Growing Up Godly

This story reflects my experience growing up in a high-control religious household and includes themes of parental control, physical abuse, and spiritual coercion. Read with care.

The gym shower feels like dirty bath water but the pressure beats the chlorine smell of the pool from my skin. My eyes run along the yellow tiles searching for creeping mold or a stray clump of hair clinging to the wall beaded with condensation. I am especially horrified by the thought of a flaccid secondhand bandaid in the same vicinity as my feet, protected by a thin sliver of dollar store flip-flop rubber, but my stall selection has spared me. Leaning against the damp wooden bench peppered with peripheral shower spray, my mom bunches her towel around her neck and leans down to pull her jean capris over her tankini.

“You know,” she says, “I never worry about your safety. At least your physical safety.” She tilts her head to the side and bangs the heel of her hand on her temple to clear the water from her ear.

I have just returned from my first solo road trip after getting my license, an expedition of budding adulthood. We live ninety minutes from the nearest safe haven of Adventism and veggie meat. This is before Walmart lined their meat-free section with the oblong sodium-packed cylinders preferable to quadrupedal flesh for those of us blessed with the absolute truth of God’s Word. Stocking up on meat-free products is an innocent enough errand for my mom to approve of and a perfect opportunity for me to sneak in a date with the asshole I have a crush on. I am sixteen, and in six weeks I will be a high school senior, so I am pushing my parents’ boundaries. Reminding them that I am still under their power while testing my wings stokes their sense of control enough to give me a fraction of freedom.

“Anyway,” my mom continues over the water, “I am constantly praying for your safety, so I know that God will take care of you.”

The shower curtain is bunched against the wall in sticky folds as far away from my body as I can push it without touching it for longer than five seconds. Really? I scream in my head. What about the seven hundred and thirty six deaths scrolling across the GDOT highway signs? Just because praying has worked so far doesn’t mean I won’t get T-boned by a tractor trailer out of control. Or sideswiped by an F150 with a load of gravel in the back. Or some maniac won’t sneak into my backseat and hold a gun to my head. He could be a stalker, someone that spotted a young girl alone at the gas station, or he could be laying in wait for me at Old Navy or Publix. God’s plan for my life could be for me to get kidnapped and murdered. The unreasonable amount of nineties email forwards warning solo women never to park next to suspicious vans have scarred me for life.

Offering a weak smile in her direction implying thanks for her supplication on my behalf, I turn off the shower and wrap a towel over my swimsuit as I inch past the offending curtain. I am so paranoid when I drive that visions of narrowly avoided calamities fill my head, and therefore they can’t happen to me, because I’ve already thought of them. My dad calls it defensive driving. I don’t know yet to call it obsessive-compulsive.

And hey — at least my mom isn’t worried. About that.

#

I thumb through the bright pink book complete with funky block lettering and interactive graphics spattering the pages. My mom has her own adult version, a mother’s guide to coercion for preteen daughters. The outside looks like it’s trying to win an ugliest Lisa Frank imitation contest, but I’m sure it’s full of disciplinary techniques and rules I haven’t imagined. Later I will sneak into her room and read through her copy so I know what to prepare for.

“Remember, it’s your responsibility not to lead men into sin,” my mom begins her introduction to godly modesty. I feel anger simmering deep in my belly and I don’t know why. I am twelve and spending time with my mom makes me uncomfortable. She will cry or beg if she thinks I don’t want to have mother-daughter dates, and going through the latest book she picked up at the Adventist Book Center is a requirement on my path to greater responsibility and, I’m told, more privileges. This is an outcome I have yet to experience as my cooperation inevitably flags before I can consistently uphold the thirteen character traits of a Godly woman, or whatever my mother has decided are the latest prerequisites to anything I’m actually interested in. She makes sure privilege never comes without further obligation to God, even for a twelve year old. I have protested enough rounds of the latest Adventist approved disciplinary tactics that are sure to work on the most Jesus-resistant child, and sat through enough maternal breakdowns, to know better than to do anything other than comply. There is nothing quite like your mother’s tear soaked face, begging you to talk to her like you talk to your friends, to share your honest thoughts and desires with her, to inject a peculiar mixture of shame, guilt, and confusion into your budding pre-teen psyche. How do you explain that when you show her even a hint of your true self, she turns against you? And when your mother turns against you, God turns against you, because God placed parents in authority over their children.

“The way we dress can cause sinful thoughts. Even Godly men can be tempted and if we play a part in their downfall, we have also sinned,” my mom continues the lesson. I am not buying into these new demands that restrict my already slim clothing options.

I look down at the small valley between my breasts. I push the fabric from my shirt against my chest with a finger and watch it spring back taut. This is a God-sanctioned test that means that my shirt is too tight. “Just because there’s snow on the mountain doesn’t mean there’s not fire inside,” my mom likes to say about the old men that walk laps around our neighborhood. They could be looking at me and sinning, even if I thought all I was doing was enjoying our front yard sprinklers in my swimsuit. I feel even more uncomfortable. Her eyes crawl over me, searching for anything that could be sexually tantalizing.

#

On our drive back from the grocery store the sun is slanting between buildings and piercing through the windshield into my eyes, giving a headache. My mom and I get in an argument and I snap at her. She presses the glowing blue button on her earbud to call my dad. Sobbing, she tells him how her twelve year old is attacking her; I’m being so disrespectful and cruel. I hear his disembodied voice raise in pitch as if he’s a tiny man living in her ear, available to defend her at a moment’s notice. When he comes home he will be grave, even depressed as my mother sniffles to him, and I’ll get in trouble. He despises conflict.

A couple of years ago my mom decided that she was tired of being the go-to parent for discipline and that her spanking me during the day while my dad was working must be what was causing my rebellion and disobedience. The new rule is that I must be hit equally by each parent so that I understand my father’s authority. After all, the man is the true head of the household, fit to command his wife just as the church is a bride to God. God punishes those that he loves most, and to spare the rod is to spoil the child. Eight belt hits from each adult is supposed to impress on me the equality of their relationship, their status as dual heads of the house, and that my father is just as upset at me as my mother even though he wasn’t around for my wrongdoing. In general my father is more open minded and relaxed than my mom and more likely to get me a treat or take me somewhere fun. He is easier for me to talk to and sometimes I can get him to listen to my feelings and thought processes regarding my conflicts with my mother. Even more seldom, he will quietly admit that he understands where I was coming from and why I acted the way that I did. This never translates to any kind of intervention on his part, and when my mom insists it’s only fair for him to share the responsibilities of the “mean” parent he complies.

Now that I am twelve I don’t get hit quite as often as I used to. Spanking has never made me feel repentant in the least, but it does infuriate and humiliate me which often culminates in back talk and another round of hits. They end only once I give my parents hugs, tell them I love them, and kneel down by the bed to admit my mistakes to God and ask all three for their forgiveness. Once, I ran away from an impending punishment and hid in the backyard. I pick the perfect spot behind some bushes that are planted too far in front of our neighbor’s fence. My parents scream into the backyard that if I don’t come out they will call the police and then I’ll REALLY be in trouble. The whole neighborhood can hear them and the thought of policemen and flashing lights terrifies me. Their voices fade back inside which is even more threatening than them stomping through the woods after me; I imagine them picking up the phone and dialing. I reluctantly sneak back to my room and cry-scream into my pillow. None of my eighth-grade church-school classmates get spanked. Their parents let them attend sleepovers. They’re allowed to watch PG-13 movies and some of my classmates’ parents even let them go to the theater. I fall asleep that night as I often do, rage choking back the sobs in my throat.

“No one will ever want to marry you if you keep acting this way,” my mother tells me when I’m being nasty, and it echoes around my brain in my sleep.

#

The organ music swells around the rigid benches and wood paneled walls of our tiny church. My mom’s stocking feet blur across the pedalboard as her hands sink into the slick milky keys. She dips her body forward, her nose hovering inches from the sheet music, before she sways backward in time with the music, her lips forming a small ‘o’, pursed in a grimace of concentration. The congregation stands after a flurry of missteps from the organ, trumpeting discordantly as my mother pulls the wrong stop. I see her frown reflected in the small mirror crowning the organ. The elder behind the pulpit misses his cue to begin singing so the last stanza restarts, prompting from the congregation nearly every dissonant pitch. My mother’s robust alto pierces through the din carrying the melody, as certain as the stumble was jarring. We kneel for prayer on the thin grey-blue carpet that is older than I am. It scrapes tiny white swirls into my knees as I inch back onto the pew.

My high school boyfriend Cody juts his square jaw out towards me with a meaningful look. We need to get out of here; we’ve fulfilled our duty of attendance, arriving a few minutes into the sermon and slipping out the double doors followed into the weak January sun by the strains of the closing hallelujah. I tug open the door of his ’98 Honda Civic with a little too much fervor and it pops, refusing to return to position.

“What the fuck did you do to my car!” He fumes, circling around to my side and jiggling the offending handle. “It’s bad enough I have to put two hundred miles on it to come see you and go to church. If you had come to me we could’ve actually slept in the same bed.”

Cody lives with his eldest sister who suggests that we take naps together, as long as one of us is on top of the blanket, and lets us do whatever we want, except one time when Cody stepped into the bathroom while I showered to hand me a washcloth. We got screamed at and locked out of the house for a couple hours after that. Sometimes she sneaks down the stairs outside his basement room as quietly as possible then whips open the door to make sure we are being appropriate. We usually are not. The repercussions depend on how sorry for herself she feels and always include a threat to tell my parents. The threat never culminates in action though, because it would mean admitting her lapse in parenting. Usually our weekends with her don’t involve forced church attendance or waiting until sundown to watch TV or go shopping, so we endure. As much as Cody complains about his sister, he complains about my parents more.

He is a broken record of negativity, a toxic loop that I won’t break until I have grown into myself enough to know I deserve better—only to find him again in a more subtle font. I flip through the radio on the way home to break the silence. Cody punches it off before I find something I like. He despises mainstream music. We get home and shed our church clothes. I text my parents to check on their progress at church: they are still visiting with congregation members but assure me they will keep it quick. Before church we discussed visiting a lake my mother loved as a child. She isn’t exactly sure where it is, but we find a pin on the GPS that sounds like it may possibly be the place. How many lakes can there be in the mountains, anyway? The problem is that my parents move at an impossibly slow pace when it comes to just about every activity around the house. We still don’t know how they do it, but they turn a change of clothes into an afternoon long event. Somewhere along the way one of them sits down to read an Adventist Review and it’s all downhill from there. My mom says that we’ll eat Sabbath lunch on the way up to the lake to save time. She hasn’t made the sandwiches yet, but of course that won’t take long. She’ll just change her clothes and put together a lunch for my dad and we’ll be on our way.

It’s pushing two thirty and my parents text that they’re almost ready to leave church. Can I do anything to start on the food? I ask my mom. We are on our way, she replies. I open the fridge to start pulling ingredients out. I am greeted with a sea of leftover containers labelled GF for my dad’s gluten allergy and filled with unidentifiable vegan goop, casseroles, and baked goods. A musty sharp smell hangs in the air. I shut the fridge.

My parents emerge from their room around 3:30 clad in high waisted jeans and matching red shirts that say ( C H R I S T ) M A S across the front. My dad sits down at the kitchen table to put on his tennis shoes and socks. My mom fusses around the kitchen, heating up vegetables and the vegan goop, spooning it onto a plate.

I look sideways at the spread my mom is ferrying to my dad. “Can we start on the sandwiches?” I ask hopefully, thinking about how it will be dark in an hour and a half and the drive to the lake takes at least two.

“Daddy is hungry now,” she counters, “he needs to eat so he doesn’t get sick in the car. It won’t take any longer than making sandwiches would.” She continues around the kitchen transferring casseroles to containers, washing dishes, cutting up fruit. I take the news back to Cody that my father has started on his lunch in the kitchen. He rolls his eyes and groans.

“They won’t be ready for another hour!” He protests. “It takes more than two hours to get there, we don’t even know if it’s the right lake, and it’s going to start getting dark at 4:30… we’ll be stuck in the car with them after dark when we’re actually allowed to leave on our own.” I feel bad hearing him tear into my parents but he’s not wrong, and I hate missing our Saturday night free time. Spending hours carsick in the backseat of my parents’ Honda looking for a lake my mom hasn’t seen since she was seven doesn’t sound like the best plan for a winter afternoon. I raise my eyes to Cody’s face. “We’re going to have to tell them it’s too late to go.”

He comes out to the kitchen with me for solidarity. I lean up against the counter and try to breathe through the knot forming in my stomach. I remind myself that we are being completely reasonable requesting to skip an unplanned drive into the mountains this close to sundown.

“Mom,” I begin hesitantly, “You know, it’s nearly four o’clock and I really don’t want to rush Daddy through eating. Google maps says that it will take us two and a half hours to get to the lake and it will be dark by the time we get there at this point. We won’t even be able to see it.”

“Daddy’s already done eating.” My mom smooths the front of her shirt, the cheer in her voice sounding particularly strained. “We’re ready to go. We can leave right now.”

“I’m just saying…” I insist weakly, “It will be dark in half an hour. We don’t even know exactly where we’re going. We could lose cell service in the mountains and get lost.”

Her voice raises a couple of octaves. It increases in volume with each word. “I know where the lake is! I went to summer camp there before I was in high school!” This piece of information doesn’t include her initial uncertainty about even the name of the lake; it has changed at least once since she was at camp. “I’ve been looking forward to taking you guys there all day!” Her voice breaks pitifully. “We hurried at church, we didn’t visit with anyone too long, we got home in pretty good time!” By now my dad has risen from the table and crossed the kitchen to wrap his arm across my mother’s shoulders. “It’s not ‘about to get dark’! The sun doesn’t go down tonight until 5:47!” She sobs into the air.

Cody doesn’t say a word. My dad shoots daggers at me while he tenderly pats my mom’s arm. “You’ve disappointed your mother.” He leans on her heavily and shifts his glare down to the floor. “She was really excited for us to go on a family trip.” My father could throw in something to smooth things over, to point out our perspective to my mother, to acknowledge the relevance of our argument in even a neutral way, but he doesn’t. We’ve sinned against my mother and deserve no sympathy. She turns into his embrace and we back out of the kitchen.

My parents spend the next half hour murmuring together in hushed, serious tones that are audible from the hallway outside my room. My mother whimpers occasionally. As a child I would crouch under the thermostat before the bend in the wall, listening with rapt attention as they deliberated about all of my psychological shortcomings and strategies for managing me. Now, Cody and I play Scrabble on my bedroom floor and share our disbelief at my mother’s tantrum. Mostly we are quiet and catch odd snippets of my dad’s flat voice sounding heavier than usual. Dusk sets in and he moves through the house, fighting with the tangled cords on our pleated blinds while my mom resumes clinking around the kitchen. We hear my parents’ Saturday night popcorn blooming in the microwave and my mom’s carpet-muffled footfall stop just outside my open door.

Her eyes are still red from crying but she is trying to be the best example of Jesus she can. We are just kids who don’t have the benefit of her faith and unwavering certainty of the ultimate truth God has given her.

The tender smile she offers us is full of forgiveness. “Would you guys come out to the kitchen for some fruit and popcorn? We’re going to be having sundown worship to close the Sabbath.”