Evangelical Therapy, Part 14 - Are You the Man Who Will Love Me?

A serialized memoir about my former life as an Evangelical.

Four months after my abortion, in early September (six months after Drew and I officially divorced), he remarried.

He and his new wife, “Kira,” (a woman from Portland who my daughters had never met) tied the knot in Hawaii, then came back to Nampa and Drew announced to my daughters that they had a new stepmom.

Kira had two children of her own, small boys who lived with her, so my daughters had to suddenly adjust to new stepsiblings as well.

With her heaps of blond hair, eyelashes coated with mascara, and blue eyeshadow, Kira seemed surprisingly un-Nazarene, although she was one, and later, Drew told me in some angry discussion that she always made herself available for sex, even when she and Drew were mad at each other, so apparently, she was a better Christian wife than I had been.

She had been married before but was one of the “good” divorced women, the ones whose husbands, in the black and white way of Evangelical thinking, had obviously sinned by abandoning them or other worse things that were only alluded to and whispered about by the members of the congregation.

Nazarenes believe not only in “salvation,” and being “born again,” but also in “entire sanctification,” via the Holy Ghost who can empower them to be constantly obedient to God. And so although “God is love,” is an idea expressed frequently in evangelical churches, people are often judged by whether they are being obedient or not to the church rules, and Nazarenes exclude certain people.

A Nazarene pastor, Thomas Oord, is currently on trial, at risk of losing his job and being expelled from the ministry for advocating for queer people and their allies, and in the early 90s, I was among the rejects for having divorced Drew. I was shocked that Drew had remarried so quickly, yet he and Kira were still “in” – together they joined the choir at our church and were absorbed back into the flow of the congregation.

I didn’t want to go to church anymore, anyway, because I had felt so judged at my time of greatest need, but also because many parts of Nazarene theology had begun to seem like a lie. Getting divorced (and getting an abortion) had ultimately helped me feel better, physically and emotionally (and had probably saved my life or at the least my mental health)—yet, I had been told all my life these were terrible sins, to be avoided at any cost. And if these ideas weren’t true, what else about my religion was false?

My world view was rapidly crumbling. I was finally doing my student teaching with the lovely older atheist gentleman I’d met a few months before at Centennial High School, and his continued kindness and polite deference and guidance confirmed what my experience with life was showing me, that being a nonbeliever and disobeying some of the biggest rules the church had come up with didn’t make a person bad and certainly not scary or evil.

I was left to reconstruct my value system from the ground up and was doing my best to figure it out as I lived day to day in my new single life. Student teaching demanded that I attend school each weekday; luckily, I had some money from selling the house, since my only other source of income was child support. (By spring I’d have a long-term sub position in a middle school, and by the following fall, a full-time position at a nearby public high school.)

And then my middle daughter Ivy broke her arm, while playing unsupervised under Drew’s care. This could happen to any parent—she later broke the same arm under my care as well. My dad and I were standing nearby when she fell while roller skating. She skinned her knee badly, which my dad noticed before Ivy did. In light of her distress, it seemed wise to head to the hospital to have her knee looked at and her arm x-rayed.

But when it happened at Drew’s house, he refused to take her to the doctor. He wouldn’t acknowledge her feelings, her attempt to describe the pain she was in, like he'd done so many times in his interactions with me. The following day he insisted she lift a milk jug with the arm that hurt because, as she reported to me, he said she needed to stop acting weak. Kira was the one who noticed her hand was turning blue and finally insisted Drew take her to the ER.

This only reinforced my feeling that I couldn’t trust him to care well for my girls, and why would I, since he hadn’t cared well for them before we were divorced? About twice a week, I’d find myself standing on the doorstep of his new house arguing with him while Kira was inside with all the children. And although ostensibly every fight was now about our daughters and Drew’s lack of ability to reasonably care for them, I can see now that it was probably also an unhealthy way of continuing our relationship.

The truth was that I’d lost my entire community. I’d broken up with Owen and other than my parents and my sisters (I have two older sisters) almost everyone else from my former church had deserted me. So perhaps it’s understandable that I continued to engage with him in this way, and also understandable that I was concerned about my daughters. I wanted desperately to yank all three of them out of Drew’s house and run away, so they’d never have to go back.

In the midst of my semester of student teaching, lonely and still operating under my long-held belief that my life hardly mattered unless it was centered around a man, and thinking all I needed was someone who was a better fit for me than Drew, I began a frantic search.

++

After Owen, I plunged into a relationship with “Alan,” a high school history teacher, who had a beautiful turn of the century house with a white picket fence northeast of Nampa, but Alan was in some ways a replica of Drew, controlling and exacting, a man who bought me the dress and the pearl necklace he wanted me to wear, ordered me to put on my seatbelt as if I were a child, and who found my glamor photos too embarrassing to display on his dresser.

I had begun experimenting with my hair and the way I dressed, trying to figure out who I was outside of the evangelical community, and he seemed to prefer a more conservative appearance (and a woman he could control). After several months, he invited me to go on a weekend trip with him, but when I had a panic attack as I was packing my suitcase, I knew I didn’t want to go on that trip (or anywhere) with him.

I immediately began trying to meet someone new. As the weeks passed by, I remember wandering through the grocery store disconsolately taking items off the shelves and putting them in my cart, wondering if this lonely time would ever end. Rebecca, my therapist, tried to get me to name things that were positive about being single, and I couldn’t think of even one.

I’m alive. I’m not sick anymore, I told myself, but I was convinced that being alone meant no one desired me, that I wasn’t worth being desired. I’d been afraid that if I divorced Drew, that’s exactly how I’d end up, and I’d never wanted to be alone—I just didn’t want to be with him.

I tried the personal ads that ran in small weekly papers back then, which provided a phone number to call (the forerunner of online dating) and went out with three different “Dave’s” and many other men, but none of them seemed right, and I never made it past a one-time date.

In late fall of my first year of full-time teaching, I got together with “Ben,” an ex-college football player who in middle age was teaching PE and coaching at the high school level. He seemed nervous at first to be dating an English teacher and dressed up in a white shirt and leather jacket for our first date, driving someone’s borrowed fancy car, but later started showing up at my house in his pajama pants and slippers, assuming we’d end up in bed, where he seemed to feel most comfortable. After Owen, I wasn’t too surprised, yet it was interesting to note that these men, who all considered themselves conservative Christians, assumed sex would be part of a dating relationship.

Ben was a generally affable guy, but we didn’t have much to talk about, and I remember feeling awkward and out of place with his family and brothers watching the Super Bowl at one of their houses. Still, I kept seeing him, if not too seriously, because it seemed better than being alone.

And then I met Jim. And my brain lit on fire.

++

Jim, a long-term sub in the English Department of the high school where I’d been hired full-time, started stopping by my classroom shortly after Valentine’s Day, to talk and say hi.

He’d been working on his doctorate at the University of Texas at Austin, and he was now living in Idaho to be near his two young sons (he was divorced), while he considered whether it was worth it to finish his dissertation. There was talk about how having a PhD was nonsense, anyway—academia was bullshit, he said, and what was important to him was the outdoor life. He loved fly-fishing and hiking and camping, and he said if he taught high school, he’d have more time to do things that mattered.

He was very convincing. His ideas always seemed smarter than anyone else’s, or at least the way he presented them did, with an edge of mischievous defiance that made him seem vastly intriguing to a woman like me who had shoved down her own rebellious feelings for years.

However, to say he was smart doesn’t begin to explain his charm. I’d known him in college—he was the slightly older guy with a mop of dark curly hair and striking blue eyes who’d sat behind me in my Modern Lit class at NNU and occasionally leaned forward to make comments to me that were clever and insightful and funny all at the same time about whatever author we were reading. I never managed much of a response, as I was afraid I’d say something unremarkable and obvious, and besides, I was already engaged to Drew, so why would I be talking to Jim? But I was flattered that he’d said anything to me at all.

And I was astounded to encounter him at Kuna High School. He was sub-letting someone’s house in that small town, as if he were on a temporary extended vacation as a substitute teacher, and I couldn’t believe he was interested in me. But he kept trying to engage me in conversation, and within a couple weeks invited me to a coffee shop where he was planning to hang out that evening, The Flying M, in Boise.

This coffee shop was new, having just opened a year or two before that, and although that might seem an ordinary enough place to most people to meet a friend, it wasn’t for me. I knew how to get to my therapist’s office and the airport in Boise, and that was about it. And even simple things like coffee were unfamiliar. Coffee drinking wasn’t against our church rules, but my family didn’t drink it, and I got nervous imagining how I’d know what to order. That alone wouldn’t have kept me from going because I was trying to be brave about my life and try new things, but Jim was vastly cooler and more sophisticated than I was, and I felt out of my league.

But there was also, Ben, who I was still involved with.

Jim’s invitation hadn’t been a date, but something about it felt date-like, and I was used to a more traditional approach from men, where intentions are clear from the start, and I wasn’t sure to make of this. I kept telling my sister, he can’t possibly be interested in me, and she’d say, yes he is!

But I couldn’t imagine that, and I ended up calling him later after school to say I couldn’t meet him that evening in Boise. He said, that’s okay, maybe he could swing by my house instead?

My heart thumped as I rushed to straighten up and get ready. The girls were at Drew’s house, so it was fine, but I wasn’t sure if I felt panicked or excited.

When he showed up, looking slightly humbler and more bashful than usual, I led him to the couch in the family room, and as we talked the feeling of closeness between us soon cascaded into him putting his arm around my shoulder. I put my hands over my face.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“I can’t do this,” I said. “I’m going out with Ben.”

“We’re just talking,” he said, jiggling his knee, seeming amused. “And I have a roommate—her name is Nicole. We’re not really together anymore.”

“But you were?”

“Kind of.”

I wasn’t sure what that meant, but we continued to talk and soon he was holding my hand.

An hour later, at the door, as he was getting ready to go, he said, “Every night when I’m lying in bed trying to sleep, I think about the two things I’d want to do if I knew I was going to die soon—go fishing on the Salmon River again with my boys, and kiss Connie.”

Reader, I believed him. I believed everything he said. I suppose I wasn’t much of a hard sell. He was articulate and so enthusiastic, and I thought this is what love was supposed to be. Everything I’d missed out on with Drew, Jim gave me. He was full of passion and emotion for me, as if I was the woman he’d been waiting for his entire life.

He kissed me at my front door that night before he left, and within days I had broken up with Ben.

After that, Jim held back a bit. One night in his living room, he turned on a song he liked—the Cowboy Junkies cover of “Sweet Jane,”—and his hand cupped over one of mine, the other around my waist, he showed me how to slow-dance, and I was practically swooning in his arms. He laughed a little about the way I clung to him and said, that song always gets ‘em, and for a moment, there was a question mark in my mind, but then he hugged me tighter than any man ever had, and I slipped back under his spell. 

I thought he would take me to the bedroom that night, but instead he took me home. I felt slightly rebuffed, and as if I might die if I didn’t get to sleep with him soon, which was perhaps part of the plan.

He attended the Greek Orthodox church, which believes it has maintained a “continuity of faith and love with the apostolic community which was founded by Christ, free from error and distraction.” I’d imagined I was done with religion, but I hadn’t reckoned with Jim, and as the weeks went by, my daughters and I attended this church with him, and he told me how the beauty of the stained-glass windows, the poetry of the scriptures, the “ritual” and “sacrament”—all of these were a different, truer way than I’d been taught for people to be able to touch the sacredness and mystery of the Divine.

“I’d tear out my heart tonight / with my own hands / still freshly beating / if l knew I’d be the one sitting next to you when your youngest graduates from college…”

He wrote poems for me, and each time he left one in my mailbox at school or pressed one into my hand, when I read it, for a minute, a thought would flash through my mind—wow—isn’t this a bit much? I had not heard of love-bombing (a term we’re all familiar with now, but which I recently read was coined in the 70’s to describe a technique used by cult members to lure in recruits), and by March (a few weeks after he started talking to me) he said he was in love and wanted to be with me forever.

I had started to do some writing myself (a longtime dream); he read a few of my poems and in response, wrote pages of exposition raving about each line, detailing the strong emotions they evoked in him, and I felt seen and valued in that way, too.

All this was intoxicating for a woman whose father had been loving and wonderful in many ways, but a bit emotionally distant, and who’d been told by the evangelical church that she was unworthy and a second-class citizen, and who’d spent years with a man who didn’t seem to consider her feelings at all.

It didn’t seem to matter in the slightest that Jim had no real home, an ancient small truck that frequently broke down, or hardly any money. We’d shop for dinner together at the grocery store, and I didn’t mind letting him pick out what to buy—it was easier to let him do the work than make decisions of my own, especially when I was afraid what I came up with wouldn’t be exciting enough to impress him. I had been taught to conform—in fact, although I had three children, I had not yet formed a self of my own or had barely started forming one—and because he seemed to appreciate me so much, unlike Drew, all this felt comfortable and easy.

He called me every night before bed on the nights we weren’t together, and although I was exhausted from teaching and being a single mother to three daughters, I’d stay awake and talk to him. His passion and enthusiasm for me carried us through every conversation. I’d left the Evangelical church, but I’d found a new god, and his name was Jim.

A few weeks later, on a camping trip, as we lay in our sleeping bags under the inky sky and thousands of stars, he teased me about how many layers of long underwear I was wearing to keep warm, and then told me he wanted to marry me.

I think he meant it in that moment. I think he meant all of it for quite a long time, but I’m guessing in some part of himself he also knew he didn’t.

Soon after, the two of us supervised a dance at the high school, as we were required to, and it was fun except for when the student editor of the yearbook wafted by doing the Macarena (I taught the yearbook class, which I had talked about to Jim), and he stared at her. “You didn’t tell me she was hot,” he exclaimed, a huge grin on his face, as if her looks mattered in some personal way to him.

This bothered me, but I didn’t know if it should. Maybe you’re making a big deal out of nothing, I told myself. Maybe you just don’t know what’s normal (a thought I often had in the years after I left Evangelicalism). In the light of everything good that was happening between Jim and me, I tried to let it go.

Later, when he and I went to a weekend conference for the school which involved an overnight stay in a motel, another teacher was across the hall from us. As all three of us came up the stairs together after dinner, he was very friendly to her and hinted we should “invite her to come to our room,” wink wink.

I was hurt, but he acted like he’d been joking, and again I overrode my instincts. He had become hugely important to me, and our consuming relationship seemed to help justify my guilt-inducing divorce. I saved everything he wrote to me, every letter, every poem, every handmade card, all stored away in a thick folder in my closet, and I assumed a real proposal and a ring would be coming soon.

We went on camping trips with our kids, and later, over the 4^th of July, he and I drove to Seattle together, and when the sun went down, we waded into in a field of tall grass outside the city to watch the fireworks. He wrapped his arms around me, pulling me tight against him as sprays of red and gold burst into the sky, streaks of light trailing to the earth, and I didn’t think I could be happier.

For his birthday in August, I made a big dinner for him and invited friends and family, and in some way this party felt like the initiation into society of Jim and me as a real couple. Jim was a beer connoisseur, as well, and he encouraged me to try it, and even though I didn’t find it appealing, I started drinking a little, too. It made me less inhibited than normal, words spilling forth as we laughed and talked around my table.

Then, shortly after this extravagant celebration, inexplicably, I felt a slight shift. At first it was subtle, but not long after, when he canceled our plans one evening with little explanation, something he had never done before, I knew something was awry.

I only found out he was at my sister’s house that night incidentally when I called her to talk, like we often did with each other when we had problems. But before I could say much about what was going on with Jim, she interrupted. "Con, he’s over here right now.”

“At your place? What’s going on?” Post-divorce from the man who had abused her and threatened to out me about my abortion, my sister had a new boyfriend who happened to be one of Jim’s close friends—Jim and I had introduced them.

“I don’t know,” my sister said. “He just said he wanted to come over. Why don’t you come, too?”

Why had he stood me up, basically, to spend time with them? Or why hadn’t he just told me that’s where he was going? I would have had a hard time understanding why I wasn’t being included, it’s true, but he had given me the definite impression he was tired and going to bed.

I drove to her place and thus proceeded a strange evening during which Jim and my sister and her boyfriend sat in the living room talking and having a good time, while I plunked myself in a chair near the front door wondering why Jim was ignoring me. I couldn’t get past the lump in my throat from knowing he had essentially lied to me, but I couldn’t bring myself to say anything about it, either. Jim and my sister were both four years older than I was, and I felt like I had been relegated to the role of dumb baby sister, who no one knew quite what to do with or who some information was being withheld from.

I could tell my sister felt caught in the middle, but I couldn’t figure out what to make of it, and I suppose in a futile effort to gain Jim’s attention, I started drinking. I had no tolerance whatsoever, plus was still taking my anti-anxiety medication, and by the time two hours were up, I’d drunk five beers.

Jim still didn’t seem to be inclined to talk to me, and I felt like a third wheel, even though my boyfriend was right in the same room. Finally, I just left and drove home in my inebriated state, so dizzy I was barely able to concentrate on the road. When I got there, I went upstairs and lay on my bed crying as the ceiling whirled around over my head.

The next day he called me. I was angry and told him so and he seemed apologetic, but things didn’t improve.

Sometime in the next week, I went to his place to talk, and while he was in the bathroom I noticed a newspaper on his dresser, with several ads circled—personal ads women had placed.

When he came out of the bathroom, I held up the paper. “What’s this?”

He sat down in his desk chair and finally came out with it. “I don’t think things really have to change with us, but I was thinking we could be something more like friends.”

“What does that mean? And you’re already looking for a new girlfriend?”

“Actually, I’ve been seeing someone,” he said, calmly, crossing one leg over the other in his typical professorial way.

I was crushed.

I didn’t want to be “friends” with him, while he dated someone else, and I would spend every night before bed for the next several months writing about my feelings, trying to figure out what in the world had happened, why the situation had so drastically changed. Was this an ordinary break-up? Had he ever loved me at all? I was no longer getting therapy by then but should have been. In desperation, I called up his ex-wife, hoping she’d have some explanation.

“There’s something wrong with him,” she said. “But I can’t talk to you about it. I’m so sorry. Believe me, I know how crappy this feels.”

His close friend, my sister’s new boyfriend, couldn’t seem to explain anything to me, either, although he admitted he was aware that Jim had continued to sleep with his “roommate” Nicole after he started seeing me, which was new devastating news.

Meanwhile, school had started again, and I still had to see Jim every day. His beat-up brown pick-up truck, what he called his “sweet little blue-door,” would be there in the parking lot of the school each morning, and for a millimeter of a second my heart would skip a beat, and then all the pain would flood over me again.

I couldn’t seem to console myself. At school, Jim made casual comments to me at times, at the copy machine, at assemblies, walking down the halls. and I tried to respond in the same way, rusty nails raking across my heart.

I started skipping English Department meetings because I couldn’t stand to see him talking and flirting with the other women there, always the center of attention, and after school one day, my English Department chair, “Belinda,” came in my classroom to admonish me gently for not showing up.

Although in fact I’d noticed Jim hanging out in her classroom after school some days, she seemed genuinely concerned about what was going on with me, and finally I came out with the whole story, including the comment he’d made about my student yearbook editor.

At the end of that year, the school told him he wouldn’t be coming back.

Had what I’d said been enough for them to let him go? He was only a sub—they didn’t have to keep him on. If there were other reasons they refused to rehire him, I never heard what they were.

And before too long, the wheel of my life would make another big turn, and Jim seemed to mostly disappear, heard only about in snatches of conversation here and there with my sister, and years later, via his brief appearance on Facebook. I heard he was teaching in Milan, and then in Shanghai, China, but I had another life entirely I was focused on by then, and three daughters who were growing up.

So I was shocked one weekend a few years ago (and yet not exactly surprised) when I randomly thought to google him and several news items popped up: “Shanghai American School Sacks US Teacher in Sex Abuse Claims,” and “English Teacher at Top School in China Fired Over Sexual Abuse Allegations,” and a blog titled, “Survivors of James Mikkelson,” which included eighty-nine comments from mostly students, as well as the letter to the parents from the head of the Shanghai American School announcing why he had been fired.

The articles said he’d been ousted from the school in Milan before the one in Shanghai, and even though it had been years since my relationship with him, reading the blog his students wrote laid me flat.

I’d been taken in by the same techniques he used to seduce teenagers at a high school, poems and compliments and passion—you’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me—I’ve never felt like this before. You’re special.

In the blog one student states, “I looked up to him and wanted nothing more than his continued validation. He could have asked me to do anything. He did. He capitalized on my vulnerability and immaturity to perpetuate sexual abuse.”

They were the same as me. Although my relationship with Jim was a consensual one, it seemed clear as l read that as a woman in my mid-thirties, I had been as naïve, unprepared, eager to please as these schoolgirls were, some as young as age fourteen.

I share this not to shame him (although I do think things like this should be brought into the light, and this is all a matter of public record, anyway), but because it’s such a dramatic example of how my particular background—trained from birth to subordinate myself, worship, and obey, rather than forge an identity of my own—left me extraordinarily vulnerable to a man like Jim.

Truly, malleable and in some ways almost childlike, I was just his type, having been groomed and prepared by my fundamentalist high school, the generational trauma that was part of my inheritance, and the Nazarene Church.

What I didn’t know back then was that I was smart, too, that I had ideas of my own, that I had a voice and could use it. I didn’t know how valuable my gut instincts were, or that I could trust them to guide me. Nor did I know that no romantic relationship is worth more than the time and attention I give myself.

But before long I’d have an opportunity to start learning these things, if I could manage to make one final big leap.