Complicated (or: I Once Slept with the Trash)
Wow.
Shit.
Yikes.
Holy fuck.
These are all things that colleagues and therapists have said as I relate things that happened in my childhood. I’ve learned to be less forthcoming with the former group. However, the latter are safe. It’s taken time for me to reach that point.
If you’re familiar with me, you know that I don’t just have stories; I have lore. And if you’re not familiar with me, welcome. You’re probably going to feel better about your childhood by the time you read this. If so, that’s par for the course. If not, I’m so sorry. Either way, get comfy.
Lastly, before we get started, some notes: This is not written in malice.
Content warning: This piece contains mention of child abuse, eating disorders, harassment, and suicide.
Social media and streaming trends show that the world at large is finally becoming aware of just how bizarre and painful the world of Christian religious extremism can be. Whether it’s through the Hulu documentary about Gwen Shamblin or any of the recent documentaries about the Duggar family or the horrifying truth behind the Frankes on YouTube, the larger world is seeing what it’s like to be fundie or extremist. The proverbial chickens are coming home to roost.
I’m grateful that I’ve gone through several intensive rounds of therapy or else I don’t know how I would have handled any of these revelations. A lot of it makes me sick to my stomach even now. What I will say is that I’m glad there’s justice for the children who’ve been harmed so publicly. The world sees them and embraces them. But what about those of us who haven’t had that public eye?
While my family wasn’t always religiously fundamentalist, the sternness was always there. My parents were inventive with their punishments. When I forgot to take out the trash one week, my parents put the trash bags in my bed and made me sleep with them. The removal of a bedroom door was quite common if either I or my brother forgot to keep our rooms perfectly tidy. If I forgot to do my chore of picking up our Great Dane’s massive turds, my parents told me to go out there and pick them up with my hands. No shovel.
My mother told me back around 2016 that I should consider myself lucky that she never slammed my head up against the bathtub like hers did to her. I’m genuinely sorry that she had the childhood that she did – my mother got herself emancipated because her mother was not a kind person. That said, not performing a specific type of violence against a child isn’t an excuse to perpetuate other kinds of violence.
I may not have been thrown up against a bathtub, but I was slapped plentifully for the crime of “talking back.” Spankings were common for lying or the perception of lying. Bare hand only, and never to the point of leaving a mark – or that was my stepdad’s rule. (Hi, Dad.) My mother used the belt when my stepdad was away from the house.
When my brother committed the sin of dipping into a cake that had been cooling on the counter, my mother made him eat cake for every meal until he could no longer stand it. When my brother stole a small sum from my mother’s purse, she had one of her friends in the police department come and arrest him. (My mother was a police dispatcher at the time.) And my stepdad disciplined my brother much like he did our dog: threats and intimidation to prove who was the alpha.
How is it does not abuse when one of my core memories is of my dad throwing my brother up against the wall with one hand around my brother’s neck, squeezing ever so slightly? “I’m not yelling at you,” my stepdad snarled. “I’m only raising my voice. Do you want me to yell at you?”
In Caro Clare Burke’s Yesteryear, the tradwife narrator’s daughter makes a gleefully snide comment about not having to appear in her mother’s videos on social media. This was one time of many where I gasped because a comment as disrespectful as that would have gotten me slapped so hard it would make my eyes water.
Discipline the children privately; the public will see a happy, thriving home with well-behaved children. Spare the rod, spoil the child. Obey thy father and mother.
No cameras. The Internet was still just “tubes.” No marks, no evidence. And who would believe a child from a household who called the police when their own children allegedly misbehaved?
My brother left to join the Navy as soon as he graduated from high school. He didn’t leave his room clean and didn’t pack up his belongings, so my mother set aside what was useful or nostalgic to her and then threw the rest in the trash.
I grew up in the 90s. Diet culture was moving past the heroin chic phase, but it was still chic to be skinny. My mother fought against her genes (and perhaps her own mother’s past chivying) with regular repetitions of Richard Simmons workouts or by acquiring exercise equipment that was repurposed as an improvised clothing rack after a few months. I was encouraged to join her. And when Gwen Shamblin rolled out her Weigh Down Workshop, I was encouraged to join in. I was fighting my birth-dad’s genes that had given me the robust physique of a Bohemian mountain wench and the calves of a Swiss alpinist. But, alas, I was neither. I was a husky teen girl trying to make herself fit for her future God-ordained husband. Ignore the urge to snack – instead pray and fill your stomach with the love of Jesus.
I wanted to see the world outside of America, the one hinted at by the photos of African children that my parents sponsored through Heifer International and the stories of my stepdad’s immigrant parents. Most importantly, I’d seen my brother graduate from Navy basic training, and he seemed like he’d gotten his shit together. So off I went, raised my hand and swore the oath. In retrospect, I don’t think my brother had that much that he needed to fix. I didn't, either. But when you hear day after day that you’re a sinner, sooner or later, you begin to believe it.
I developed an eating disorder in the Navy while trying to starve myself into standards. I completed the Marine Corps 10K twice. I graduated from military survival training. I still got discharged for being “fat.”
As I’ve discussed elsewhere, the house that I grew up in has been restored to its original beauty. My mother let my stepdad have the house in the divorce, and he wound up selling it to a nonprofit that hires the unhoused and teaches them construction trade skills. I have no problem with this. It was difficult, though, to see the nonprofit post about the house on their Facebook page. They talked about how rough of a state that the house was in when they bought it, and how helpful my mom and stepdad were in providing plans and inspiration during the restoration process.
There was a hole in the foyer ceiling, the front steps were crumbling, and the basement stairs were a hazard. Water damage everywhere. Metal and plastic shavings in the carpet here and there from the workshop in the basement. But then the nonprofit mentioned the pristine teal green carpet from one of the upstairs bedrooms – it was like it had never been used. Well, folks, it had been used. I picked it as a tween because it reminded me of the ocean. You can guess why I kept it pristine.
The unspoken side effect of the house’s restoration is that there is no evidence left of its prior condition other than “before” photos on the organization’s social media. Their posts don’t acknowledge that children were raised in that house. If they did, who knows what kind of questions it would raise? But what the public sees is my parents’ benevolence. Look at them. They can’t be that bad, they’re helping a nonprofit give jobs to the unhoused!
My brother committed suicide in 2003. My mother was the sole beneficiary of his life insurance policy. She used the money not to fix the hole in our ceiling or to make the steps safer, but to build a bakery. Our house was not a home. It was a roof and walls.
When I think of how I was raised, I thank the universe that mommy blogging wasn’t a thing at that point. With my mother’s love of the stage, she would have taken to it like a fish to water. She would have made bread and sewed costumes and used my brother and I like dolls to showcase her talent. There would have been trips to the farmers’ market and to amusement parks and to Wal-Mart. Photos of her showing me how to bake and keep house. And there’s no denying her talent. Even today I note that she is incredibly competent at baking. She is adept at anything she deems worthy of her attention. I cannot easily say that my brother and I were subjects of that focus.
“But it wasn’t all bad!” my parents will insist when they read this – and I know they will. And that in itself is true. My stepdad helped me make a catapult for a grade school science project. My mom pulled my brother and I out of school one day during my earlier years in California so we could go on a trip to the Beach Boardwalk. They hosted and cooked senior prom dinner for me, my date, and my friends and their dates in our dining room. My mom and I giggled while making baklava for dessert. My stepdad even braved the mall to buy me a dress for the dance. There were countless individual moments of care and genuine love. And that’s the thing with abuse – it’s complicated and rarely ever so clearly delineated.
After all, what’s a hole in the ceiling if the mother is known for making good bread? And what does it matter that the older child committed suicide due to hazing when the younger child – raised to fear failure – graduated from the Defense Language Institute with honors and awards not once, but twice?
Even though they’ve been divorced since 2014, my stepdad still sides with my mother in all things. He allegedly doesn’t understand why it upsets me when he passes on news of me to my mother, with whom I cut contact shortly after her remark about the bathtub. (There are a lot of things he claims not to understand, which would be possible to understand by exercising empathy. I'm exhausted of trying to lead him to this conclusion.)
I recently made my first successful loaf of sourdough with my own starter. I’m reclaiming the things that I loved about my childhood through the lens of an adult who is trying to give grace to their younger self.
I’m grateful for the Franke kids and how the world is finally seeing the rot underneath their polished childhood. It’s easy to believe because the evidence is right there, preserved in the amber of the Internet.
There’s no justice for those of us who grew up before the panopticon. Timing is both a blessing and a curse.
If you are a survivor of sexual assault and need a compassionate ear, please visit rainn.org for free, confidential resources.
If you are an adult survivor of child abuse, please consider https://www.ascasupport.org/resources/.
If you are in the United States and are in a mental health crisis, please consider calling 988.
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