Facing My Abuser

It's been a hard weekend.

Friday, I saw my stepsisters post some pictures of their reunion with their biological father on Facebook and I was just waiting for my dad to call. Sure enough he did, but I missed the call. I braced myself for the torrential downpour of self pity and anger from my father when I answered his call back to me and I wasn't disappointed.

This time though, it was different. Usually I just listen while supplying the appropriate uh huh and yeahs in the conversation lapses, but I couldn't. Something inside me said no.  Not this time. He doesn't get to do this today.

I told him I don't blame my sisters for wanting to have a relationship with their father, that they are entitled to know him and allow him into their lives. He kept blathering on and before he could get a full wind of poor me under his sails, I knocked it out of him. I told him that sister has a right to feel pain when looking back on her past because he abused her.  He abused all of us.

He had the balls to say he didn't abuse us.

For fifteen years I have played out how this conversation would go in so many ways. In some I'd cry, in others I'd scream. It never went calmly for certain. So it was a huge surprise that I heard myself detailing the abuse we suffered at his hands in such a calm tone and manner. It was so matter of fact. I felt almost entirely detached from the words exiting my mouth. It was as if I was reading a story out of the paper or something.

He said he never hit us with a fist so it wasn't abuse.

No father, slamming your child into the wall and holding her off the ground by her throat isn't abuse. Beating my sister from knees to shoulders with a tennis racket isn't abuse. Lining all four of us up in a line and walking down the line beating us one by one until someone confessed to whatever sin you'd imagined up that day and then beating the confessor because she caused us all to suffer needlessly to cover her lies isn't abuse.  "Spanking" us on an almost daily basis to the point we can't sit. Worst was then laughing to your friends and making me show them the bruises you'd left on my backside.

This isn't even the tip, not even a sliver of what we all went through.

I often sit here wondering if my life isn't some fantasy horror I made up in my mind. Perhaps I created a tragic past in my head to make myself feel better about being such an enormous failure in my life. I know I didn't. I know that what I, and my three younger sisters went through was real and I know the horror of it is worse than everything I can remember because I've blocked so much of it from my mind. Each of my sisters remembers things that I don't, but when they've talked about it, it all comes surging back and I feel even more saddened that we had to live through that.  What we lived with is the stuff of Lifetime movies. Physical abuse, mental abuse, and religious abuse just topping the charts of a childhood so dysfunctional.

Of course, my father didn't appreciate me dealing more pain to him when he was already so hurt. He sarcastically apologized to me and I told him that when he as ready to offer an actual apology I would be ready to accept it and forgive.  The conversation ended there, standing outside of the car in the parking lot of a Halloween store with the kids clamoring to say hi to "Pa."  I had to take a few breaths, put on my game face, and cheerfully tell the kids Pa had to go but let's go look at the Halloween stuff!!  All the while I was shaking and trying to catch my breath.

I don't hold any hopes or illusions in my mind that an apology will come anytime soon, if ever.

So I have been sitting on this all weekend. I faced my abuser. I want to feel proud of myself, but I don't. I feel that I've destroyed the last shreds of what relationship I had with my father, monster though he was. I'm now utterly alone in this world and what I'm facing in this world is daunting and terrifying.

I feel so lost right now. So alone.

Speaking Tongues at Summer Camp

I've been seeing a lot of postings on Facebook and online about Jesus Camps that are directed towards small children.  The videos and images shown are of crying children being taken over by the spirit of god under the guidance of adults.

I'm going to share some of my personal experiences with such things.

When I was 11, my father remarried and began attending his new wife's church.  It was a living church, which means they aren't dead in the spirit and use praise and worship with upbeat and emotive music instead of traditional hymns.  I admit I enjoyed the music and at the age of 12 joined the praise and worship team as a violinist.

The church hosted a summer camp for the members and of course, we went.  Free childcare! Free food!  It usually wasn't too bad, but as the program progressed it started to get a bit odd.  We'd always start out with prayer, some fun songs, and then go off to crafts and bible lessons.  It was pretty typical vacation bible school fare, but it always ended in the chapel with an intense praise and worship session.

Soon, however, following the prayer and fun songs, our leaders would ask if anyone wanted to get in some extra praise and worship time.  This was always followed by energetic cheering so the music would continue and instead of Onward Christian Soldier! and other such fun songs, we'd start singing modern praise and worship.

Each day this P&W would extend and extend until it was all we did.  Then people started talking about speaking in tongues.  We were encouraged to open our minds to the spirit and to allow it to take hold of our mind and tongue so that we could speak our special language that was between ourselves and god.  One by one, kids started jabbering and blabbering in gibberish as they mimed the adults.  I kind of sat there uncomfortable because it wasn't happening to me.

An adult came over to me and a few others who looked just as confused and uncomfortable as I and pulled us up onto the stage in front of the congregation for a "private" meeting.  She was kind and caring as she asked us why we weren't speaking in tongues.  I looked down at my shoes and started wringing my hands while casting furtive glances at the congregation staring at these kids who were in trouble on stage.  I could feel myself starting to sweat which made me begin to perspire even more.  I just sort of mumbled that I didn't know how.

The sweet lady brightly asked us what our favorite motorcycle was.  I perked up instantly and shot my hand into the air.  She pointed at me and I said "Harley Davidson!" because my dad rode a Harley and I was SO proud of his motorcycle.  She kind of chuckled and asked for Japanese motorcycles...like a Kawasaki, Suzuki, or Mitsubishi.  I had no clue where she was going with this and reverted back to staring at my shoes while wringing my hands.

She then went through a lesson on how to speak in tongues.  She said to repeat those three motorcycle names over and over and over again, very fast, and before we knew it, god would take over our tongue.  We just had to practice!

I looked at her in horror.  I knew scripture well, even at that age I read the scriptures voraciously every morning while my dad had his coffee and we had our cereal and juice.  Perhaps because of our new church's beliefs, we'd been studying speaking in tongues that summer and what I was being taught at VBS completely conflicted with what I had read in the bible.  I was under the understanding that the disciples were speaking in tongues ONLY when they were in a crowd of unbelievers who did not speak their language.  That tongues were just a language you didn't understand, but was understood by everyone else.  It was a known language.

This is not what the church was teaching.  They were teaching babble talk, nonsense gibberish, and if I didn't do it, and do it soon, I'd be the last kid standing on the stage in front of the entire church.  I'd be a bad child who didn't believe in god like the rest of them, someone who had hardened her heart and stood apart, separate from the rest of the flock.

So I started to jibber and jabber and mutter odd words.  I was hugged and god was praised before being sent back to my seat with a taint of someone who couldn't accept god on her own.  It felt so wrong.

This is the first of many odd experiences I had in church.