Life's been good to me so far

And things I have, perhaps, let lie unsaid too long - here is an entry I wrote more than a year ago and kept privatized to see if I still wanted to say it all, later:

I still want to say it all, except maybe for that bit at the very end.

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.

I am at such a loss about faith, church, and so on.

My mind is an absolute whirlwind about it.

It's like, my husband doesn't like the Catholic Church or want to be a part of it, no matter what I tell him or how many times I reiterate. This might seem like less of an issue if it wasn't a family-centric religion that you have to be married within, come into together, etc. The priest at St Louis agreed with me coming in without a convalidation of marriage but that's one of those things that is not really Rome-approved or understood by other Catholics.

It's an ongoing paradox, that I would be coming into a religion that is under the ultimate authority of a group it doesn't really obey. How do you take a sacred vow to adhere to the lax and vague standards of American Catholics who nod to but act independently of Rome? It doesn't even make sense.

I have my own doubts about the Catholic Church, myself, and I am kind of embarassed and over-explaining when I try to tell any of my friends or relatives why I am drawn toward it or considering it.

I was drawn toward it partially by tennets that validated my life choices in a lot of ways - procreative sex, openness to life, all that. Now I can't have more babies, I'm getting an IUD to avoid, you know, death.

The parish I went to initially, close by, my family didn't like, so we went far away, where Grant liked it, and I ended up in RCIA there, which is great, except that now nobody but me wants to do it anymore and it's really impractical to be driving half an hour each way to any and every thing. We've revamped our whole life (Grant's job and side jobs, kids' extracurriculars, how we shop, everything) to stay in Homestead, especially now that we're down to one vehicle. I don't know that it will ever be doable - in time or gas money - to go to the half hour rosary prayer or the early morning breakfast or any of the other myriad things they do up there throughout the week.

I am kind of dangling by a hair this weekend, right on the line where I can choose to beg my Elvis loving, overly-lecturing, well-meaning-but-off-the-mark RCIA teacher and the priest I met with (who was vague and sent me out to a secular counselor), and bend over backwards for them, and continue. Or I can just slack off a little more in indecision and be dropped out.

My sponsor (KT), a wonderful woman I love, is extremely alarmed that I might be dropping out. She's talking about spiritual war and how of course obstacles and interference are going to get in the way, because I'm about to make a leap, but I have to stay the course. She's lighting candles and doing a prayer vigil and begging me to call her back later today and throughout the week.

I'm thinking of all the time I've spent in RCIA soooooooooooooooo bored, just struggling not to go to sleep (KT would say her husband sleeps through mass all the time but is still reaping some spiritual reward for being there). All the time that I've felt like I'm seen as very backwards and half-way because I am not expressing the overwhelmed conversion feelings other people are sharing in a circle; I'm really honest sitting there like "I didn't want to come today. I didn't want to come yesterday. I'm glad I did, though, now that I'm here." and that is not met with enthusiasm.


I am scared that I spent so long protestant church shopping that I'm never really gonna be part of a church, if I drop this. I'm scared that I'm kind of gradually giving up on Christianity altogether, if I drop out of this, because the truth is I don't trust or want to be a part of protestant churches anymore, so if I am also out of the Catholic circle, what does that leave? I guess my devotional journal still has a few more empty pages that might multiply themselves like the loaves and fishes and be there when I go to them for another decade?

I'm TERRIFIED of what sort of changes in my world view and personal ethics could happen as a result of not having Christian beliefs anymore, and I'm also very afraid that even if Christianity were not true, CHristians are still getting a level of fulfillment from it that is not possible outside of having defined, "practiced" faith.

I'm curious about whether the Disciples of Christ Christianity that hit me so hard and changed my life so radically as a teenager was pulling on the Pagan-leaning part of me - I found God in the woods, I thought my first real baptism was sudden spontaneous rain, and I was sure the Holy Spirit was there for me in those early years in gusts of wind, and shooting stars I saw from a swimming pool.

I certainly did not have any problems whatsoever with stopping at Grant's on the way to teach Sunday School to get it on, or with kissing Bobby in a prayer circle, or even sitting in worship fantasizing and giddy right up to the moment I grinned up the aisle to get (metaphorical, Protestant) communion.

I've felt sure I sensed evil many times over the years. I don't know what to make of that. I'm not one of those people who doesn't believe in real objective evil, I really do.

So yeah. I guess I am not really ready to commit to being Catholic, to throw myself in to a lifelong committment that is unbreakable. I started having serious problems week before last because we started having to recite the creed during Mass (we used to be dismissed beforehand) and I don't really feel comfortable doing that ("We believe in one holy Catholic and apostolic Church...."), for all sorts of reasons even down to technicalities about whether or not the Orthodox or they are saying it right (AND THE SPIRIT, those three schismatic words).

I still want it, I want to dip my fingers in holy water as I walk in the door and cross myself, because it's passive and comforting. I want to hear the music swell during Mass when the one acapella singer up front lifts her hands and everyone else joins in. I want to get down on my knees with hundreds of other people every week and clear my mind of everything and just open my heart.

I actually want those things REALLY BAD. I want to NOT have a hole in my life where I want religion to be, again, too. <---nonsense grammar, even beyond the usual, my apologies

There's just all this other stuff, too.

Miscellany:

1. The Pope is being charged with crimes against humanity in a world court in a case that I found shockingly compelling from a purely secular perspective.

Of course the missing part of the story is the incalculable charity and volunteerism and financial giving of Catholics, to people of all faiths.

2. I am not at all sure I'm up to the challenge of being devoutly Catholic and not sure I'm comfortable being lax. I mean that even with total faith in the Church and in Christianity, even with total spousal support and a local parish, I enjoy walking the line way too much. I mean I can't wait for True Blood to come back and I'm rabidly infatuated with Anne Rice books and inexorably drawn to like...bdsm erotica, goth clothes and industrial music.

My best RL friends are: the Pagan leaning divorced woman who taught belly dancing and has a new hip to calf man-o-war tattoo; the x-drug dealing x-con with tattoos of govt agents heads in jars; the flamboyant swinger of a tattoo artist; the former drug addict and fashion-obsessed agnostic with the throw-down cynical Daria worldview; and the lesbian and ftm trans couple. There is also the lapsed-ish Orthodox woman I love with my whole heart, but, truly, I can't help but think lately that she is completely miserable partially because of the Orthodoxy. Then I think no, it's the lapsed part.

There's also my sister, who I'm tremendously grateful for and is a pretty conservative Christian with a really conservative Christian husband, but - I can't help but feel responsible for her faith on some levels, as I've taken her to church, given her bibles, talked to her about this at length, etc since we were very young, as the older one she looked up to - she's even come to and considered Catholicism and St Louis since I started going. Also I can't stand her husband's company (and vice versa, this is openly mutually acknowledged).

I've never really been sure, even in my most pious and prayerful times, that the more devout Catholic and Orthodox people (I don't mean my dear friend) I'm exposed to aren't wasting their lives and/or hiding their true selves. I'm not sure I want to commit to a belief system that involves missing Sunday Mass being a sin. I am sure I don't want my kids to believe masturbation is a sin, at least not until they're past being teenagers, and that is EVEN IF THAT IS TRUE.

Does this make sense?

I'll be honest, I can't make a damned bit of sense out of it.

AS YOU MAY HAVE NOTICED.