It’s amazing how one negative word can wound you for life. Make you feel hopeless and worthless and doubtful of your every ability.
But compliments are another thing. It takes 10 compliments, 10 words of praise, encouragement or positive reinforcement to erase those negative ones. And even still, a shiny, pink puckered scar remains; a constant reminder of those words and who you could have been, had they never been uttered.
To this day I can’t remember why I loved either of them. To this day, my face in those pictures is like looking at another person, in another life. Like time travel, without the emotional baggage. But then again, that’s not entirely true either. Although I can’t distinctly remember why I loved, why I cried, I worshiped and all but groveled for their love and attention, I do remember that scary feeling of being completely out of control. Balls to those that say you can’t unwittingly give your control to anyone without your consent. Love doesn’t work that way. Or should I say the obsession with euphoria doesn’t work that way. Like an addict I chased that feeling of euphoria I got when I was wanted and needed by someone. Only, the feeling backfired on me and then I became the one driven for the attention.
So pathetic. Mousy. I’m mortified to think of who I was, how I unknowingly morphed into this “yes” girl, this girl with blond streaks and “church outfits” stacked in her closet. The girl who smiled to their face and rolled her eyes behind her back and screamed in her head that they were weak to count on God and to be afraid of their sins.
I was at constant war with myself for three years. I struggled to be true to me, but conform, be good, be subservient, be pure - a struggle anyone would be doomed to fail. For three years I would drive my raspberry sports car two hours west to his parents trailer-like home, with its filthy bathroom littered with manure-scented clothes and cow-themed kitchen. Nestled on the back seat would be a dozen chocolate chip cookies, brownies or some other peace offering I always felt compelled to bring along. As if it would make up for the fact that their only son was dating a “non-Christian” as if those sweet little treats would erase the fact that in their eyes, I was tarnishing their little boy and intentionally steering him away from the Lord and handing him over to the devil himself.
Mealtime with his family was always awkward, but I was a quick learner. After the first outing, when I inadvertently kept talking after the appetizers were served, not realizing we had to hold hands, bow our heads and give thanks, I knew when to keep my mouth shut. I wasn’t so much embarrassed with praying in public, it was the holding hands that sent me over the edge. And it seemed they did it out of habit, out of fear, more than actual thanks. I hated holding hands with. I hated touching his mother’s soft, perfumed hands reeking of judgment and disapproval. I hated the way she pretended to like me to my face. Pretended to be the good Christian wife. The wife that was forced to marry at 17, because her own parents were afraid she would have pre-marital sex. The wife that was arrogant in her “godly” status and confident that her Christianity made her better than me and every other poor unseeing person.
She never reached out to me. Never tried to help me learn what she knew - what was so fan-tastic about God and His ways and His work. I asked one question after church, the one and only Bible-related question - because her answer, told me what she thought of me.
"Why do we need to be saved?"
She looked up at me from across the table over her runny eggs and replied, "From hell, of course." She could have added, "You stupid little shit." on the end for all that her tone implied.
Of course we weren’t allowed to sleep in the same bed when I visited. I slept in his room, on see-thru sheets dotted with baseball gloves and bats and a flat, stained pillowcase. I could hear the wind rattle and wheeze through the windows and see the faint red of the flashing stop sign reflected on the walls. I would lie there and listen and wrack my brain for an explanation as to what made them so special, what did they have that I didn’t, besides God? Besides God, why did it seem to me that no matter how nice I was, no matter how many times I went to church, to bible school, to picnics and parties, no matter what I did it just wasn’t good enough?
There were too many moments to count. Too many instances that told me that the odds were stacked against me. However, it somehow became blindingly clear when his mother called my house, looking for her son – who had already left – and asked me what my testimonial was, knowing full well, I didn’t have one. The almighty testimony, of how I found God. How I was saved from a bleak existence, from a desolate life wrought with blackness that only a soul without God could have. It’s funny how I don’t exactly remember the conversation, other than guiltily admitting that I didn’t have a testimonial and in her eyes, all but saying I was a devil-worshiper. What I do remember though, is hanging up the phone, throwing it across the living room and bursting into tears. She hurt me in a way that I didn't know I could be hurt.
The funny part of the whole story, the real kicker, the irony is I never lead him away from God. He led himself - eventually. After the relationship took a nosedive it was he who began seeking solace in strangers in bars and driving home drunk. It was he who got arrested for stupidly taking mail from his job at a post office home to sort, who got arrested, charged and sentenced to house arrest. And like the good little Christian boy he was, he found his way back. And I had nothing to do with him going, or choosing to return.
I think about her often. I wonder if in me, she saw herself, what she could have been, had she not married in her teens; if she wasn't raised to judge so harshly (even I know the old Bible verse) "Just lest ye be judged." Obviously she missed THAT one completely.
And yet I was judged from the very moment her son told her I was a "non-Christian".
I blame her for tainting my relationship with God, today. I blame her for me being leery of Christians' motives, their kindness, their and out-reaching spirit - all of which, I know now, she should have shown me all along - that IS the way it's supposed to be.
God bless you Trudy, may I endeavour to grow as a Christian and be nothing like you.
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