2009 October » No Longer Quivering

by Sierra

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When we went to visit the house in Pennsylvania, it seemed remote, dark and expansive. At the inquisitive yet reticent age of seven, I hovered behind my mother’s leg as we looked around the basement of the long ranch house. It wasn’t quite a finished basement, but there was a bar installed with Heineken cans lining the ceiling. A child about my age was sitting on the floor playing with some ugly 1990s toys. We shared a mutual glance of childhood understanding: we were not agents in this business of buying, selling and leasing real estate (I couldn’t yet wrap my mind around what “real estate” meant in the first place). We were the dolls in our parents’ dollhouses, and I was displacing this other child. I felt the distinct urge to leave, as though I had stepped unbidden into this little boy’s territory and threatened to take away his home.

My parents and I had already moved about fifty miles west, an unheard of stretch from the perspective of my extended family. Now, a year later, we were moving just a few more miles, into a house where my father wouldn’t feel the landlord’s constant presence; after all, in our current house, he and his wife lived right next door. Since they’d invited me over for tea once or twice and had been perfectly agreeable to me, I couldn’t really relate to my father’s sentiment. All I really knew, or cared to know, was that moving was terribly exciting. I loved the way the teetering towers of packed goods transformed our living room into an alien landscape of artificial mountains, trails and caverns. I rescued a few stuffed animals from being boxed, and we escaped together to explore the cardboard jungle.

The forest of boxes had taken root in the plains of sorrow, however. Not long before we began touring the insides of other people’s houses, a fateful night had shaken our reality. It was the middle of a warm May night when I was roused by hands shaking me gently and then picking me up. I sleepily clutched a stuffed cat as my father loaded me into the front passenger seat of our Chevy sedan without shoes on. I contemplated how weird it was not to be wearing shoes in the car. And then we were following the ambulance.

vyckie_nlq

Dear Frank,

I am a former Christian homeschooling mother of seven who finally walked away from fundamentalism after our radical extremism drove my oldest daughter to attempt suicide ~ and I would like to help you spread your message and sell your books.

In bible college, your father was my absolute hero ~ I read all of his books and was determined to study Christian apologetics until I could defend my faith as skillfully as Francis Schaeffer!

However, as the years went by, fundamentalist “family values” put me in my place as a woman ~ and so I shifted my focus and that’s when your mother, Edith became my role model as I devoted myself to homemaking and motherhood.

I dutifully birthed seven “foot soldiers for Jesus” ~ nearly losing my life on more than one occasion. I was totally sold out ~ and as a homeschooler, I was exposed to the most extreme aspects of Dominionism. I felt that James Dobson, Tony Perkins, even Don Wildmon were lightweights ~ I much preferred the uncompromising Randall Terry ~ and Paul dePairie was better yet.

benham

When Flip Benham came to Nebraska, I baked chicken-pot pies for him and we packed all our friends and associates into our livingroom to hear Flip speak about what it really means to be radically “pro-life.”

I was married to a blind man and in order to create a way for him to support our growing “quiverfull” family, I started a “pro-life, pro-family” newspaper in Northeast Nebraska. I followed all the major right-wing leaders in the “culture wars” and used my newspaper to challenge Christians to join the fight to restore America’s godly heritage. My articles advocating no-birth-control-for-Christians and heralding the Old Testament patriarchal family structure were carried by all the major home school publications ~ I even wrote for AFA’s Agape Press News.

Now, my newspaper, which I published for 16 years, had a circulation of around 5,000 ~ so I was totally a small-bit player compared to what you were doing on the national level, but that is not for lack of talent and ambition ~ it was only because, as a woman, I was too busy fulfilling my high calling of producing and raising up an army for God within my own home.

Cutting to the chase here ~ the extremist lifestyle was a total set-up for burn-out for me ~ and psychosis for my oldest daughter.

I met a long-lost uncle who is an atheist ~ and for some reason we hit it off and began a year-long email correspondence. At the very beginning, I wrote to my Uncle Ron this quote which I picked up from one of Francis Schaeffer’s books: Atheists have both feet firmly planted in mid-air. There’s no way that I would ever give up my certainty ~ my absolute “Blessed Assurance” for Ron’s worldview which he described as a “dissonant world of emergence and transition.”