| It was weird to go. It was 14 years between leaving home and coming to any sort of reconciliation with my family in 2006.
Then, later that year, there was an awkward conversation while I was taking an internship in Costa Rica and hanging out with the other interns. They were all talking about things they remembered from growing up, happy memories. I usually shut the hell up when people get to talking like that, I don't have much to add that wouldn't be either a complete downer, freakish or sort of bland. I usually try to batten down and wait for the subject to pass. Except it didn't. It went on forever, and I kept not saying anything, until eventually the friendly prying started.
I tried not to horrify them, they were nice people who'd had nice lives. And I didn't want, in that moment, to taint them. To take them away from the pleasantries I'd been vicariously enjoying (ah, so people sometimes get to grow up like that, well, doesn't that beat all) and worry them that they'd made me feel bad by being happy about their experiences in front of me.
I told them a little, and I also told them that I'd recently gotten back in touch with my family, and we were starting to get along again. Then one of them asked me how I could even talk to them after everything that happened, which was at last an easy question.
"Because they're my family. I love them."
You can see how it is, that first loyalty. How it can endure time and distance, estrangement and bad feeling. So it is, naturally, that it can be a bit hard to talk about them in ways that put them in a bad light. Because they're my family. I love them.
On the Benefits of Dirty Laundry
But two things happened in the last day that made me think I really should talk about some of what went on in our house, in our lives.
First, a friend told me about this letter to Dan savage:
Four months ago, my mom walked in on me messing around with my boyfriend in our garage. I'm also a boy, age 15, and I hadn't gotten around to coming out to my parents yet. I felt bad that my mom had to find out by seeing what she saw. I stayed in my room crying until my father came home. They called me down to the kitchen and told me they loved me and that they were very, very sorry if they had ever done or said anything that made me feel like I couldn't be open with them about who I am.
My boyfriend is 17. He came out to his parents at Christmas, and our parents met for the first time last night. We don't have a question. We just wanted to thank you and thank all the other gay people who came out back when it was much tougher to do so. Our parents wouldn't have reacted the way they did if it weren't for all you guys that already came out.
Then, another friend sent me an article that they thought it would help me to read. It hurt to read it, I was sort of a basketcase all last evening, but they were right. Going behind closed doors in Christian Right households was like a punishment to read, or rather, it brought up a lot of very disused memories with a visceral immediacy that it's hard to account for. From the article, emphasis mine:
... This leads us to the third aspect of a Christian Right home: the subordination of women. "Obedience is the most necessary ingredient to be required from the child," writes Reverend Jack Hyles, late pastor of First Baptist Church of Hammond, Indiana and author of 49 books and pamphlets. "This is especially true for a girl, for she must be obedient all her life. The boy who is obedient to his mother and father will some day become the head of a home; not so for the girl. Whereas the boy is being trained to be a leader, the girl is being trained to be a follower." It's an unashamed, old-fashioned vision of oppression updated in The Natural Family: A Manifesto. "We do believe wholeheartedly in women's rights," write Carlson and Mero. "Above all, we believe in rights that recognize women's unique gifts of pregnancy, childbirth, and breastfeeding."
... And so the fourth characteristic of a Christian Right home is that children are born evil and can become good only through a Godly mixture of love and punishment. "One does not have to teach antisocial behavior to toddlers," writes right-wing family psychologist John Rosemond in a 2006 column, syndicated in 225 newspapers. "They are by nature violent, deceitful, destructive, rebellious, and prone to sociopathic rages if they do not get their way." ...
Do you understand that this isn't some fictional dramatization? That it isn't a missive from some impoverished country whose leader's name George Bush needs to sound out about fifty times before he can say it without embarassing all of us? That it refers to the home lives of people you might work with, that children are being raised thinking that way, in this country, in your town or city, right sodding now? Do you?
I only ask because in all the many years I've been away from home, I've rarely run into the sorts of people who respond with anything besides incredulity to the slightest brush of this truth. And people need to know. They need to know the damage it does so that one day, authoritarian repression in families will start following homophobia's slow slide into irrelevance, and so these very hard core sects stop seeming so damn cute to people who know frak all about them.
It needs to be talked about.
Spare the Rod: Vignettes
- Jehovah's Witnesses don't have Sunday school for the kiddies. There are five hours of church services a week, two blocks of two hours in the church (properly, a Kingdom Hall) and a one hour group study discussion that's usually held in someone's home. All children old enough to be considered toddlers are supposed to be learning to keep still and silent during services.
- When one of my sisters was little, she got away from my mom and broke for the front of the Hall. The Brother (they're all Brothers and Sisters) giving the talk interrupted it to glare at my mother and sternly command her to "Get that baby!"
- When I was just old enough to start having memories of walking around, talking and operating doors, my father caught me hidden away somewhere with my pants down, playing with myself. I remembered that very clearly for years, I remembered the look in his face, how very angry he was, and exactly where I was when this happened, though it's hazier now. I remembered that he took me to my mom sitting in the dining room and ordered me to tell her what I'd been doing. I have never retained any memory, at all, of what happened after that.
It wasn't until my late teens that I registered even the faintest sexual sensation again, and it was pretty iffy for a long time into my twenties.
- When I was about five, my father died. (No, it's all right. It was a long time ago.) He was very well known. He and my mom had given up a lot to be extra devout, to give his time as an Elder, to move often in order to spend time in areas "where the need was greater," all up and down the State of California, where both my parents had been born. He had at least three funeral services at different congregations, but I don't remember the exact number, I was small. Anyway, my younger sister was always the one who remembered numbers.
At the funeral service for him that my family attended, I started to cry. My mom leaned over and told me to stop. I wasn't to disrupt the sermon. I stopped.
- For as long as I could remember when I was small, I had a horror of my mom's jar of wooden spoons. They were nerve racking. She had a big pizza paddle with a broad handle, and it was a joke (funny, ha ha) that my name was written on one side of the handle in my favorite color crayon, and my younger sister's on the other side in her favorite color. But the thin ones were the ones she used; they hurt the most, they left the worst bruises.
Spoil the Girl: A Ramble
Though they've softened their message, in reflection of the economic realities mentioned in the article, the Jehovah's Witnesses used to strongly discourage women from working outside the home. All young people were discouraged from going to college, and this is also less true today, but especially young women. I slacked in school, no one was ever going to let me go to college and study anything interesting.
Also, I wanted to be virtuous, you know. That was the only mark of real status a person had in that society, especially if you weren't male.
See, if you were a woman in your 60s, you might have put in several decades of intensive proseletyzing through knocking on people's doors and studying with likely prospects in their homes. You might expect to know by then nearly all the useful scriptures, or how easily to find them, by heart. You might have practiced all the rhetoric of faith for so long, studied so much and been such a careful attendee of meetings, that you were practically a walking encyclopedia of the doctrine.
And yet. If you were such a woman at an informal prayer meeting before going out in Service (knocking on doors), even though you might be the most senior and experienced person there, a teenage boy had precedence over you to say the prayer for the group. Though if it were just women, you'd do.
That rankled. Not as much as the story of Tamar, but there you are. It set wrong with me, like the woman who considered it disrespectful to say 'oh, man,' because men were supposed to be the heads of, well, everything.
Though it isn't just Witnesses that think these things. Don't comfort yourself that it's only some odd little sect you barely have to hear about. No.
It's like the far Right Evangelical coworker I had who took me to lunch one day with a friend of hers. My coworker was married, didn't have kids, and had come to religion later in life. Her friend was divorced, with a deadbeat drunk of an ex and three kids. The oldest, a teenage girl, had started getting into trouble. The preteen boy had some minor developmental problems. I don't remember the story with the toddler.
My coworker's suggestion for dealing with the girl's behavioral problems was to say that she should be encouraged to look to her brother for leadership, and that the boy needed to start being the man around the house. Yeah. Because what a troubled teenage girl without a stable father figure needs is to be told to be obedient to a developmentally challenged younger boy.
I was a temp worker at the time, at the end of a rocky marriage that I'd gotten into as a teenage girl with zero self-esteem, mainly because I'd been told I was worth less all my life and that I should always defer my own judgment to that of others. I could also have been fired for no reason at all and it was the best job I'd ever had at that point. I chose to be a coward and kept my mouth shut as my coworker advised her friend on how to ruin her daughter's life even further.
Results, or, the Inevitable Consequence
All that sounds perhaps frustrating. Maybe the horror of it isn't really clear. So I'll tell you what happens when people live together like that, with the punishment mentality, the sex hatred, the misogyny, and don't see anything wrong with it.
When I was 6 or 7, a young woman who was close to my family and was old enough to leave home went to a party with some "worldly" young people. She went into a room with a boy, they made out, and at some point, she asked him to stop. But he didn't. No one at the party came to help her and she was raped.
Then she turned to her community, those people to whom she had the strongest ties of loyalty, the group to which her family belonged.
And the Elders of my church Disfellowshipped her for having been so unwise as to go to a party like that. She stayed in disfavor for a year. So in the year after she was raped, she was able to live with her grandmother who wasn't a Witness, but she couldn't visit her mother or siblings. None of her childhood friends could speak to her at all and she wasn't supposed to try and make new friends who weren't Witnesses.
She was very dear to me. Every year I've been alive, her story has made me more angry and sad than it did the previous year.
Meanderings and an Ending of Sorts
At base, it's all a cruel and horrible way for people to treat each other. It's a vile way to force children to see life. To tell them they're evil, bad, and can only be redeemed at the whim of an angry and capricious deity whose wrath they see embodied in the 'loving correction' through beatings administered by their parents. It creates in them a fearful relationship to what they see as a senseless and intrinsically ugly world.
This is nothing to do with Christianity, as such, because I dare you to find me anywhere that Jesus said people should act this way. You'll never do it. And I promise that you'll find the same messed up home lives, to one degree or another, in every society where authoritarianism is practiced.
This is where the sicknesses come from, the diseases of the mind that turn people into automatons.
Even if you didn't live in a house like mine, and can't fathom that there are even worse ones, that's where they come from. This is the foundation of authoritarian behaviors and desires. This is the vein of fear, guilt, terror, and retreat to traditions that everyone always hated anyway, that allows bad leaders to commit huge crimes and cover them up with devotion to petty moralisms.
The love of money may well be the root of all evil, but the authoritarian plague is the root of all blindness to evil. The ties that bind us into obedience and hide from us the failings of those whose approval we fear to lose.
Though you have to understand, even when I was a ball of newly escaped anger and wrathful spite, even when I was young enough to believe that I hated my family, I loved them. And they loved me; as they do now, as they always have. When I'm around them now, our shared quirks and gestures give me a tremendous sense of comfort. We fall so easily into a smooth fabric of conversation, such that it can't be denied that we belong to each other. It's just unfortunate that we ended up knowing each other under the circumstances we did.
If you want to feel in yourself where authoritarianism comes from, so you really get that it isn't something that can only happen to 'other' people, you can't hate my family nor pity me. Then you won't see anything useful at all.
(And if you'd like to apply hate or pity to some other situation that I don't know of, erm, go for it if you must. But bear with me, here.)
Where are your loyalties? How well, and why, have you chosen them? What will you do for, or overlook on behalf of, the people you owe them to?
Those are the feelings you have in common with me, with my family, with all the people who live today or have lived before us. It's in what are potentially these best and strongest of our emotions that the seeds of all our cruelty, our undoing, lie.
That bell tolls for all of us, as they say. What will you do to check this impulse in yourself, to keep from passing it into the future?
"Language creates spooks that get into our heads and hypnotize us." - Robert Anton Wilson |
