Evangelical Therapy, Part 7 - Miss Priss

A serialized memoir about my former life as an Evangelical

To understand what happened when I went to “Jeremy’s” house after class, maybe start with this:

A photo of me at age ten, standing by two other girls in the auditorium of the local Nazarene college during the Caravan Fair. We’re wearing aprons we’d sewed ourselves and had modeled in a fashion show, the crowning activity of a year’s worth of badge-earning in cookie baking, sewing, and hospitality.

For Nazarenes, Caravans was the evangelical cousin of Girl Scouts. Instead of Brownies, we were Indian Maidens, and then Pathfinders, although very little of it had to do with learning about Native Americans. In the picture, I am clasping my hands, my shoulder-length hair is curled and held back by a hairband. I’m wearing glasses, a green skirt and white blouse (the Pathfinder uniform), and a yellow gingham apron, which I had sewed at church in the basement, where Caravans took place.

The other girls in the picture are “Tracy” and “Nicole,” whom I considered my friends. There is something more carefree about them than me, a bit of the wild urchin in their casual hairstyles that showed little sign of a mother’s helping (or controlling) hand.

Tracy had sewed a whole skirt; Nicole’s was an apron like mine. They are both skinny with knobby knees, pointed chins. Tracy is missing a tooth. Nicole is tall. I am wearing a wristwatch with a black band and a silver ring on my little finger that was engraved with my name, Connie.

As an adult I look back on that time in my life, on myself, with quite a bit of fondness. I didn’t know yet I was being conditioned to accept certain restrictive, harmful beliefs, and I often felt happy as a kid, except for my mother’s periodic withdrawals of affection.

I had a blue Schwinn bike, saddle shoes, and a miniature dachshund named Schatzie. I thought I looked okay, and it would be a few more years before I’d start comparing my appearance to my beautiful older sister and find myself lacking.

But six or seven years ago, worlds, lifetimes later, I connected with Nicole through Facebook, and she said to me, “I can’t believe how much you’ve changed! When we were kids, I used to call you Miss Priss.”

In one moment, my entire childhood was recast in a new and terrible light. That’s how she’d thought of me? And maybe how everyone else had thought of me, too? I’d genuinely had no idea.

I’d always had more friends at school than at church for some reason I hadn’t understood—the group of church girls was a hard nut to crack. I’d been born in that church, like the rest of them, and yet often felt excluded, a little shy, scared about going off to church camp for a week.

At school I was considered smart and felt well enough liked, but getting good grades didn’t seem to carry the same cachet with the kids at church. Was it my carefully curled hair? My glasses? The faintest hint of a double chin? The small black patent leather purse my mother made me carry?

Once my family went to dinner at Nicole’s house—our fathers were both professors at the Nazarene College—and during dessert, she asked me to come in the bathroom with her and then jerked up her top to show me her bra.

“When are you going to get one?” she asked, a tinge of superiority in her voice as we stood looking at ourselves in the mirror. 

“I don’t know,” I said, chagrined to admit I was wearing an undershirt under my dress.

We were nine—fourth grade, one year before the Caravan photo was taken. I went back to the dinner table with a painful feeling in my chest. Years later, thinking about this moment, I found it hard not to conclude that for reasons of her own, Nicole had intended to humiliate me, that she wanted me to feel deficient.

++

Nicole moved away with her family in junior high, and I thought she was gone for good, but pretty soon, she showed back up. After high school, we attended that same Nazarene college, and when we walked out of chapel each Wednesday morning, she’d trail her fingers along the shoulders of every young man sitting in the pews, the ones nearest the aisle, and I assumed she knew something more than I did about how to be appealing to men.

Later, when Drew and I were first married, we sublet a house that had a garage apartment in the back. A college boy lived in that apartment, and Nicole, who was still in college then, liked him, but I’m not sure he liked her back. The last time I saw her come over, she pounded on the garage door for twenty minutes shouting his name. She knocked on the window, too, cupping her hands against the glass, but he never opened the door or even pulled back the curtain.

She seemed very sure of her sexuality, I thought, watching as she demanded to be let in.

Or perhaps, like me at that stage, she had an empty place inside from being told by our culture and our religion that the only way to be worth anything yourself was to tie that worth up with a man.

++

“Nicole has one,” I told my mother when I got up the nerve a few days after the dinner to ask her about the possibility of a bra. I didn’t tell her it had become a badge of honor in the fourth grade to have a boy come up behind you and snap your bra strap—both affirming and embarrassing—and that those who didn’t wear one felt hopelessly out of sync, like a silly baby, a little girl.

Was the boys’ behavior a compliment or an insult? Although it seems obvious now, no one back then seemed to know, or we weren’t able to say it, but without that sort of attention, one’s standing in the social structure sank like a stone. How odd, that disempowerment should bring a certain power, but I accepted this as part of what it meant to grow up as a girl, and from what I can tell, many Evangelical women continue to buy into this dynamic. For me, in the fourth grade and for many years after that, I believed it was the only choice I had, the only way to have any power.

My mother caved, surprisingly, and the first day I wore it with a button up shirt, I sat in the kitchen eating breakfast, supremely aware of my new undergarment. My father looked at me and called my mother into the other room. “She’s wearing a bra already?” he asked, sounding conflicted and astounded.

I was newly horrified again that my father had noticed, that he’d spoken the word bra. I hadn’t known he was aware such a garment existed. My parents hid their intimate life and didn’t talk about sex or bodies, except to say jokingly to anyone, at practically any opportunity (it seemed to me), that Connie doesn’t like boys.

I don’t know where my mother got that idea. Maybe it was something I’d said in kindergarten, the day Darryl Gardner had pushed me down the slide?

You don’t like boys, do you? She asked me that question many times during my elementary school years, which I realize now was an indication of her own conflicts and fears about adulthood, particularly womanhood.

No, I don’t like boys, I always answered, staunchly, which meant—no, I am not a sexual being and promise not to be one, but that’s a hard promise to keep. No, I will not grow up.

I have no idea why she decided to buy me a training bra when I asked. Maybe she was trying to be a good mom. Or maybe the better to flatten my sprouting breast buds, to not let them show the way they had started to in my soft undershirts. Maybe the better to veil in secrecy the beginnings of my own womanhood.

++

My mother had enacted a deal with me from the time I was very small, and this is how I understood it: You are the best little girl in the world, and if you never disobey me, I will always love you.

Of course, the inverse of that is that if you disobey, I won’t, the same sad deal around which evangelical Christianity is organized. If you refuse to repent of your sins, if you don’t recognize your innate depravity and beg for forgiveness, you’ll be cast off, eternally separated from the love of God.

And here was the way my mom sealed the deal—if I displeased her in some way or if she was upset for reasons I didn’t understand, she would go in her bedroom and lie down in the dark with a cold washcloth on her forehead and close her door, and my life would grind to a miserable halt. I found it impossible to go on playing happily or doing anything happily when Mom was mad. She withdrew and her affection disappeared, and it seemed possible it might never return.

Thus, when I couldn’t bear it anymore, I would go into her room and stand at the foot of her bed and apologize for whatever imagined wrongs I’d done, and eventually, hours later, or sometimes the next day, she would emerge and slowly our house would go back to normal. The normal, where we were all afraid of doing something to upset her.

In my memory, I was always alone when my mother withdrew into her room, but maybe that was just how I felt.

In any case, the possible mysterious withdrawal of her affection, painful and frightening for a little kid, ensured that I obeyed her at all times, going out of my way to anticipate what she would want me to do, and do it.

Finish all the food on my plate. Stand very still while she was braiding my hair, concentrating on the goldfish swimming round and round in their clear, glass bowl. Hurry and clean my room. Wear the pale purple Swiss dot dress with violets at the waist. Carry the small black purse.

Say the prayer my family repeated together with folded hands before dinner every night: Dear Jesus, Thank you for this food and help me to be good. Amen.

My mom adored me, though, the rest of the time, and she could be clever and fun. Sometimes she gave the goldfish brownie crumbs which they sucked into their mouths, and laughed, saying they looked like they were smoking cigars. She played Tchaikovsky or Rachmaninoff on our stereo from her collection of records, while, as a tiny child, I galloped around the house. She read lots of books and told me which ones she thought were good, which meant I should read them, too.

But she rarely spoke to her sisters or parents, who lived in California, and never to her father. She didn’t like my father’s mother, either, and when we went to his parents’ house on Sundays, she stayed home.

“You’re not going to be the kind of girl who gets stomach aches, are you?” she asked me, sounding irritated, when I came downstairs to the laundry room one morning to tell her I didn’t feel well. I was eleven.

“No,” I said, a stunned feeling coming over me that I couldn’t name or didn’t dare to. The laundry detergent sat on a wooden shelf above the washer and dryer. I can smell its fresh scent now, along with a faint mildewy odor from the musty pipes. The laundry room was dimly lit, the floor was cement. A wooden post supported the ceiling. All these details are burned into my mind, this moment I remember being explicitly told to bury my feelings. Do not express this feeling or I will abandon you.

Later, in high school, when I wanted to stop wearing glasses and get contacts instead, my mom walked with me to the optometrist’s office every week for almost two months, till he found a pair he thought fit best. And at age sixteen, I was allowed to go out on a date. But by then those earlier ideas of myself, that my role was to be obedient and good, rather than an individual who could state needs and desires of my own, were pretty well fixed.

I would not grow up to be the kind of young woman who could say no, certainly not to Drew when he asked me to marry him, or to Jeremy, when he asked me to come over to his house. Who will love you if you say no? If you displease him in some way? If you assert yourself? If you disagree? If you stand up when you’re supposed to sit down? If you try to identify your own feelings and say them? No one I had ever known. Not my mother, not Drew, and certainly not God, not in any world I was privy to.

There’s something wrong with a religion that reinforces the harmful treatment of a wounded parent.

++

Years later, when I would finally get divorced, I’d be released into a world where for the first time I’d make an attempt to reclaim agency over my sexuality. One thing I chose was to have glamour photos taken, like many women did in the 90s.

I wore a leather jacket in one, a sparkly boa in another, but the man I had begun seeing, who ostensibly I’d had the pictures taken for, refused to keep them on his dresser. I’d framed two and given them to him for a gift, but he seemed embarrassed, and hid them in his drawer, as if I’d revealed myself to be what—a Playboy playmate? A slut? A sexy woman?

He apparently wanted to have sex with me, but not have a picture that showed me looking sexy. Again, the confusing messages about power and sexuality. Be beautiful, have breasts, wear a bra, but not too beautiful, not too much lacy lingerie. Be sexy, but not too sexy. If you’re too sexy, I will shut you down, put you in a drawer.

As a very young girl, I’d felt ashamed for not being sexy enough, and now I felt ashamed for being too sexy.

The year Mandy Evans told me how babies were made, the same year Nicole asked me when I was going to get a bra, I’d gone over to Mandy’s house after school. Three boys were there and three girls. Someone turned off the lights and a sort of mock make-out session ensued underneath the pool table in the basement, as we paired off and kissed each other. A boy named Wayne seemed unsure but decided (after whispered conversations with the other kids) that he would agree to make out with me, but only if I took off my glasses and unbraided my long hair, so I did.

++

In my eleventh year of marriage, after “Jeremy” and I got to his house to do work for our group project, I didn’t resist much. There were chairs in the front yard, but he opened the door and led the way inside.

Imagine me, somewhere in between the little girl in the green skirt and the woman with big hair and a denim jacket, sitting on a crummy couch in the house of a single college man with a strong jaw and blue eyes and not much else going for him, while my three small daughters waited at home with their father for me to return.

That’s the worst part in my mind when I think of it now.

Whatever was driving me in that moment, all the complicated reasons that led me to make such a choice, an unfortunate way of saying no to Drew and attempting to say yes to myself, overruled even that. I still have a hard time forgiving myself for those extra thirty minutes after class in which I was thinking only about this person Jeremy or about myself, even though I understand now my actions were a step toward the way out.

He and I sat quite close to share an open textbook we’d spread on our laps and neither of us read a word. In the silence, as we stared at the book, the back of his left hand hovered close to the back of my right hand, brushing it a few times as he turned the pages, and finally he wound his fingers awkwardly through mine.

“I’m married with three kids,” I blurted out.

Something inside him seemed to go still, and then he put his arm around my shoulder. “Everybody’s got something going on,” he said, and leaned over to kiss me.

I didn’t stay long. But I came back again one evening the following week, and that time I stayed longer.