Historical Assemblies of G-d Ministry Stuff

Well, here's some interesting memorabilia I found while web surfing.

Therapeutic Letter to my Assembly of G-d Pastor

This is honestly a difficult letter to write. I've been trying all day to address it to the Assembly of G-d Church in general, but really, that's not working. I've been trying to figure out what my issue is with the whole church in general, but what it comes down to is this: I don't have a personal beef with an entire group of people. Oh, sure, it was your culture and your formation, and your entire worldview that led you to fail me, but in the end, you were the point of contact between my crazy ass dad and your crazy ass religion.

I'm furious, and broken hearted. It's not just that you failed to rescue me, but that you made what happened to me so much worse. Without you, and your worldview, my dad would have been a sadistic, perverted, drunken child abuser. With you he was a sadistic, perverted, drunken child abuser with G-d on his side.

I honestly believe that if my dad had not been completely deluded by your particularly poisonous version of fundamentalist Christianity, he would have had to try a little harder to blame me for my own abuse. When you promised G-d's divine healing for me, you gave him a ready-made weapon to use against me when G-d didn't deliver. You gave him the vocabulary and the framework in which to see me as culpable. You brought even crazier people into our church to say yes, the devil is in this child. Her infirmity is because of demons. 

Not only did you set me up, but you made me feel responsible. Oh my G-d. I cannot tell you how much of my childhood was spent in misery because of your sermons. And the altar calls. Oh, my G-d. How many times did I "get saved"? How many "rededications"? How many tears did I shed, kneeling by those old altars in front of the sanctuary? Didn't you ever wonder just what in fucking hell I had to feel so guilty about? Didn't it ever once occur to you that wasn't normal?

Did you ever once think "Hey, maybe I could offer some counseling and find out what is bugging her so badly?" You visited our house often. It was at least once a week. Every Sunday night after Dad got so ill, you'd come by before church, and visit with Dad. Then you'd pray with us. I still remember holding your hand as we joined in a circle. Your hands were warm and strong. You listened to my dad and you prayed with him. During all that time, all those words, didn't you ever once think: "Wow, this guy's insane and evil."? 

On that note, how did you sleep at night, when you held hands with us for years and years, praying for divine healing that never came? No matter what we did: more church attendance, more "love offerings", more "mission support", the steady tithing, giving of our time and talents, attending more and more "revivals", earning badges in Prims, Daisies, and Missionettes, singing in the choir, singing solos, despite all of it, G-d just didn't choose to heal anyone. How did you reconcile that? 

Knowing that what was wrong with my eyes was treatable, knowing that my dad delayed medical treatment for me based on your promises, knowing that by the time he gave up and allowed my mom to take me to a surgeon that it was too late for anything but cosmetics, knowing that the only reason he allowed it was because he was convinced that I was demon possessed and G-d would never do anything for me, knowing all that, did you ever feel a twinge of guilt? Didn't you ever think of saying "Look, man, going to a doctor is okay." Hell, didn't you ever once think of saying "Hey, man, if YOU can go see the doctors at the VA, then YOUR KID can have surgery." EVEN ONCE? DID THAT NOT OCCUR TO YOU?

Huge swaths of my childhood were spent completely dissociated. It's weird, but all those times that I stumbled down the aisle to the altar to repent, I never clearly thought "I am feeling guilty because of the sexual abuse." It was so weird, but every time it happened, it was like a horrible surprise, like something that sprang up out of the blue, and then when it was over, I would just not think about it anymore. I would completely ignore it. Yet, I was convinced that I was a terrible sinner. That there was something integral to me that was unacceptable to G-d. I would pray to Jesus, sing hymns, cry my eyes out, feel guilty, get forgiven, and then feel happy and joyful. Over and over and over and over. Didn't you ever once think "Man, something's wrong here."? Because I think I would have noticed. 

Did you notice? Were you guys gossiping about me when I wasn't around? Did you have a narrative? Did you know? Did you know what was going on and tut tut about it in private? Did you deliberately ignore it because it "wasn't any of [y]our business"? Seriously, I wish I knew.

P.S. That bullshit you pulled with my mom about college? Not cool, Dude. Not. Cool. It's been almost thirty years and I still wake up in a cold sweat worried that I'm wrong, you're right, and it's demons. 

Therapeutic Letter to My Mother

Mom. What the ever-loving fuck? WERE YOU ON CRACK????

I'm a mom myself now. I hired a babysitter once. She was bonded and certified. She worked for a reputable agency that did background checks. She stayed with the kids at our house one day while I attended a conference for CEUs back when my license was still active. My oldest son started having nightmares about hands shortly afterwards. Hands touching him, hurting him. I did what any good mom would do, I talked to him. He said he didn't want to talk about it, that he was ashamed. 

I waited. I swallowed my panic. That night, I picked him up and cuddled him in our rocking chair, the one he'd nursed in since he came home from the hospital. He'd had a warm bath with epsom salts. He was relaxed. No one else was around. He was in his comfy jammies. I said "Son, I love you. No matter what happened with the baby sitter, you can tell me about it and I will believe you and I will help you." Slowly at first, scared and shaking, he told me the whole story.

She held him down and tickled him. She wouldn't stop when he asked. She called him "chicken" when he ran away from her. On the inside I took a huge breath of relief. So that was "all". But I didn't let him see that. I told him that it was not his fault. I told him that decent people stop if someone says stop. I told him that if someone bullies him, it's because they are making a choice to do wrong, not because he did anything to deserve it. I told him firmly that I would deal with it. That he was safe, and that she would never come into our house again. He went to bed. He trusted me.

I called her agency. I demanded to talk to her supervisor. I told her the whole story, the way I learned it. I didn't want them to minimize it. I knew it wasn't "the bad thing" even though every alarm bell in any normal person's head would be going off like crazy, but it also was really fucking inappropriate. And it was Not. Okay. 

They listened. They heard me. They disciplined her. She didn't come back to our house. And my son knew he could count on me. He knew that I had his back. He knew he could come to me with troubles that were too big for him, and I would help him. The nightmares went away. That's what you DO when you learn that someone is hurting your child. You fix it. You make it stop. 

So, I ask you again: what the ever-loving fuck?? WERE YOU ON CRACK????? 

You knew I was being molested. You had a doctor look you in the eye and tell you that your baby girl was being molested. That a sexual predator had wormed his way into your life and that your baby was being hurt. And you did what? You told my dad?? **MY** DAD??? The useless asshole with a known criminal record because he had already had sex with underage girls? You trusted HIM to come up with an appropriate response?

Mom, that was worse than useless. 

There were other failures. There were failures of boundaries, there were failures of knowledge, there were failures of developmentally-appropriate expectations. But none of them come quite to the breathtaking level of fail of you turning over the task of "What do we do about the sexual predator taking advantage of our daughter?" to the even-worse sexual predator you lived with. 

"What else could I do?" you asked me once, a decade and a half later. You could have left. You could have called the fucking cops. You could have shot the bastard for all I care. YOU COULD HAVE DONE ANYTHING BESIDES TURN YOUR BACK AND IGNORE ME WHILE YOUR HUSBAND RAPED ME BECAUSE I WAS OBVIOUSLY A WHORE WHO WAS ASKING FOR IT ANYWAY.

What the ever-loving fuck, Mom? Were you on crack?

Therapeutic Letter to my Father

No Broadway show tunes for you, you bastard.

While "Grandpa" may have left me confused and struggling to sort out the good from the bad, I don't have that luxury where you're concerned. I have two, TWO, happy memories of you from my entire childhood. (When I was four, we went to a dance in the school gym. I remember you and I danced. You let me stand on your feet, and you twirled me around the glossy wooden floor and it felt like flying. On the drive home, the tree branches overarching the road felt close and comforting. Then when I was five you and I got up before Mom and you helped me bake her a cake for her birthday in my EasyBake Oven. We decorated it with leftover Valentine's Day candy hearts.) Two happy memories. And, to be charitable, one neutral memory. (When I was a bit older, eight or so, you drove Mom and I out to a big empty field and you waited in the car while she and I flew my Baby Bat kite in the spring wind.) Everything else is evil. Evil, stupid, horrible, sadistic.

I don't want to chronicle everything here. I can't chronicle everything here. Where would I start? The time when I leaned out the car window to wave goodbye to my friends at church and you rolled the window up catching my neck in the window and laughed while I struggled to breathe? The time you left me in the truck on Christmas Eve while you went into the bar and got drunk out of your mind? The time my friend Sharla spent Sunday afternoon at our house and fell asleep on the couch and you poured ice water into her ear to wake her up? All the times you beat me with your belt until I was covered in bruises and all the kids at school saw them and I made up stupid, unbelievable lies about how they got there? The time we went to the county fair and they were doing some idiotic "jail" fundraiser, and you paid them to lock me in the cattle racks and then left me while I screamed in terror? The time you got angry with me for "talking back" pulled over on the highway and made me get out at a rest stop and drove off and LEFT ME THERE?

I can't even.

No, let's concentrate on the worst. The first time you ever called me a whore. I was eight. I'd been being molested by our neighbor for at least a year. I was being molested by the neighbor that you trusted to babysit me while you and mom went to your doctor's appointments at the VA, the neighbor you let me visit frequently. The neighbor you packed me off to their house for overnight visits with the admonition: "Be good. Do as you're told. Don't make me give you a whipping for talking back."

I was in the third grade. My behavior at school was so bizarre that my teachers must have talked to you and mom about it, and I was taken to a doctor. I remember nothing about the exam, just sitting in the waiting room forever with Aunt Sue and my cousin Carolyn while Mom talked to the doctor. Later, decades later, I would find out from Aunt Sue that the doctor had told Mom that I'd been molested. Mom denied it, at first denying that the visit had taken place. When I pressed the issue, telling her every single detail I remembered, she finally admitted that the visit had taken place, that we were there, but it was my cousin Carolyn who'd been examined, not me. That Carolyn had been abused, not me. Crazy making much?

I never forgot what happened afterwards though. You and I were in the backyard. You were leaning on the propane tank and I was standing there with you. We were talking about something, when you leaned over and you said to me: "I know what you're doing over there with that dirty old man." I froze. I stopped breathing. You continued. "You're a dirty whore. You're no good. You're going to burn in hell if you keep that up."

That was your sole contribution to protecting me. To blame me. To insult and shame me. To threaten me with eternal damnation. To put the responsibility for somehow extricating myself from the situation on my shoulders, on an eight year old child. I tried, G-d, I tried. Because even though you knew what was going on, YOU STILL SENT ME OVER THERE. The next time I found myself alone, scared, with a pedophile lifting up my shirt to fondle my nonexistent breasts, I said "We can't do this any more. My Daddy suspects something is going on." "Let him suspect!" he said, and continued planting sloppy kisses on me, the saliva drying on my skin as I stood there and waited for it to be over.

I guess I lied. That's not the worst, come to think of it. Believe it or not, that's not as bad as it gets. The worst is the terrifying flashback that is always there. The nightmare that won't go away. It's not at the neighbor's house. It's not in the cellar. It's not in the workshop. It's not riding his too-big-for-me bike in the lane behind the garden with his fingers slipping inside my shorts yet again. It's not in his upstairs bathroom with a too-small washcloth clutched to my chest, staring at the light fixture in the ceiling pretending that if I can't see him, he can't see me . It's not in the study trying to perfect a headstand with his hands steadying my legs before they, inevitably, slip between my thighs. I am in my bed, in my room. I remember the padded white headboard. I remember the window and the starlight outside. I remember my nightgown around my neck, choking me. I remember the sensation of my hair being pulled. I remember heaviness on my chest. I remember feeling stiff. I remember the pain in my throat as I wanted desperately to scream, or cry, but I didn't, and the ache of holding that all back. And I remember. . . nothing else. Not who it was on top of me, not any sensation at all below my waist. Not what actually happened. Not who did it. But I suspect it was you.

Who else would have had access to our home? Who else would have been there in the middle of the night? Who else would have had that kind of power over me that I wouldn't scream for help?

I've felt confident enough to change my name. I've felt confident enough to come out to our family. I've felt confident enough to say "My father raped me." I've told my story over and over. Besides Mom, who (let's be honest here) had a stake in denying it, not one person has ever said to me "No! That's not possible! Your father would never have done such a thing." I've heard "That explains what a weird kid you were." I've heard "We suspected something was going on." I've heard "He always was a creep." I've heard "We knew it was going on at the time but what could we do? It wasn't our place to interfere." Two separate women in our family have even privately come to me and said "He did it to me too." And that's good enough for me.

But it's not good enough for my brain, apparently. The flashbacks keep coming. The memory keeps clawing at my subconscious. I don't want to remember that fully. I don't want to know any more. I don't want to be plunged any deeper into despair and terror. I just want it to go away.

But it isn't going away.

Therapeutic Letter to My Abuser

I remember sitting across a card table from you. It was winter. Your home was warm and cozy. Your wife sat in the living room crocheting and watching television. You had no use for television. You preferred to build things and read. At the time you were teaching me to play dominoes. Double nines, because double sixes were too easy. I remember the long trail of numbers on our scoresheets.

We talked a lot then, about a lot of things. We talked about your garden plans for the spring. You always had a huge garden, almost an acre. I remember the dill plants, and the crunchy dill pickles every year. I remember the watermelon. I remember you talking about organic gardening before I even knew that was a thing. It was the seventies. You were too old to be a hippie, but you were still into all those things. Alternative energy, organic gardening, compost, recycling, energy conservation; you built your own solar shower out in your workshop.

 I don't know why I was allowed / encouraged to spend so much time with you, except that my parents just wanted me out of their hair. Even after it all came out what you were doing, they still sent me to you for babysitting. I still can't wrap my head around that. (Weird Freudian slip; I originally typed "warp my head around that".) I know that it was important in my formation. I know it was messed up. I know I adored you. I believed all your tall tales so much that I argued with my teachers if any of their new-fangled "science" contradicted your stories. Yeah, I know, I'm cringing now. Sorry, Mrs. Neese.

 I think one of the things that bugs me so much is that it wasn't all bad. That "so much of me is made of what I learned from you. You'll be with me like a handprint on my heart." Pretty sinister for a Broadway show tune, innit? You were a rebel. You weren't content to be trapped inside the conventions that said "you must believe this and not that", and you didn't want me to be either. You believed in me. If I said I was too little or too clumsy to do something, you said I most certainly could learn to do it, if I wanted to. You taught me yoga. You taught me to ride a bike. You taught me to build things, and use power tools. You taught me to climb a rope and to balance on a rolling barrel. I was athletic around you, like I couldn't be anywhere else. When the kids at school made fun of me for being pudgy, you just kept encouraging me, and helping me adapt and learn. And you cheered all my successes. But it was all twisted, wasn't it?

 It seeped into everything, you know, like your fingers sliding up my legs and under my shorts at the most unexpected times. Yoga, biking, balancing. There we were, having fun, and then suddenly this unpleasant, unexpected (no matter how many times it happened, I never really managed to see it coming) touching that grossed me out. Sometimes I think "What a fucking idiot!". My therapists, and all the books say that's normal. They say children need love and acceptance and mentoring from adults, and if their caregivers can't or won't give it to them, they'll seek it elsewhere. They say that's what people like you do, that it's how you choose your victims. You look for the lonely ones, the hurting ones. They say that's how you get them to go along. "Grooming" they call it. The presents, the companionship, the time spent, the praise. All of it a means to an end. Or maybe the majority. Maybe part of it. I don't know.

That's hard to sort out too. Were you just an evil, conniving bastard who manipulated me so you could use me sexually? Were you just a fallible, fucked up human who really cared for me somewhat, but didn't bother to see that your desires were inappropriate and would cause me long term harm? I don't fucking know. How the hell should I know? But it's still with me either way. Like that g-ddamned handprint on my fucking heart.

"It well may be that we will never meet again in this lifetime,
 so let me say before we part: 
so much of me is made of what I learned from you.
You'll be with me like a handprint on my heart. 
And now whatever way our stories end, 
I know you have rewritten mine, by being my friend. 
Like a ship blown from its mooring by a wind off the sea, 
like a seed dropped by a sky bird in a distant wood, 
who can say if I've been changed for the better? 
But because I knew you, I have been changed for good."


"For Good - Wicked"

Subtext is of the Devil

Way back in the day, when my husband and I were just friends and I was dating someone else, my boyfriend and I had a terse exchange in front of him. After my boyfriend walked off (kinda in a huff), My Beloved asked me "What's up with that?" I shrugged and said "You know. subtext." He looked confused and said "No." I sighed and said "You know, when you have something going on between the two of you, and neither of you is really willing to talk about it, but it keeps coming out in little ways in unrelated conversations and stuff?" He looked blank and then said "When I have a relationship, there won't be any subtext." I said "How you planning on pulling that off, Dude?" He said "We will just always be 100% totally honest with each other no matter what and then there won't ever be a chance for any subtext." I laughed in his face and said "You are so fucking naive. That is NEVER going to work." He confidently said "Oh yes it will."

Fourteen years later, it's working. And what's more, it's made me absolutely intolerant of anything less. I refuse to play head games. I cannot abide friendships that aren't brave and open enough for people to say what they mean, be who they really are, and ask for what they want, even if the answer is no. Radical honesty isn't easy. It's damned hard. It means having to admit when I fuck up, and oh man do I fuck up more than I wish. It means having to own my own crap instead of pulling the "You made me feel X" BS. It means having to talk about sex instead of just shut down and go along because it's easier, quicker, and he probably wouldn't be able to tell I was faking it anyway. But it's worth it. We've come through really scary stuff together, and we're still good.

I'm going through something now that's scary, and I want to fall back on my radical honesty, but I'm still nervous pulling that out on other Not-Husband people. I'm scared of what happens if the recipient doesn't yet understand how freeing it is. Scared of what will happen if My view point is deemed too threatening. At this point I don't think it matters though, because honestly? At this point I don't think I'm capable of playing it any different way.