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by Millipede

Eventually, the church building materialized. At first, we had a larger group. Soon however, there was a falling out with a group which had comprised most of those from the Patriot group. Part of it was personality and some of it was viewpoint. Some wanted to the place to be a patriot type meeting house while some wanted it to be a church. This belied a rift that plays itself over again and again in this end of the spectrum.

On one hand there are what I would call the “political types”. This is simply for lack of a better term and is not indicative of a lack of Faith. People within this group were most often led into church via ideological means. Their religious views are part of a larger concert of views. I heard a pastor bemoan such people, saying that they simply added Christ onto a long chain of train cars of belief. One car might be their position on gun control, another states’ rights and so on. With the “religious question” answered they move on to continue to build the train. He stated that they needed to make Christ the locomotive, not merely regulate Him along a set of beliefs.

On the other hand you have those for whom Faith is the primary motivation. They often come from a strong Fundamentalist background. Not from in a distant childhood past either, but often having recently come from various conservative churches. for these folks, ideological issues are important, but they are subordinate to questions of faith.

At first both groups over lap in various organizations, but over time, they unwind. As one pastor said, there were the “beans and bullets” types and the “folks who wanted to have church”. Those outside the political spectrum might not notice. At face value, these two groups look identical. In fact they often proclaim identical or closely related viewpoints.

NOTE. This is a socio-cultural observation only, not a measure of sincerity or depth of belief. Both groups view themselves as being both committed Christians and as being sincerely dedicated to various ideological causes.
My husband and I along with our new circle of friends belonged to the “church goers”. In our view, a lot of patriot types liked the high ground that being a Christian presented, but were not really committed to the Faith. for a lot of them having church was really having a group of people sitting around discussing political issues. They had a “to each his own” when it came to theological views. We, on the other hand, were committed to pleasing God, in spirit and deed. If the Bible forbid something, we would abstain from it and would not hesitate to proclaim that truth even if it offended would be allies.

Soon, the church had a split with the more “political” group going off on its own to hold its own version of church. I saw people I considered my friends leave with that group. Even after the split, we remained on friendly terms, but we were not close. Our new circle, however was tight, both a result of personality and of viewpoint.
We enjoyed fellowship not only in church, but as friends. In the first couple of years, I enjoyed our time together. They were friendly people and we spent a lot of time together.

Our faith was a growing thing and with each new turn, we molded our lives around each new truth. My life had changed quite a bit. we went to church regularly and attended various conferences, often traveling hundreds of miles.
I made a great deal of personal changes. I had been dissatisfied with my job in the past and things came to a head when when we were getting heavily involved in our faith. when I told my husband that I was going to look for another job, he suggested that I stay home and we could start a family. When I replied that I was worried about our financial stability, he said that we should step out in faith. So instead of changing jobs, I simply put my two weeks notice in with plans to stay home. Not long after that a fortuitous event occurred that met our financial concerns, a sure sign of a blessing.

So I stayed at home and we tried, without success, to have children. This didn’t concern us. although we didn’t believe in birth control and were for having large and often home schooled families, no one was legalistic about it. It was between a husband and his wife about the number of children they should have. Also, if a woman abstained from having more children due to health concerns, no one looked down upon her. In this respect, I feel that our group was very balanced, there was no pressure or condemnation concerning the bearing of children. Even though I now take issue with other stances, I feel that we as a group had a healthy take on the issue. There was none of this “having children at any cost” or “maternal martyr” mindset. Indeed it was not beyond the pale, if the medical issue was grave enough, for a woman to have her tubes tied.

On the other hand, there were views that we adapted which proved harmful in the long run. They started with little baby steps at first which made it easier to swallow. Little things…

To be continued…

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Part 1

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by Calulu

This is a new series that I’m starting. I actually started writing about my history with the one person that impacted me the most during my days at the old church. I’m flip, I’m sarcastic in this series but mostly I am processing what happened to me because it seems like a plot straight out of the recently cancelled series GCB (Good Christian Bitches). After telling my therapist years ago about this man I was encouraged to write it all down. I did and if I didn’t laugh and poke fun I’d be crying right now. It was the most corrosive relationship I’ve ever been in and I didn’t even have the common sense to run from it. I’ve changed names and some small details because until recently this person still stalked me in an effort to make me return to my old beliefs. I have to believe his extreme inner hurt drove his behavior.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

If there was one person that affected my journey both into and out of a Patriarchal Fundigelical church that man would be Tom Smith. He was there at the start and he still haunts me like a cackling insano Captain Ahab chasing Moby Dick around an endless ecclesiastical sea. He has a monomaniacal desire to either force me back into our old borderline fundamentalist way of life replete with a submissive attitude or to hound me about going to hell. Sometimes he seems to spit at me “ … to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee. “ but it sounds more like, “You are going to HELL for going to THAT church with homosexual abortionists and unGodly UNSAVED!!!!” Eleventy1111111!!!!

Back when the husband and I were new believers we ended up going to the same church as he back in 1995, PCC. He and his wife pounced upon us at once, inviting us over to watch movies, play cards, or share a meal. We didn’t know anyone else in the church at that time and they, Tom and Tina, had four boys ranging from just older than our son to the same age as our daughter. The kids loved to get together.

From the first I was put off by Tom’s fake-seeming Jesus Freak persona. He would do things like stop in the middle of a movie or game to lecture about Jesus. He prayed very publicly in almost a showy fashion at the drop of a hat and constantly had Christian rock and roll playing at full blast. These things set off my internal bullshit detector but since we were newly minted kool aid drinkers I thought I was the wacky one.

But it always gave me pause. It was like the minute anyone was around Tom put on this Ned Flanders false self. But I swallowed hard and thought well, I’m the baby Christian, he’s been a Christian for more than twenty years, what do I know.

Around the same time our pastor at our new church pulled me aside and told me not to be so friendly with the Smiths because they ‘had issues’. Pastor didn’t tell me what those ‘issues’ were and I could not see anything besides Tom’s Olympian attempts to be “Super Christian – Savior of the Unwashed Masses of Sinners.” I wondered about that but I didn’t do anything. Even as my internal Lost in Space Robot was shouting ‘Warning Will Robinson!” every time we socialized with the family. But… I checked my common sense at the door because the kids loved hanging out with their boys and Hubby really liked Tom and Tina.

After awhile I noticed that Tom would do and say things to his wife Tina that just rubbed me the wrong way. Tina had progressive serious muscular skeletal disease very badly, had trouble walking and sometimes functioning in simple things. She also seemed to be one of the meekest, kindest ladies I’d ever met. Tina acted always like Tom was her knight in shining armor that could do not wrong.

Did Tom treat her well? No. He sometimes would ride her like a mule, ordering, whining, nagging her over some small things. I clearly remember one night when she was having a lot of trouble walking he ordered her to make a banana split for him. He didn’t offer to help, he just keep sitting there like king turd on a mountain of crap waiting to be worshiped. I thought this was pretty harsh behavior but it was nothing compared to what he did next. Tina brought him his ice cream, acting very servile, like a whipped dog sidling up to it’s master wanting mercy but expecting to be beaten. Tom started to berate her for forgetting to put wet nuts and cherries on his ice cream. She told him that they were out. His response was to order her out of the door in the freezing sleet that was coming down, drive to Wal Mart right then (around midnight) and get his cherries and a jar of wet walnuts in syrup.

Woman!!! Get me my wet nuts and cherries right now!

She did it. I so wanted to visit violence on him that night, give him real wet nuts, but again, what did I know? Tom was a MUCH more mature Christian than I.

Tom spent the rest of the night either telling Tina what a failure as a wife she was between telling Hubby that I needed to learn to be subservient like that. It’s Biblical, don’t ya know.

On the ride home that night I told Hubby exactly what I’d been itching to say all night, that it wasn’t Biblical submissiveness we were witnessing, it was a power tripping assclown verbally abusing his disabled wife. Hubby, bless his soul he always tries to see the best in folks, said that just because their marriage and way of dealing with each other was different than ours it was just their way. Sure, he said, if Tina was being abused she’d leave.

So time marches on, I grow enough in my religious faith that I become more and more uncomfortable with the treatment of Tom towards Tina. I befriend her and discover that she’s about an intellectual as a kumquat or a lump of coal for all her niceness and sincerity. I also discover that she really believes that she should be submissive to Tom in all things and all ways. She says if she were a better person or a better Christian that Tom would love her better, be happier and not have to correct her all of the time.

We still got together with the Smiths but I became even more disgusted with Tom’s high handed behavior and his superior judgmental attitudes. I only tolerated him because I worried for Tina and we were friends now. I tried and talk to her about the way he treats her but it’s like talking to a someone that’s been brainwashed by a cult. Hubby and I make other friends at church and start to withdraw from the Smiths quite a bit.

.During all of this time Tom wastes no time or tact telling me when he thinks I’ve screwed up, have a wrong attitude or don’t treat Hubby with proper Christian womanly deference. I grit my teeth and for the sake of both Hubby and Tina I don’t knock Tom’s block off or curse him out like I secretly itch to do. Maybe I’m the wicked one that needs Christ and Christian love I’m not feeling, I think.

Also two other couples came into our circle of friends. Mike and Cathy, from Vermont. Mike works at in federal office in our town and Cathy, like Tina and most of the women at the church doesn’t work. Mike and Cathy squabble a lot over dumb things but Cathy is feisty and smart, plus we both love antiquing and interior design. The other couple, Sam and Alice, are brand new at church and also have kids in the same age brackets as ours and the Smiths. Sam is a insurance agent and Alice is studying for her masters in arts. I tried to be friends with Alice but I kept hearing warning bells in the back of my mind about her for no reason I can see. I remember one get together when Alice, Cathy and I were dancing, taking turns swing dancing with Sam and Tom got very angry before declaring dancing a sinful tool of the devil. Yep, he was being a tool once again.

About three years after we start going to church my father has a stroke and I have to leave town with my Hubby for our far-away hometown. Because I trust Tina and know she’s a great mother regardless of Tom and I knew that my father’s death would create massive family drama I leave my two kids with Tom and Tina Smith.

When we come back ten days later something has happened, something no one will tell us about. Alice and Cathy were always in a huddle whispering, cutting me out of the conversation. Tina was clueless as ever along with Sam and Mike. Tom, oh Tom, kept acting like an egg-sucking dog looking for another hen house. It was just a very weird time, strange vibrations. It was a very strange time, I felt uneasy, that robot shouting “Danger Danger!!!” again my mind but I kept mentally berating myself for having a suspicious mind.

A couple of weeks later I run into Sam in town and he asks me how I enjoyed the Vermeer exhibit in a nearby big city. I tell him I don’t know what he’s talking about. He tells me that sure I must know because Alice and I spent last weekend in Big City before going to the exhibit. Sam tells me how night it was for me to treat Alice out to a hotel room at the Four Seasons and exhibit tickets. Unfortunately I have to tell him that Alice was not with me, I didn’t spend the night in the city and I’d seen the exhibit last month before my father passed.

Tina calls me and references the same thing except she tells me how nice it was that I met Tom in Big City for the exhibit and that I didn’t have to give him the hotel stay for the night. One of the hotels near the museum was giving out those hard to get exhibit tickets for the Vermeer show. I make vague noises and get off the phone without telling her I was no where near the exhibit last last weekend.

So I call up Tom and Alice separately, confronting them about why each of them used me as an alibi. Alice bursts out crying and tells me it’s nothing, just a platonic friendship. When I reach Tom he tells me to my horror that he’s deeply in love with Alice, they are going to both leave their spouses and be together living the hipster outre life of artists.

Now this is a guy I’ve known for 3 or 4 years and never once heard one word of interest in art before. He starts babbling out that Tina has the mind and intellect of a 12 year old, that he doesn’t love her and never did. His life is crushing him, blah blah blah… and it gets worst.. to be continued.

Discuss this post on the NLQ forum. Comments are also open below.

Calulu lives near Washington DC , was raised Catholic in South Louisiana before falling in with a bunch of fallen Catholics whom had formed their own part Fundamentalist, part Evangelical church. After fifteen uncomfortable years drinking that Koolaid she left nearly 6 years ago. Her blog is Calulu – Roadkill on the Internet Superhighway

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by Permission to Live

This post is part of a series of nine posts. Please click here to start with the series Introduction.

It had been a year since my spouse had come out to me. It felt like it had been much longer. So much had changed and yet nothing had changed. We still hadn’t decided how Christianity tied in with our changing reality: I was leaning further and further away from the idea of God but my spouse still believed. We felt like there were no real answers anymore. Life was not as black and white as people wanted it to be. My spouse was talking more and more about transitioning and I felt like there was no one-size-fits-all in gender identity. Maybe my spouse would become comfortable living as a man and wouldn’t need to transition, but maybe he wouldn’t. Maybe he would transition to living as a female someday, but again, maybe he wouldn’t. The idea just wasn’t that scary to me anymore. My spouse was already living as such a feminine person as he had grown more comfortable with who he was, transition would just be a natural next step if it happened.

In fact the only fear that still clung to me was how this would affect our children, and that made me wonder if my spouse should try to put off transition until the kids were grown up. The faith and culture that I had been brought up in told me that children had to have parents of both genders to be happy, healthy, and well-adjusted. Wouldn’t our children resent us for having grown up with two female parents? How would society treat them? Would they always be the kids with the weird dad? Was it even possible to raise kids without a “manly influence?”

Despite my fears and doubts, I couldn’t deny that my spouse was happier than I had ever seen him. He was relaxed and involved. He was dressing more and more femininely at home, and the kids didn’t mind at all. They were starting to figure out that their daddy was a bit different than other daddies, but they were happy to have a peaceful parent who loved them and cared for them, talked with them and snuggled them and listened to them. It was as if a huge burden had been lifted off his shoulders, like he no longer had to spend the majority of his time struggling to constantly tread water and keep his head above the surface and stay alive. Instead, all of the energy that had been consumed in that struggle could be spent on parenting and living. The conversation about transition “someday” started to change into transition being a real option in the near future, and I couldn’t come up with a reason our kids should have to go back to having a depressed repressed parent who lived as a male and struggled to survive with the help of anti-depressants instead of a happy relaxed involved parent who lived as female. A guy as feminine as he was turning out to be was going to out of the ordinary anyway. Why was I questioning this at all? To please a god? Who had played this gender joke on us in the first place? A god I wasn’t even sure existed?

So, to combat my fear of my children growing up with gay parents, I once again turned to education. I started reading about non-traditional families and one of the stats that startled me was that over 50% of families today did not fit the traditional standard that I had been led to believe was the only healthy family. There were many children being raised by single moms or single dads. Often parents divorced and children spent time living with either parent at different times. Children today are being raised by grandparents, foster parents, and widowed parents. My kids certainly wouldn’t be the only ones with a “different” family. Studies showed that the child’s emotional well-being and healthiness had more to do with how they were respected and loved and cared for as individuals than the exact set-up of their families.

I began reading more and more about LGBTQ parents. I read the stats on how their kids did in school, and how they matured emotionally. I read books written by people who had grown up with gay or lesbian or transgendered parents, and listened to their perspectives. The stats were encouraging, and most of the hardships involved with growing up with LGBTQ parents seemed to come from the pressure from society to conform and the prejudice that created, not the parents themselves. In fact, the divorce that commonly took place after the revelation of sexuality or gender identity questions seemed to have more impact on the children than the sexuality or gender identity questions themselves. The parents and the kids seemed to have the normal range of personality traits and issues that any family would have. Why would our kids be any different? We didn’t hit them, we would accept them and love them whoever they were or whatever they wanted to be. Their emotional health and well being was a top priority for us, and would continue to be so. Did it really matter that their dad would have a unique story? Normally, if a parent had a medical condition that hampered their ability to be happy and productive, society would bless and encourage their seeking treatment. Why should my spouse’s condition be any different?

One of the things I had to consider was that if my spouse did end up completely transitioning to living as female, the medical treatments for gender dysphoria would mean an end to fertility and further genetic children. I had already come to the conclusion that I did not want as large a family as I had grown up in, but the idea of limiting children or being done was still relatively new to me. We now had four beautiful children, whom I loved dearly and who had kept me from getting a full night’s sleep for five years straight. I knew I needed a break and I did not want to become pregnant again in the near future. I also knew I wanted to have the time and energy to be there for each one of my children. But because I had spent most of my life believing that my main purpose in life was to produce children it was hard for me to imagine any other reality.

I kept thinking about it, determined to get to the bottom of my feelings and make sure that I really was OK with a future with fertility limitations. Slowly I started to see that I had value outside of my fertility. I asked myself if my spouse had any other medical condition, would I demand that he refuse treatment because it could affect his fertility? I also learned more about the range of options available for people who are undergoing treatment that may compromise fertility, including sperm banking. And I wondered if perhaps there could be a space in our family for adoption or fostering children someday, a dream which seemed so impossible back in our Quiverfull days of having a baby every 18 months.

As the idea of transition in the near future became more real, we talked at length about our children and our marriage. We asked ourselves if was divorce something that needed to happen? My spouse wanted to make sure I was really OK with him going ahead with gender transition. He insisted that he would understand completely even if we needed to part ways, and that he would continue to provide us financial support regardless. We talked about our children, and asked ourselves if they would they be better off if we separated? But divorce still didn’t make sense to me. I was happy with our relationship and thrilled with my spouse’s new involvement in our children’s lives. Even if for some reason we decided that our relationship wasn’t going to work out, I knew I would still want him involved with parenting our children. I was attracted to him now, and I couldn’t see that changing. He had been the first person to love me unconditionally, and had been there for me all along my journey of questioning and healing from my past. He was a caring, empathic, patient and passionate person, and I wanted to continue my life-story with him. And as I’d begun to unwrap my own sexuality for the first time, I was starting to feel that if we were to separate for some reason, or if my spouse were to die, I would be romantically interested in women anyway, so I had nothing to lose by staying together.

It was better for our kids for our family to stay intact,
and it was better for us,
even if that meant going through transition together.

Discuss this post on the NLQ forum. Comments are also open below.

You can read more about Permission To Live at her blog – Musings of a young mom.

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by Permission to Live

This post is part of a series of nine posts. Please click here to start with the series Introduction.

Even though we had hoped that it would be enough for my spouse to simply be more authentic to his feminine self, it seemed that the idea of transition was coming up more and more. My spouse talked about how frustrating it was to have this battle raging in his head every single day, his brain telling him again and again that he was really a woman. He told me how the idea of becoming an old man terrified him. It was bad enough being trapped in the body of a young man, but to be old and helpless and cared for by people who would treat him as a guy was dreadful to him. Sometimes he cried, all of the bottled up fear from the years gone by pouring out along with fears of the future and living life day after day fighting this never ending battle.

When the talk of transition initially came up, my heart sank. Were we losing the battle? Was I wrong to have let the conversation continue this long? Should I have told him to be quiet and put his head down and fight it alone? I told my spouse again and again that he didn’t need to change anything, that he had me in his life, and I loved him exactly the way he was. Except that as time went on I realized that I was contradicting myself in that very statement. Transgender WAS exactly the way he was, and if I really loved him regardless, transition wasn’t going to change that.

Talk of transition was a natural progression of the ongoing discussion we’d been having. Right alongside the growing contentment and happiness, my spouse would have periods of days or weeks where he slipped back into despair. It was usually triggered by some conversation where we discussed the future and how we were going to continue to handle this question of gender.

The societal pressure was so intense, usually he would talk about what a horrible person he was to be “putting us through all this” and that surely he could figure out some way to make it through life as a man. And then he would get quiet and moody again, and go back to wearing the old polo shirts I now knew he hated. It scared me seeing him like that, I knew he was trying to spare us from the prospect of gender transition, but also I knew how happy and carefree he could be, and it was hard to see him so miserable. We seemed to be going in a slowly recurring cycle. He would push himself to be more “manly” and get more and more depressed to the point of saying that “would all be better off without him”, and then I would tell him that he needed to get help, and he would start talking about getting on an anti-depressant to help him cope. And then we would talk again about self-respect and self-acceptance, and just letting go and being ourselves and seeing where life took us. And things would get better again. It was almost magical, how putting aside the guilt and shame would free him up, suddenly becoming the open, peaceful, lighthearted person I knew he was. The more we relaxed and stopped stressing about who we were “supposed” to be, the less frequent the down times were. Slowly, the conversation started to change.

Maybe he should get involved with a support group, with other people like him. Maybe we could go out shopping sometime with him dressed as a woman, just us together as a treat. Maybe someday when the kids were grown up, we could go on vacation together as two women in a place where no one who knew us would see us. Maybe after the kids were grown up and living their own lives he could transition to living as a woman full-time. Maybe someday he wouldn’t have to fight this battle every day.

Maybe, someday, he could just live.

One interesting development was realizing that the actual thought of him becoming a woman someday did not scare me. I had always known I was sexually attracted to women, but I kept asking myself “shouldn’t I be a little more freaked out about the idea of my spouse changing sexes?” The fact is, I wasn’t. The theoretical transition was still years away in my mind and my spouse was still my spouse. Throughout this whole process he had only gotten healthier and happier overall. We loved each other and we were a good team.

I started to talk about my own journey a bit, talking for the first time about the girl I had had a crush on in my early teens, saving a sticker she had given me in my jewelry box after she moved away. The times I had fought the sudden urge to kiss several different girls I knew, totally confused as to where the strong feelings had come from. How I had watched as friends talked about this or that cute actor and felt that they all looked alike to me, so I picked the hairiest and “manliest” actors I could to hide the real truth. How I had asked my mom what she had found attractive about dad, and when she said it was his broad shoulders, that became what I told people when they asked what “my type” was. How I had asked my parents about same-sex attraction and received answers that made me feel even more alone. How I had patted myself on the back with purity culture pride for being so completely in control of my interactions with and feelings for men. I knew that the only path that was acceptable was to get married to a conservative homeschooling Christian man and have his children, and I had felt so despairing of all the young men I met, none of them seemed right for me. But somehow my spouse and I had forged a relationship despite it all.

The more we talked, the more we realized how our secrets had affected our marriage as well. The evangelical marriage books I had read about how to serve my husband best and discover “what he truly wanted” had completely backfired since he was nothing like these books insisted men were. All of the behaviors and mannerisms he had tried to keep up because he had been told they were manly were now gratefully dropped. We started communicating about what we liked and who we were and longtime sexual hang-ups in the bedroom began to collapse. We laughed about the times I had pointed out an attractive girl to my spouse in the past, and times I thought he had been being silly when he put on an article of my clothing and asked how he looked. How had we not realized these things about each other sooner?

Despite all the new questions
our relationship was closer than ever.

Discuss this post on the NLQ forum. Comments are also open below.

You can read more about Permission To Live at her blog – Musings of a young mom.

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by Latebloomer

From hanging around with people such as Scott Lively in my fundamentalist Christian homeschooling community, I understood the danger that America was facing from the gay agenda. I believed that the gay lifestyle was depraved and corrupt and a sign of rebellion against God. I believed that God expected me to use political activism to stand up for righteousness and his design for the family. I believed that my “pro-family-values” activism was actually me being loving to the deceived people around me, people who were just taking the easy way out by accepting every type of lifestyle.

Then one day I accidentally met a gay person.

It was at my first real job, when I was 23 years old. My favorite manager, Chris, called the store one day while he was off-duty. He chatted with the on-duty manager Katie for a few minutes; when she hung up, she remarked to me, “He’s so funny! Why did he call me from a gay bar? haha!”

I was extremely confused. “Yeah, that’s weird,” I said, trying to process the information, “Why would he be at a gay bar?” Her jaw dropped, and she stared at me for a minute. Then she said slowly, “Um…..because he’s gay. Didn’t you know that?”

It was a huge moment for me, but a million panicked thoughts flooded my mind at once. How was it that I hadn’t noticed anything “different” about him? He seemed so normal and sweet, not at all detrimental to society! He had always been so thoughtful to me, even from the first day I walked in the store in my awkward unstylish clothes and shyly handed him my resume. He was the first guy to tell me that I was pretty, that I looked like his favorite childhood actress Molly Ringwald (he couldn’t believe that I had never heard of her). But he was gay?? What was I supposed to do now??

I started to feel a huge spiritual burden for him, the feeling that I had a responsibility to help him get out of that damaging lifestyle somehow. But how should I approach that topic with him? Should I try to talk to him about turning away from that lifestyle and starting to follow Christ? Or should I just invite him to church and let God speak to him through the sermons and the pastor? I couldn’t really see either scenario playing out very well, so I waited and thought and prayed.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I had no idea what was inherently wrong with gay sex and gay love! Why was it not equally valid? It started to seem a very arbitrary thing to forbid, and reality didn’t match what I had been taught about it in Christian culture. In some ways, I felt like my gay boss was a better example of love than many of the Christian people that I knew. After all, he had hired me willingly, even though he knew that I was a very conservative homeschooler and very likely to be strongly anti-gay. I knew he would not have gotten the same treatment from many conservative Christian employers. Cautiously, I started to think to myself, “Maybe homosexuality is ok after all.”

And that was just one of many cracks that formed as my Christian worldview hit reality. For the first time in my life, I was hearing about other worldviews directly from their source, instead of a filtered, watered-down version presented merely to strengthen my own worldview. And, for the first time in my life, I realized it was possible to hold different opinions from my own without being “blind”, “deceived,” or “in rebellion against God”–my worldview was not so obvious, and “unsaved” people were not so bad after all.

But what were the implications for the Bible? I had always tried to approach it simply, ready to believe the literal interpretation even when it required personal sacrifice. To me, it was a timeless book, orchestrated by God, without contradiction, the only reliable source of truth. But as cracks formed in my carefully-constructed Biblical worldview, in the end I had to decide what I thought about the Bible. I had always avoided my natural curiosity about how the Bible came to us in its current state–it certainly didn’t fall from the sky in its present form! Acknowledging my questions about it was terrifying, but ultimately necessary. If it were really from God, and if I really genuinely wanted to know the truth about it, I shouldn’t have anything to fear. So, very gradually, I looked at my beliefs and asked the hard questions.

My worldview said, “The Bible is the source for morality!” –But then why does it condone things like genocide, and call men “godly” when they offer their daughters to be gang raped, and advocate forced marriages between a girl and her raper? Why doesn’t it condemn slavery and child sacrifice and polygamy with child brides? My worldview said, “The Bible is written by eyewitnesses, and their accounts don’t contradict each other!” –Then why was I afraid to look at the supposed contradictions? They are there, after all, and just saying they don’t exist isn’t a valid argument. The Bible has internal contradictions on theology and history, and there are significant variations between historic manuscripts. Also, many of the books have unknown authors and were first written hundreds of years after the events took place. In its present form, the collection of books we call the Bible doesn’t have even more contradictions because those other books were thrown out as “uninspired” simply because they contradicted too much. My worldview said, “The Bible is the source of truth about salvation through Jesus!” –Then why are there over 2,000 language groups in the world today that have no way to access that truth? Why have billions upon billions of people lived and died without ever having a chance to hear it?

I was rooting for my Biblical worldview to win, I really was. It was comfortable because it was all I knew, and I really don’t like change. However, in the end, it didn’t hold up very well against reality. In the end, there were too many cracks, and my worldview shattered. And when it shattered, I finally saw what a tiny box I had been living in, and what a huge, beautiful, and interesting world was out there to discover.

Since much of my personal growth happened while I was in college, some have said that my changing opinions were the result of “liberal college brainwashing”. To those people, I doubt that I could say anything to change their opinion about that. However, the fact is that at no time during my education at community college or Christian university were my opinions mocked or belittled. At no time did anyone tell me what to believe or not to believe.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of the fundamentalist Christian homeschooling environment. That is where you are told what to believe. That is where other opinions are belittled. That is where even questions are dangerous. I don’t want to be part of that culture anymore. To me, a worldview is not worth keeping if it requires ignoring or twisting reality to fit the worldview, pushing down your questions and doubts, and only listening to those who already agree with you.

These thoughts took a very long time to process, and my ideas are still a work in progress today. For now, I am finding that many of my new ideas fit within a looser interpretation of the Bible, one where I don’t completely abdicate my responsibility to think about what’s right in today’s world. I see that morality was a work in progress in the Bible, and I accept that it still is today too, and that I have a role to play.

Discuss this post on the NLQ forum. Comments are also open below.

Latebloomer is on a journey away from the ideals she was raised with in the conservative homeschooling culture. Becoming a wife and mother has prompted her to re-evaluate her childhood experiences in an effort to avoid repeating those mistakes.  Her blog Past Tense Present Progressive is her place for sorting through her thoughts.

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by Permission to Live

This post is part of a series of nine posts. Please click here to start with the series Introduction.

It was the end of 2010. I was starting to question the existence of God while my spouse was as Christian as ever. Sometimes I did not understand how he could keep believing in a God who had made him this way and then said that he couldn’t do anything about it. I couldn’t understand how it was god-honoring for a person to live their life “the way god wanted them too” while being miserable and secretly hoping that they would get into an accident somehow that would force the removal of the hormone producing organs that caused them so much mental anguish. The thought reminded me of some Quiverfull women I had encountered who in their exhaustion wished that a horrible labour and childbirth would cause a uterine rupture or something, nothing too drastic, but enough to cause the removal of their reproductive organs and the reassurance that they would be done having kids without ever having to “disobey” God’s command to be fruitful and multiply. But the idea of limiting children through artificial means to save their life or their sanity wasn’t acceptable? It was better to live life trying to glorify God with the lot he had given you? I used to think that people like that just had a bad attitude and needed to find a way to be happy with whatever God had decreed for them, now I was starting to wonder if they were just stuck in a sick system.

My spouse often asked if he should stop talking about transgender questions and issues. He worried that maybe this was too much for me and that he should just fight this alone. But I had seen how healing it was for me to talk about my own issues and to let my kids express their feelings, and I didn’t want him to have to go back to bottling it all up. So I encouraged him to continue processing as much as he needed too, and told him I would always be here to listen. Now instead of being distant or depressed on a regular basis he tried to talk about the overwhelming gender dysphoria, trying to sort out who he was and where he fit.

He had begun to relax and be himself more. He started letting down his guard and not double checking how he was moving his hands when he talked or worrying that the way he crossed his legs was “too feminine.” He started buying his own clothes, choosing colors and styles that were closer to his sense of self than the pants and polo ensemble he had been letting me buy for him. We joked that he had enough style for both of us; I tended to be very practical in my clothing choices, comfort being my highest priority, but he actually cared about how he looked and that began to be reflected in his sense of style.

The dad who used to come home and usually disappeared into the basement to play video games had turned into a parent who played on the floor with the kids every day. He wanted to be involved in their day to day lives. He was learning how to feed them and dress them, he started taking them for bedtime walks bundled up in the wagon in the pajama’s each clutching a bedtime snack and their blankies. He would talk about how 3 babies seemed to be more work than 2, and I would laugh at him and explain that to me this was the easiest parenting period yet, because he was parenting them alongside me for the first time. He stopped complaining that grocery shopping was women’s work and began going with us to the store on his day off, I didn’t have to shop alone with multiple babies and toddlers anymore.

Genuine smiles had been few and far between during the last few years, I used to have to tickle him to get him to give a real smile for pictures. Now he was smiling all the time, and laughing. Instead of shrugging and vaguely referencing a life led by whatever ministry dictated, he was dreaming about the future again. Crazy loopy dreams, like driving out to Alaska or teaching English abroad or becoming a makeup artist in the movie industry. He was getting piles of books out of the library and reading sections of them aloud after years of saying he was too busy reading theology to check out anything else. It was as if his world had become more 3-dimensional. He was swimming regularly and had lost a lot of excess weight and had started letting his hair grow longer. Sometimes I caught him in front of the mirror, he would look at his reflection and say in wonder “For the first time I am starting to like what I see.”

It seemed so natural for him, that it didn’t feel strange to see him painting the kids toenails and then painting his own. It wasn’t out of the ordinary to see him in a bubble bath at the end of the day, I laughed at how happy it made him. Choosing anniversary cards and birthday cards was easier. For the first time I felt like I knew how to really love him. A flower left on his desk or watching a movie while playing with his hair meant more to him then the silly sex ambushes all the marriage books recommended. After being married to someone who had kept part of themselves so mysterious for so long, it was a relief to be getting to know all of him. I didn’t want to lose that ever again.

That Christmas was the best we’d ever had. For the first five years of our married life I had wracked my brain every Christmas and birthday, trying to figure out what to get him. It was always bewildering to try and pinpoint what he would enjoy, and when I asked him what he wanted he couldn’t really come up with anything that sounded cool. I usually went with a book or some article of clothing in the end, but this year for the first time, I knew exactly what he wanted. I knew what he liked for the first time. I bought him a hair dryer and curling iron, tools for a trade that he told me he had always been interested in. We had hopes that going into cosmetology would get him involved in enough feminine things that he would be happy living as a male. He had experimented with some of my eye shadow, so I bought him a kit of his own to have fun with. And the pink fuzzy socks I threw in his stocking became something he wore almost every day they were clean.

It was a good Christmas.

Discuss this post on the NLQ forum. Comments are also open below.

You can read more about Permission To Live at her blog – Musings of a young mom.

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by Calulu

A few weeks ago I took my daughter out for an celebratory lunch at her favorite Greek restaurant. She’s gotten acceptance letters from all of the colleges she’s applied to plus we really needed to touch base, take a time out together from the busy of our lives. Over sovlaki and hummus she started talking about what she would say to our former pastor Patrick if she ran into him again. She had run into him an few months ago and had been so surprised she’d just hurriedly muttered out pleasantries before leaving him as rapidly as a man with his pants on fire would run for the lawn sprinklers.

I had to ask her what she would say to Patrick if they were face to face. She blurted out something like “F**k you, motherf**ker and thanks for ruining my f**king childhood!” before laughing. We both laughed imaging the faces of those sycophants and hanger on-ers Patrick was always surrounded by if she let the F word fly.

That’s one big marker of a cult-like unhealthy church atmosphere, if everyone treats the pastor as if he is either the world’s most famous rockstar or the big toe of Jesus touching down on the earth to be adored. We saw that, participated in the pastor-pleasing behaviors too, perhaps not to the depth that many did but we did it as a family. It’s dangerous business for the most part. When everyone is busy kissing the rear end of the pastor or bowing down to his every whim and word it starts to look like a one man show with no real room for the Lord or anyone else. Plus the pastor starts to think he’s in control or assumes control. It also breeds unhealthy competition among the members all vying for the attention and favor of the pastor.

There were certainly those at Possum Creek Church that courted Patrick’s opinion on every subject conceivable or at least enabled him to control most facets of corporate life at our church. Patrick picked the praise songs, rehearsed the worship team, picked out the study materials for all classes, picked who was allowed to do what and ordered others to do other things. I hosted our yearly baptism for years because Patrick ordered it so and I never thought to say no even as it was a huge amount of work for me. Baptism used every towel in my house, meant I’d have wet people traipsing in and out of our home and that I’d had to shock treat the pool with chemicals a few times before and afterward. Huge imposition but I didn’t think I had the option to nix.

He also preached that if you were good and holy you’d be rewarded here on earth. Patrick owned three houses and told us he obtained them by “God’s Favor” He flew out to the West Coast for his doctorate studies on the church’s dime. Patrick lived a life style much better than most everyone in the church with the exception of the one wealthy family.

We had a number of families in serious debt in our church that seemed to think it was okay to spend, spend, spend on their credit cards because, after all, God was going to bless them financially. It was their right since they lived lives of pure righteousness. I cannot tell you how many bankruptcies stemmed from this thinking at the church, but if I recall correctly it might have been as high as ten percent. This was when the economy was strong too. No telling how high the rate is now. Prosperity gospel mixed with the Rock Star Pastor mentality tends to use up your time, energy, emotions AND monetary resources.

Once the economy tanked and some of us that had good jobs left the church it seems that tithing dried up. It got so bad that Patrick issued a stern letter to the congregation stating that everyone who was a church member must attend plus bring their paycheck stubs. He was demanding to see exactly what everyone made and to extract a contract from them agreeing to tithe their full ten percent on the gross pay.  Well, this went over like a lead balloon with the congregation and some still there simply refused to tithe penny one or allow the pastor to know exactly how much they made.

When Patrick left PCC it all fell apart since it was all cohesive around him as the center. One of the big bombshells of his leaving is that it came out as the church had started to lose members during these tough economic times that Patrick had indulged in a little creative money management to keep drawing his salary. He’d drained other accounts, such as a building fund and endowment funds, to pay himself until all the accounts hit pretty much zero. That’s the sort of thing that can only really happen at these one man show places. I heard later that the elders knew what was going on but felt that they had no authority to stop him.

Now the few people left at the old church are struggling to raise enough funds just to keep the electricity on much less come up with the funding for a new pastor.

Unfortunately this isn’t exactly an isolated incident. Last week I heard of a large very popular church in our area that is going to lose the entire property their church sits upon. Why? Their long time pastor moved on after convincing the elders of that church to take on huge debt to build his personal dream, a large community center. Attendance and membership dropped off after Pastor Ted left. The few remaining folks not following Ted around are stuck footing the bill for something they can ill afford. The bank is calling in the unpaid mortgage and will be seizing the building soon. My new church has absorbed many members from the fall out there.

A few days ago while reading the news on a popular online news aggregate I saw that even Brownsville Assembly of God Church in Pensacola, Florida is in similar straights after Pastor John Kilpatrick departed to start a new church in nearby Daphne, Alabama, Church of His Presence. Once the Brownsville Assembly of God church was hosting nightly revival meetings attracting thousands from around the world. This went on for years. I’ve been myself many times to the revival services. (against the wishes of Pastor Patrick, he hated it when we went off to conferences at Brownsville, or Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship or Harrisburg, Pennsylvania’s Life Center Church)

I remember that the name “John Kilpatrick” was in the lips of many attending, discussing the teachings or planning to go. He was a big fish in the pond of Brownsville. The revival had already started to dwindle off before Pastor John left but it seems his leaving was something of a final straw. Many left followed him just right across the state line into Alabama to his new church.

Now I don’t know for sure that Pastor Kilpatrick was a Rock Star Pastor with a huge following but it sure seemed that way to me from my visits. The aftermath of huge debts and very few members at Brownsville makes me think that he must have been perceived that way by many. I’m not saying he urged anyone at Brownsville to go into massive debt. I’m merely observing there seems to be some markers there that the church had run amok at some point, following in the ways of those that are now trying to overcome bad decisions made by their superstar pastors.

The Rock Star Pastor can wreck a place without the pastor leaving at all. These last few weeks I’ve been reading many articles about the upheaval and allegations about TBN and it’s founders Paul and Jan Crouch. Another perfect example of control by the pastor and everyone going along with it, even if it borders on illegal and bypassed immoral ages ago.

I don’t quite think this is what Jesus had in mind with the 12 apostles or those that came after him, not controlling large groups of people or trying to live like a rap star. I think He’d be pretty aghast at what’s taken place in His name.

If your pastor is trying to preach the prosperity gospel while living like a petty dictator at the behest of his subjects then your church has morphed into a cult. Leave. Leave as soon as this starts happening because it’s not going to end well for anyone.

Finding it very sad that people can be led like sheep to abandon their own sense to follow not faith or belief but another human being just as flawed as all of us are off proverbial cliffs. Putting your faith in some Spiritual Superman is always dangerous. What I experienced with Pastor Patrick has led me to avoid the pastor at my current church much of the time. I have the opposite reaction now, I only want my own approval of my spiritual journey. Never again will I seek out the approval of pastors or put aside my own feelings and needs.

Discuss this post on the NLQ forum. Comments are also open below.

Calulu lives near Washington DC , was raised Catholic in South Louisiana before falling in with a bunch of fallen Catholics whom had formed their own part Fundamentalist, part Evangelical church. After fifteen uncomfortable years drinking that Koolaid she left nearly 6 years ago. Her blog is Calulu – Roadkill on the Internet Superhighway

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by Permission to Live

This post is part of a series of nine posts. Please click here to start with the series Introduction.

I had always been under the impression that LGBTQ people were a new phenomenon. That the population of gay and transgender people had really taken off during the modern age those “godless” sixties. And that before it had become “cool” to be gay, virtually no one was. But that wasn’t making sense anymore. Even today, being queer continues to unleash considerable bias and discrimination. Kids are still routinely getting kicked out of their homes for admitting they are gay or trans. I couldn’t see any benefit to coming out as LGBTQ unless that really was who that person was.

In my research I had begun to uncover stories of gay people throughout history, and not only that, transgender people were around too. Throughout history is a whole list of people who upon their deaths were discovered to have anatomy which did not conform with the gender they had publicly lived as. Some of these persons were quite famous such as Chevalier d’Eon, a French diplomat during the 18th century; but most of them were ordinary people who knew that the gender assigned at birth did not match them. Growing up I had read some stories about women who disguised themselves as men to serve in the military such as during the Civil War, but what I hadn’t picked up on then but discovered later is how many of them continued to live as men after the war ended. Without the help of any of the medical advances of today, these people transitioned to living authentic lives in the gender that they felt fit them. My research was starting to point towards gender variant people as being a part of the diversity of the human family whose source was from antiquity. The myth of transgender persons being new or a radical experiment of the psychological community didn’t add up.

Because the Catholic church took a different position on LGBTQ issues than did the conservative Protestants among whom I had been raised, I talked about transsexuals with a man studying to be a catholic priest. I had hoped that he might be able to give me some knowledge, some wisdom, some word from god, but his recent and ongoing education seemed really out of date. He tried to be kind and considerate, but seemed convinced that transsexuals were either homosexuals trying to attract men who wanted to change their bodies to achieve that goal, or they were an autogynephiliac, meaning that they were “sexually aroused by the idea of having female body parts to play with.”

Neither of these sexually charged explanations made any sense to me. First off, from what I had read, many transsexuals (including my spouse) were very attracted to women, and they had no interest in changing their body to attract male attention. Any physical changes they made seemed to be made for themselves, not anyone else. And how did this theory on transsexuality apply to female-born persons who transitioned to living as men? Were they changing their bodies to be more attractive to men? The second explanation he offered wasn’t any better: my spouse did not have an obsession with having female parts to masturbate with. A transgender person who seeks to make physical changes, is willing to accept a variety of outcomes, including unforeseeable changes to sexual function. I could hardly see how someone with a sexual obsession would be willing to take those risks and make those sacrifices. And again, how did these explanations apply to transgendered people throughout history who had lived for years in the gender opposite that assigned to them at birth? This was centuries before the modern therapy options had become available, and they would not have been able to change much about their bodies. Many of them lived completely celibate lives, so that their secret would never be found out. This did not sound like a sexual obsession to me. Even today there are trans people who are happy living in their chosen gender without doing any modification to their bodies. The theories the priestly candidate gave me seemed full of holes. I started to feel more and more frustrated. People weren’t fitting into my nice little religious boxes anymore.

Furthermore, in my reading I had started to realize that LGBTQ people were denied many of the legal rights I took for granted. Growing up as a conservative Christian I was always under the impression that our rights were being snatched away one by one by the liberal and secular government. Now I was starting to realize how many U.S laws were based on religion. A straight person was free to marry who they fell in love with, but if a gay person fell in love and wanted to make a commitment to that person and have the legal rights that such a union provided they were not allowed to. Parents who came out as gay or lesbian persons often lost custody of their children to the straight parent in a divorce, and in many states LGBT people could be fired or even denied housing based on their sexual orientation or gender identity, real or perceived. I could not come up with a reason these laws existed other than religious understandings of the legal contract of marriage and sexuality, and the religious bias that made employers and landlords want the right to discriminate.

At this point I still believed that God was not OK with people “acting on unnatural desires,” but if people really were just born with these issues, and did not get them through any desire or action on their part, then why were religious people trying so hard to make life difficult for them regardless of the religion these people were a part of? And how was it alright for a government to be enforcing laws based on any religion? I thought about how scary it would be if an employer decided my spouse was too feminine and fired him and we had no legal recourse. How was this an OK law? I was horrified that people could have their children taken away from them simply because they didn’t fit into a nice little religious box and play up what society had decided was the “norm.” How did that have anything to do with their ability to love and care for their child?

When I tried to talk about this new understanding with people I knew, they were shocked. Some of them became visibly angry and accused me of abandoning my religious beliefs. In one conversation with one person, I tried to explain why I felt it was wrong for landlords to be able to deny people housing based on their sexual orientation, the reply I received was this:

“Melissa, think about it. If you could only afford to live in one apartment complex in town, and there were gay people living there, would you really want your children exposed to that?”

My heart sank into my gut. To this person LGBTQ people were perverts, a menace to society and a danger to children. If this person knew my spouse’s secret, or even my own same-sex attraction, would they feel safe having us around their children? Would this person feel we were unfit to have children ourselves? To most of the religious people I spoke with, giving all people equal rights meant that they were giving up religious rights somehow.

They simply could not put themselves in a gay person’s shoes, even for a moment, and I was ashamed to realize that
I had never tried to think about it myself until I recognized
the issue in my life.

Discuss this post on the NLQ forum. Comments are also open below.

You can read more about Permission To Live at her blog – Musings of a young mom.

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by Permission to Live

Before I go any further I just want to make it clear that my spouse has participated in the writing and editing of this series, and has given their full support and approval of it’s publication.

This post is part of a series of nine posts. Please click here to start with the series Introduction.

Over the next number of months it seemed that we talked about transgender questions and issues constantly. My spouse had been unable to talk about this for so long and now it was like a floodgate had opened. He told me about how he had always felt different, that even as a small child he wished he could play with some of the girls’ toys and wondered why he couldn’t have long hair like his sisters. He remembered feeling sad when he figured out that he wouldn’t ever be a mother. But he learned early on to behave in the manner expected of him and he didn’t have a name to put to the feelings he had.

As a little Christian homeschooled boy, there wasn’t much available information on LGBTQ people, but one day at about 11 years of age, he was reading a large illustrated history of the 20th century when a small paragraph near the bottom of the page caught his eye. The title of the section was “Man becomes Woman” and reading it with his heart thumping wildly, he realized that there were other people like him. The short story was about one of the first transsexual women who went public with their story, her name was Christine Jorgensen and she had transitioned back in the 1950s. Several times a week he would pull the heavy book from the shelf and open to the page with the story, to read again and again about Christine. He was not alone.

He brought up gay or trans people up in conversations here and there with the people in his life, looking for clues as to how they felt about the issue. Having repeatedly heard the common Christian attitude on these topics, he quickly started to believe that talking about how he felt would be sure to bring rejection from those he loved most, and maybe even subjection to painful therapeutic procedures pushed by Christian ministries to “fix” him. He desperately wanted to please his relatives and his community, he prayed fervently for the misgendered feelings to go away, but they remained. He wished that it would be discovered that he was physically intersexed in some way, because if his body was somehow both male and female perhaps it would become acceptable for him to live as a girl. But puberty hit right on time, and the torment got worse. His body was maturing further into what his brain told him was the wrong gender. There was nothing he could do to change it, and waking up each day to the body he hated got more and more difficult.

He immersed himself in school, studied hard and started on a track towards becoming a minister, but the feelings were still there. Now that he was in junior college he had access to public computers and he took the chance to read anything he could on the condition he knew he had. I started to realize that despite my hours upon hours of research, I had merely scratched the surface of the extent of reading my spouse had done over the last number of years. He studied the treatments and surgeries and read about the side effects and problems. But all the while he had such shame believing that God condemned him for having those feelings. He wondered why God would give him such a heavy cross to bear, what had he done to deserve this? He knew all the “right” things to say on the LGBTQ issues if questioned, but inside he was afraid of his secret ever being discovered.

Gender dysphoria was always lurking under the surface, sometimes spiraling into bouts of depression. On dark days, wild ideas screamed through his mind, maybe he should run away from home and spare everyone the pain of having such a child in the family, maybe he could somehow cut off the source of the hormones wreaking such havoc on his body, maybe it would be better if he was ended his life and with it the possibility of his condition causing pain to those he loved. But in the end the only real option seemed to be to numb the pain as best he could. Suppressing, denying, and keeping as busy as possible. He had grown up with many of the trappings of an American childhood, the friends, the vacations, the hobbies. Yet under the surface the gender dysphoria was always there, it never went away.

He fell in love and we got married. His hopes were high that this issue was going to leave once he was safely in a god-sanctioned relationship where he would have the role of a husband and father to fill. Feelings of despair hit hard when soon after marriage he realized the gender dysphoria was still there. So many of his low periods during our marriage made more sense now that I knew what he had been struggling with.

Hearing more of the story was heartbreaking for me, and realizing how hard he had fought this his whole life made me start worry that my efforts to help him would just be a drop in the bucket. He had done his best to be “who God wanted him to be”.

He had denied himself everything,
prayed and begged God to heal him,
but he was still wrestling with it now, years later.

Discuss this post on the NLQ forum. Comments are also open below.

You can read more about Permission To Live at her blog – Musings of a young mom.

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by Latebloomer

Do any of these sound like you?

I have to always say yes to others, or else I am selfish.
I have to always hide my hurt, or else I am unloving.
I have to treat other people as faultless, or else I am holding a grudge.
I have to keep my wants and needs to myself, or else I am a burden to others.

People who experienced authoritarian parents tend to turn into adults with poor boundaries. They were trained for it their whole lives and can’t imagine another way of doing things. However, it’s an extremely unsatisfying and unsustainable way to live, don’t you think? But most importantly, it’s actually not what a loving person is like! For me, when I was in that mindset, my “loving” actions were actually motivated by obligation or guilt because I thought I didn’t really have a choice; I was just an actor.

Besides hindering me from showing real love based on real choice, this mindset also prevented me from ever feeling loved. My buried wants and needs were still there; I just expected any true friend to be hyper-vigilant to my emotional state and correctly guess my unexpressed wants/needs. I felt that anyone who didn’t put in that monumental effort didn’t really care about me. And when people hurt me, I didn’t give them a chance to repair the damage to the relationship; I either lied to myself and them by saying that I wasn’t hurt, or I expected them to realize the problem and fix it without being told. Obviously, it was really hard for anyone to break through those defenses to form a real and lasting connection with me, even if they wanted to.

When I was in my late teens/early twenties, equipped with my driver’s license, I began to have more opportunities to interact with my peers. However, with my poor boundaries and repressed emotions from authoritarian parenting, and with my severe social anxiety from isolated homeschooling, I wasn’t exactly set up for success. It’s not surprising that I was able to form friendships with more dominant and outgoing people most easily at first. They were the ones who were confident enough to break through my guardedness and befriend invisible me. I had no identity and nothing to contribute, and they were the ones who could talk enough to cover for my silence. They were the ones with ideas that I could go along with. And, thankfully, they were the ones who could ask me the pushy and nosy questions on occasion that helped to break open my protective shell.

It’s also not surprising, although really sad, that many of those first friendships didn’t last through the turbulence of my mid- and late- twenties. In a way, I was really experiencing my teens and twenties simultaneously. Out on my own for college, I was trying to discover and establish my own identity for the first time in my life, and dealing with an incredible amount of childhood baggage at the same time. And just when I felt I was making real progress in replacing social anxiety with relationships, my progress in forming boundaries set me back.

I asked my husband to provide a little outside perspective of what the process looked like, since most of it took place during our relationship. He sees it this way:

1. I realized that conflict had to be acknowledged and resolved rather than ignored in order to have a healthy relationship. That meant that it was ok to admit when someone’s behavior bothered me. However, since I had no experience at conflict management, I didn’t know when or how to go about it. I was a mess of over-reactions and under-reactions, and the whole time I was incredibly stressed and afraid of rejection.

2. Once I began to open up about my feelings, wants, and needs, a backlog of repressed emotions suddenly started to flow out. In my mind, lists of ways I had been wronged started to appear, even from all those times that I thought I was being loving and not keeping a record. So, whenever I needed to talk to someone about a conflict, they would be surprised and hurt by the size of my list of related issues.

3. I wasn’t secure enough in my boundaries, so I was hyper-sensitive to any attempts to control or manipulate me, whether it was a friend or a family member. Even just their attempt to change my opinion by sharing a different perspective was threatening to me. Figuratively speaking, if a person even dared to knock politely on my boundary wall, I would appear with a shotgun and tell them to get off my property. I had very strong ideas about how I should be treated, and it was almost impossible for people to fit in my narrow tolerances. Everything had to be on my terms; I expected anyone who cared about me to change immediately when I informed them of a problem.

4. Now I’m finally feeling more secure in my boundaries, so I’m starting to become more balanced and pick my battles more carefully. I’m getting better at differentiating between real offenses and simple mistakes, as well as determining what approach might be most effective way to manage the conflict. I’m also trying to prevent emotional build-up by dealing with things right away. And most importantly, I’m trying to take other people’s differences and imperfections into account and realize that change usually comes slowly. It’s easier to accept that when I remember that others are also being patient with me in ways I can’t fully see.

I deeply appreciate my husband’s support during this process; without him, it would have been much more difficult to work through so many issues. Even though this process has been extremely challenging and painful at times, and even though I still have a lot of progress left to make, I am so much happier than I was before. Now when I choose to help people, I have the reward of feeling happy and satisfied because I did it willingly. Now I take responsibility for my needs, wants, and feelings, so I don’t feel so helpless and dependent. Now when I choose to tolerate people’s imperfections, I feel a sense of our shared humanity rather than feeling devalued.

However, it is unfortunate that I had to go through this process so late in life. I feel like it was much more traumatic than it needed to be because it conflicted with the progress I was making in forging friendships with people for the first time in my life. If you are dealing with similar issues as an adult, I’d like to recommend two things: read the book “Boundaries” by Cloud and Townsend and find yourself a good therapist; hopefully you can find a way to establish and maintain good boundaries in a less destructive way than I did.

Discuss this post on the NLQ forum. Comments are also open below.

Latebloomer is on a journey away from the ideals she was raised with in the conservative homeschooling culture.  Becoming a wife and mother has prompted her to re-evaluate her childhood experiences in an effort to avoid repeating those mistakes. Her blog is her place for sorting out her thoughts at Past Tense Present Progressive.

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