nor finding thine own pleasure, nor speaking thine own words"
• "Behold the handmaid of the Lord, be it unto me according to thy word"
• "Not my will, but thine"
• "She that liveth in pleasure is dead while she liveth."
• "lovers of pleasure more than lovers of God"
• "Ye have lived in pleasure on the earth, and been wanton"
• "the pleasures of sin for a season"

This phrase is probably part of why I lean so hard into my own pleasure now. A compelling reason to prioritize actions--like yoga, like dancing, like mindful eating--that help me be more present and content in my physical body. And I definitely lean into my sensual pleasure—whether I want orgasms, a warm touch, or just a soft, cuddly sweater hugging my shoulders.

Prioritize your own pleasure this week, friends!

"Flow"

Holiday Drama

I used to think depression around the holidays was a newer struggle for me, until a quick tour through old journals last December showed that it's one of my oldest traditions. This year I began strategizing early to head off, or at least minimize, the holiday blues. Back in September, I auditioned for my second community theater show this year, and to my surprise, I got a part!

Hurrah for intensive DRAMA THERAPY!

If you haven't seen the classic film Harvey, starring Jimmy Stewart, well, you probably should. In keeping with my "Living Backwards" motto, I am playing a twenty-something single girl: Myrtle Mae. A stay-at-home-daughter, if you will! Myrtle Mae and her widowed mother have been cast on the generosity of her uncle (and his imaginary friend).

This 40's hairdo has been too much fun.

Harvey was the farcical creation of Mary Chase, a journalist from Denver who kept on writing stories of all kinds as she raised three sons with her news editor husband, and the play won her a Pulitzer during World War II. I love being part of plays written and directed by women. This one also happens to include relevant themes like mental illness, feeling trapped, loneliness, and male doctors not believing women. Not to mention the complexities of living with someone who has a "relationship" with an unseen entity!

"Play-acting" as the Puritans in The Witch of Blackbird Pond called it, has been a fun challenge and a very welcome distraction. Memorize lines? But, of course! Didn't I memorize entire chapters of the Bible once upon a time, to recite with my siblings, sometimes with coordinated motions? Every night I get to have angry outbursts and tearful meltdowns, speak sarcastically to my stage "mother", curse the invisible being who makes my life miserable, and despair of ever being found by a man who will be my ticket to a wider world.

Myrtle Mae with Aunt Ethel!

It's been strangely therapeutic to work with a team of no-longer-strangers to create two hours of living, breathing art that will no longer exist after today. Each performance is a dance as together we weave a tapestry of words and movements for our audience--painfully attuned to their sighs and their giggles, their gasps and their coughs; their guffaws energize us. Gently, subtly rescuing each other when one of us stumbles over a sentence or misplaced prop, we own our mistakes and do all in our power not to repeat them as moments of intensity under the lights alternate with stretches of backstage boredom.

The camaraderie of the cast conjures memories from my cultic past. The intimacy of sharing darkness, close spaces, eye contact (remember that one?), dressing rooms, inside jokes, script books, snacks, even bobby pins, with people one may only have known a few weeks is uniquely exhilarating...and exhausting.

Seeing how people look after each other has reminded me how each individual's success (or distress) directly affects that of the whole. Each person's contribution is valued, and supported. The show is an organism made of many individuals filling unique roles--each one vital and, at this theater, each one is a volunteer effort.

Tomorrow night, I will miss these friends. I will miss their kindness, their quirks, and their silly banter. I will miss the anxiety of stepping into a new scene and the sense of accomplishment of stepping out of one. I will miss the countdowns, the cues, these phrases that have finally begun to roll off my tongue when they are supposed to. Perhaps what I will most miss is having a professional coax my hair into victory rolls!

And you may catch me wearing white gloves and 1940's makeup at the Kroger from time to time, just for the fun of it.

In my PJs, learning my lines.

Patriarchs, Purity, and Virginity Tests

Some art is constructed out of pure rage.

Did you know girls are jailed in Afghanistan for failing "virginity tests"? That tests for so-called "virginity" are used all over the world to determine whether a woman qualifies for employment, or education, or even marriage? Even here, a woman's sexual activity can diminish her worth in the eyes of her community, or even the laws that are supposed to protect her.

I'm not surprised, of course. If there was one message that came to me from all directions with surprising agreement, it was that the best gift I could possibly offer my future husband was an untouched vagina. Tampons were viewed with suspicion not merely as a health hazard, but because they posed the risk of "prematurely" stretching a hymen, which could mean no bleeding on one's wedding night. Horrors!

Deuteronomy 22, which I had read more than a dozen times before my own wedding night, assumed that a bride's parents would hang onto the bloodied honeymoon sheets (euphemistically called "the tokens of the damsel's virginity") to produce as evidence should her husband later try to worm out of the marriage by accusing her of having had premarital intercourse.

And in this Old Testament gem, Moses himself orders the Israelite army to use virginity tests as an act of war. It's rather horrifying in any translation, including the Jewish Publication Society's Tanakh (1917):

Now therefore kill every male among the little ones,
and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him.
But all the women children,
that have not known man by lying with him,
keep alive for yourselves.    Numbers 31:17-18

The Good Book, indeed.

Even Jesus, in the story supposed to illustrate his compassion and respect for the woman he met at the well, quickly brings up her sexual history ("you have had five husbands, and the man you have now is not your husband"), establishing her unworthy position in the patriarchal hierarchy with a single sentence.

It was a revelation to me to realize (not that many years ago) that a woman's value is not, in fact, tied to her sexual experience, OR to her lack thereof. That my sexual history is my own, not a gift I present to a partner. And a woman's sexual experiences, consensual or otherwise, ought certainly never influence society's interest in her safety or well-being. 

Fuck you, Moses.