Frivology

Jesus loves me, this I know.
For the Bible tells me so.

After grandpa died, my family moved to NW Washington from Southern California. It was a pretty big no-brainer for my parents.  Mom was having trouble finding work and dad was about to get laid off.  Grandpa had just died, removing our ties there for his reasons, and NW Washington had friends of ours.

I was eight and starting the third grade.  I  did a lot of living in my head back then, for a variety of reasons.  My school in California consisted of a lot of rich kids, and I came from a family that had hardly anything.  This was a reality I was constantly reminded of, so I tended to avoid the other kids.  In Washington, the kids came from a more diverse selection of households, but they were still mean.  So, I stuck to myself most of the time.

Until, that is, I met another girl at church.  I recognized her from school and we started talking while we were waiting one day for the adults to decide what sort of activity we were going to do next.  Her family didn’t come with her to church.  She got rides from her neighbors.  Her name was (and is) Tina.  Tina and I became fast friends, bonding over My Little Ponies, Cabbage Patch Kids and all of the little playthings that attract kids to one another.  We also went to church together, finding the sermons boring, but sitting through them dutifully.  Tina’s dad, I would eventually learn, had a drinking problem.  Her mom did a majority of the caring for their family and was easily steamrolled.  By us, by her little brother, by her husband… it didn’t matter.  Still, Tina accepted me and I accepted her and we had great fun together, alone in our little world, fighting off the bullies and mean kids and going to church every Sunday.

When we got a little older, we joined the Calvinettes, a group for older girls like Busy Bees, which I went to when I was younger.  In Calvinettes, we each got a white scarf with a blue slider.  We worked through our little Calvinettes books to get different badges, which we would then sew onto our scarves.  Beyond knowing the gospels and taking little quizzes on portions of the New Testament, we earned badges by doing things like learning to decorate cakes, bake and do arts and crafts.  The boys, in the Cadets, in the meantime, got to do fun things like woodworking and law enforcement.  In this respect, my mother did her part to drag the Calvinettes kicking and screaming into the 80s.

Both of my parents were law enforcement, and my mother was big on telling me I shouldn’t let any sort of sexism get in the way with how I lived my life.  In fact, she did this through example (before this, she was a tow truck driver and after this, she was a machinist).  She didn’t like the fact that we were restricted to badges that encompassed the traditional female role, and after much wiggling, she got the organizers of the Calvinettes to agree to give us a law enforcement badge.  One of the state troopers came to our church and showed us how his car worked, how he clocked speeders, and talked to us about the importance of obeying the law and wearing our seat belts.  All of the girls participated and had a lot of fun.  Afterward, we went back and boldly sewed one of the boy’s badges onto our scarves.  The colors were entirely different and they didn’t match, but that made it all the more a badge of honor.

This wasn’t the first, nor would ti be the last, time my mom challenged the norms of our church, either.  She helped chaperone our events, taught Sunday school, sang in the choir, helped organize the Christmas and Easter programs and was the one who made sure - rain or shine, sickness or healthy - our family got up every Sunday morning, got dressed and went to church.  Dad wasn’t exactly a slouch, either.  He did a lot of handiwork around the church, attended a men’s Bible Study, went to evening services on Sundays (something typically only the adults did - it was a bit of a rite of passage when I was finally invited to go as well) and he did all of the a/v work for the church.

Our family was incredibly active with our church, yet we still remained a bit of an odd minority.  We were a lot more progressive than most of the people there.  Not far away, there was a town with actual’Footloose’ religious-imposed laws, and many of thsoe fundamentalist folks had decided to go to our church, bringing with them a lot of fundamentalism.  Along with their fundamentalism, they brought a lot of judgmental attitudes.  Much of our time there was an internal fight between us and them.  At one of the girl’s “lock in” slumber parties, my mom even went so far as to rent videos for us to wach that were plainly anti-fundamentalism, including Footloose itself.

Church, even these “fun” things, was always a chore to me.  It meant having to get up just as early on a Sunday as you did Monday through Friday, having to get dressed and having to go to school before you went and sat listening to a pastor for an hour or more.  Then, you’d have the distinct displeasure of having to wait for your parents to finish chatting with anyone that they found before you finally got to go home.  Sunday School was a constant repeat of the same things… teaching the basics of Christian morality, plus teaching again and again what faith is and why we should have it.  As if it were such a difficult thing to natural grasp (which it is) that we had to do it through nothing but rote repetition.

We stopped going to church when my mother could take the fundamentalism no longer, and when I started to turn into a teenager even less interested in spending my Sundays at church than I had been before.  To me, it was a relief, but I learned much later that to my mother it was a major defeat.  She felt the fundamentalists had won, and maybe she was right… but at least she did the right thing in removing her family from that atmosphere before it poisoned us even more.

Me, I still believed in God… and I still believed that through God, I could speak to my grandfather.  When I talked to God at night, it was often to pass on a message to my grandfather.  He was a huge part of the reason that I believed in the first place.  Some part of me kept thinking that if, maybe, I talked to God long enough, grandpa would end up being my guiding force.  The problem, though, was that it wasn’t working.

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