So January was apparently Break Your Own Heart Month. (Just in time for Valentine’s Day!)
For one thing, I don’t particularly enjoy having to give anyone in my family a violent verbal shove or contemplate total “divorce” from the lot of them, even when my mom insists upon continuing to pound my buttons as if they were nails and all she has is a hammer.
It also kills me to force distance between Ted and me when all I long for is the opposite.
I keep thinking of Aron Ralston, the guy who sawed off his own arm to save his life, or the animals who chew off a paw to get out of a steel trap. I feel like I’ve been trying to chew off a paw. It’s an act of desperation to cut off a part of yourself in order to (supposedly) save yourself and get free. It feels like sawing off living flesh.
**
I do feel much stronger about my exchange with my mother, because it was truthful, and confrontational, and not least of all (to be brutally frank) because it was more painful for her than it was for me. My worst agonies of maternal alienation and abandonment already happened a long time ago. Really all I did was quit being invisible in the name of protecting her. And the truth is, I feel much freer now.
In a nutshell: she pushed the religion on me one more time (after I expressed something resembling self-doubt in my Facebook feed) with the tired message that I “already know where the answers are.” (Wasn’t I just describing for you in my last post how fundies pounce on the faintest indication of vulnerability as an opportunity to proselytize?)
I lost my shit, kids. This time around it was the last proverbial straw hitting the camel’s back.
The first thing I did was to adjust my privacy settings so that she could no longer comment on my posts. Then I decided to take away her ability to so much as see them. Finally I sent her a private reply.
In my defense, I could have been a lot meaner.
Will you never let it rest? Oh, no, that’s right…you’re working on Commission. What you seem to forget is that you’re trying to sell me the same old lemon that never drove for me (subjectively speaking) in the first place – and a bizarre, bloodthirsty theology cobbled together from literalized myths from a plethora of ancient sources (objectively speaking)…
Do I ever try to force my beliefs (or lack thereof) on you? NO. Do I live and let live? YES. Why can’t you have just a tiny bit of respect for me, too, for a change? (That’s what finally gets to me. The constant picking. It’s like with parents who can never be happy with their child the way he or she is.)
Oh, no, that’s right…I’m going to “Hell.” I’ll tell you what…if “Heaven” is anything like that nutter Jesse Duplantis made it out to be (in that badly written book [my brother's wife] forced upon me), there’s no way I’m hanging out at that infinitely soporific church picnic. Send me wherever Mark Twain and Bill Maher are. I can’t imagine any decent god would want to live without them, myself.
I’m going to regret this outburst tomorrow, but…I just can’t take the picking, always picking. And the smugness of “being right.” You’re as bad as some of the more strident atheists I know. Fundamentalists (on both sides) and their certainties!!! I’m long overdue for a good explosion.
It took her a week to respond. Her reaction was predictable: shock, hurt, and the confusion that comes with years of stubborn, intentional denial. “I couldn’t believe it came from the daughter I have known and loved these many years,” she lamented (with a nice heaping helping of parental guilt), “and wondered what was going on in your life that produced such an outburst.” Ever the willful innocent, she continued “I never expected to receive such a hurtful attack, not ever.” My reply was an “attack,” as if it came out of nowhere, apropos of nothing. As if she had not been attacking my choices and beliefs for decades.
Clearly (and perhaps deliberately) misunderstanding what I meant by “respect,” she defended herself by talking about the admiration she had for certain thoroughly unobjectionable qualities of mine, like the “tender heart” that led me to take my first job at a local homeless shelter. (I swear on Lucifer’s balls, every time my mother talks about my “tender heart,” so help me Jesus, I want to go out on the street and kick a puppy or snatch a little old lady’s purse.) She expressed bafflement at what I called “picking,” and insisted she only wanted to “share” things like “videos and stories” that had “touched (her) deeply,” completely ignoring the fact that it had been yet one more presumptuous evangelistic prod that had pushed me over the edge.
With a feeling of weary, almost callous resignation (perhaps the feeling one has when it’s time to get an actual divorce) I realized that just because she was never going to “get it” didn’t mean I had to sit down and STFU. I wrote back.
Follow my metaphor for a moment. You’re sitting behind someone who used to agree with you. Now she just does her own thing, and tries not to bother you or anyone else, but you feel the need to keep intermittently poking, prodding and nudging her. It’s not good enough for you to peacefully coexist. She must agree with you!
For twenty-five years this goes on, you poke and you prod, and from time to time she turns around and politely asks you to stop.
Finally, after twenty-five years, she suddenly turns around and gives you a violent shove that sends you sprawling, shocked and hurt, onto the floor.
Honestly, can you blame her?
Of course, much of the problem here also lies in the phrase “Who wrote that?”
I’m afraid that no matter what I say, I will fail to communicate with you in any significant way. The fact is, I’ve tried several times in the past few years to “come out” to you — which would be easier if I were actually gay, then there’d be a thorny but concrete identity issue that might possibly work some change here — but at this point it seems like whatever you don’t want to see or hear is going to get filtered out. Or maybe it’ll be just chalked up to “evil” or “sin,” which are handy catch-alls for otherwise normal human traits and behaviors that often frighten and/or confuse fundamentalists of all stripes.
When I say “respect,” by the way, I don’t just mean “admiration for certain desirable traits.” I mean respecting other people’s boundaries — which runs completely against the whole born-again modus operandi of “witnessing,” I know, Henry Cloud notwithstanding. I also mean respecting the differences and choices of others, which in evangel-speak would probably be translated to “tolerating sin and destructive choices” — so there’s really no way I can win here.
I’d be lying if I didn’t say it was an angry outburst. I hoped to shock more than hurt, although I could write entire volumes about what, within the belief system I was raised in, has hurt me. Perhaps now I can start doing that publicly. What I couldn’t tell you before is that the work I did with that career coach revealed that one big thing I want to do is somehow help others who have been screwed up by Manichean evangelical Christian doctrine/culture. Franky Schaeffer (prodigal Greek Orthodox liberal son of Francis) is a role model of mine.
I have to say, part of my outburst, at least in my opinion, was damn funny too…what I said about Jesse Duplantis and church picnics and Mark Twain…that’s my real sense of humor: sharp, pointed, ironic/sarcastic, highlighting absurdity. It’s nothing foreign or affected — although I tone it down to the point of disappearance around every (member of our family) but (my brother). I don’t think he would have been as shocked as you, or found me quite so unrecognizable. He’s a lot tamer and more conservative than he used to be, but he still has a little bit of a subversive streak.
I’m more than a marshmallow peep, Mom. I’m not just sugar on the outside and a soft, chewy center. I’m also tart and I have bite. Don’t you like Macintosh apples?
Sorry to have hurt your feelings.
That was over a week ago and I haven’t heard from her. But at long last I feel freer than ever to say whatever the hell I want, even without the anonymity of this blog. Perhaps I’m that much closer to setting up my own fundamentalist-recovery Web site.
I thought the marshmallow peep comment was particularly inspired.
**
On Super Bowl Sunday I went over to my 74-year-old gay friend Richard’s house for wine and cheese, and we watched Howl instead of the game. It was an imaginative project, built around the 1957 obscenity trial of the publisher of Allen Ginsberg’s titular opus. James Franco completely inhabited the otherwise inimitable character of Ginsberg. He was astonishing.
The reason I mention the film is because of something Ginsberg said to a writer from Playboy during their lengthy recorded interview (shown between clips of the trial, Ginsberg’s first public poetry reading of “Howl,” and hallucinatory animated interpretations of the poem). He talked about how he would have been unable to write such an uninhibited, nakedly honest poem if he had ever thought about his “daddy” reading it. Instead, he strove for the kind of intimate self-expression one experiences with one’s closest friends. “Don’t hide the madness,” he said. “You say what you want to say when you don’t care who’s listening.”
I wish it hadn’t taken me so long.
**
But it’s been another film, or more properly a film series, that has given me a non-fictional character with whom I could wholly identify, who makes me feel less alone in my particular life ineptitudes, and who gives me some hope that I can eventually prevail.
Out of a longtime curiosity, I requested Michael Apted’s 7-Up series from Netflix. This is the ambitious ongoing documentary series that began in 1963 with a group of fourteen seven-year-olds from various areas and social classes in England. Apted intended to follow up with them every seven years, although as the years went by some of the grown-up children wound up opting out.
It’s fascinating. Even at seven, the children have distinct accents, opinions, and personalities. (One upper-class Londoner named John is practically a miniature William F. Buckley.) Some become more subdued by fourteen. But by twenty-one, a few have changed pronouncedly. Neil Hughes, a middle-class Liverpudlian, is one of those few, and the filmmaker’s interview with him made me burst into tears. I saw myself in the series’ only societal dropout — rejecting his upbringing, questioning everything, devoid of self-confidence, unable to find his place in the world.
A bright-eyed and precocious child at seven, Neil is, at twenty-one, perched on the edge of homelessness — living in a squatter’s flat and doing day labor after having dropped out of a third-class University. His expression is one of perennial woundedness and bewilderment. Battling depression, directionless, he has a strained relationship with his devoutly religious parents, who (as he relates, with a nervous calm masking suppressed rage) taught him that “if one was to survive in the world, one had to believe in God” and that he should “always think of other people first before yourself, to a ridiculous neurotic degree.”
I don’t think I was really taught any policy of living at all by my parents…I was just left to fend for myself in a world which they seemed completely oblivious of. I found when I even tried to discuss problems that were facing me in school, my parents didn’t seem to be aware of the nature of the problem.
At that point I felt such a powerful recognition and sorrow I started to weep. The cluelessness and helplessness of which he speaks is, I believe, part of the fallout from growing up within a narrow religious worldview in which all problems are “spiritual” in nature (rather than social or psychological), we are essentially powerless to direct or change our own lives, and everything is a matter of God’s will. That is, some invisible, inscrutable external Being is in control of our lives, not us. Decisions are made and problems solved through prayer and submission to His divine will.
Given the overwhelming silence and absence of said Being, and the reinforced belief in one’s own helplessness (and worthlessness), this does not prepare a child to go confidently into the world and shape his or her own destiny. What it does do is encourage passivity and paralysis.
When Apted asks Neil if he is “kicking against stability,” Neil replies that there never was any stability to begin with. “I think I’ve been kicking in midair the whole of my life.”
Ouch. I hear you, brother.
“How many parents really think of their children as individual human beings?” Neil blurts out passionately, tangentially, at another point, interrupting his interviewer. And I found myself thinking of my own losing battle to show my parents who I am. “I couldn’t believe it came from the daughter I have known and loved these many years.” That unwillingness to let one’s children, or even other people, be visible — it seems to also come with this religious territory.
At the end of the conversation, Neil rues his inability to “take any positive course of action” and hopes that one day he’ll be able to “wake up in the morning and feel this day is going to be worthwhile.” Which I couldn’t have said better myself.
By 28-Up, Neil is a drifter in Scotland, living in a rented trailer, picking up odd jobs. He waxes philosophical about what Thoreau referred to as the majority of men living lives of quiet despair. He never wanted the 9-to-5 life and evenings spent watching television. (Another thing we have in common.) I already know that by 49-Up he will be living in a small England town and be involved in politics, so somehow it’s reassuring to see him flounder, rootless and directionless, the way I have all these years.
If Neil can find his way, I can too.
**
But then there’s the ongoing story of Ted.
After a while, Ted seemed to grow used to the status quo, i.e. my assiduous avoidance, and by then I had become too passive and cowardly to change course. Following three weeks of no contact (other than being in the same big room), I was at last getting to a point where I didn’t think about him that much outside of work. I was going on some Internet dates, which, though unsuccessful, were at least dates, and resulted in some interesting conversations. (What would be even nicer would be if I could inspire interest in someone I actually found at least marginally attractive.)
Granted, on the days I did see Ted, I still felt that undercurrent of low-grade misery that comes from prolonged, unresolved inner dissonance, of behaving in a manner diametrically opposed to one’s true feelings, and my numbers suffered. (I’ve had four quota warnings in six weeks. Good thing they like me too much to fire me.)
Then those nonexistent rom-com scriptwriters decided to fuck around with me again.
Ted had, one particular evening, decided to be more in-my-face than usual anyway by taking an empty station just on the other side of the row partition from me. Perhaps because my (nervous) energy level spiked as a result, I started scoring some solid pledges right away. There had been a system crash earlier in the day, but we hummed along without incident for an hour into the evening shift. Then suddenly my computer screen froze. I kept “pitching” the donor without the use of my script, and had just persuaded her to donate ten dollars a month to the ACLU, when the line went dead.
Another system crash. The supervisor rebooted everything. In the meantime, I jotted down the donor’s information and phone number to complete the transaction manually, and went to the reception area to call her back. Twice I got voice mail. The second time, I left a message explaining what had happened with the system. I told her she would probably be getting a call from someone else in the near future. (Ruefully, I assumed I’d lost the pledge.)
When I walked back into the call room, Ted and the supervisor came rapidly toward me. My donor was back — on Ted’s line. Apparently when the system came back up, the autodialer must have redialed her number and sent her to his computer. I had to finish my call from his station. (Out of all the call stations in all the rows of all the sections of the call floor, as Bogart once said…)
With a laugh, Ted told me that both he and the donor could hear me leaving the message. It was the most we’d interacted in a month. Again, as in my last post, I experienced that fleeting warm and homey feeling of everything being all right with the world.
Ted either left of his own accord or got sent home at the shift break, but my performance continued to shoot through the roof for the rest of the night, and saved my whole week. That’s the good news. I can’t say if the indulgence of renewed fantasies involving furniture-smashing resolutions of sexual tension later that night, leading to certain unmentionable conclusions, is good news (Russ would probably say so) — but it might just as easily be comparable to the indulgence of a self-destructive drug addiction. After all, you come back to work the next day, and he’s way over there again, and it hits you that this is never really going to happen, and then you feel about as shitty as a junkie with a crack hangover.
Ted may be leaving soon. I know he’s had a number of interviews, and last week he was in the director’s office with the door closed, which may mean he was giving his notice — but not having talked to him, I don’t know. Yeah, I know. You don’t have to tell me how lame that is.
**
My rational mind tells me to get free and get on with my life. My emotions and my body still crave Ted. Avoiding him is an act of both despair and helplessness, because I feel on the one hand too weak to follow my mind’s ruthless resolve, and on the other utterly helpless to get what I want from him.
Is it worse to divorce yourself from what you know you want today, or to sabotage possibilities you might want in the future, but don’t yet know you want? Especially if you have no confidence whatsoever in your ability to win either way?
If Ted simply leaves, it will be taken care of for me, by virtue of my own passivity.
Which is how good little Christian boys and girls like me and Neil have been trained to deal with our life challenges.
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