Day 2

For the life of me I couldn’t understand why my parents had turned out so differently than they’d started out as. Long after I was grown I found out that once upon a time they’d both been relatively normal people, from typical all American middle class environments. Dad had been class president and Momma a cheerleader. A cheerleader? Hard to believe she was the same woman that had once ran around in short skirts and did dance routines in such skimpy outfits and then turned around and dressed in garments resembling calico potato sacks.

We were taught physical modesty above all else. I had no idea during all those years of prairie styled cotton that my mother had ever worn anything that revealing. She acted as though the human body was as dangerous as dynamite. Imagine, if you can, the difficulties her view presented, such as that Grand Canyon trip, riding down the side of the canyon on a mule wearing a dress and not riding side saddle. Mother had made each of us wear special denim riding skirt that was uncomfortable and unwieldy to wear.

Things weren’t much better the next year when the network filmed us going to the beach and the family girls had to wear modest swimwear. Modest swimwear as defined by my mother consisted of neck to elbow to knee spandex leotard topped by what looked like a polyester cafeteria ladies dress. Very hard to swim much less hang ten trussed up like this.

Because of the years of modesty and being constantly admonished to ‘stay sweet’ it was a pretty big shocker to find out that my parents had been normal once upon a time, that neither of them had dressed like us, that they’d attended public school, been on organized sports teams and been involved in extracurricular activities.

How did I find out that my parents didn’t live like they insisted we do? Many years later when I’d established a relationship with our distant grandparents. During our childhood we weren’t allowed much contact with our grandparents, they’d visit once or twice a year and Mother read their letters to us and collected our correspondence to send back. To know my grandparents as an adult unraveled some of the mysteries of our family for me.

My grandmother Anna told me that during senior year of high school that my parents had been dating and my mother had gotten pregnant. My father paid for her abortion but within a few months he’d found religion and was convinced they’d done the wrong thing and the only way to right this horrid wrong was to repent, turn to God, marry and have as many children as God would bless them with. Somehow he convinced my vapid airhead cheerleader mother that he was right and she married him the day after high school graduation.

So that’s how I found out that our strange family wasn’t created in great romantic love, that we were born out of guilt and fear, that we were on some strange level all fungible, sacrificial for that first unborn child. For the first time I understood why my parents seemed so obsessed with avoiding sin in all it’s myriad forms. They believed they’d committed a sin that would take some mighty works and years of righteous living to undo the seriousness of. I’m just sorry we kids were all hostages of their sin fate all these years.

Because my siblings and myself didn’t come out of our odd childhood without a few scars and quirks of our own. For more than a few years I believed that our family has started to spin out of control and some of us rebel because of my early rebellious inner thoughts after being exposed to the outside world via the television film crew. I took the bulk of the sin and blame upon myself wordlessly. What was it that Mother used to always say? You have to take every thought captive to the will of Jesus Christ. If that is true then I really was sin in the camp in those days.

It was only after many years of therapy and self analysis that I was able to let go of this notion that it was all my fault for not controlling my thought life. I discovered that those of us kids that grew up and became something that the family found monstrously outside the fundamentalist norm all secretly felt that our own thoughts had ruined things. I remember the incredulity of my more rebellious brothers and sisters when I found out about my parents aborted pregnancy in high school. All of us felt betrayed, like we’d been held to some false impossible to obtain standard while our parents hadn’t been able to reach that same standard they set for us.

We were all emotionally stunted in our own ways because of the way we’d been raised, it was just that some of us were more aware of it than others were. Of the seventeen of us, seven of us were living in ways that went counter to what our parents taught us. I was a psychologist in the big city, Cynthia was missing but when last seen was stripping for a living up in Baltimore. Our big brother Jake lived in DC as a graphic designer with his life partner. One of our younger brothers, Kevin, was flamingly gay, living in Key West Florida and hooked on crystal meth. Our sister Mary taught at a local high school not far from where we were raised, she had a family, a husband and three kids, but Momma and Daddy and our other siblings would have nothing to do with her because she was ‘worldly’ Another sister, Joy Autumn, was married to a polygamist Mormon and lived out in Colorado City, Utah, cut off from all of us, living in a different type of fundamentalism than what we grew up with.

Our other brothers and sisters toed the line, they all intermarried with the children of our father’s Church of the Holy Basement, started popping out babies within a year of marriage and supported themselves either as farmers, construction workers or a few enterprising brothers did like Dad did, started buying up rental real estate and because local slum lords. None of them questioned one bit what we’d been raised in, the rightness or wrongness, they thought it defined who they were ultimately.

Those siblings living the life treated the rest of us like lepers, not that we were that eager to go back. Finding out as an adult that Daddy owned most of the substandard housing for rent in the county was a shocker. He rented for exorbitant rates to those already at a huge financial disadvantage. When I asked him why he said that he was entirely justified to do so because he’d been a good financial steward of the resources that God had gifted him with and he saw nothing wrong with practicing good stewardship. It was Biblical. Oh how I remember that fight we had over this, I was in college and had started to realize the many ways we kids had been used and exploited by our parents, whored out to television for money and then to find out that Daddy collected rents off those least able to pay them was shocking.

For me it was one of the final straws in the heap of hypocrisy that I’d once thought was righteousness. And it lead me to start separating myself emotionally from my parents and going deeper on my path of self realization, knowing that I was somehow different than them and I would not allow them to pull me back down to their level of self righteousness. I remember how angry I was in those days after finding out that the perfection my family preached was a facade only.

I was the first one to get away, at nineteen years of age. During all of Momma’s births after I was around thirteen I was allowed to attend her because as a child I’d expressed some interest in growing up to be a midwife. My interest in midwifery became my ticket out of the family compound. For awhile I was allowed to help the local midwife when she went out and I did a lot of study using online courses and the like but the time came when I had to leave the area and actually attend a university to attain my certification.

Now my father was a man opposed to greater education unless it was something to further his own agenda, like being a midwife or obtaining a law degree so one could become a politician. My father had aspirations of a political dynasty along the lines of the Kennedys. He wanted to put Jake in the White House as a lawyer but was unsure if he wanted to let Jake leave the family home, seeing that this was the only way for Jake to become a lawyer. After I’d been away at university to be a midwife for a semester and hadn’t ended up pregnant or unrighteous he figured that perhaps Jake might be able to be morally upright and strong enough to do well in school. So when Jake turned twenty one he was sent off to Liberty University to learn law.

What my father didn’t realize is that while I was attending Southern Mississippi Christian University on full scholarship in Biloxi, Mississippi I was also supporting myself as a short order cook at a seaside greasy spoon, that I was living a life very different than he could have foreseen. After a few months in the town located on the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico I’d abandoned my gunny sack calicos for regular clothing. Modest regular clothing but the type of things that allowed me to blend in with my fellow students and the towns people, slacks, t shirts, modest shorts. I even owned a real swimsuit, a tank suit no more revealing than those worn by the Miss America I remember the great freedom and trepidation I’d felt the first time I wore it on the beaches of Biloxi, feeling the thrill of the warm water splashing on my bare thighs.