Weird Little Things

I hate to think what I tolerated as a mom in that church. I home schooled because I wanted their younger years to be formed predominately by people who loved them and would be encouraging to them. I switched schools in when I was in second grade from a school where I was happy and had many friends to a school where I was bullied and generally made to feel on the "outs".  I think that experience had a profound effect on how I saw myself for many years to come. I wanted something better for my kids.

And then in the name of "God" I stayed in a situation where they were treated in some ways, worse, because so much of it came from adults in suits that they were supposed to respect and  were called "elders and deacons".

Though around the teenage years the kids seemed to really pick up on this culture of criticism, and would begin lecturing each other. Because of the rigid courtship rules the girls were always policing each other about their clothes, make up, how much they talked to boys, everything.

This was the atmosphere. Atmosphere is a weird thing. It wasn't just this incident or that. It was a consistent atmosphere of judgement. Heaviness. Depression. Wondering if you were just imagining everything and if you weren't being paranoid. The girls feeling like the elders were always giving them body glances. What did he say? What did he mean? Was that supposed to be a reference to us in that sermon?


That's what I really want to say. I'm not trying to say "Look at us, so sad." I want this to mean something.  If you are miserable, depressed, confused and you don't know why,  if you are afraid to say *anything* that goes out of the norm of your church or "group" and you know if you do you'll "get it", (there are a few members of this church that go around on other people's facebook statuses and posts telling them if they are not "Orthodox" or in the Reformed circles, "Biblical" enough. I call them the orthodoxy police.)  if you find yourself having to come up with long, intricate justifications for your personal decisions just to protect yourself, if you feel like you can't make decisions, period. If you feel like God is more likely to come down on some little thing you've done than to help and encourage. If you constantly feel like you're trying and trying and not getting anywhere. If you have a deep mistrust of yourself. Like if you're afraid if you had to be away from your church for a while that you would drift or do something awful or something would happen to you if you left. What are the little things going on around you? Especially at church? Listen to those.


I remember once standing at a softball game watching the kids and I tried to strike up a conversation with the pastor. He started giving me this long talk about how the Baptists have been taken over by a feminist mindset (because they wait for their children to "accept" salvation rather than continuing it by the decision of the family-through the line of the father, I guess.) and as America had drifted more toward Baptist Christianity rather than Reformed Calvinist theology it had become more and more feminist. (Feminist is really, really bad, if you didn't know. Basically the font of all things evil.) I felt kind of confused because nothing I had said had anything to do with Baptists, feminism, theology, anything, and I certainly was not a feminist then, (I am now!) but I shrugged it off.

Little things you keep shrugging off.

Unfortunately little things often grow, The misogynist outlook seeped into my marriage. My husband who for so many years prior was my best friend, who would be late to work in the morning because we would get so busy talking, stopped talking to me and talked to his men friends instead. His attitude toward me began to be "on a need to know basis". I could never submit enough, be honoring enough. As with so many things, the time we spent in this place was a flow of poison. And because of my feelings of submission, wanting to be a "good wife", "good Christian woman", I passively let it go on. We still struggle. I wish I had had someone to empower me. To tell me to listen to my feelings when I knew something was wrong. I don't know really, if I could have done anything to change how things have gone. But at least I could have stood up and left earlier, at least not sat under the teaching that was poisoning my life and make myself breathe that air in the name of "pleasing God'. At least I could have gotten me and my daughters out far sooner.