(no subject)

[altarflame]

As soon as I had kids, I realized that a lot of my old, childhood fears had dissapeared - a new litmus test of sorts developed right away: if it scared me for them, then it was real. If it just scared me in a way that didn't involve them, I was being a damn ninny. Please keep in mind I was 17 when I got pregnant with Ananda, and moved out of my grandparents' house and into my own "first place" right before she was born. With that in mind, for instance, I had always been very creeped out by closet doors being open - or worse, ajar - as I tried to fall asleep in a dark bedroom. Lying in bed, it ranged from distracting to genuinely scary based on my age, what horror movies/books I had recently been into, and my own imagination. Then I had Annie, and there came a moment when I lay her down in our bed and went to tiptoe away only to realize - the closet door was ajar. And blocked by a pile of stuff (because I had my first new baby and was not cleaning). And it would probably wake her up if I started unbalancing precariously stacked miscellany to get to it. As I walked out of there, I thought about how silly closet doors being open as a scary thing seemed - and I have never been scared of that, personally, again. I actually can't remember the last time my own closet even was closed, in this house I own as a 30 year old. Because, really, if I could leave my precious vulnerable newborn, who had stolen my heart so thoroughly, in that room with an open closet door...it was because I knew that in reality there was nothing to fear from a closet being open.

As an avid fan of Stephen King going back to 3rd grade, you can repeat that same sort of scenario for all sorts of things: shower curtains used to terrify me (WHO KNOWS WHO'S ON THE OTHER SIDE - they'll strike when you have shampoo in your eyes!), cats staring off into nowhere as if they see something, things under the bed that could grab your ankles as you get up, the list goes on and on.

I am kind of amazed, looking back, at how my maternal instincts have so rarely led me wrong. I didn't have any college education, access to the internet or even a decent collection of books, and yet I went head to head with doctors who were wrong about Ananda (needing speech therapy for her stutter) and Aaron (being mentally handicapped rather than "just" SID) and with relatives (on everything from breastfeeding to you-name-it). My children get the best of me (all of my kids - not just the oldest two) and they continuously challenge me. They bring out the best in me, stretching me and maturing me and scaring the living shit out of me and making me proud.

I have historically had a really hard time getting along with terrible parents; but I don't see "terrible parents" everywhere the way the whole "boob nazi"/attachment parenting cliche tends to imply. For the most part, if you have children and you're doing better than your parents did (because how we were raised often poses huge challenges), I respect you and your efforts and you get my admiration, even if our standards are radically different. If you have kids and your parents ARE raising them, or you are just generally being a fucking dipshit and causing them grave traumas, that's very difficult for me to deal with on a face to face level with honesty and tact. My close friends who are really crazy or totally wild or off the wall unstable have my total endorsement because they don't have kids and it's their lives to do with as they please. I can accept that freely.

I am actually approaching a point, here. With a heavy sigh.

I have had problems and conflicts with my children and Christianity from relatively early on. Not the very beginning. Praying for my kids made perfect intuitive sense to me, as did praying with them, before bed and before meals and other times as well. I liked having a tool I could give Isaac that would help him feel less frightened before sleep, which was often full of nightmares for him. Explaining the deeper meanings of our cultural holidays and making Easter and Christmas rich and the ends of seasons (Lent/Advent) was beautiful. Attending church improved their behavior at concerts and restaurants.

There is also the not-so-incidental situation of relying on my devotional journal for guidance and my Lord for a miracle when Elise was in dire straits.

But, as they got more cognizant, I realized I was absolutely NOT comfortable teaching them about the concept of Hell. Not because it's a hard one - I talk to my kids about famine and natural disasters and why Aunt Mindy wants to use crack - but because I didn't want them to know about Hell, or believe in it, or be afraid of it. I was terrified of Hell by things taught to me in Baptist private school in K-1st and remember crying myself to sleep about it, nightmares about my heathen parents roasting, and so on.

I was also not at all eager to introduce the concepts of the devil, spiritual warfare or temptation. I didn't want them to start seeing evil in the shadows and interpreting the world through the lens of it being an invisible battle zone. I didn't want them to worry that they were doing things under sinister puppeteer influence because their faith wasn't great enough to resist it. I've had thoughts and feelings like that keeping me up at night and driving me nuts for years and years but I didn't want to tell them about it and give them that preoccupation, not at all, it seemed very cut and dry and that -

THAT. Seemed like the closet door.

It felt like, "That danger is only real in your own mind when you believe it, and they do not need that on them." It felt not only like I could disregard the dangers of Hell and Satan as directed at them, but also like I had to protect them from belief in those things.

By the time I had kids turning 9 and 10, these were pretty glaring omissions from their religious teaching. To some degree, studying Orthodox and Catholic theology and especially reading The Mountain of Silence was personally comforting in this area, kind of quelling some of my own cognitive dissonance, since TMOS defines Hell VERY differently than our standard Protestant (non-biblical, wtf) fire and brimstone cultural definition. Really more as as a sort of abstract "suffering because you are not yet with God because you weren't ready to be when you died, until you eventually become ready and then go to Heaven with everyone else, just late". But, Orthodox (/Catholic) people still believe strongly in being on guard against temptation and spiritual war and all of that. There is actually a more defined belief in demons, possession, and so on.

And overall, Catholic and Orthodox personal expectations - that you're supposed to have of yourself, as a believer - are much more stringent, and they exert many more detailed rules over everything from how you eat on different days to how you're allowed to have sex within your heterosexual, Church-sanctioned marriage.

This is one of the conflicts I had about my kids continuing in AWANA/VBS programs. Another, was that I did not want Christian people talking to them about homosexuality or sexuality in general.

Did you read what I just wrote? Because it is pretty radical in my own mind, to admit to myself, even though it was a motivating concept in my behavior for a long time while I avoided articulating it.

I did not, and do not, want Christian people talking to my kids about their own sexuality, or other peoples'. Individual persons who happen to be Christian could gain my trust to talk to my kids in a way that doesn't represent "Christian beliefs" or *shudder* ...Christian politics. It gives me a rush of protectiveness, this urge to shield them.

Like, to such a degree that my older kids are now "with it" enough that I'm nervous about them ever listening to another sermon and it's part of what's kept us out of church services for, oh...the last year?

Yeah, it's been a year. It's been a year before, when we were "church shopping" and didn't know where TO go. But a year when there is a church I like a lot and that they can all deal with available is strikingly different.

Because I can't go to a church that says birth control is wrong and use birth control. I know lots of people can. But I can't. I can't go to a church that says birth control is wrong, and help Ananda acquire birth control, and I want to be able to help Ananda acquire birth control, and I want her to feel she can come to me and talk about that openly.

If one of my kids turns out to be gay, which I think is relatively likely considering my particular kids, it makes me do a maternal PANIC to imagine them growing up within the church! I've tried for years to explain to and hash this out with Christian friends.

I absolutely can't just sweep under the rug the parts of these beliefs that don't gel for me, and enjoy the rest. Maybe I should be able to? Maybe that's even the point! I don't know. But I can't.

I can't be Catholic (or Orthodox) and teach my kids that masturbation is a mortal/grave sin. I don't believe it is. I think they're all gonna do it and I think it's not just acceptable or "to be expected" but a GOOD THING to explore your own body, understand it, and figure out how it works as you navigate adolescence. Without any weird taboos or "down there" terminology. I don't want to take them somewhere that's going to teach them the taboos. I don't want to teach them that. I can't stand it for them to get caught up in the cycle of soul-crushing guilt, temptation, giving in, repeat, that I lived in for SO LONG, experiencing so much stress and despair about who I am, how I am, etc -

Do you know how that detracted from things I should have been worried about?

I spent so much time thinking I should not be having sex because it was wrong to have sex outside of wedlock that I seriously avoided birth control partially BECAUSE it was like condoning/giving in to that behavior. Pre-meditated fornication, "living in" sin. Keeping in mind, here, that ONLY Elise of my five (six pregnancies) was conceived in wedlock. It was like mental illness, knowing I wasn't ready to be married for most of that time but feeling like it was the only way to assuage what has always been my massive sex drive and need for affection. Suspended in conflict without resolution. "Failing" over and over. I think this is part of the general cloud of dysfunction surrounding my relationship with Bobby, and also part of why it was so hard for Grant and I to get our relationship going again/sustain it.

I had five children and a second trimester miscarriage between the time I was 18 and 25. And I love them, I am not bemoaning them, I do not regret them. But I can see myself in retrospect now, always hormonal and vulnerable, always physically awkward, in poor and even abusive medical hands, ending up again and again in situations I always swore I wouldn't - and it makes me cringe with horror to imagine Ananda in those shoes. I did well with it. I've made the best of it. I love a lot of things about my life and so maybe, again, I'm missing the point? But I have reached a point in my life where I see that I was swept away and out of control, and that rapid-fire super-young child begetting is something I had to spend a couple of years on the dl recovering from, as much as the near-death experience. I was never an adult who wasn't gestating or postpartum before! I never slowed down enough to stop and say, wait, what would be best for me (or even "us"), I just had so many rules caging me in on every side and NO advocate, that I was being carried along. There was never a conscientious midwife or a knowledgeable mother or aunt or a good friend for me during that time, to say hey, do you realize you have options here?

I tried to be on the pill in high school and experienced major complications. I spent the next 10 years thinking I "couldn't take birth control", and aside from truly hating condoms thought I was setting myself up for sin by keeping them around ready to go. All around lose-lose for someone who had only slept with two virgins anyway and didn't need to worry about STDs. I did try the mini-pill once, but GOT PREGNANT. And really in the end felt I didn't have options beyond the rhythm method/NFP and "trying not to". I didn't know about the IUD. Nobody knows about the IUD! Which is ridiculous, it's the cheapest and most effective option out there, hormone free, and there is all this "abortifacent" propaganda that you can research your way through to the other side of - but it takes awhile.

I just read an article yesterday about how women's health is and has always been controlled primarily by the church, politicians and the medical community - basically, three groups of patriarchal and often sexist men who are not motivated in most cases by what is best for women. And even though I know that sounds like feminist/communist/whatever propaganda on some level...I also know it's fucking true. I know how my SELF CONCEPT CHANGED FOREVER the first time I experienced quality midwifery care. How I burst into TEARS the first time Nancy asked me if she could touch my stomach.

Anyway. I hear all this stuff about Girl Scouts, you know? How they push the pro-choice agenda, they talk too much birth control and inclusivity with other-sexual people (like there's a fucking boycott right now on cookies because a troop in Colorado let a transgendered girl in?). And, well. Ananda is selling cookies. And I don't see why people are so afraid of INFORMATION.

Unless it threatens beliefs that are dependent on ignorance.


And this brings me to cognitive dissonance, which I threw out as a term I thought I was making up last week (some psych major, eh?). I was talking to Grant, thinking strictly of dissonance in the musical sense - things clashing, stuff sounding off, clangy and jangling wrong sounds. I told him I was experiencing cognitive dissonance all the time for so long now and I'm tired of it and I meant in many ways, really - knowing I can't continue eating too much and trying to do it anyway and being a night owl that increasingly has to get up very very early are examples. He didn't seem to know what I meant. On a lark, I googled the phrase and realized it's actually something that's been studied and written about for more than 50 years - perhaps I have heard it before, and pulled the right words from my subconscious? Anyway, it's when you have clear evidence in front of you that something you believe, is wrong, and you experience distress. Sometimes acute distress. Generally people avoid distress when possible, so in these situations they immediately whip out a coping mechanism - denying or arguing away evidence, changing their beliefs, or convincing themselves that the particular incompatibility between the beliefs and reality is unimportant, such that it can be forgotten about - those are all coping mechanisms here.

I haven't been using any coping mechanisms most of the time. I've been living in acute cognitive dissonance FOR YEARS. I arrived late in the year to RCIA classes, on a whim, and then almost dropped out a dozen times over the months, and fought my own boredom and tried to find the good spots, and decried my own blasphemous thoughts, and then got denied passing when I made it to the end. I went to Orthodox churches and read Orthodox books and stayed close to Orthodox people, and it never felt like more than foreign, even when it sounded philosophically like such good stuff. I lost all interest in Protestant church long ago, and can't even take what I hear second hand seriously a lot of the time. The last dozen times I was in a Disciples of Christ church were cripplingly disappointing. My trip to a shrine to the Virgin for my religion class last semester left me somewhat devastated and just...apathetic, as I called Grant to discuss how blah the whole thing was.

I've went from "I feel guilty" to "I feel guilty for not feeling guilty", and am fast approaching "aren't I supposed to feel guilty for not feeling guilty?"

What I do feel, is grief.

Full on bereavement, that is sometimes truly awful.

And confusion, because, truly, I do continue to feel it's obvious that there is "something more" than what we can understand and quantify - or perhaps ever will be able to - at work in our lives and world. I feel certain that I've experienced supernatural...something. And that prayer DOES "do something"...even if only because we're all made of energy and energy focused can affect outcomes.

And I feel the most heart wrenching misery when I consider Jesus, who I continue to physically cringe over blasphemy over and who I am not in any way ready to say isn't...real. The whole concept of "considering" any of this makes me feel small, lost, lonely and like a toddler in a world I don't understand. Also scared of losing Christian friends and alienating people, and EVEN scared of hurting anyone else's faith. I still feel like that would be horribly wrong, to do.

Even as I consider the parts of the gospels I always glossed over to quell my own cognitive dissonance. "This language is hard, these translations are old, my understanding is vague". I still see wisdom and benefit and light in the gospels. Quite a lot of it....mixed in with things I can't deal with.

I always said - and say - that if something is true, it doesn't matter whether or not I like it. I said in great mental suffering over and over that there were things galore I did not like about Christianity but that my preferences were really not the issue, Truth was, and that I was upset that I was part of this system I as a mortal human seeing as through a glass darkly could not understand, but that I believed God did understand it.

Do I now have such motherly hubris that I think I know better than He does re: my kids? Maybe. I don't know.

What it FEELS like, now, is that maybe it's just NOT true. Maybe it's a lot of stuff a lot of people say for reasons that have nothing to do with truth - reasons like a desire to be a part of something, a desire to help people, mental illness, a desire to control, a desire for riches, a desire to reinvent the wheel and fix whatever was wrong with religion BEFORE...because we all want religion at some point in our lives, on some level. It's programmed in our brains and maybe even (according to TIME magazine) our DNA. It increases our health and life span and decreases our stress, to have a religious faith and a religious community. I don't think people would BE this way, if it weren't for some natural and beneficial reason. Like one pastor I know says, we're hungry and there is food, we want sex and it exists - all our instinctive cravings are there for the purpose of being fulfilled, to drive us toward something that IS out there for us. And maybe we can really plug into the universe, or Life, or energy, or an actual supreme being, through prayer and ritual, regardless of what we call it.

There is an argument that peoples' feelings shouldn't play in - that real faith is not dependent on God constantly proving Himself. That you shouldn't be testing Him. But that's kind of hard to get behind when I only started believing all of this because of feelings. I never could have become a Christian based on reason and logic; it is not reasonable or logical. I was pulled in by strong feelings that led me to leave logic behind. Now, other Christians tell me to put aside feelings because they can't be trusted. And sometimes, feelings can't! But feelings are what I've got.

And maybe I could have kept "calling it" Christianity forever, regardless of misgivings or dissonance, if I had been childless and my life was mine to do with as I pleased. But I have kids. And I don't want to pass this torment on to them in a way that's intrinsic and deeply rooted such that they can never truly, totally shake it off - like my 6 year old Hell terror - because I think that's how what we're taught in childhood is.

It stays with us, like the cycle of abuse I fight, like the dozens of Disney song lyrics I can sing beginning to end after not hearing them for DECADES, like growing up bilingual or eating candy all the time. It stays with you, and then you gain intelligence and you study it and you find out that cremation is wrong because all our bodies are supposed to be resurrected when Christ returns and you go, what, wait - God can resurrect dust but not ash? What about people who burn to death in fires? I had someone I love dearly say she could never get a tattoo because it seems wrong to mar this body she's in for eternity and I was like, wait, what? So like my surgery scars and hernia are for eternity? I mean. I mean. This is kind of crazy talk. The feelings, the passionate feelings and the fervent desperation for it to be true can gloss over the craziness, sometimes indefinitely. Without the feelings, what is left?

There are a lot of very smart people using their superior intellects to compose elaborate diatribes on the minutia of Christian theology and all I can think is, you know, as a very smart child I was able to use my superior intellect to hone superior coping mechanisms and flesh them out until my delusions were almost real. Intelligent people have the hardest time being happy in general. Intelligent atheists, in my experience, are absolutely miserable much of the time. Who wants that? No. Cognitive dissonance = explanations forthcoming. 2000 years of overlapping and sometime contradictory explanations from some of the greatest minds and most ambitious men in history.


OR!!!

Maybe I'm so awash in secular media with such a long time since I did more than browse the theology tag on tumblr or listen to a Christmas carol, that the devil finally has a hold on me and can speak freely, through me, from my big influential blog platform - just like God might have worked through me in 2007 such that I got countless comments and emails from people who had their faith renewed by Elise's story.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

It's true, being an atheist is hard. Not everyone has the strength to accept the meat-hook realities of this life. But isn't it better to live in the real world and be miserable than to believe things that fly in the face of common sense? Isn't the truth the most important thing? Deliberate ignorance has been holding humanity back for so long.

[(Anonymous)]

Only there is no compelling theory for reality, thus making the case for a potential higher power. Just not one that is presented by organized religion. No one knows anything with any certainty, atheists included.

[heavynleigh.livejournal.com]

I'd much rather go through life with hope in something more than to be miserable. If I'm wrong, it won't matter because we'll all be worm food in the end. If I'm right, then I'll be glad I held onto that hope and faith and pushed through even when things really sucked and I didn't understand why. The truth is, we don't know what the truth is until it's all over and the dead aren't talking.

[bicrim.livejournal.com]

Thank you for sharing this. I had been wondering where you were with your spirituality. I personally have come through a journey of being brought up atheist, to being emotionally born again in my 12 step recovery, to coming to a place of "resigned from the debate society" and happy agnostic. I don't know what is on the other side, I can't know for sure, and for me, there is no point in thinking too hard about it. I can choose the life affirming and joyful parts of prayer and god and spirit and reject organized religion as a tool of control, and feel good about it. I can teach my kids that different people believe different things, and what some of those things are, and that they can believe whatever they want as they grow up.

It feels good, when I remember to lean into it.

[mommydama.livejournal.com]

The Orthodox Christian Church does not teach against cremation (unless absolutely necessary) because God can't resurrect ashes. It teaches that cremation as a matter of course brings with it danger of showing a fundamental disrespect for the physical body. Same goes for most body modifications. Which is why there is no clear teaching or "canon law" on either because it is about respect for the physical body not about laws and rules.

There are other things here I'd like to address,but I don't feel I have the words or the power or the right. If I was one of the people you were afraid this would upset or whatever, rest assured there is nothing in here I have not been over a hundred times in my own head. I understand it all. I'm at a low point in my own faith (I always seem to be at a low point, I'm not sure I can call it that anymore). I hurt for your confusion and angst because it mirrors my own in many ways and I can understand it on such a visceral level. I'll bet most people can, Christian or not. One thing that really sticks out in this regard is teaching about Hell (and for me this means teaching about Heaven) to my children. I have struggled mightily to find the right words as I just do not even believe remotely what I was taught as a child and there does not seem to even be vocabulary for what I do believe now. Huh. Never quite put that one into words either. So much of this is just without words for me.

I believe in Love and Truth. I'm pretty sure I know where they are. There is just a lot of stuff in the way to crawl over and through before I get there. I hope we both find them, wherever we are meant to find them. I hope we all do.

[norwegian-wood.livejournal.com]

i would love to talk about all of this with you on the phone sometime if you want to, unfortunately i can't have an online discussion about anything significant due to inability to keep up with the internet!

[http://users.livejournal.com/_delphiki_/]

My computer isn't working right now so I'm typing this out on my iPod. There are going to be errors. Anyhow, I went through a year Of deconversion from Christianity and it was very painful. I was in so much emotional agony for most of that year and for a while afterwards. Now I'm agnostic with a splash of Judaism. I've considered converting for about 6 years now. I think there is something out there but I also take great comfort from the idea that when this life is over, it's over. I have more to say, and you're welcome to call me if you'd like but typing on this is challenging.

[mama-blogess.livejournal.com]

Religion doesn't make people happier, having a supportive community does. I can get the same thing at my UU church as any Catholic can get out of their religion and I don't have to believe in god or teach my children any of the things you mentioned, yet I still get the benefits of "religion". You don't have to force yourself into a cycle of trying to believe the unbelievable and then feeling guilty because you can't seem to believe it. It's also kind of a coping mechanism for your cognitive dissonance to try to tell yourself you need religion to be a happy person and that religion is somehow beneficial, when in reality religion has caused a lot of suffering, trauma, chronic guilt, and unhappiness. Keep in mind that religious people have a vested interest in trying to convince others how happy they are since they are in the business of converting others. Atheists have no such agendas, so what you see is what you get with them.

I actually think you are right about more intelligent people being more unhappy, and perhaps atheists are even more unhappy, but there is really no way around that. If I were still a Jehovah's Witness I wouldn't be worried about global warming, or saving for retirement, or saving for my children's college funds, because Jehovah's Witnesses think armageddon is coming very soon and all the non-JW's will die and all the JW's will live forever in paradise. But you know what, there is something to be said for living in reality. I may be more stressed out by things, some of which I personally have no control over. But knowing what it is like to live in both places, and knowing how hard it was to get to this place, I would not trade reality for anything.

I feel like I'm watching your deconversion and I feel for you because you've been stuck in this in-between place for a long time now. I call this "the worst of both worlds". At least for me it was. I felt like I couldn't fully participate in my religion and feel safe there anymore. Everything they said upset me and I didn't think I could ever teach my son what they were teaching me, and then I spent weeks feeling anxiety and guilt and wishing I could believe it because life would be so much easier. But I couldn't fully live in the real world either because I felt like I was doing something wrong, and that the people there didn't understand me, and that life on the outside was big and scary and cruel. I think once you can land on one side or the other you will be happier. Though probably not immediately so depending on how those decisions affect your life.

[yolen.livejournal.com]

You said mostly what I wanted to say, but probably much better than I would have :).

[(Anonymous)]

Struggling with much of this myself. I consider myself religious...mostly consider myself Christian. But really am bugged by so much of organized religion and fucking church politics. My father was a minister but incorporates many faiths into his beliefs. I'm fiercely pro-choice, about as liberal as they come, support gay marriage, think sex education is severely lacking, and am practically a walking birth control ad. I love the high church liturgy of the Catholic Church but so much of their teachings....not so much. So much of what you said is true. If I ever have a child I wish I could find a way to encourage faith the way my family has while shielding them from the fear, hatred, and especially the superiority complex that I seem to find in fellow so-called Christians. I'm at the point in my life where I don't know if that's even what I want to call myself despite my strong faith in God and belief in Jesus. I suppose I just want everyone to experience love and acceptance. And this comment is a mess...

Please just know this is meant to say thanks and you aren't alone in some of your thoughts