Happy Sunday friends, I hope you’re having a restful weekend. Today finds me feeling deep gratitude for my healing journey. Lately I’ve been pondering shame and blame and how it can stay with us for a long time. Shame feels like a clinger, no matter how hard you try to shake it off it just won’t let go. I’ve been working to heal my shame for what feels like forever. During this time I’ve had to figure out how to separate what shame/blame belongs to me and what shame/blame belongs to others. It might seem like the answers would be obvious but when you’ve been raised in a toxic spirituality that teaches you that you are always to blame it can become hard to see reality. Even when you’ve solved the question of shame it keeps coming back around and you have to keep rejecting what isn’t your to carry.
Putting the shame and blame where they belong doesn’t mean you’re magically healed. I was deeply sad for a long time. I would ask myself, why would a man want to hurt me that way? Why would the church blame me when I was just a child? Why do they still seem to think I deserve to carry the shame of what others did to me before I could consent? If I let these questions get the best of me, I would be carried off to a very dark place. I would be overflowing with self-loathing and depression.
For about a year, I have been working with a very good therapist who really understands trauma. Because of this I have noticed a shift beginning to come over me. I’m not sad about the trauma anymore, I’m angry. This may not seem like much improvement but it is a big deal to me. I finally feel like I’m moving through my trauma again. I was making progress before and then some things happened in my life that caused me to freeze and kind of shut down. Freezing seems to be my preferred trauma response at the moment and once I’m there it is hard as hell to thaw out. So I’m angry, what does that mean? Well…I think it means that my self-loathing has lifted and I’m not feeling so sad. When I think about what happened to me I’m no longer interrogating myself but I’m allowing myself to feel anger towards those who did me wrong. I have no idea how long this season of anger will last, and I’m trying to just let myself feel it. I will release it someday, I’m sure, just not today.
Whew the last couple of summers have been challenging. Many of us in the survivor community have had to be brave in ways we never thought possible. Looking back it makes me beam with pride to see all we have accomplished. I have not seen the kind of justice I’d like to see but I feel good because I know I’ve worked hard to bring forth as much justice as possible. I’m tired but I’m not going to quit because this work is too important to me.
Speaking of rest, I have taken time over the last few days to strive less and rest more. I’m in the midst of a fibromyalgia flare and I’m once again reminded that I am not invincible. My eating disorder has popped back up probably due to stress and so I’ve had to be mindful to fuel my body. I’ve been struggling to sleep well so I’ve had to give myself some grace on the days I sleep later than I’d like to. All of this work has a cost and right now the cost is my sleep, my ability to eat, and the flaring of my chronic pain disorder. I’m not trying to come off as complaining but I’m trying to be honest about my personal limitations. I’m grateful that I can fill up on time with my children and grandchildren. I’m lucky to have two sweet doggos who are always up for a snuggle or a game of fetch. When I’m on my own I try to remind myself to breathe deeply and show myself self-compassion. Self-compassion is key to remaining healthy when doing work that is triggering due to trauma. I’m also working toward leaning into my softness and not feeling like I have to be in self protection mode all the time. This is especially difficult due to the C-PTSD I suffer from. Trying to heal while being hurt by the process of your work, being triggered daily, and never feeling like you’ve done enough can really throw a person. I wrestle every day with the drive to keep moving forward and also the desire to cut myself a break. This week I’m trying to be on the side of giving myself a break and resting.
This blog post is about what comes next so I suppose I should let you all in on what I have on my agenda. I’m currently working on revisions for the book I’m writing. It is exciting and taxing. I’m loving the process and I can’t wait until I have something to show you! I’ve also been considering what I’d like to research and share with you all here. The church teaching that caused me the most stress as a child was the theology of the rapture. I intend to talk more about that here and on my Youtube channel as I unwind the teachings that I took in as a child. I finally feel like I’m in a place with my trauma where it is safe for me to do that. After that I’d love to dive into the idea of original sin, but I feel that is a ways down the road. What would you like to see discussed here? Do you have a trauma sticking point you’d like me to cover?
Lastly, thank you. Thank you for sticking with me for so long as I work through my childhood and try to gain justice for myself and others. In some of my toughest times your comments have helped to see me through.
I’m back after a long break! I’m writing a book and so I’ve been putting much of my focus there. There are some things happening within the UPC Wisconsin District and hopefully soon I will have an update for you all.
The reason I’m here today has to do with some fresh spiritual abuse coming from my family. I do not have a ton of extended family and I’ve mostly put space between them and myself due to how judgmental they can be. I know that my mother’s fear of the rapture and hell came directly from her parents and then she passed it on down to me. When she decided to attend a church that her parents disapproved of it created a ton of drama in the family. Their brand of Christianity comes with a heavy dose of fear and standing in judgement of others. My uncle Mike is an assistant pastor in Florida. He posts the services from his church onto Youtube. A family member made me aware of some things that my uncle Mike first said about me and then about my brother. This all came about because my uncle has had some really unkind things to say about my brother and his sexuality and lack of church attendance. I stayed out of it until I felt I had to step in as a shield for my little brother. Then my uncle Mike turned his venom onto me. After I asked him to stop talking about my brother and I in his sermons and also to stop harassing my brother I blocked him from my social media. After this he went in front of his church and told them that he had been to the gates of hell because of the conversations my brother and I had with him. He has gone on to lie further about his communications with my brother. I just don’t understand how you can get up in front of your church and lie about your family. Both my brother and I have been nothing but respectful toward him in these conversations. I did tell him to remove the beam from his own eye before trying to remove it from my brother and I. I tried to explain to him in language that he could understand that he should focus on his own salvation.
My brother and I have suffered a lot because of our family. Many of them have held a zero tolerance policy towards homosexuality but also just towards churches that are not exactly like theirs. Every time they attempt to speak with us about God it always comes with a fear chaser. They dangle hell over our heads and then wonder why we want nothing to do with them. Here on earth they have not been kind, loving, or nurturing. Instead they have been judgmental, intolerant, and cold. They speak about the love of Christ but that is not what they are projecting out into the world. They only have love for those who are exactly like them or believe close enough to what they believe. Over and over I have heard how much they miss me and yet whenever I interact with them I’m told that hell is waiting for me. My uncle Mike even alluded to wanting to be present when we are standing before God so he could bare witness to what happens to us. Maybe if they approached us with love, acceptance, and care we wouldn’t feel the need to run away from them. Maybe if they presented God as love instead of a wrathful judge we would be more inclined to want to be a part of their faith. I have presented my uncle Mike with this perspective but he doesn’t want to hear it. Instead he uses his interactions with my brother and I to talk about how there isn’t much time and you never know when you’re going to die. He talks about us making his life so hard when we didn’t go looking for a fight with him, we are just living our lives. He attacked and then is hurt that he didn’t get the response that he wanted. I feel that even if we agreed with him and came back to church we wouldn’t ever be good enough. We would never be right. We only serve as a way for him to toot his own horn and celebrate his ability to scare us back into the fold.
I wish I could say that I’m beyond being hurt by them. Whenever something like this happens it triggers that part of me that has suffered so much at the hands of the church. It reminds me of my mother and all that she suffered because of her family. I think of her praying night after night begging God for help and never feeling rapture ready. I was the only witness to that pain and I lay the blame firmly at the feet of our family. In this moment as I feel the tightness in my chest that comes when my C-PTSD is triggered, I’m trying to remember to be grateful. I’m so grateful to be free from the fear virus that my family line carries. I may not always feel free and so I have to remind myself. I’m surrounded by my children and grandchildren who love me and a supportive community of friends. Lastly I’m free from the scary, always constant monster of a God that was introduced to me in my childhood.
The topic of historical abuse keeps popping up lately. Today I want to explain why I keep talking about my story. Some people might think, well this all started way back in 1981, shouldn’t she be past it all by now? There tends to be this misconception that just because I continue to speak about it means that I’m not trying to heal or move on with my life. Nothing could be further from the truth. I have worked and continue to work very hard on my own healing while recognizing that I will always have C-PTSD. It is not my desire to have to keep fighting this fight, nevertheless I press forward because I cannot turn my back on all of the children who are still in church. My conscience will not allow me to stop fighting until the church has been brought to justice. I’m not saying that all survivors should follow my path. We each have to do what is best for ourselves.
I know that my abuser has at least one other victim.
“Most perpetrators will continue to abuse children if they are not reported and stopped. Nearly 70% of child sex offenders have between 1 and 9 victims; at least 20% have 10 to 40 victims. An average serial child molester may have as many as 400 victims in his lifetime”
These statistics are what keep me awake at night. We know that abusers rarely stop at one child, I know my abuser had at least 2 victims. We also know that they do not stop unless they are brought to justice. My abuser still has access to children through the church he leads and the community that he has become very involved with. I am left to wonder how many more victims he has picked up over the years? These abusers are life ruiners. Once you become caught in their web you will likely spend your entire lifetime dealing with the damage they have caused. These acts are not something that you just move on from. It takes so much time and money to heal from these abuses, time and money that could be spent on so many other wonderful things. Every day I live with the fact that my abuser is still out there. People will say well he can’t hurt you now, and I understand that, but I am also aware that he can still hurt others. I think he should be on the sexual offenders list and be monitored by the authorities. At the very least I continue to speak so that others know to steer clear of him and the United Pentecostal Church. If I can save even one child from the pain I’ve endured it will have been worth it.
When abusers and those who cover for them are not brought to justice the cycle continues. Not only are the abusers able to continue their sick practices but those who cover for them are most likely going to be willing to cover for others like them. As long as these people remain in power the cycle continues and the victims pile up. In my case my pastor, John Grant Sr., was the district superintendent for the state of Wisconsin. I am sure he counseled others beneath him on how to handle cases like mine. He also had multiple cases within his own congregation that he swept under the rug. Because he has never been held responsible for his behavior the Madison church developed a policy of covering up crimes against children. His son is now in charge and has his own problems with being inappropriate with minors. How driven do you believe Roy Grant to be with regards to reporting abuse? So far it appears he is not shown himself to be willing to take responsibility for what he has done or how the congregation has a history of covering up crimes against children. He has shown himself to be unwilling to make any kind of amends towards survivors and so the cycle continues. Because it was not dealt with way back in 1981 we are still dealing with it in 2022. I know of so many survivors who once sat under Pastor John Grant and I’m sure there are so many more who are too afraid or just weary to come forward. Are you starting to see the cost? When crimes go without being brought to justice the cycle moves on and on. When institutions allow a culture of covering up abuse and then nepotism allows churches to pass from father to son children will continue to be at risk. Why do you think Calvary Gospel has so many survivors? I feel it is because abusers clearly saw that those in leadership were not moved to stand for children and because of that they felt safe to carry out their crimes. Men might have to stand before the church and confess but no one was going to call the cops. Also the men knew that the young girls would most likely be standing right there beside them because the church rarely sees these things as crimes against children but chooses to see them as adultery. Children were and are sacrificed on the altar of the church’s public image. Men who abuse minors are not weeded out and when they invite their friends to church often their friends are just like them. Over time the number of men willing to abuse minors grows while none of them are ever really removed from the congregation. This is how churches become rotten. Anyone who has ever had a garden knows you have to weed. I have to ask myself do the men in power cover up the crimes of congregants because they are afraid that maybe the finger will be pointed at them? Are they in hiding because of their own misdeeds?
We rarely ever speak about the women and their role. I can tell you from my own experience that the women within my home church were the meanest of them all. When I needed support or maybe someone to report on my abuser these women had nothing for me but accusing eyes and gossip. I think because women within the church are treated as second class citizens they try to garner status in any way they can. It might come in the form of who has the longest hair or the best clothing, whose husband has the highest position, or it might come in the form of looking your nose down on a little girl that you see as beneath you. Either way the women within the UPC are not free from responsibility. They support the church and keep the secrets just like the men do.
All of this creates a legacy of abuse and my story is just one small part of it. As long as the cycle continues I feel I have to keep telling my story and speaking about the systemic nature of it all. What we refuse to acknowledge and deal with will continue to fester and spread. What can you do? Well, you can uplift the stories of survivors. You can speak out regarding abuse you have witnessed and you can call out the leadership of your church. You can report abuse when you suspect it and you can speak the truth when others are too afraid to. For my part I’m going to continue to shed light where I can and I’m going to continue to seek my own healing.
I’ve been thinking about survival. Before writing this morning I asked myself, “How did you survive when things were so awful?” When I was a child and teen I had a very rich inner life. When I was a little kid my imagination helped me to go to other places in my mind. Most of the time this was a good skill although sometimes it would lead me into imagining hell and other scary scenarios. At times I would get stuck in a loop and it would be almost impossible for me to escape these imaginations. It was like a virus that had to run its course. Now I understand that it was trauma. Often escaping these cycles of thought required something stronger to override their power.
On good days I would imagine myself as Wonder Woman. My bike would become her invisible plane and I would fly through the neighborhood solving crimes and kicking ass. When I close my eyes I can still go to that place. I can still feel my bike beneath me and the wind gently sweeping across my face. When I allow myself to go to that place in my mind immediately a smile creeps in. My bike was freedom. It was a way for me to work out all of my frustration and pent up anxiety. Those endorphins are good medicine.
Physical exertion has always helped me cope in difficult times. When I was a child riding my bike along with other things like gymnastics and hitting my tennis ball against the wall could help me get out of my head. I never enjoyed gym class but it wasn’t because I hated exercise. It had more to do with the social dynamics at play and being forced to participate in team sports that I did not care for. I have never really been comfortable with competition. During gym class I was often picked last. My family did not care much about sports so I had little exposure to things like football and baseball. My parents enjoyed solitary sports and my father enjoyed boxing. They instilled in me an appreciation for being outdoors and competing against self vs others. My father in particular was always pushing me to run farther and faster. He would shadow box with me and I was fond of playing with his boxing equipment. Jump roping was another activity I enjoyed. I would count my jumps to see if I could beat yesterday’s number.
Luckily for me I had a very creative mother and she instilled in me a love for art and music. Art in particular helped me to escape the sadness that permeated every part of my life. I could lose myself in a flow state. I could spend all day drawing or gluing popsicle sticks together. I played with clay and always had tons of coloring books around. To this day when I need to shut my brain off for a bit I will color in my adult coloring book.
Music was another thing that supported me when life was too tough to take. I have always enjoyed singing and my mother would sing with me at home. My father was very sentimental and he always had music on as well. I liked some church music but secular music was so much better. Church music just reminded me of things that made my anxiety worse. It is true that listening to “worldly” music would bring about a sense of guilt but the happiness it brought made it worth it. Secular music offered me a chance to escape into the world of the song and imitating the artists allowed me to try on different identities. It did not take long for musicians to surpass television and book characters as the focus of my escapism. I spent so many afternoons singing into my hairbrush imagining being anywhere but my bedroom.
Fast forward to now and my coping mechanisms are the same. I would like to say that they are all good but that would be a lie. I can still go inside my head and lose myself in my inner world. Sadly it is not always friendly inside my head and I no longer see myself as Wonder Woman. Going too deeply inward can often turn into dissociation. It is like I’m not really present but floating above my body or just outside of the frame of my life. Disconnected from what is happening right in front of me. It isn’t that I have anything terrible to escape but it has become a coping mechanism I employ in order to handle anxiety. Suffering from Complex PTSD means that as good as life gets I always have to remind myself that I’m no longer living the life I lived in the past.
Television helped me to handle the lonely days of childhood and it can still help me at times. I have to be careful because it can become a numbing mechanism, keeping me from being present. I realize that it was a numbing mechanism when I was a kid as well, but survival requires doing what you can to get through. Now I have other better ways of coping and so I have to remember that. What works best is being mindful. Mindful of which television shows I watch and that applies to other things as well, like podcasts. By choosing things versus just numbing out it helps to keep me present.
I still love to exercise. Moving my body helps to keep me sane. Just like when I was a kid, endorphins are great medicine. I can tell when I haven’t moved my body enough because my anxiety becomes really high. Exercise allows me to shut my brain off for a while and just be in my body. Not floating above like when I’m dissociating and not numbing out either. It is like my brain becomes still, which is not a state I can easily achieve. My body gets to release all of its pent up frustration and anxiety. Even as I write this I can see how I separate my mind from my body instead of seeing myself as a whole being. Fractured is the word that comes to mind. It probably would not surprise you to know that I view myself as broken. I have to fight that thought and feeling. Yes, I have C-PTSD and that makes me different from most people but it doesn’t make me broken. I have to work very hard to send my poor injured brain love instead of berating myself for not being “fixed” by now.
Creating art is probably the most pure thing in my world. I still use it as a coping mechanism but at the end I have this beautiful piece of expression to hold in my hands and enjoy. The act of using my hands to create soothes my anxiety and allows my mind something wonderful to focus on. If left to its own devices my brain just naturally wonders to a sad place, that is my set point. Sometimes it is depression and much of the time it is just a result of my lived experience. Creating helps me to breathe deep and lose myself in that flow state once again.
Music is still so dear to me. Some of my only happy memories involving church revolve around singing and music. My husband and I recently went to see The Avett Brothers in concert. Nothing beats being in the midst of a crowd singing along to your favorite song. I often come away from these shows with aches and pains from dancing and jumping around to the music but it is worth every bruise. Music is a double edged sword. It can heal or hurt depending on what I hear. Hearing hymns or the dreaded Thief in the Night song which shall not be named can trigger me in pretty profound ways. Songs get stuck in my head and it can be VERY hard to get them out, that being said nothing heals like music can. It can erase my anxiety and help my mind to shift when a trigger threatens to overwhelm me.
“One little song
Give me strength to the leave the sad and the wrong
Bury safely in the past where I’ve been living
Alive but unforgiving
Let me go, let me go, let me go, let me go”
Souls Like The Wheels- The Avett Brothers
It’s funny how I’m still that little girl I used to be. I still use the same coping mechanisms to survive. Someday I would like to see myself as thriving and not merely surviving but I’m not there yet. When people ask me how I made it through my childhood it can be hard to answer. Some of it was the methods I mentioned above, some was luck, and some was a toughness gifted to me through my parents. Yes, things were very hard but they could have been worse. Especially when you stop to consider how often I was left unsupervised. In many ways my life is a miracle. I’m here and I’m safe.
If you are a survivor I hope you can hear this next part very clearly. If you need to numb or dissociate to get through whatever you are going through do not beat yourself up. Are there better coping mechanisms? Sure, but sometimes you can’t reach them for a whole host of reasons and so doing the best you can today is ok. I am 51 and I have been working on healing myself for a long time. We are not all in the same place and so wherever you are I’m glad you’re here and I hope that tomorrow is a better day. When I speak about my own survival I am not judging you for where you are in your journey towards healing.
I attended an Accelerated Christian Education school or A.C.E. If I could change one thing about my childhood after taking SD out of the picture I would change my educational experience. It would have been better to stay at my public middle school and get beaten up every day rather than spend one day at Calvary Christian Academy. Going to school there has impacted my life in nothing but negative ways. A.C.E. was big on being in the world but not of the world and so they tended towards isolationism. We never socialized with people who were not in the UPC church, so I believe it made sense to them that they should have their own school to further ensure isolation. I was really excited to start school there. My mother’s friend Juanita went to work making my uniforms which was a relief because we did not have much money for school clothing. This was supposed to make things easier. In one way wearing a uniform made it less obvious that we did not have money, in another way it created an additional stressor each fall. We had to find someone to make me a uniform and over time more and more that responsibility fell on me. I hated those uniforms. They were ugly polyester and uncomfortable. The worst part is they made us stick out like a sore thumb. I’m sure we looked like a crazy cult whenever we went out in public for a field trip. They were supposed to equalize the students. Wearing the uniform was supposed to take away competition over clothing and put the focus onto learning. It did not really work that way. Kids know which families have money and which ones do not, a uniform is not going to change that.
I entered Calvary Christian Academy with so much hope and soon discovered that I was wrong. It was nothing like I was expecting. While in public school I excelled at pretty much everything and always received good grades. Teachers liked me and told my mother that I was very bright. I never had any behavioral issues and I enjoyed learning. When I left Calvary Christian Academy my spirit was crushed and I believed I was incapable and unintelligent. As a side note, these schools have a pretty bad track record for traumatizing kids. There are support groups and FB pages where you can go to get support if you attended one of these awful schools. I cannot overstate how bad this educational choice was for my mental health. Whatever was started when I went through my salvation experience combined with being molested by SD was finished by the school. It was a completely joyless experience.
If I had to use one word to describe my time at Calvary Christian Academy it would be loneliness. We were required to spend most of our day sitting in a tiny office with slats on either side. We had very little human contact, it was a bit like solitary confinement. My mind would drift to just about anything to take me away from my lonely situation. Oftentimes this meant my mind went to SD, my parents, and other problems. Alone I would contemplate my life and in these lonely hours, my depression became like a roaring lion, loud and hard to escape. Maybe had I been in public school someone might have caught my depression and offered a helping hand. This kind of thing did not happen at the church school. Within the church school there was only right and wrong, black and white. If a student was struggling they never asked why. You either completed your work or you did not. Punishment or avoiding punishment was the name of the game. In the early days I was so thin and rarely ate much at lunch. I would go sit in the church parking lot and wait for the others to come out for recess. No one ever asked why I didn’t eat or if we had enough food for lunch. Our emotional wellbeing never mattered, what mattered was were we following the rules and were we completing our goals for the day. I would argue that even our physical wellbeing wasn’t much of a concern. I would go to gym class and we often held that class outside. We would go to a neighborhood park. They would stick me somewhere in the outfield amongst the dandelions and grass. My eyes would be watering and I would be sneezing and no one really cared. I would wheeze when I ran and I think they just thought I wasn’t athletic. What was actually going on was that I had bad allergies and playing in a field was just not a good idea for me. The allergies led to asthma and that caused my shortness of breath. I know I keep beating this drum but I feel it is necessary. I cannot overstate how I felt like no one at school or church, speaking of the adults in charge, ever cared about my emotional, mental, or physical wellbeing. Instead they judged me and others and kept score of our shortcomings. I was at church more than I was at home, in some ways the church raised me, and yet to this day they refuse to take any responsibility for the ways in which they harmed and neglected myself and many others.
I am a kinesthetic learner. Reading all day to learn and never having any experiences or debates/discussions did not work well for me. I was bored stiff and now getting a double dose of indoctrination. Originally I thought this school was going to be perfect for me because I was always ahead in school and bored with the slow pace of things. Accelerated Christian Education is set up so that each student can work at their own speed. All this did for me is provide me with the opportunity to be way ahead in some subjects and terribly behind in others. I did pretty well across the board until I hit Algebra or the dreaded math pace 97. Algebra was pure misery for me. It caused me so much stress and the lack of empathy and real help from the staff lead me to feel stupid and incapable. We had no real teachers, you were expected to figure it out from reading a booklet (PACE) you were given and then work through the problems. Our monitors and supervisors, who passed for teaching staff, were not licensed educators. One of them had a nursing degree, one was the church secretary, many of them were youth leaders, young ministers, and their wives. It seems to me that working in the school was some kind of hazing for young ministers. Put your time in here and then you can do other stuff. Be a youth pastor and if you do a good job there we will give you other responsibilities. They may have passed algebra at some point but that was a long time ago and it did not mean they knew how to teach it. None of it made sense to me. I would call a monitor (adult staff who were supposed to help you) over to my office for help and nine times out of ten they had no idea what to do for me. They would suggest I ask my supervisor who at the time was also my principal, youth leader, and at times Sunday school teacher for help. John Seidl had so much power and influence over my life and empathy and compassion were not his forte. I would wait, sometimes for hours, for him to come over and help me. He would get frustrated that I could not figure things out and I would end up in tears erasing holes into my PACES. My experience was that the adults would get frustrated because they did not know how to teach and that would all roll down onto the students. I hold John Seidl very responsible for all of this. He was the principal for most of the time I was attending. He never once offered to give me any extra tutoring and he never tried to find any other way of helping me learn outside of just telling me to read the PACE. I spent so many nights crying over algebraic story problems. My mother would look on with sympathy but she had no idea how to help me. My mother had been a truly awful student. She got Ds all through school and I think it shocked her to see me struggling. School had always been so easy for me. She did not know what to do or where to go for help. We’d seen a warning this might be coming in the 5th grade when I really struggled with fractions. Luckily my babysitter was able to help me and then everything was fine. I just needed a little extra to get me through.
To pass a class you had to complete 12 PACES (these were little booklets with a test at the end) and take the final test. If you did not pass the final test you had to take the whole unit over, all 12 PACES. You must get 80% to pass. I would often clock in at 76% and be told to start over. I even once had a 78%. It should take you a year to complete algebra and I just kept working through the same PACES and taking the test over and over again. Soon it started to affect my science education. You could not pass through science without algebra so my science education just stopped at physical science. I would be sent home with whatever I could not finish in school, this did not help, no one in my home knew how to work these problems. I would return the next day with unfinished work and then be given demerits. These demerits meant you did something wrong. I would have to stay in my office while everyone else went out for recess. I would be punished for weeks at a time for not understanding what they could not teach. Some of this is my mother’s fault. She should have intervened and found me help or maybe decided this school wasn’t for me. Instead, she left me hanging. The school staff knew I was trying and only one of them ever took compassion on me. One day Kitty, the elementary school supervisor, came to my office, one time, and told me to just go out with the other kids. She also helped me with algebra. She wasn’t a great teacher but she showed me some empathy and for that I am grateful. Those long stretches without even recess to look forward to are really depressing to think about even now. Plus now I was struggling and falling behind in two subjects. On a brighter note, I went back to public school for my last year of high school. I took algebra and passed with a B+. My algebra teacher told me I just needed to be shown a different way to look at it. He was a good teacher and helped to restore some of my confidence. I feel like if I had been attending public school and struggling like this safety nets would have kicked in. My mother would have been pulled into the conversation more. I would have had tutors available and maybe a teacher who would meet with me during off-hours. None of that happened, they just let me twist in the wind.
Because I believed that my supervisor was frustrated with me and because they punished me instead of helping me I felt even more like an outsider. I had no refuge except for maybe the library. Home was awful and school was awful. Because the school was in the church basement and because I would soon be a Bible quizzer I was spending 7 days a week at the church. I was at church as much if not more than I was at home. God and the church had completely swallowed my life. Instead of bringing me joy unspeakable and full of glory all I experienced was being driven to death by my commitments and judgement.
Every part of the school day was highly regimented. There was no time for asking questions or free thinking. The Bible was our main literature book. Why do you need anything else when you have the Bible? We never read any of the classics or really anything except for the dreaded allegory Pilgrim’s Progress. One of my great joys was discovering books, especially classics. This leads us to one of the most subversive things I ever did, I went to the library. We lived just a couple of blocks from our local library and I loved to visit there. I consider myself lucky to have developed an early love for reading and an understanding of how libraries worked thanks to my early public school education. At that time you were not supposed to read things unless the church approved or it was written by a UPC author. Adults could read things by Christian authors who were not UPC if the topics were marriage and raising children. The adults knew how to discern when doctrinal lines were crossed in a way children and adolescents did not. Because my mother was not strict about standards and because no one was ever watching me I would often escape to the library. My heart would leap just approaching the building. Looking through the windows and seeing all of the books was my signal that I could breathe easy. Within these walls were adults who would help you find great reads and not judge you or give you the stink eye for asking. My neighborhood library had a great kids section and young adult area. Later I would bring my own kids there for story time. Once inside, after carefully checking the parking lot to make sure no one would see me, I would make a beeline for the teen area. I always read way above grade level and so even at 11 or 12 I would seek out books meant for a much older audience. Once I found a book I liked I would quickly find my favorite blue cushion to recline on. I always sought out a corner where I could shrink into my cushion and hide from the world. I did not bring the books home so sometimes I would be disappointed when the book I had been reading was checked out. Once I was sunk down into my soft spot I would bring the book to my nose and breathe in the smell. I loved the smell of books, I still do even if it drives my allergies crazy. My happiness could never be complete or free of worry. I worried someone from church would come in or see me coming in or leaving. Now I see how silly that is, they would never be in a library. I think I was always scared. I read lots of Judy Blume who I loved in late elementary school. This led to other things, even romances. I felt guilty but the pull of fresh reading material was too much to resist. I would tell myself later how dumb I had been to risk my salvation for a stupid book, I would promise to resist and make God happy, but I never kept that promise.
I have to stop for a minute here and praise librarians! They were friendly adults in a world where that was hard to come by. They recognized me when I came in and were always ready with fresh suggestions. They made me feel welcome and normal.
I hated Pilgrim’s Progress. It was boring but my hatred of it seemed deeper than just boredom. To this day I do not know why I hated it so much. I asked my principal if I could instead read C.S Lewis. I loved the Chronicles of Narnia and had read them in the 4th grade. That opened a whole unexpected can of worms! “C.S Lewis is not saved? He is not UPC and we do not agree with his theology.” I argued, “It’s an allegory and that is what I’m supposed to be learning about. Isn’t Aslan a picture of Jesus? Isn’t it very clear that Jadis is the bad guy?” But I could not budge him. That was the day that I learned my most beloved books were sinful. They had talking animals and witches in them. How had I not seen it? I thought since I saw them at Zondervan’s (the Christian book store) they would be ok. This was a crisis for me. I loved those books dearly, like an old treasured friend. I never got rid of them, in fact they are in my basement right now. They are super dogeared and well loved. I read them over and over in bed at night for probably three years. Mr. Tumnus was as real to me as anything I ever learned in the Bible. But even the joy of my favorite books was in part ruined by the guilt of knowing I was doing something sinful and rebellious. By the way, Pilgrim’s Progress was not written by someone within the UPC either, but it was a part of the approved curriculum. It seemed like the adults in my life were on a mission to rob me of any little thing that might bring me some comfort.
Zondervan’s Christian book store was another way I sinned or played too close to the danger zone. We had one in our local mall and every so often I would wander in there and look at their books with one eye on the door. I knew people from church bought music there but the books were a no-no. Too much strange theology, too many opposing viewpoints. You might learn about grace or God’s love. The United Pentecostal Church International claims that their mission is “The Whole Gospel To The Whole World.” I do not feel I received the whole gospel, especially not the parts about grace, compassion, and caring for others.
One day when I was at the library and just wandering around and I discovered something wonderful, magazines! My fingers glided through the glossy pages and my eyes drank in all of the brightly colored ads. The librarian saw me and came over to tell me about the teen magazines. She knew me well and would often offer her suggestions. What? You have teen magazines? I knew about these magazines because I would see them at the grocery store but I had never purchased one. This was a whole new world. Even in my extreme joy at my discovery there was a strange knot in my belly. This was wrong. These girls were made up like harlots and the topics within the magazines were sinful. The funny thing is that back in the early 80’s the girls in the teen magazines looked much younger and more innocent than young women in similar magazines today. It was all about fashion, music, boys, and makeup. These publications were like drugs to me, I couldn’t get enough. My mother even started buying them for me from time to time when we had the money. She saw them as harmless but I knew that they were bad news and I should feel bad for having them. I liked fashion and dreamt about makeup, I even liked the heart throbs on the covers but in the innocent way young girls like boys. This is where I learned the tip about clear nail polish. After getting into trouble because of the nail polish these magazines felt even more dangerous. At this point I started to feel like two people. The angel and the devil. I loved God and tried so hard to be good, to act right, to remember to repent everyday and to be of service. The devil side of me wanted all of this contraband, this was my flesh, the part of me that was impossibly sinful. I wondered if all of this was because of SD? Had my sinning with him opened some sort of Pandora’s box of evil within me? Would I ever be right? At this point I could not imagine a life not soaked in fear, guilt, and looking over my shoulder.
Fashion and the letter of the law but not the spirit. There were always certain adults who seemed to disapprove of me and give me the side eye. This is not uncommon in a church that is so legalistic where folks thrive on judging others. They compare themselves to others in order to gauge how close to God they are. I was always careful to follow the church’s holiness standards when it came to how I dressed but I was too young to really understand them. I wore skirts or dresses all the time. I did not public swim because wearing a swimsuit was a no no. My dresses always came to the bottom of my knees or lower and my sleeves were always three quarter length or longer. In gym class the girls had to wear pleated culottes so that is what I wore. Still even with keeping these standards I felt like it wasn’t good enough but I did not understand why. My mother was no help really. Her main concern was whether or not I was wearing a dress to church. She had always required that even before we joined the UPC. She always said you have to wear your best, whatever your best is.
I became an amazing bargain hunter and that super power still serves me today! I started to babysit and so I could make a little money here and there. One day I found the most beautiful fuschia shoes I had ever seen. They were on clearance and in my size! I tried them on in the store and I never felt more fancy than I did at that moment. I was about 12 or 13 at the time. These shoes were ridiculous and if any of my daughters had tried to wear shoes like that at that age I would have said no, wait till you’re about 21. They had a four inch heel and they were a shockingly bright color. They had a fake snake skin pattern on them. I would never attempt to walk in shoes like that now, but to my 13 year old self those shoes were the height of fashion. I wore them to church in the middle of winter. They were a strappy sandal and not good on the ice and certainly could not keep my feet warm. So here I am at church wobbling around on these stupidly high heels feeling like a million bucks! That is when people started staring and even asking questions. Some of the adults laughed when they were asking me about them the way you might laugh at a child who is being silly, but I did not understand at the time and I thought they were making fun of me. It hurt and it took all of the air out of my happy find. “Does your mother know you have those shoes?”, “Where did you find those?”, “Don’t you think those shoes are a little too high for you?” One of the girls close to my age later told me her mother said they looked like hooker shoes. As adult after adult questioned me and smirked I started to feel shame. I’m not even sure if I ever wore them again. What I know now is that shoes like that would have been considered too immodest. They would be seen as trying to draw attention to my legs and therefore cause a man to fall into sin. But at that age my mind did not automatically go to those places. If my legs were mostly covered what difference did it make? The part of this story that makes me laugh is when I went home. An adult couple gave me a ride home and I must’ve fallen four times between their car and my front door. At first I did not find it funny but after the fourth fall I had to join in with their laughter. I must have looked like a baby deer trying to walk up that sidewalk. I was wobbly in those shoes even on carpet so glare ice was near impossible to walk on. I think I left my boots at home because I wanted everyone to see my pretty shoes. I paid for it in bruises to my ego and legs.
In the 80’s textured tights were a big thing. I was very fond of these tights that had tiny hearts on them and I had them in many varieties. Red tights with white hearts, white tights with pink hearts, and more. Soon after that came tights with a seam up the back, tights with flowers snaking up the ankle and tights with polka dots. To me they were so pretty and fashionable but to the adults around me they looked too old for me to wear and drew way too much attention. The thing is this was the early 80’s and it was what young teens were wearing. I did not get it. To me they were pretty and feminine. My young mind could not understand the connection between my polka dotted tights and men’s lust. To me it was about fashion, my tights with the hearts on them matched my purse with tiny hearts on it. It was about looking my best. My mother never complained and so I assumed it was ok. When I think back to that time I was the only teen dressed like that and I am sure it is part of the reason why so many adults gave me the side eye and did not want their kids to have anything to do with me. Especially the boys. This is just an example of how an adult could have come alongside me and explained how it looked to many people. Instead of gossiping and judging they could have simply talked to me.
My happiness was found in a $72.00 Jessica McClintock Gunne Sax dress. Every Easter my parents would buy me a new Easter dress. Many times my dad would come through for me. He hated being around for the hard stuff but liked to show up and be the hero from time to time. He took me to the mall and we started combing through the racks. My heart leaped when I found my dream dress hanging there. It was a Jessica McClintock and it was on clearance! Even on clearance it was $72.00 and I knew it was nothing more than a dream. These dresses were very easy to spot at this time. They looked vintage and were outside the stream of pop culture fashion. They reminded me of the dresses I would draw for hours as a child. In grade school I became obsessed with the Gibson Girl style of dress and drew those dresses over and over complete with parasols and fancy boots. My father looked at the price and said sure I could have the dress! I stood there frozen in my disbelief, then I grabbed the dress before he could change his mind. It was a tiny bit big on me but who cared? It was perfect and I felt like the richest girl in town for a moment. When I brought the dress home my mother was livid. She was so angry that my father had spent that much money on my dress. I was confused but knew enough to just go to my room. Who could understand my parents’ issues with each other? He bought me a dress and now you don’t have to, was how I saw it. My mother had every right to be upset. He never paid child support and couldn’t be bothered when I was hungry. She saw through him and knew all he wanted was to look good to me. Easter morning was the next day and I put my dress on with some pretty tights with flowers on the ankle. I was a walking flower that morning. When you are poor, and you have body issues, it is a big deal to feel so pretty if even only for one day. This dress was magickal! It had a lace collar that went all the way to my neck and it fell almost to my ankles. The body of the dress was a very pale almost white lavender and it had light green vines with tiny flowers all over it. Covering my chest was a light lace bib, this thing was like something out of a Disney movie. The sleeves came all the way to my wrists and were kind of gausy and ever so slightly see through. A slim panel of lace went down both arms. I was covered and I mean covered from head to toe.
I glided into church that morning feeling like a queen. The church secretary thought it was very important to point out to me that you could see through my sleeves. I have olive tone skin and you could ever so slightly see through my sleeves but you had to be really looking. I went to my seat and started to feel self conscious. Could you see through my sleeves? Did I miscalculate? Was this dress sinful? Once again one of the church harpies had ruined my happiness, but not for long. My friends LOVED the dress and it became a big deal for many years. When we would go to camp we would often trade dresses for the evening service, this dress was always the top request and in heavy rotation. Somehow it never got ripped or too dirty. It was magical. I recognized as I got older that it was edgy because of the sleeves but I wore it anyway. Now those Jessica McClintock Gunne Sax dresses are considered vintage and still go for a ton of money. My early teenage dream was to someday glide down the aisle in a Gunne Sax wedding dress. My first wedding dress looked alot like what Lady Diana wore on her wedding day, not a Gunne Sax but still hyper feminine.
I’ve written all of this to explain not only how the church stole my joy at every turn but to also illustrate how I did not understand the standards. I was following the letter of the law but not the spirit. I think I thought I was following the spirit of the law but my young mind just could not anticipate what would be an issue. My mother did not follow their standards and thought I looked fine. The ladies at church would make snide remarks but no one ever thought to sit me down and explain things. It was more fun to talk about my mother behind her back. About her poor parenting and not following the holiness standards herself than to take pity on a kid who just needed someone to explain things. My friends would tell me how their parents did not approve of my clothing and that hurt. I did not understand. My 13 year old mind would not have expected that a man might get turned on by the sight of my arm or a calf with tiny hearts on it. My world and self esteem could have been so much better had someone just been compassionate and talked to me about the standards, not from a judging place but from a loving place. I was proud of every pretty thing I owned because I bought most of it. I hunted for sales and collected bits of, what I thought were acceptable fashion, and kept them as treasure. But even that pride at having found these beautiful items was sinful.
“Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.” Proverbs 16:18
Looking back I have to ask myself, “What is wrong with these men?” First of all, why would they be looking at pre-teen and teenage girls to start with? If they are lusting after children isn’t that their problem? Why does the church ask young girls to protect men from lusting? It seems to me that they may have understood that they had problematic men within the congregation and so instead of removing the men they laid a heavy burden on the girls. Better to keep sleepy men around who pay tithes than to take action to protect children.
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.
Over time I became attached to SD as other parts of my world fell apart. My parents were divorced, my mother was constantly struggling to keep us fed and to keep the lights on, and being in the Christian school did not turn out to be the way I thought it would be. I became a master at disassociation and I felt trapped in a life that I did not want and did not know how to escape. None of my fears about God, the devil, and hell went away during this period. I only felt more distant from grace and I feared that my sin had crossed the line into being unforgivable. Was I the reason we did not have electricity? Was my sin keeping my mother sick? I just knew I was some kind of horrible Jezabel and maybe I hadn’t fallen far from the tree. My father was a dirty cheater after all. My mother told me all about his dog-like inability to control his impulses. I was like my father in lots of ways, maybe I was a dog too.
Eventually, I blew the whistle. I do not know how I gained the courage to tell someone but I did. I worked for the church’s popcorn wagon. We had a little food truck that sold popcorn, soda, and fruit downtown near the state capital. The minister who baptized me ran this little operation and I would work up there a couple of days a week. It was unpaid and a part of the church’s fundraising efforts. My partner was a young woman named Shannon. She was about 19 years old and she lived with a young couple a few blocks from my house. We became friends and I trusted her. One day when we were done for the day and sitting on the curb waiting for Brother O’Neil to take us home I blurted it out. To her credit, she did not react in a surprised or horrified way. She asked me questions in an interested way which made it easier for me to tell her. It felt good to tell someone. I had been carrying around this secret for nearly two years. At this point, I had no idea what was coming.
Shannon was one of the only adults who did not fail me in this situation. She may have only been 19 but she acted much more mature than the other adults. When she went home for the evening she discussed what I told her with Sister Cox. To her credit, Sister Cox who was a friend to me tried to do the right thing. She told Shannon to tell me that if I did not tell pastor Grant what was happening she would. At the time this sounded like a threat but now I actually believe she was trying to help me. Within the UPC this is what you do. No matter what the issue is, you take it to the pastor. No one went to the police or even talked to a mental health professional and the last thing you would do is call social services. This is the part of the story where I’m in awe of the strength that I had. After all, I was only 12 or 13. The next day I set up an appointment with pastor Grant. This took guts! I was afraid of him and I avoided the church secretary like the plague. She had always made it clear she was judging me and everyone else and I firmly believed she did not approve of me or my parents. Once John Grant came in for the day he called me to his office. There I was in the lion’s den! We were never this close and I was never alone with him. He asked why I wanted to see him and I started to explain. He stopped me and got out a small (for that time) tape recorder and started taping our conversation. The distance between us seemed enormous. John Grant is known for his ridiculous oversized desks. If you talk to any survivor of Calvary Gospel Church they will tell you about his gigantic desks. I felt like Lily Tomlin’s character Edith Ann, everything in the room was huge and I felt small in my chair. He asked me questions, very generic questions, and I answered very generically. He knew what happened but he did not ask and I did not give details. He knew enough to know SD had been molesting me for almost two years and that he had tried to have intercourse with me. Our conversation ended with John Grant telling me he would get back to me but he never did. I then left his office and took the long lonely walk back to my desk. I bore this burden alone. No one checked in on me or asked if I wanted to speak to a therapist. No one offered to pray with me or even offered a hug. It was almost like it never happened. The only proof that it ever happened came in whispers and innuendo.
At this point I did not have much trust in adults. It took a lot of courage for me to tell anyone what happened to me. What crushes me as I write this is how strong I had to be to reach out to an adult and how thoroughly they all judged me and offered no help. The lesson I learned from this is to keep my sadness and pain to myself because no one would care or help if I shared. I received the message that I was not worthy of help. If my world was lonely and dark before now it had darker and more ominous clouds.
The most painful fall out came from my mother who called me a little hussy and was mad at me for a long time. I’m actually not sure how she found out. I know it was not pastor Grant because she told me, “I had to find out through the grapevine!” My guess is that Shannon told her. They had developed a friendship. All I know is she picked me up from school one day furious. She did not see me as a victim; she saw me as a whore, probably because she did not see me as a child. If I was a child I would need more from her and she had too many other things to worry about. Around this time she read my diary and saw the things that I wrote about SD. She mocked me and called me names. I never wrote in a diary again until I was in my own apartment. I was not surprised by her reaction. Around this time she had also referred to me as, I won’t use the word but you’ll understand, lover because a young boy my age who rode the Sunday school bus with me had started calling the house. This made absolutely no sense to me. She was disowned by her own parents for a time because she married a Mexican so one would think she would be more understanding. She did not seem to have problems with black people except if it seemed like interracial dating might be going on. To look back on this makes me so sad. This sweet boy never tried anything with me and our interactions over the next couple of years involved him following me around like a lost puppy. We were children, after all, not even teens yet. One day a friend and I met him and his friend at the mall. He won me a little red furry heart out of the crane machine and the four of us ate pizza. To this day that memory warms my heart as one of the few happy memories of childhood associated with the church. My mother thought his friendship was a sin and I had to hide it from her, and she thought my sexual assault was at least partly my fault, and this is why I never went to her for help.
During this time I felt completely estranged from my mother. As I grew older she became more cruel and crass when interacting with me. She would even mock me and make fun of me in embarrassing ways in front of other adults from the church. As time went on she became more and more like Jim and less and less like the mother I thought I knew. I spent almost all of my time in my room alone. She and Jim were wrapped up in their lives with each other and my father wasn’t around much. I had an old tape player/recorder, the kind you would see in schools in the ’80s. It made a kachunk sound when you closed the cover. I would listen to Amy Grant and others for hours in my room. I had to use batteries when we had no electricity and so sometimes the music would be very slow due to the batteries running low. I read a lot and thought a lot about SD and what he was doing and if he was ok. I took long bike rides alone. I moved through the world feeling a great sense of loneliness and sadness or just being numb and dissociated.
Shannon and Jeanette (sister Cox) never treated me badly but they never offered help or went to the police. I think the assumption was that pastor Grant would deal with things. Everyone who knew about this John Grant, his wife Darlene, Jeanette, Shannon, and my mother just went on with life. My mother gave me the side-eye a lot but she never asked if I was ok or offered her support. Everyone else just went on with things but I could tell the undercurrent had changed. People were less friendly and seemed kind of standoffish at times. There was a change in the wind, things were colder now and I could feel their eyes on me. Writing this reminds me of a scene from the film Age of Innocence when Newland Archer figures out that everyone knows about his affair with Madame Olenska. “He guessed himself to have been, for months, the centre of countless silently observing eyes and patiently listening ears…” As a child, I was never really sure who knew. I knew that the pastor’s son knew because he brought it up to me in front of my peers at school. I knew that most of the younger adults knew because DD was friends with them and a husband doesn’t just disappear and no one notices. He would not be playing trumpet at the front of the church and his wife would be sitting alone. I’m sure that John Grant would have called a meeting of the elders to discuss what had happened and at that time there were around 12 couples serving as elders. As an adult almost everyone I have spoken to who is a survivor of that congregation knew something about it, most of it gossip that they were unsure about.
Many times when young girls are abused they become promiscuous. After SD stopped abusing me I did not interact with a boy physically for about a year. It wasn’t anything big, just normal puppy love stuff. Over the years I started to become more physically involved with the boys I dated and when I was 16 I had sex for the first time. I think I was chasing the feeling of friendship and closeness I had with SD but all of these encounters only left me more hurt and disappointed. Chasing my father and my abuser would be my pattern with men even going into my adult life. Both SD and my father were often unavailable and would disappear for a period of time and then come roaring back into my life. This led me into so many relationships with unavailable males. I always felt abandoned and my self-worth sank lower and lower with each relationship. Most of my relationships involved controlling and angry men. Men who would cheat on me and sex was always something to check out of. I just went away somewhere else in my head. Probably because I was having sex with men who were distant and who were not really connected with me emotionally. I wonder if all of this could have been avoided if I had received counseling about both SD and my father. I did not have any female role models to really show me how to value myself. Every woman I knew seemed to have to grovel for male attention. I grew up under the teaching that a woman should be submissive and I internalized that to mean a man can do whatever he wants and you just have to love him until he straightens out.
I learned the hard way that things can always get worse.. Soon after I spoke with pastor Grant I received a very unexpected phone call from SD. He spoke in a clipped way, “I have to leave town, it is not your fault.” That was it. I said nothing but held the phone for a long time after he hung up. I wasn’t super surprised that he was leaving town, I figured his wife was probably pretty upset with him. I think I was surprised by how little he gave me in the end. No apology, no remorse, and no comfort. I loved him much in the same way that I loved my mom and dad. My family had its faults but my parents always told me they loved me. Within the church telling people you loved them was common. “I just love you so much!” Bleh. I had once told SD that I loved him and his response was to say, “I know.” It was cold and at that moment it stung. I was alone again. As bad as the abuse had been, it gave me something to look forward to. An escape from my home and the constant arguing and poverty. Don’t misunderstand me, the abuse was scary and wrong but it wasn’t the whole time we were together. Remember he fed me and talked with me, or groomed me, and that part felt good.
Soon after the phone call was our midweek service. I went and I was worried and again alone. I had no idea who knew and what people would say to me. Why my mother would allow me to go back there without an adult is beyond me. I faced it like I faced all things in my childhood, like a brave soldier. Being assaulted for two years, being heartbroken, and traumatized was no reason to miss church. No one said anything except for SD’s wife. She was waiting for me. She looked stiff and angry. She pulled me aside as soon as I walked into view and she growled in my ear, “We need to talk right after church.” I was really freaked out and how I made it through that service is beyond me. It felt like the shortest service ever.
After the service was over she found me and led me down into the basement of the church. She was in her early twenties and I was 12 or 13. She led me into one of the Sunday school rooms and turned on the light. She clearly did not see me as a victim, she saw me as an adulteress. She told me she had always believed she could trust me with her husband and that she was very hurt that I would betray her this way. She insisted that we pray for my forgiveness. Other than a quiet, “I’m sorry” I was silent during this whole encounter only being able to eek out a mumbled prayer through my tears. She, on the other hand, started to pray loudly and spoke in tongues in a way that scared me. She was having an experience but mine was completely different. She laid her hand on my shoulder and pushed me back and forth much like the women did on the night I got baptized. When her frenzied prayer ended we both silently went upstairs. She never spoke to me much after that. I had lost a friend but I really couldn’t blame her. Now when I look back on this I see her in a different light. I feel for her but what she did to me was wrong. I was a child. I know I keep repeating this but I have to for no other reason than to remind myself.
DD has three sisters, One older and two younger. Her older sister attended church now and then but I never got the impression she was a true believer. Her younger sisters still lived at home with DD’s parents a couple of hours away when I first met them. One day I was driven out there by SD and DD. SD was already abusing me at this point and so the whole situation was pretty uncomfortable. I’m pretty sure DDs parents lived on a farm and they seemed to be pretty poor. Both SD and DD thought her sisters and I might become friends and we did. Both of her younger sisters would write me letters and we became pen pals. In those days it was all colored scented pens and stickers. I would always get excited when they came to visit or when SD would take me and other girls out for a fun day. Eventually, AD, the youngest sister, came to live with SD and DD. I don’t know the reasons why but at the time I was very excited. My friend was coming here to stay and she was planning to attend the same school. AD was always shy and quiet but friendly. Once she arrived in Madison she seemed to change. She became cold and standoffish. I was heartbroken and I could not understand, had I imagined that we were friends? To make matters worse she started hanging out with the kids who were kind of mean to me. I’m sure some of it was the age difference. She was 3 years older than me. When I would speak to SD about how sad I was about AD and I’s friendship seeming to vanish he would just smirk and act as if it was just girls being girls. He seemed to enjoy the tension between AD and I. He never tried to mediate but would actually throw us together and then laugh at our discomfort.
This is where things take a turn for the weird and unexpected. OK yes I know that sounds funny, my whole childhood was weird and unexpected, despite that this next event shocked me. I have debated how to tell this part of the story or if I should tell it at all. I have decided to tell these events as I understand them. Some of this was told directly to me and some of it was pieced together from scraps of information I have discovered doing research. On the night of or close to it that DD pulled me down into the basement, that first night I was back at church after SD left town, I found out why SD was gone and also why AD seemed to be nowhere in sight. I was standing in the vestibule and someone whispered in my ear that SD was caught in bed with A. I cannot remember who passed this info onto me. This shook me to my core and I had this feeling that SD was not driven from the church because of me but because of AD. You’re never supposed to bring the police or social services to the church’s door. Those in authority seek to protect the church and its image at all costs. I believe they thought I was under control, but AD had parents outside the church, who knows what they might do. They might call the cops, they might bring a scandal, plus DD’s older sister had not drunk the kool-aid so she could be trouble too. This is all my opinion but it makes sense to me. I have not been able to speak to anyone who has the whole story. I have only heard bits and pieces from people who heard something or maybe spoke to DD. My 12/13-year-old self had so many feelings about this. Part of me felt abandoned. If he was going to flee, why did he leave me here with my depressed mother and impoverished life. Part of me was shocked that he was molesting my friend and I was angry thinking that he might have been the reason I lost her as a friend. I was confused, all this time he made me think that it was all about me and my impossible to resist sinful body when in fact he was obviously struggling with other impossible to resist sinful bodies. I wondered how long it had been going on, and if there were more of us. I wondered If AD knew about me. All I knew for sure is that SD and AD got out and I was left to bear the shame and stain of everything that happened. I got up the nerve to ask one of SD’s friends where he had gone. He told me that SD fled to Vegas. He was still in contact with some of the men in the church. He was seeking restoration, now I wonder if he was seeking a quickie divorce. I don’t know where AD went but I was told eventually she was allowed to go be with SD. They are married to this day. They got married after she turned 18. The church allowed SD and DD to divorce because SD committed adultery. Adultery was the only reason you could get divorced within the United Pentecostal Church. Let that sink in, adultery not pedophilia. She was 15 and I was 12 or 13 when this all blew up. Together the two of them, SD and AD pastor a church in Oconto Wisconsin. Yes, you read that right, dear readers, SD is a pastor.
I’m not going to say much more about AD. In my eyes, she is a victim whether he married her or not. Her story is not my story to tell. I only hope she is ok. SD is not ordained through the UPC organization but he still socializes with them. It is very complex. For a while, he was pastoring a daughter work of a UPC church but now he is independent. My guess is that they would not ordain him because of his divorce and remarriage. What I do know for sure is that he has been welcomed back into fellowship with UPC ministers and members. That is very uncommon. UPC people do not associate with people outside of their organization, they are very insular, but SD is an exception. He has had UPC ministers at his church to preach which is against the rules of the UPC, but again somehow he gets by with it. On social media, he is friends with people who attend Calvary Gospel and who attended when he was molesting me. These people know what he did but they say he is forgiven and so that makes it all ok. No one talks about what he did to me in terms of child molesting, they call it adultery and so does he. To this day I have received no justice. No one from Calvary Gospel has apologized to me for not reporting the incident and for not offering me any help. When confronted they claim that they did report and have always reported but the police have no records of them ever reporting anything. I am not the only victim who had crimes against them covered up by Calvary Gospel, I’m just one of the oldest. I see myself as a test balloon. They covered up SDs crime and no harm came to the church. After my situation came many other young girls, and boys too. They were not victims of SD but of other men. SD was not an exception; he was part of a systemic problem that has infected the UPC organization. When the choice is to protect the church or the young life of a victim Calvary Gospel will always choose the church.
My day to day life at home did not change much, my mother eventually got over it. My life at church and school changed a lot. The adults around me started to give me a knowing side-eye and I knew they were talking about me. Adults withdrew from me and I could feel the silent judgment. No one offered me help or compassion. These adults who saw me day in and day out never asked why I was so thin or so sad. I tried to make friends with the church kids and I was able to establish some friendships. Most of my friendships with peers were with other kids on the margins. Race played a big role in this. They were on the margins due to being children of color and also due to being poor. I had friends whose parents were considered more “in” but my friendship with them could only get so close. Their parents always looked at me as if I was dangerous and I wasn’t invited over for dinner or sleepovers. I never felt the same after what happened between SD and I. So many things caused me to have to grow up so fast and the abuse SD inflicted on me only sped this process up even more. It was like he threw gasoline on a raging fire. I was never the same. Now I fully understood how my mother felt at church. Silently judging eyes and smiles that seemed so forced and fake. I could be in the same room with these people but somehow there was an invisible wall between us. When I look back on it now I think that maybe they thought the sin that had come into my life through SD might be contagious. The UPC church teaches God’s forgiveness but in practice, Calvary Gospel never really forgave me for being a victim. From what I have observed they tend to have an easy time forgiving men but women are another story. Once your reputation has been ruined in some way you cannot ever be truly restored. At 12 my reputation was obliviated and no amount of hard work on God’s behalf or asking for forgiveness would ever remove the stain left by SD’s abuse. I spent my teen years striving for transcendence. To this day I would say that transcendence is a goal of mine. I set my sights on being and feeling worthy both in God’s eyes and the church’s but I never got there. It wasn’t until I was well into adulthood that I realized that only I could grant myself worthiness. My parents bear some of the blame for my feelings of worthlessness and it would be unfair to say otherwise that being said when SD decided to abuse me he set in motion a terrible storm. His acts against me caused me to seek relationships with males as an escape from the pain of my life. Those relationships always had a price and always left me alone to mend my broken heart. His actions made me feel like a Jezabel like I could never get clean or be good enough to rise above what happened between us. His actions left me alone to bear the stain of what he had done to me and his wife. He moved on to another city and I was the living reminder of what had happened. His actions caused the church to view me as damaged goods. Within these sorts of churches once you have been used by a man or even choose to be sexual and they see your purity as damaged you become something less than worthless, you become a temptress and something to be feared.
Debbie McNulty 