by Sierra

William Branham with a woman in his prayer line. (He would lay on hands, pray, and they would walk away healed, allegedly.)

If you asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I always had an answer. If you asked again in ten minutes, it would be a different one. I wanted to be a figure skater, detective, veterinarian, zoologist, writer, astronaut and archaeologist – and not just one at a time. When I went outdoors to play, I climbed rocks and saw them as mountains. When I jumped over streams, I bravely bridged rivers. With stuffed animals as my companions, I sailed pirate ships and submarines and narrowly escaped devastating wars through wit and determination. I harboured refugees and defeated tyrants. In the house, I turned huge cardboard boxes into storefronts and sold pets to imaginary customers. The bar in the basement was converted to a restaurant where I served gourmet meals to my four-footed friends and ran a lucrative business.

And so it came as an utter shock when I began to talk to my friends at church about the future. “What do you want to be?” I’d ask them, dreaming of sailing off to Europe in a wooden ship and forging a new life from grit and grease.

“Oh,” they would say, “a mom, of course.” Genuine surprise crossed their faces at the consideration of anything else. They told me how many baby boys and girls they wanted and what their names would be. They told me about their future houses and the music that would play at their weddings. Their words rattled against my ears, lifeless.

I stared at them in defeat, and wandered off toward the woods where the boys were playing with sticks fashioned into swords. If there was anything I didn’t want to be, it was a mother. The church made motherhood look like a living death. It meant confinement to the house, a constantly bulging belly, eternally wiping up spittle and piss and listening to the grating wail of infants. It meant serving perfect meals to a man who couldn’t make toast. I watched my own father as he concluded his meals with a barked, “Coffee, woman!” and was aghast to see my mother scurry to put water in the coffeepot. As soon as I was old enough to learn, I began to set up the coffeepot in advance and discretely plug it in before he had finished eating, desperate to stave off that disgraceful command. It didn’t work. When I moved to help my mother with the dishes and lessen her load, it drew comments that boiled my blood.

“Look at my two women in the kitchen, just the way it should be.”

I’m not your woman, I seethed inwardly. I may be your daughter, but I belong to me. [Read more →]

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by Sierra

By my eighth birthday, Anna’s church had become our own. My father attended sporadically, but my mother and I adopted a weekly ritual of driving forty minutes through the woods, to the highway, passing numerous small churches on our way to the secret annex of the YMCA. No one would have guessed there was a church there, unless they happened by as we all bustled in with our flowing skirts and dresses and exited under the mid-afternoon sun. My mother was enthralled, talking excitedly to Anna and her new friend Sheila every day. A frequent topic of conversation was her journal, in which she recorded her thoughts and prayers as well as verses from the Bible that seemed to answer every concern in intimate detail.

During this year my mother decided that we would stop cutting our hair. I was relieved; I was afraid of the stylist with her cold, sharp implements of destruction. Excitedly I watched as my hair crept toward my shoulders and my bangs began to blend in, leaving my forehead free. I was on my way to long, luxurious, elegant hair like the pastor’s daughter, Sara had. I didn’t mind, either, that the supply of pants in my wardrobe had dwindled. I had hated leggings, especially the ones with those annoying stirrups that awkwardly bunched beneath my heels. I began to perfect the art of climbing trees without exposing my underwear. It was a skill at which I would become adept. [Read more →]

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by Sierra 

“What did you think?” My mother asked, as our blue Chevrolet rolled smoothly out of the parking lot, mingling with more expensive cars on a fresh-paved freeway.

“I liked it,” responded seven-year-old I. “I actually listened.”

We were talking about our first visit to Anna and Sven’s church, an informal affair that gathered weekly in the upper annex of a suburban YMCA. The church had begun in the pastor’s living room, hosting only two or three families. Over the next few years it had grown to six or seven. The pastor and his wife had six children, the youngest still a newborn. They’d welcomed a new child every two years since their eldest.

Church wasn’t a new experience for me. I’d been christened in the Catholic Church my grandparents attended and carried along to various non-denominational meetings, ranging from an informal Bible study with a lone guitarist to a somewhat larger group of mild but friendly moderate Christians with a slightly aging pastor. My mother had been put off by the impersonal feeling of the Catholic mass – and so thoroughly terrified by the severity of the nuns at her Catholic school – that she sought instead a familial atmosphere, a place where God was personal and the congregation close.

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by Sierra

Every so often, a story circulated around Message churches. Our pastor related it with a twinkle of humour in his eye. The precociousness of little children was always a failsafe source of amusement in a world that afforded so many sinful entertainments. Children quoting scripture were even better. Out of the mouths of babes, it was oft repeated, the Word of God was made perfect. And so, it was with paroxysms of mirth that the following anecdote was passed around.

One day, a minister’s wife was out doing the grocery shopping with her family. Her youngest boy, then only four or five, spied a worldly woman in the supermarket. With frank and immediate assurance, he called out, “Hello, Miss Dog-Meat!” He looked up innocently to his mother for approval, who could not correct him – after all, the words he’d spoken had come from the prophet. Surely God would use the boy’s words to convict that woman of her immoral lifestyle. Her son had spoken the Truth – the Word of God was a seed, which would surely bring forth good fruit in the woman’s life if she but yielded to the chastisement of the Holy Ghost.

What was wrong with this woman to draw such censure from a small child? What aspect of her appearance instantly gave away the grave moral deficiencies of her character? She had been wearing eyeshadow.

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by Sierra

I was about nine years old when I started paying attention to some of the doctrines that were slowly infiltrating my life over the past two years. I’d stopped wearing pants or cutting my hair by the end of the first year, following my mother’s lead. The last pair of pants she wore were a lovely pair of wide-leg trousers with a sheer lace overlay; they could pass for a skirt until she took a step. She wore them to church, then threw them away – she felt “convicted” for wearing a man’s garment. She threw away her makeup, too, keeping only a sheer moisturizing lip gloss as a token of her past.

I liked my new dresses, and I liked the long hair slowly descended across my shoulders. I’d begun to look like some of my favourite book characters: Anne of Green Gables, Pollyanna, Jo from Little Women. And so all of my old tomboyish clothing smoothly faded away without a fuss. But as little as I missed these things, I was taken aback by the sudden realization that Christmas was over for my family.

Christmas did not go without a fight – from my father. He grew increasingly uncomfortable as my mother spent more and more evenings at all-night prayer meetings in believers’ homes, and her stylish wardrobe began to fade into dull, baggy flea-market dresses. Her hair grew jaggedly out of its layered bob, and she began to resist his carnal desires for sex, money, and ostentatious living.

My father had visions of the high life – spurred on by the infrequent but massive work orders he received for his small business. He saw himself at the head of an illustrious new corporation, and proudly passing it on to the next male heir. I gritted my teeth when he mentioned these things, wondering if I could prove my mettle and pass for a son, since, no thanks to me, the chance at a son seemed to have died two years prior. Maybe if I’m smart enough, I thought, he’ll let me take over the family business someday, even though I’m not a boy.

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by Sierra

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.

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