Evangelical Therapy, Part 3 - The Swimsuit Issue
A serialized memoir about my former life as an Evangelical
I was used to keeping secrets from my husband.
As a stay-at-home mom, I had no money of my own, except the small allowance Drew gave me from his paycheck to buy groceries and necessities for our small daughters. Drew believed that as the Biblically ordained leader of our home and as a lawyer and CPA, he was best suited to handle our finances. And even though he made plenty of money to support a family of five in southern Idaho, we lived on the same shoestring budget we’d had when he was finishing his last two years of law school. For the first couple years of our marriage, we’d even done the grocery shopping together, and I had to ask him before putting any item in the cart.
One day, after we moved into the white and brick house on Sunset Road, in a rush of imagining the tasty and easy dinner I’d be able to make the following Sunday, I bought a box of chicken breasts stuffed with broccoli and cheese from the Schwann's man, who was driving around making deliveries to our neighbors. Sundays were stressful, making sure three little girls were bathed and in their best dresses, getting everyone to church, planning and preparing the noon-time dinner we’d have when we came home. I turned all this over in my mind as the charming delivery man stood at my door. It was hard to say no, and it felt good, for once, to say yes. But Drew thought frozen meat delivery was a rip-off, and when he got home that night and saw the chicken breasts in the freezer, he insisted l call Schwann’s and ask if l could return them.
The next day, the same delivery man came to our door, and humiliated, l held out the box.
“Was there something wrong with them?” he asked. He didn’t seem quite as friendly or cheerful as he had the day before.
"l bought them without asking my husband's permission," l said, trying to force a smile.
He nodded, accepting this as a reasonable explanation and hurried back across the lawn, and the yellow truck with its elegant swan painted on the side rumbled away, taking my dream of an easy Sunday dinner along with it.
Occasionally l took the girls to Kings, a discount store in our town. The store smelled like popcorn from the Carnival King glass popcorn maker on the first floor, from which customers could fill bags and buy them, but we usually headed straight down to the toy department in the basement. The girls loved looking at the long aisles of dolls and Playdoh and Slinkies, and if no other customers were there, I’d let them test out the small pink bicycles and the Big Wheels, ride them up and down the aisles. If I had any extra money, they got to choose one small toy, or if there was something special one of the girls wanted, I'd put it on layaway as a present for a birthday or Christmas, and plan to pay for it slowly over time.
Drew didn't know about the toys on layaway, or how one day, a few weeks after he insisted I return the chicken breasts from Schwann’s, l’d applied for a credit card from JCPenney with a $500 limit.
It was the first credit card I’d had in my life, and I used it to buy the girls clothes and a few extra things we needed. Drew deposited my monthly allowance into a checking account of my own—his one concession that I was a human adult who could handle money—and I managed to keep the credit card a secret for months, by writing a check from my account to pay the minimum monthly balance.
At that point, money issues were mostly what I kept hidden from Drew, although I didn't tell him about the thoughts I’d had about his brother, either. I didn’t tell anyone about that. Or about the way Dr M had enveloped me in a hug after our first visit. Or about the Mormon OB/GYN doctor several years before, who had been so nice to me—I liked him—and then during the last visit before my second daughter’s birth, had leaned over and rubbed his nose affectionately against my big pregnant belly. For a second, I’d thought he was going to kiss it.
What to make of these things? I never knew quite how to interpret any of them, who to tell or what to do, or what to say in the moment, but even though I kept all of them from Drew, including the recent event with Dr. M, he found another reason to object to Dr. M’s visits to our house.
What bothered Drew by that point in our lives seemed to be not so much that I felt sick all the time, but that I no longer wanted to have sex with him and hadn’t for months, no matter how much he wheedled, gave me the silent treatment, or pressured me by his comments and suggestively raised eyebrows when he happened to come into the bathroom while I was taking a bath.
I’ve always been a side-sleeper, and he approached me in bed almost every night by putting his arm around my waist, then letting his hand move higher or lower. I remember the struggle I went through each time, trying to get myself to comply, but my body seemed to be speaking for me during those days, almost outside my conscious control.
And since whatever Dr. M was doing wasn’t improving our sex life, or seemingly doing anything to help me feel less ill, and also because there was a question about whether our health insurance would cover his house calls, after a couple more visits, Drew called him and said we’d decided his services would no longer be needed.
A deflated feeling filled me when Drew told me his decision. Dr. M seemed odd, and no one ever explained why he didn’t have a real job (I wondered if his license had been revoked?) but the conversations we’d had made me feel like some action was being taken to help me. One of the questions he’d asked me was – what do you like to do? And – if you ever got a job, what might you be interested in doing? I knew so little about myself that I didn’t know the answers to these questions, nor could I imagine myself having a job, but when I talked about reading and writing, he said my face lit up. With his encouragement, I’d written a piece for our local newspaper’s essay contest and to my great surprise, I won.
So when Drew told me about his decision to pull the plug on what felt like a thin lifeline to feeling well again, I had a hard time responding calmly. "I felt so dizzy at the grocery store yesterday. He said I need therapy,” I reminded Drew in an emotional voice, but he had a different idea in mind.
Apparently, he’d shared the list of symptoms I'd been suffering from with "Richard," one of the partners at his law firm, who told Drew that his wife had gone through the same thing.
I was shocked to hear this. In the late 1980s, pre-internet, I hadn’t heard of a single other person who’d had a years-long mysterious illness like mine.
“He suggested the two of you have lunch,” Drew told me, as he poured himself a bowl of cereal before work.
I wasn’t sure from this idea whether to feel like my symptoms were being diminished to a smaller size, one that could be solved over a lunch with the wife of Drew’s business associate, or whether this was a positive sign, a way to believe my problems weren’t as abnormal and frightening as they felt. But I agreed, trying to shift my mind toward this new idea of how I was going to get help. Looking back, I can almost feel panicked again at the way my life was buffeted along through those years of my marriage, decisions being made about my problems by everyone except me.
A week later, “Liza,” his partner’s wife, and I met at the Country Inn, and over salad and date nut bread, she engaged me in cheerful small talk about our families and other mundane things we dredged up. She never seemed to stop smiling, and I felt out of my league, since she was the sophisticated and worldly wife of a man who was the lead partner in Drew’s law firm. I think maybe she and Richard were Catholics? Or Presbyterian? Both denominations seemed foreign to me since most people I knew were either Nazarenes or Southern Baptists, and she and I had very little real connection. When we’d gone over to their house for dinner once with other members of the firm, she’d served wine, the first time anyone had offered me alcohol, and afterwards, Drew and I had had an argument about his decision to drink it and my decision not to.
That afternoon at lunch, as the waitress was about to bring our check, Liza finally said, “Listen. I know you haven’t been feeling well. Just go to your family doctor and tell him you need an anti-depressant. You’ll be fine,” she said, smiling again as if there was nothing to be concerned about. “And go on a date night. Or a weekend alone with Drew. You probably need a break from the kids.”
I drove home, disappointed by our conversation. I hadn’t gotten to say a word about my symptoms, and she hadn’t revealed anything about her own situation or how she really felt.
“I don’t want to take drugs. I need to find someone else to talk to,” I said to Drew that night, reporting what Liza had told me. I’d gotten a negative feeling about the usefulness of anti-depressants from my conversations with Dr. M—and although I hardly knew whether to trust him, I had no other authority to give me information, and he’d made it clear that in his opinion, over the long haul, therapy was the better option.
“How about a weekend away? Like she suggested.” Drew tried to pat my hand, a rare gesture on his part, but I snatched my hand out of his grasp.
A few nights before this conversation I’d woken from a dead sleep to find him touching me, already halfway inside me, as if he could trick me in my sleepy stupor into revealing my true physical desire for him, which he seemed to think I was willfully suppressing. I’d never seen a naked man until my wedding night—not even a picture. I didn’t have the understanding back then or vocabulary to verbalize the concept of consent, but in some instinctive way, I registered his act of forcing himself on me while I was barely conscious as a violation. I felt angry about this, and said so, but Drew didn’t think he’d done anything wrong. “We’re married,” he said. “You’re my wife.”
I had in fact refused to include the word obey in our wedding vows, opting just for love and cherish, but that hadn’t stopped Drew from trying to convince me that wifely submission was the correct order of things. Another evening early in our marriage, Drew had invited “Gabriel,” a man known in our church for his devotion to Biblical scholarship, over to play board games, then while the three of us sat at the table, engaged him in a conversation about that topic, asking Gabe to give his opinion about whether the Biblical injunction for wives to submit was accurate and should be followed.
My youngest daughter was a baby then, not yet sleeping through the night, and I remember leaving the table to go upstairs, pacing the floor with her to comfort her crying, as below, Gabe and Drew agreed on the idea that their interpretation of Bible verses about women’s obedience was indeed the right one.
The night I woke to find Drew already inside me, that conversation with Gabe took on greater weight as I realized just exactly what I was supposed to be submitting to. This wasn’t new information. In the Women’s Bible Study group in our church, there was a lot of veiled talk about “pleasing your husband,” and everyone knew what that meant. But it seemed more personal when an authoritative man came over to my house and pronounced it to be so.
Another of our arguments early on had to do with the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, which one of Drew’s friends mailed to him each February. As a young woman who had been raised to believe modesty was a virtue, and perhaps even more so as a woman who didn’t feel very secure about her physical appearance, I was upset that my Nazarene husband felt it was perfectly fine to ogle these barely clothed women, and we had a fight about it every year. Over the years, this magazine issue had become a frequent focal point of our arguments.
“How would you like it if I bought magazines full of naked men to gawk at?” I’d asked him one day, and now, in the wake of my lunch with Liza, and our discussion of a weekend away in a hotel in Boise as a way to revive our marriage and help dispel my distressing physical symptoms, Drew brought this issue up.
“I don’t think I’d care,” he said. “I’ll bring one with me to the hotel.”
“I don’t want one,” I said, understanding that the impetus for his offer, like so many things about our marriage, was in an indirect way meant to benefit him.
Because we would have to ask my parents or my sister to take care of our daughters for a night, my family was looped in on the plan that Drew and I were going away to “fix things” in our marriage.
I think everyone in my family hoped this would help me. My dad and I had begun riding miles on our bikes a couple afternoons a week—he was convinced exercise might help, and I did in fact feel some better during those bike rides, although my symptoms always came back shortly after we’d put the bikes away and my dad had gone home. My mom and sisters were worried about me. My family knew I was not okay, and no one knew quite what to do.
But I didn’t want to go to a hotel with Drew. I knew what he was expecting, and the pressure I felt to “get things back on track” with him was enormous.
My beautiful blond older sister was divorced by this time, and my self-concept was still based on the idea that I was not her. Some part of me wished I could be as free as she seemed to be (I’m sure it never felt quite that simple to her), but even at age thirty-one, I was stuck in my role as the good girl who did what I was supposed to, the one who didn’t cause my parents any problems.
All of that, combined with our church’s strong stance against divorce, led me to believe that divorce was out of the question. Regardless of my bold words to Drew’s brother Tom in my back yard when he’d visited to paint our house, I genuinely believed divorce was not an option. Not for me, with my three little girls. For other people, maybe, for my sister, yes, but absolutely, positively, not for me. To get a divorce would be to explode everything I believed about myself and about the rules of my small world.
And l didn’t want to get a divorce, not really. Divorce felt frightening and wrong, and l didn’t want to do that to my children.
So one weekend soon after my lunch with Liza, we deposited our daughters with my family, and Drew and I got in the car and headed to a hotel in Boise. On the way, he stopped at a convenience store. He wouldn’t tell me what he was doing, but when he came back out, he was carrying a magazine covered with a brown paper wrapper.
I knew when we got back home, I’d have to report what had happened to my family, and I knew exactly what they were all hoping and expecting to hear.
Wow, Constance. I don't know you all that well, but well enough to find it pretty shocking that you were so susceptible to this kind of gaslighting. It says a lot about how we can be conditioned by our upbringing and surroundings that someone as smart and insightful as you are became convinced that you were the problem. I'm so glad those days are far behind you.
Your writing pulls me in and doesn't let me go.... I'm fascinated by this glimpse into your life as an Evangelical wife and the ways in which you and your body responded. The body holds the score!