The last post was about reclaiming happy childhood memories. I said I have many happy childhood memories. That is true, but there are some uncomfortable ones mixed in, and now that I am an adult with more understanding those create a confounding variable for my childhood. So I can look back at good times while still understanding how the foundation for abuse was laid, and that does tarnish the whole thing somewhat.

Some of the first memories I have that I can see were problematic are ones about the division between “the church” and “the world.” Anyone who didn’t go to my church was worldly. Anyone else remember that? Even Christians of the wrong denomination were worldly. As early as kindergarten I was hearing that my classmates were worldly and that I shouldn’t go along with them. Once we went to a barbeque fundraiser at the local community center, and my grandma escorted me away when a local dance group did a performance wearing tutu-style dresses that showed knees and shoulders. There was a girl in my class in the group and I remember wondering if this girl who was always nice to me was going to hell. We were eight or nine, and it was apparently bad for a bunch of kids at a community event to be dancing. Or like when I went to a friend’s birthday party, and my Mum wrote our phone number on my hand so I could call her to pick me up if people started singing or dancing. My friend’s uncle brought his guitar and we did a silly song/dance thing about some childish subject. It was so fun I forgot to feel guilty until after. We were seven or eight. I could keep going, but you get the point. I won’t even get started on the relatives we had who smoked.

Then there were the memories at home. My older siblings explaining to me what to say if CPS came. My Mum coaching me on what to tell the doctor, and listing off the things we can’t talk about at school. Mum explaining that parents are allowed to lie but kids have to tell the truth, even when we get punished for telling the truth. Or Mum explaining to me that age=morality, so if my older siblings lie and I call them out on it I’ll get punished for accusing them of lying because I’m younger. Or Mum explaining that girls can’t lie. Or the non-stop refusal to answer questions. Do people only have sex when they want a kid? Where does debt come from? Why isn’t the women’s lingerie locked up in a case at the store like the guns? Why does the government let bars operate? Who let that billboard company put a bathing suit ad up? You get the point, for some reason a lot of the stuff had to with the female body, particularly boobs and bellybuttons. This was before cheeky bikinis but during the 1990s Britney-crop top era.

As I hit the teen years the pressure changed. Suddenly I was somehow a sinner because girls wanted to talk to me. Not even in a flirtatious way, we just hit the point where suddenly young teens sit around talking about personal stuff instead of playing in the sand. Maybe I talked for five minutes to a girl my age who was wearing tight rip-off jean shorts and a white tank top and I’d get grilled for fifteen minutes about it. I joined a soccer team, and when I’d get home my Mum would ask me which of the girls wore shorts. Hint: all of them, it’s soccer. So from 12 years on I had to keep a mental list of what every girl I talked to wore for when I testified before the court of Mum. Real healthy.

And then the career stuff started. “don’t get a good job! That’s pursuing the love of money! Don’t get a worldly job! Jesus was a carpenter!” At some point the marriage pressure started. It wasn’t “you must get married now!” or “marry this person” but more of a general “you will get married young, so don’t get an education that keeps you from earning money young. And don’t look for someone compatible, just find someone else willing to get married young. It will all work out!” I think I might do a whole blog post on my family’s views on marriage.

I feel like fourteen-sixteen years old was a watershed period for me. A fourteen year-old boy is not an adult, but around then I started thinking more independently, and I started forming good relationships with people outside my family who helped me expand my thinking. So I can’t really include memories from after that.

 Here’s the thing. I eventually got my head out of those thoughts. When I was sixteen I went to a church youth event where the keynote speaker spoke about creating a positive marriage with a strong foundation based on mutual support and common values, with a good dose of financial stability. He also stressed that being single is not sinful, nor is it sinful to just be around girls in a positive environment. I remember walking out of that service feeling like a load was lifted off my shoulders, because at that point I had people in family saying you had to be married by the time you were twenty or so, and I was getting close to that. In other situations I talked to older guys that I respected about how they found their way in career decisions, and that helped me have a more realistic idea of what to do than “take the first trades job you find and trust that the Lord will fill your vessel.” Because working a minimum wage job and cranking out babies with a random wife always works out.

But some of my siblings didn’t have that same exit. Some of them thought they were destined for hell because they were single adults, since we are supposedly saved through marital sex. What verse says the vagina is essential for eternal salvation? So some of them figured if they can’t have marital sex they’d just have extra-marital sex and hope God counted that. They were so desperate for salvation they didn’t care about consent. Same thing with money, they were afraid to make too much money, but saw nothing wrong with theft from family members to get by. Because stealing from Christians is more godly than earning money from companies owned by sinners. And then the classic “you go to hell if you take medication” which brought its own challenges. Like hallucinations and violent outbursts and social problems.

I wonder if the most harmful part of this upbringing was the desperation to protect the family reputation (and legal status) by never telling outsiders about what was happening Because if people had felt comfortable getting help maybe the abuse would never would have happened. I have memories of key points where someone could have gotten help, but they apparently twisted around the situation. At one point my mother was having issues with paranoid thoughts and she told me she was going to talk to our pastor about it. I sort of thought that meant she’d get help. Years later I found out that when she said “get help” she meant get him on her side against me, not talk about her untreated mental health issues. So instead she complained about me living in sin. The sin was that I got a job at a company that hired both men and women, my Mum wanted me in a single-gender company to preserve my purity.

To my pastor’s credit, he explained to my Mum that having female co-workers is not a sin, and that it’s not a church leader’s role to pressure young men to change jobs. I don’t know if they discussed her paranoid tendencies. You’d think that would be the end of it, but that started several years of my Mum warning me to not talk to my pastor, her “seeking help” made things worse. Welp. I also remember my siblings saying they’d rather go to prison than admit to struggling, or that they would go to hell if our pastor found out they were struggling. Because apparently he decides that, not the all-knowing God they professed to believe in. Of course, if you get arrested for certain things people find out eventually, it’s hard to quietly slink off to prison without anyone talking. Especially if the girl’s parents tell people.

Anyhow, back to talking about how these memories mess with good memories. Until I was maybe fourteen I didn’t know that things could be different. It was just normal to protect the family secrets. It was normal to go to school and have fun with kids and then come home and get questioned about it. So normal that it didn’t even get me down. I’d be in fear for a few minutes waiting for Mum to investigate, I’d try to act casual as she gave me that suspicious “I don’t believe anything you say” glare, and then when it was over I’d run outside and forget about it.

I had plenty of innocent, childish, non-sexual fun with girls at school and then lied to my Mum about it. And yes, some of them were good-looking. I think I had my first crush in grade 2 during a gym class baseball game when a girl did a victory dance and I couldn’t look away. We were young and clueless, get over it. In middle school I hung out with an awesome girl a bunch. Nothing sexual, no relationship, not even random “I like you” boners, I just liked being with her. Her looks were incidental, even if I was sufficiently aware to know she was good-looking. It was around late spring in grade 10 when I had several classes in the un-air-conditioned part of the school that I really started to notice my classmates.  I still occasionally remember English class when I watch the music video for Complicated by Avril Lavigne. Fortunately, by the time I realized I was a raging heterosexual I was old enough to not let my parents find out. And guess what? I got through public school without ever holding a hand, kissing a girl, or feeling anyone up. The fact that I was a horny teen, as God created me, didn’t mean I was necessarily going to commit fornication or licentiousness. I just happened to know some nice people who also happened to have boobs.

Pardon me for maybe saying “boobs” and “boner” too much, I feel like Christians need to get at talking about bodies, sex, gender, etc, instead of vague references to “the sins of the modern age” or “youthful indiscretion” or whatever catch-phrases your church used. Clitoris, orgasm, butthole, consent, two-way communication, boundaries, credit card, Chrome Incognito, pornography of varying degrees of legality and harm, erectile dysfunction. There, a few more things to mention.  

But now when I look back I see how others suffered. I was mostly clueless and mostly happy. I know other people who nearly killed themselves or ended up in prison or homeless on drugs or divorced because of what they went through, the constant condemnation and pressure of their upbringing broke them. So when I remember my happy childhood I also end up remembering the eventual result, both for me and my family and friends.

I think I might have to do a post on what it’s like watching people come out from that mentality. But in a way I wouldn’t like that, it would be me talking about someone else’s experience based on what little I know. I’d have to be careful.

One of the many sad elements of abuse is that people can lose a part of themselves when good memories are corrupted by abuse. I grew up in a mostly happy family, and I was to young and clueless to see the groundwork for future abuse being laid. And I was so used to what mistreatment I experienced it didn’t really get me down. So I have many happy memories, especially of typical experiences with my siblings. We had a big house, a big yard, no money, and lots of free time.

But then the same people I had a good childhood with turned on me when I became an adult. They often used our connection against me, emotionally imploring me to be nice to them and enable their violence, or in a hurt voice asking why I would threaten to call the cops on family members. Or talk about how in a loving family we make all decisions together, so if I wanted safety for myself and my younger siblings we should “have a family vote”, as if the right to control access to your own body and spirituality is a family voice. Read between the lines on that.

After my family kicked me out for refusing to be an enabler and for refusing to join their collective abuse I went for about six years without seeing some of my siblings. Then, over a period of about three years, I sort of integrated back into the family. Sort of. I’d go to family events and discretely stay across the room from some people, or make sure I was never alone with others. I suspect my family has no idea what is going on. They probably think that because I’m around again the violence and abuse have ceased to matter.

I can be around them again because they’ve chilled out. Medication can, in the right context, be an amazing thing. When my family members finally admitted they had serious issues and saw a psychiatrist they improved rapidly. When someone isn’t hallucinating or flying into a violent rage at the slightest insult (like someone getting to the washing machine first) they become more capable of living a normalish life and rebuilding relationships. But some things can be medicated away because they aren’t medical symptoms. Messed up ideas about teenage sexuality and semi-arranged marriage don’t disappear as psych meds tinker with neurotransmitters. People can learn restraint and get to the point where they can keep their mouths shut, but that doesn’t necessarily eliminate harmful behaviour. Problematic actions can keep happening. Like trying to negotiate memory, where someone asks me a question and after I say three sentences about what I experienced they try to argue me into remembering their memory instead. Or the usual “are you sure you remember that correctly? You are bipolar, maybe you’re making this up.” Sound familiar?

Anyhow, back to losing good memories. For years after I was kicked out the family I couldn’t think about my childhood. I could have mental images of good times, but the sight of my siblings’ faces in the memories brought up painful memories, and it was easier to just cut out a part of who I was. And that sucks. We’re formed by who we are. I’m still the same person now that I was when I was a kid, and I do the same things. Sort of. I have expensive woodworking tools and buy tropical hardwood instead of using old tools from my grandfather and garbage-picked wood, but it’s the same interest. My current bike actually has brakes, but I still love biking in all weather, just like in childhood. Seriously, biking in the rain is beautiful. You get the point. But I lost a part of who I was when I cut out those memories.

Rediscovering them has been painful. Part of the process has been realizing that the people who screwed me up also helped form me, they are a part of who I am. I was a little kid playing with my older siblings’ stuff. They took me places. I wanted to be just like them. I loved them. That’s part of why the abuse hurt so much. If a random drunk on the street had attacked me and yelled at me about rape I could have brushed it off. But bit by bit I have realized that my siblings were different people then. They hadn’t yet discovered r/incel, they hadn’t gotten into far-right politics, they hadn’t gotten involved with other people of a similar mentality. We were all innocent then.

Realizing this has helped me reclaim something that nobody has a right to take away. Those are my memories, I made them and I own them. Oddly enough, it has helped me partially reconnect to my siblings. Things will never be the same. People toss around the world forgiveness or healing or reconciliation in this naïve belief that if you yell forgiveness enough you can eradicate trauma and restore the pre-trauma relationship. That doesn’t happen. Violence and abuse end relationships, you can’t restore the relationship. In some instances new relationships between those people can be formed, other times they are gone forever. This can’t be forced, it must be done on the initiative of the abused as they heal. If they heal in that direction, not all do.

I’m at a point where childhood memories no longer cause me pain. I can remember happy times without what came after corrupting it. but it took me about a decade to get there, and a lot of bike rides and canoe trips to process stuff where nobody could see me. Mentally processing trauma can be a very physical event.

Anyhoo, do what you want with this. I say don’t let abusive people take away your memories, reclaim them if you can. But if you don’t feel ready to go there, then don’t. Look after yourself.

Damn it, I cried writing this. My eyes hurt.

I might at some point come back and edit this to add a picture that somehow represents my childhood memories, but I’m trying to avoid too much identifiable material. So maybe just imagine a little boy on an old 1980s bicycle flying down a muddy farm path and then coming home and walking through the house dropping mud everywhere.