Evangelical Therapy, Part 5 - The Ring
A serialized memoir about my former life as an Evangelical
I had begun breaking the rules, and no one much liked that. And I didn’t like it, either.
I felt like I had done something wrong by refusing to have sex with Drew at the Red Lion Hotel, and I couldn’t bring myself to tell anyone about what had happened there except my sister. Having been through a divorce herself, I knew she wasn’t likely to judge me.
But a couple days after we got back, when she came over and asked about our weekend, perched on my couch in her stylish red winter jacket and cute boots, even she had an almost jaunty and light-hearted tone in her voice, which seemed to carry the hope that maybe things had gone well. I’m not sure what she was thinking in that moment—probably wishing things still could go well with me and Drew, or perhaps hesitant about bringing up the taboo topic of sex.
What I do know is that by then I was still feeling sick and on edge and was very thin, getting close to the weight I’d been in early college when I’d developed an eating disorder. As a freshman (the year Drew and I met), I’d dropped to 110 pounds on my 5’9” frame. “The one thing is, I could never be with a woman who’s fat,” Drew had told me before we got engaged, and although the cause of my eating disorder was about much more than Drew’s attitude, it was a genuine problem for me, and I didn’t recover until I was pregnant with my first daughter.
And for the three years before Dr. M had diagnosed my mysterious symptoms as resulting from an emotional problem, I was teetering on the edge of that again, as I obsessed over my stomach and digestive issues, believing they were caused by specific foods.
First I decided I was lactose intolerant and cut out dairy products. One day after preparing lunch for my daughters, I ate a small bite of Extra Creamy Cool Whip on pie and began feeling ill. Later that afternoon, I announced to my father that this confirmed my lactose-intolerance theory.
“Hmm, maybe so,” he said. He had come over to go with me on another long bike ride, and he nodded his baseball-capped head, trying hard to be supportive, but I could tell he wasn’t convinced.
Then I decided it was eggs and cut them from my diet.
Gluten wasn’t a commonly discussed problem food in the early 90s, but after reading and researching in the public library, I came up with the idea my problem might have something to do with yeast and stopped eating breads and sugars. My weight plummeted, and people began to notice, asking what might be wrong.
My distress affected my three small daughters as well. A month or two after the “sex trip” to Boise, I found myself unable to deal with their hair. “You cry too much when I have to comb it out,” I remember telling my youngest, as she looked up at me with her sweet, earnest face. Little girls in our church typically had long hair, braided or curled on Sundays, but I convinced my daughters it would be fun to cut it almost pixie-length short, which we did.
So many things felt like too much. Even the click of the turn signal in the car seemed unbearable as I drove my girls to their gymnastics classes and T-ball, or to ShopKo to buy school supplies.
One day I accidentally left a Daisy disposable razor on the edge of our bathtub, and my youngest grabbed it, making a few tiny cuts on her fingers. She didn’t cry and hardly seemed upset, but I panicked when I saw blood trickling down her hands. Later that afternoon, I took the girls to my mom’s house and sobbed on her shoulder like the world had ended, and she seemed taken aback by my outburst.
Thinking about it now, although I had numerous symptoms that were hard to cope with, it seems appropriate that the worst part was the discomfort in my head and the way things looked, since really, it was my mind that was distressed, and my conditioned way of seeing the world (and myself) that was off.
My daughters were attending Nampa Christian, the same private school I’d been enrolled in from seventh to twelfth grade, an institution which was outspoken about what they believed was women’s Biblically prescribed subservient role. Evolution was treated like a bad word, and in science classes my daughters learned the earth was 6,000 years old, and that God buried dinosaur bones in the earth to test our faith. Archaically, the school still utilized corporal punishment--“swats”-- via a paddle that hung on the wall of the principal’s office.
Even then, I knew the science curriculum was hopelessly skewed and incorrect. My dad had earned a PhD in physics from Harvard. Throughout my childhood he’d made a point of saying that the Bible was a work of literature, not a science book, and he, in some ways a pioneer and outlier in our church, believed faith in God could co-exist with factual science. (His rejection of Biblical literalism was likely a starting point for my later ability to question fundamentalist thought.)
I was also adamantly against the use of physical punishment for children (Drew disagreed with me), but a choice of schools had to be made, and at that point, I was still enmeshed enough in the Nazarene Church to believe the training ground of Nampa Christian was better for my daughters than a worldly public school.
I remember pulling into the parking lot of the school each weekday to pick my girls up and looking out my windshield at the kids running to greet their moms. The women all appeared to be fine and happy, and I wondered what was wrong with me, why I couldn’t seem to feel that way, too.
But the dizzy, pressurey feeling in my head was almost always present, like the intrusive thoughts I’d had about Drew’s brother. My entire nervous system was signaling SOS, and it wouldn’t let up, wouldn’t let me think about anything else. You’re not okay, it signaled, day and night, waking me up at three in the morning with damp sweat on my chest and a pounding heart.
One day after a basketball game, one of the other moms, who seemed content with her dairy farmer husband and three blond children and permed bangs (we all had permed bangs), asked me how I was doing, and even though I barely knew her, I burst into tears on her shoulder as well.
I sensed she wasn’t comfortable with my distress, and that neither was anyone else. A few months after the Red Lion weekend, my sister suggested I should go ahead and take an anti-depressant.
“I hate drugs,” I repeated to her, a refrain I have often used to describe the feeling I have about putting a new and unknown substance into my body.
“Con, just try it. Go to Dr. Gillam,” she said, naming the one psychiatrist we knew of in town. “And tell Drew you have to go to therapy, too.”
Both the idea of drugs and therapy made me feel like I was failing in some way, but finally, I did. I tried two different anti-depressants, both which resulted in intolerable side effects, and then an anti-anxiety drug, which of course were prescribed more liberally back then. This drug didn’t make my symptoms immediately vanish, but I did finally start getting more sleep, and it didn’t seem to make me feel worse.
Drew’s homework, from the therapist, was to talk to me for five minutes every day when he got home from work.
Five minutes, sometimes ten, he sat at our dining room table with me, still in his white dress shirt and tie, while I talked about my day. I tried not to think about the fact that this was an assignment, or that he had not felt motivated to do this on his own (then or at any point during our evenings).
And it did help some. I’d found a woman, “Dr. Redmond,” who wasn’t like the first Christian counselor we’d tried, a man who stated Drew didn’t need therapy and only wanted to work with me. Unlike him, Dr. Redmond seemed to know what she was talking about, and gave practical suggestions she thought might help.
I made a photo album to remind me of happy moments from our marriage and looked through it often, pictures of our little girls standing among the daffodils and tulips in front of our house, playing in the snow, birthday parties, and one of Drew, the day our first daughter was born, in blue scrubs, cradling our daughter to his chest.
I made a gratitude list and tried to add items to it every day.
That spring, one weekend, our church had a sand volleyball tournament with other churches in the Treasure Valley, and Drew and I played, two couples on each side of the net. I’d never played volleyball much except for fun, but I leaped and smacked that ball like my life depended on it. I could see Drew looking at me with approval, and I gave every point everything I had, as if I did it well enough and our team won, my marriage would win, too, would somehow be repaired.
Our team did win the tournament, and Drew and I went to church the next Sunday sunburned and tired, but triumphant.
Then, near the end of June, we took our little girls to the Boise River Festival, and for fun, my older sister came, too. The Night Light Parade was a magical event. Fifty-foot long floats were fitted up with twinkly lights and sent down the river in the dark. The evening would end with fireworks, and everyone there seemed to be feeling festive and frolicky. Our girls hopped up and down, waiting for it to start, and eventually it did. A big crowd had gathered, but we’d gotten as close to the water as we could.
Everyone was sitting down except the small kids. Our older two were tall enough to see over the mob of people, but my youngest, at three, was crying, having a hard time getting a look, so in my exuberance, I picked her up and tried to move to an unobtrusive spot. Just for a minute, I thought, conscious of the people sitting to my left behind me. I didn’t want to be in anyone’s way, but for that moment my desire to give her this wonderful sight of sparkling floats outweighed my other concerns.
Alli was a good-sized three-year-old, and I struggled to boost her up. Vaguely, behind me somewhere, I heard a man yell, “sit down,” but I continued to hold her, pointing at the lights, and then heard his voice again, much closer to my ear, shouting, and felt a dump of cold liquid over my head.
I sank to the ground, beer trickling down my face, as a spindly unkempt man receded into the darkness.
Drew, several feet away from me, turned slightly away, as if he didn’t know me.
My sister, observing all this, was outraged on my behalf, and in a show of solidarity, pushed her way back through the crowd until she found a policeman and told him what had happened. The policeman came over and stood nearby keeping watch as the floats went down the river. Afterwards, he hauled the drunk man over and made him apologize to me.
Drew, my lawyer husband, who knew the laws of the state, and what might constitute assault, did nothing.
I was still fuming when we walked to our car in the parking lot.
“Why didn’t you help me?” I asked, before we got in the car. “Or do something?”
Drew didn’t hesitate. “You should have sat down when he told you to.”
“What?”
He opened the car door. “You were supposed to be sitting down.”
“But that didn’t make it okay for him to pour his beer on my head!”
Every bad feeling about our relationship rushed back, the work of the past several months of therapy wiped out in one evening.
Drew was no different than he’d ever been. Maybe he’d put on a layer of something more civilized to try to make our marriage work, like a coat of paint on the walls of a broken down house, but something inside him believed essentially that women should do as they’re told, be silent and submissive, not make a fuss or put themselves forward, obey male authority, and be punished if they make a mistake or even stand up in an unexpected spot.
And maybe I shouldn’t have stood up, even off to the side. I did block a drunk man from seeing what he wanted for at least one minute and might have continued to for one minute more, if he hadn’t dumped his drink on me. Possibly other people were annoyed, too, by my choice. “That policeman made him apologize,” I said. My hair was still damp and smelled like beer, but Drew had no further comment.
I wasn’t very good yet at knowing how to stand up for myself or my daughters. But I knew then I wanted to.
And the situation told me something about Drew as well. He hadn’t committed any actual crimes against me in our marriage or broken any laws, but he was fine with someone else doing so to teach me a lesson.
What if he had punched me? What would you have done then? I wanted to ask, but in the darkness of our van, Drew was silent, refusing to talk.
The next day was Sunday, and we went to church like normal. On Monday, after Drew left for work, I took off my wedding ring and put it in a drawer. I didn’t have a plan or a goal. I wasn’t thinking—I have to get a divorce. I just knew I didn’t want to wear that ring, and I declared to myself that I wouldn’t put it back on.
I do not like Drew. Just sayin'
Oh, I can hardly wait until the post “Escape from Drew.”