Day 1 NaNo 2007
My hands shake. I cannot open the slim file on my desk. I debate inwardly again and again, afraid of what I might find, afraid of what I will miss if I don’t open the file.
What does this simple manila file contain? The fate of my long lost sister, the only one of us, seventeen siblings who no one has had word of in over ten years. For the last ten years it’s been like Cynthia Rose vanished off the face of the earth, as if she never existed or had been erased suddenly.
The shaking spreads to my body and I shiver sitting here, completely unable to make a decision as to what to do. I tell myself it’s really not that big a deal because only five of my seventeen siblings will care what happened to Cynthia Rose, the other ten still live firmly in the same lifestyle we were raised in. The rest of us realized what freedom was once we were adults and Cynthia is the sister that strayed the furthest from the nest. Mother doesn’t allow anyone to mention her name now, to our parents Cynthia Rose is worse than dead.
I think about the why and realize that there is no answer to the question of why unless you go back to the beginning of our family. Our family wasn’t always semi-famous, we just became that way after Momma kept having babies and it kept making the news. The year that the cameras of public broadcasting television followed us around didn’t seem so bad, just sort of weird. We were all so innocent back then. Home schooled, strictly raised without much contact with the outside world. We’d only watched religious programming and vcr tapes, never regular television so we were all in for a shock once our series aired. It brought the exposure of the world to us and that is when things started to really go awry. As long as we lived in our sealed bubble all were content.
As the oldest daughter, my life, the life of Emily Ann Frehley, consisted of marshalling the younger kids into doing all the household chores, while I and Cynthia did all the cooking. We had a couple of hours home schooling in the mornings where the older kids studied using video tapes and then taught the younger ones their lessons. The afternoons were filled with the chores, splitting wood for the wood burning furnace, cleaning, laundry and whatever else needed to be done to keep our huge family running.
My mother did very little, she tended to the youngest baby until it was six months old, then she would pass it off to whichever daughter had the least number of little pals to watch over. So not only were we responsible for all the work of the household and our own education, we had to raise our younger siblings. My mother seemed like someone sleep walking through life and now that I’ve gained some years and life experience I’d have to say that she had to have been on some sort of heavy duty mood drugs and tranquilizers all the time. She spoke in a little girls voice with a slur in a soft tone you would have to lean forward to hear.
I never questioned how she raised us, until the public broadcasting people showed up I thought everyone lived like this, large families, home schooling, thrift, hard work and, above all else, God. Religion permeated everything we did, from our school lessons to the few other families we socialized with. Over and over again it was pounded into our heads that we girls, all eight of us, were to ‘stay sweet’. No man would marry a girl with a proud head strong manner. Pride goeth before a fall. Stay sweet, stay humble and be a vessel of service and mercy at all times. My father lectured us that we were to emulate our mother in all things.
The other families we were allowed to interact with were exactly like our own, strong politically involved father who owned his own business, soft spoken mother that had a new baby every 18 months and hordes of children, girls in tight plaits and calico and boys with short shorn hair, polo shirts and polyester blend slacks.
I remember the first time I saw a woman wearing lots of makeup, slacks and jewelry. It was one of the producers of our documentary series. She had nails like crimson talons with a matching color slashed onto her full lips. I memorized every tiny detail of her appearance and once I ran off to be alone in the pine woods surrounding our home I tried hiking up my calico skirt to the approximation of tightness and length of her mini skirt worn over leggings. I used pine sap to glue pieces pulled from pine cones to make fake long nails. Futilely I rubbed flower petals against my mouth and cheeks for makeup and to emulate her high heels I just walked on tippy toe. I remember how thrilled and guilty at the same time I felt trying on this foreign persona. I was worried about getting caught. But I didn’t and my secret rebellion was born at 16 years of age.
As the years pasted I became adept at concealing that I thought differently than my siblings or parents on a host of issues. Every time PBS would come film our family or haul us on an outing like our Grand Canyon trip or the time we were sent to see Disneyland in Florida it was as if I were Alice stepping through the looking glass to a place that existed far away. I hungrily devoured new experiences, sights and places, sorting them away in my memory to be mulled over on those long afternoons when I was stuck changing diapers or peeling potatoes. I could day dream about what it would be like to wear a bikini and surf in the churning blue gray waters of the Atlantic.
My horded memories kept me sweet and smiling throughout those long sessions in our home church, a church that was held in the basement of a local factory. They rented us the space and all our other home schooling family friends around the greater Harrisburg, Pennsylvania area would assemble with us and Daddy would preach on being vigilant against sin in the camp. He’d be yammering on about the yawning portal of hell being paved with secret sins and how we were to keep ourselves utterly pure in thought at all time lest we be dashed down that chute into a fiery eternity with the devil. He’d be speaking about hell and I’d be thinking about the freedom I felt riding on a stinky mule to the bottom of the Grand Canyon, remembering what the air felt like and the way the sun slipped up over the rim of the canyon.
And I know I wasn’t the only one doing this. Cynthia Rose and I would giggle over these things and other worldly agendas, like if the bagger at the Kroger had a crush on us, what it would be like to go on a date, wear makeup, dance, all things forbidden by our parents.
Even with the guilt I felt in my still heart of hearts that if Jesus was the loving lamb He was portrayed as that He wouldn’t begrudge me a rose pink lipstick and a twirl around the dance floor in the arms of a handsome bag boy.
Throughout all my teen years my parents never picked up on the fact that I was the sin in the camp, that I longed for something different, that the moment they’d allowed us to be exposed in the media that myself and several of my siblings eyes had been opened to the big beautiful bold world beyond our farm in Pennsylvania Dutch countryside.
Now I realized the hypocrisy of the way I was raised. My parents looked down on the local Amish and Mennonites for keeping the letter of the law but not the spirit when they themselves were no different. Sure, we didn’t wear bonnets or shun electricity but I know that we did many of the same things those communities did, keep ourselves mostly separate from the world, shun things that were not humble and practice a religion that didn’t leave much wiggle room for simply being human, failing and making mistakes. My parents believed that we were so much better than the Amish and Mennonites and were proud of this, never realizing that they were sinful in their pride by their own false standards.
I don’t remember exactly what point it was that I realized that neither I, Cynthia or our eldest brother Jake Jedidiah, believed the same as what had been instilled in everyone else. Perhaps it was when Jake kept having broken off betrothals, each time Jake would be punished by our parents, locked in his prayer closet for days until he’d seen the error of his ways. None of us knew what that really meant but years later when Jake came out of the closet as openly gay and moved to Washington DC, immersing himself in the openly gay community there, it made perfect sense.
And I thought my struggle between what I wanted, what I believed and what the family wanted was a hard one. I cannot imagine having to deny your own natural sexuality to keep from hurting your momma and daddy. To my parents Jake was immediately dead too.
He’s still my favorite brother. But watching him struggle with faith, our family, what we’d all been taught has been a very painful thing to behold. Our parents believe that he is the one that started what they consider the downward spiral of the family into sin. They never realized it was actually me who started thinking that perhaps they had it all wrong. I was good at hiding my guilt.
What does this simple manila file contain? The fate of my long lost sister, the only one of us, seventeen siblings who no one has had word of in over ten years. For the last ten years it’s been like Cynthia Rose vanished off the face of the earth, as if she never existed or had been erased suddenly.
The shaking spreads to my body and I shiver sitting here, completely unable to make a decision as to what to do. I tell myself it’s really not that big a deal because only five of my seventeen siblings will care what happened to Cynthia Rose, the other ten still live firmly in the same lifestyle we were raised in. The rest of us realized what freedom was once we were adults and Cynthia is the sister that strayed the furthest from the nest. Mother doesn’t allow anyone to mention her name now, to our parents Cynthia Rose is worse than dead.
I think about the why and realize that there is no answer to the question of why unless you go back to the beginning of our family. Our family wasn’t always semi-famous, we just became that way after Momma kept having babies and it kept making the news. The year that the cameras of public broadcasting television followed us around didn’t seem so bad, just sort of weird. We were all so innocent back then. Home schooled, strictly raised without much contact with the outside world. We’d only watched religious programming and vcr tapes, never regular television so we were all in for a shock once our series aired. It brought the exposure of the world to us and that is when things started to really go awry. As long as we lived in our sealed bubble all were content.
As the oldest daughter, my life, the life of Emily Ann Frehley, consisted of marshalling the younger kids into doing all the household chores, while I and Cynthia did all the cooking. We had a couple of hours home schooling in the mornings where the older kids studied using video tapes and then taught the younger ones their lessons. The afternoons were filled with the chores, splitting wood for the wood burning furnace, cleaning, laundry and whatever else needed to be done to keep our huge family running.
My mother did very little, she tended to the youngest baby until it was six months old, then she would pass it off to whichever daughter had the least number of little pals to watch over. So not only were we responsible for all the work of the household and our own education, we had to raise our younger siblings. My mother seemed like someone sleep walking through life and now that I’ve gained some years and life experience I’d have to say that she had to have been on some sort of heavy duty mood drugs and tranquilizers all the time. She spoke in a little girls voice with a slur in a soft tone you would have to lean forward to hear.
I never questioned how she raised us, until the public broadcasting people showed up I thought everyone lived like this, large families, home schooling, thrift, hard work and, above all else, God. Religion permeated everything we did, from our school lessons to the few other families we socialized with. Over and over again it was pounded into our heads that we girls, all eight of us, were to ‘stay sweet’. No man would marry a girl with a proud head strong manner. Pride goeth before a fall. Stay sweet, stay humble and be a vessel of service and mercy at all times. My father lectured us that we were to emulate our mother in all things.
The other families we were allowed to interact with were exactly like our own, strong politically involved father who owned his own business, soft spoken mother that had a new baby every 18 months and hordes of children, girls in tight plaits and calico and boys with short shorn hair, polo shirts and polyester blend slacks.
I remember the first time I saw a woman wearing lots of makeup, slacks and jewelry. It was one of the producers of our documentary series. She had nails like crimson talons with a matching color slashed onto her full lips. I memorized every tiny detail of her appearance and once I ran off to be alone in the pine woods surrounding our home I tried hiking up my calico skirt to the approximation of tightness and length of her mini skirt worn over leggings. I used pine sap to glue pieces pulled from pine cones to make fake long nails. Futilely I rubbed flower petals against my mouth and cheeks for makeup and to emulate her high heels I just walked on tippy toe. I remember how thrilled and guilty at the same time I felt trying on this foreign persona. I was worried about getting caught. But I didn’t and my secret rebellion was born at 16 years of age.
As the years pasted I became adept at concealing that I thought differently than my siblings or parents on a host of issues. Every time PBS would come film our family or haul us on an outing like our Grand Canyon trip or the time we were sent to see Disneyland in Florida it was as if I were Alice stepping through the looking glass to a place that existed far away. I hungrily devoured new experiences, sights and places, sorting them away in my memory to be mulled over on those long afternoons when I was stuck changing diapers or peeling potatoes. I could day dream about what it would be like to wear a bikini and surf in the churning blue gray waters of the Atlantic.
My horded memories kept me sweet and smiling throughout those long sessions in our home church, a church that was held in the basement of a local factory. They rented us the space and all our other home schooling family friends around the greater Harrisburg, Pennsylvania area would assemble with us and Daddy would preach on being vigilant against sin in the camp. He’d be yammering on about the yawning portal of hell being paved with secret sins and how we were to keep ourselves utterly pure in thought at all time lest we be dashed down that chute into a fiery eternity with the devil. He’d be speaking about hell and I’d be thinking about the freedom I felt riding on a stinky mule to the bottom of the Grand Canyon, remembering what the air felt like and the way the sun slipped up over the rim of the canyon.
And I know I wasn’t the only one doing this. Cynthia Rose and I would giggle over these things and other worldly agendas, like if the bagger at the Kroger had a crush on us, what it would be like to go on a date, wear makeup, dance, all things forbidden by our parents.
Even with the guilt I felt in my still heart of hearts that if Jesus was the loving lamb He was portrayed as that He wouldn’t begrudge me a rose pink lipstick and a twirl around the dance floor in the arms of a handsome bag boy.
Throughout all my teen years my parents never picked up on the fact that I was the sin in the camp, that I longed for something different, that the moment they’d allowed us to be exposed in the media that myself and several of my siblings eyes had been opened to the big beautiful bold world beyond our farm in Pennsylvania Dutch countryside.
Now I realized the hypocrisy of the way I was raised. My parents looked down on the local Amish and Mennonites for keeping the letter of the law but not the spirit when they themselves were no different. Sure, we didn’t wear bonnets or shun electricity but I know that we did many of the same things those communities did, keep ourselves mostly separate from the world, shun things that were not humble and practice a religion that didn’t leave much wiggle room for simply being human, failing and making mistakes. My parents believed that we were so much better than the Amish and Mennonites and were proud of this, never realizing that they were sinful in their pride by their own false standards.
I don’t remember exactly what point it was that I realized that neither I, Cynthia or our eldest brother Jake Jedidiah, believed the same as what had been instilled in everyone else. Perhaps it was when Jake kept having broken off betrothals, each time Jake would be punished by our parents, locked in his prayer closet for days until he’d seen the error of his ways. None of us knew what that really meant but years later when Jake came out of the closet as openly gay and moved to Washington DC, immersing himself in the openly gay community there, it made perfect sense.
And I thought my struggle between what I wanted, what I believed and what the family wanted was a hard one. I cannot imagine having to deny your own natural sexuality to keep from hurting your momma and daddy. To my parents Jake was immediately dead too.
He’s still my favorite brother. But watching him struggle with faith, our family, what we’d all been taught has been a very painful thing to behold. Our parents believe that he is the one that started what they consider the downward spiral of the family into sin. They never realized it was actually me who started thinking that perhaps they had it all wrong. I was good at hiding my guilt.
posted by Blues In The Night | 8:14 AM
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