Hints and Guesses

Growing up, I rarely went to sleep right away because we were made to go to bed so early. No one else we knew went to bed at the time we did.

So it was in the dark I lay awake. I made up stories about the people who lived in the curtains. I read books (sometimes forbidden books!) by the dim glow of my alarm clock. I listened to them fight, her sharp, clear words alternating with the indistinct drone of my father’s voice. I dreamed of running away. I stared at the lights of the power plant in the distance. I listened to the bullfrogs croak by the cow pond. The dark was my time.

Sixteen years ago a fire destroyed nearly every physical artifact of my childhood and young adult years. Much to my surprise, last week I discovered something I’ve carried through moves overseas and back, one divorce, and one remarriage.

About eighteen years ago, I wrote these words for the Adventist Review* in response to the question “If you are still an Adventist 10 years from now, why?”:

“The church must allow absolute freedom to explore the doctrinal foundations of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, whether they number 22, 25, 27, or 28. My belief in the church is worth nothing if I am not permitted to question, to examine logically, or even to disagree. My questions may disturb more staid, conservative Adventists of all ages, but the blind obedience of adolescence is no longer enough. The church must shed its traditional fear of intellectual thought and let its members search for the truth that it claims to hold.”

It was a brief blurb in a sidebar, and if I remember correctly I wasn’t the only young adult invited to answer that question. I didn’t keep the magazine; all I have is half a ripped page, with an ad for Kettering College of Medical Arts on the reverse.

You might notice that my passionate** answer doesn’t directly answer the question***; we’d just had a guest speaker who spoke as I’d never heard an Adventist speaker speak before. Old ideas new to me and challenging to others; during the Sabbath afternoon session, the union conference president rose and spoke against the guest speaker. Some of the speaker’s words still ring true for me today.

I believed those words when I wrote them, and I believe them now, although in a different way. The blind obedience of adolescence is at least that far behind me****. I don’t have a belief in the church, but I still have ideas about what I’d like the church to be.

I’m tempted to wonder if the church is listening, if the church has moved beyond that place of fear. But that’s the wrong question; “the church” is an institution, and institutions don’t listen. People do, at least some of them. I don’t know how; when the shouting gets so loud, I can hardly hear myself think. That’s when you’ll find me moving off to the side, looking for the others.

*For which issue, I cannot yet say. It was likely published some time in 1991.

**At least that’s how I read it; I can still conjure up the emotions I felt when I wrote it.

***Yet the editors printed it anyway. Even I was surprised.

****Some might say I was never blindly obedient. You may not have been paying attention.

In my twenties, I latched onto a fantasy that one day I would confront Sue on Oprah.

I imagined telling my story in front of the whole country. Who could fail to sympathize? And Sue would never be able to show her face in public again. This time, everyone would know exactly what kind of person she was, and she’d never be able to hurt anyone else.

I held onto this fantasy for a few years, until the day I asked her “Why? Why would you do that to your children?” At that moment I realized that there was nothing—nothing—she could say that would ever make any of it better. And inexplicably a big chunk of the burden I carried melted away. Just like that. I haven’t seen that part since.

It was a family saying: “Huh?”

Or at least Sue thought so.

She, an amateur woodcarver, carved a plaque even, a plaque that simply said, “Huh?”

Huh.

I stood alone. My father sat to my left in the black lounge chair. My stepmother sat to the right in the brown recliner. My mother sat somewhere in Kansas.

“Your mother sent a birthday card,” she said. My tenth birthday—or it had been, four days past. “What kind of mother sends a card like this?” She’d signed the card “Happy birthday, Mother.” There was no gift, just the card. And it was four days late.

“She doesn’t love you,” she said. “If she did, the card would have been sent on time, and she would have written something meaningful. And she would have sent a gift.”

My small, skinny, 10-year-old self began to cry, and for the first time, my father spoke.

“Why are you crying?” he asked.

Why was I crying indeed? Perhaps because the mother I got, the one I lived with every day, was not so much mother as caretaker. She fed us three times a day. We wore clean clothes. We went to school. She made birthday cakes and held small family parties. These are not small things, and acknowledging them is to recognize part of the truth.

She served as religious educator. We studied our Sabbath School lesson and read assigned religious books every day—an hour on weekends, half an hour on weekdays was the setup, but in reality we started when she told us to start, and we stopped when she told us to stop. She often told me I was a bad, unrepentant child who was on the certain road to committing the unpardonable sin (whatever that was), so to save my soul she repeatedly assigned Steps to Christ. I can spot a quote from that book at fifty paces.

She hit us. Sometimes with a wooden paddle. Sometimes with the leather belt that hung behind our bedroom door. Sometimes with the plastic ruler in the pencil cup on the table next to her brown recliner, or the one she kept in her car visor. Occasionally she hit us with her bare hand. She hit us often, and almost always she hit us in places no one else would ever see.

Fours years and a handful of visits with one mother. Five years of living every day with this other one, plus a father who was often gone. In the face of overwhelming emotion, my ten-year-old self was powerless to do the math, but the result was still the same.

“I’m all mixed up,” I said.

He took me in his arms, and I cried some more.

Read the companion piece to this post at Thursday Drive.

Surprise, surprise. Surprises can be fun, but I’d rather be the surpriser than the surprisee. A childhood in which most of the good and most of the bad (in other words, nearly everything) was a surprise heightened my appreciation of the value of anticipation.

One memory of a surprise floats to the surface. Most of the setup details are lost to my memory, but when I returned from Korea in 1989 at the beginning of my fourth year in college, I didn’t tell my sister exactly when I would be returning. I told some friends, however, and we concocted a plan wherein a group of them would be at the airport to greet me. She’d go there too, on her own, having been told by her boss to pick someone up.

She was surprised, all right. We both cried, and our friends laughed at their success.

Weekly Anamnesis