“Sometimes I think gravity
was like: to be brutally honest…& then
never stopped talking. I guess what I mean
is that I ate the apple not because the man lied
when he said I was born of his rib
but that I wanted to fill myself with its hunger
for the ground”
—Ocean Vuong, “The Last Dinosaur”1
Does it always start so innocuously? At my own kitchen table, with my daughter and a second grade math word problem. One moment we’re chugging along, let’s-get-this-done-baby, and the next I’ve stopped reading in the middle of a sentence, vision closing down to a single dark tunnel and the roar of an incoming wave in my ears. This is how old trauma hits me, especially when I don’t realize it’s there. Despite so many attempts to find stillness in meditation, my mind is only without thought for any longer than a few seconds when I’m riding the crest of a wave like this, and the only way I can fill the screen abandoned by my own words is to trace the ones that released this breaker over and over again in my mind, like a tongue examining the tender space left by a tooth it only just missed. I am not even sure what it is that I’m reading, I seem to have translated it as: “If God put all of Eve’s self-worth and dignity in one piece of fruit; and if Eve, not knowing, took only one bite before handing it over to Adam; which of them would forever be blamed for the act?” That is not what it says, just one tiny trigger too many; and now I am realizing that it’s going to take a shit-ton of work to get me back on dry ground in one piece. I can’t even start now, because we’re in the middle of a mother-loving math lesson and it’s a school day, and I’m the only responsible adult available at the moment. Even still, I see them. The ticker-tape of moving images that marches down the tunnel, drawing me behind it as inexorably as air filling burnt space. I am slow rolling thunder, sweet baby. Give mommy a minute, OK?
I thought the damn book was an answer to unspoken prayer. It was filled with pictures of farm animals and cute animated drawings of twin kids, Charlie and Charlotte2, and each lesson began with a story about them. I thought, Yes! This will get Rena and me through the perilous first year of school. And it did, so we got the second book, and she’s loving it, too. But I have been feeling increasingly uneasy. Now that the twins are seven they are being treated unequally. Charlotte helps her mother to cook and care for their baby sister. Charlie builds stuff with his dad in the barn. Charlie eats more than his (twin, remember?) sister, always. A lot more. She shudders delicately when he teases her with a Play-Doh snake. She is described with words like sweet, kind, patient, gentle, and polite. He is described with words like enthusiastic, rambunctious, impatient, hungry, and mischievous. Their parents and grandparents spend more money on treats and toys for Charlie than they do for Charlotte (that one hurt). And perhaps worst of all, Charlie seems to be smarter than his sister. He tends to be quicker to answer questions, especially the harder questions. Or maybe he’s just bolder with thinking he knows the answer. Either way, he usually speaks first. And he’s always right. She doesn’t get it wrong, she just takes longer, seeming more cautious, less sure of herself. Yeah. That might’ve been it right there. Or, maybe all of it together. Words are powerful, and some have been absorbed so deeply and over so many years that it no longer matters if they are true, they simply are. Now, I’ve stopped seeing the little blond, smiling kids, and all I see is myself.
I see me the day my younger brother gets his own shovel to help our dad dig a septic trench in the yard. We barely knew our dad back then, he was completely devoted to his job. And even though I hadn’t had a burning desire to play in mud even back then, it felt like he only wanted to spend time with my brother. Actually, it still feels that way. The shovel was followed by his own tool set, then his first gun, then a hatchet, then bigger guns. I am also taught to shoot (“a girl should be able to hunt to feed her family or shoot to defend herself”). I am not taught to chop wood, or how to fix plumbing problems, or wire an outlet without burning down the house. These are a man’s jobs. I am taught to cook, clean, do laundry, sew a patch, purchase groceries on a budget, plant a garden, change a diaper, wear a baby. All useful things. I spend my youth cleaning men’s piss off the bathroom walls and floor. It is a woman’s job.
I see myself at twelve, puberty a furnace burning the childhood out of me. In desperation at losing half my hair and it still falling out, I swear to God that I will cover my head like my mother does if only He will stop me from losing all my beautiful hair. It works, and I keep my promise. Well into my teens, and sick to death of being asked if I’m Amish and hiding my now thick and even curlier locks, my dad gives me permission to stop wearing the head coverings. A father can release his daughter from a vow made to God, he says. It is Biblical, the only circumstances under which such a vow can be released. He is being kind, assuaging my guilt over not wanting to keep my promise anymore. I am relieved, and also uneasy. A girl under her father’s care, according to the Bible, is not a person at all.
I see me at seventeen, allowed out of my parent’s sight for the first time and not at the house of a friend but the Christian ranch where I used to take riding lessons before becoming a volunteer trail guide and instructor. My brother pitches a fit. The next year, only sixteen, he is allowed to get a job with the township. He has his own money. He is trusted with living life responsibly outside the home.
I see me with my new body filling out the dress a family friend gave me, one she had made for her own senior dance. When she and her husband come for dinner I put it on to show her, so proud of this magical garment that makes my short, stocky body look elegant and womanly. Until her husband makes a dirty remark about the way it fits me, and nobody says a word. She and my mother shield me in my now shameful dress with their own bodies, hustle me back into my bedroom, safe out of sight. She says she doesn’t remember it being that low cut, her eyes apologizing to my mother, who scolds me later for wearing the dress where everyone could see me. I should have stayed in the bedroom ankle deep in my sisters’ toys, should have asked just our friend to come in. I apologize to my father and brother, neither of whom have said one single word, for embarrassing them. No one tells me to do this. No one has to.
“Pluck out your eye. If you don’t,
think of Eve, naked and ashamed.
Better to be blind. Better to starve
than be exiled from your Father’s love.”
—Elizabeth Johnston Ambrose, “Her Father Talks to Her About Sex”3
I see me when my dad signs me up for college classes. Accounting, like his mother, who fed her four kids by keeping the books for businesses and doing people’s taxes, all from home. There is no mention of the stories I have been writing and rewriting since I was twelve. He is paying for the classes, wants to take the first ones with me; I do not argue. Later, he will joke that it was mostly “to keep me busy” until I got married.
I see me when one of the older boys in church compliments me on having outperformed my dad on an Accounting test. He very rarely spoke to me at the time and I was caught off guard, responding awkwardly that the only reason I scored better was because I had more time to study than my dad did. He said it was “very modest of me” to say that. I wanted to scream, “I’m a good Christian girl. What the hell else would I be?”
I devour all the Christian magazine articles on modest dress, listen closely to the swimsuit advice on Christian kid’s radio. I use the three-finger rule for my neckline, buy only knee-length shorts, three-quarter- or full-length skirts and dresses, shirt sleeves that cover my armpits, and absolutely nothing made of stretchy, clingy fabric. When in doubt, they say, model an outfit for your dad or brother. The men always know what’s appropriate.
I see me voting, my first adult right, holding the piece of scrap paper my dad filled out for me as a reference. We are a family, we think alike.
I see me in my first car; only, I didn’t know it was mine. Dad told my brother it was “our car” for driving to college, bribery to get my brother to go. Naturally, my brother thought that meant it was his car. I rarely drove it, and only alone. Until he wrecked it, that is.
I see me reading all those parental-sanctioned books about girls wistfully waiting. Slender, delicate, doe-eyed girls in modest dresses. I try. I try so hard. Dad calls me his “dainty little dumpling” whenever I do something he thinks is unladylike, with a fond smile on his face. I don’t feel soft and doughy. I feel strong, sturdy. I can throw as many hay bales as my brother. Apparently, slender maidens don’t throw hay bales. My parents don’t know about the other books, the ones about girls who didn’t wistfully wait. The ones that bring heat to my awkward, un-maidenly body. The shame of both feels equally heavy.
“Think of those girls, opening their legs.
Suffer. Your whole body burns.
Cut off your tongue. Cut out your heart.
Throw it away. Better for you.”
—Elizabeth Johnston Ambrose, “Her Father Talks to Her About Sex”
I see me the first time a boy at a revival meeting asks me to sit with him. I tell my mother where I will be, just across the open sanctuary from where she and my brother and sisters are sitting. Her face is a storm brewing. She says nothing as loudly as I’ve ever heard. I fidget, I twitch, and finally, part way through the sermon, I fetch my little sister to sit with the boy and me. Later, my mother will “ask” me if that wasn’t my own conscience squirming. I am never asked to sit with the normal teenagers again, the ones who don’t wear shapeless denim dresses and cover their hair with a folded handkerchief. It is so much easier not trying to fit in.
I see me when I ask my parents if I can get a job at a grocery store that is hiring. I’m twenty, and money is tight, and I have horses to think of. I am told ‘no’. I am needed at my dad’s store. And anyway, a girl working “outside” would almost certainly be working for a man, and “that’s just not a good idea, to put yourself in that position.” A woman is always under the power of a man. If that man is not her father or husband, than he will most likely abuse it.
I see me during the months of my courtship, too stressed about doing it right and avoiding the appearance of evil to even think about what I needed to know about the man I wanted to marry. Mostly, I wanted out, and that didn’t scare me nearly as much as it should have.
I see me engaged, finally getting to hold hands, hug, touching just enough to learn to want, to feel my body expanding, my skin burning with the constraints of not now and inappropriate. This chunk of flesh, I had been taught, was not a thing that I could trust, but a husband could be trusted with it. A husband saves a girl from her own shameful body.
I see me on my wedding day being passed from one man to another; a charge, a thing to be cared for and carried around, a burden lost and found. And I, I was dancing with the freedom that I didn’t yet know I actually had.
I see me newly married, realizing that everything I have been taught about men and women is misguided, and unfair to both. Women are not really that powerless. Men do not really want that much power. I feel the wonder and the confusion. I am beginning to realize how lucky I am. You mean…I belong to myself? You want me to be myself? Who the hell is that?
“Mommy? Mommy!”
I blink. Here I am, safe in my own kitchen. My daughter is staring at me, ready to continue the lesson. She has no idea what has just happened. But she will. When she is old enough, she will know it all. She will not be a non-person, not for one single day of her beautiful life, not if I can stop it. She and her sister will know a different way to become, and it starts with this pain. It starts with the helpless rage, and the anger, the humiliation and shame and self-loathing. It starts with feeling it all again, so my girls will know that the feelings will pass, and do not need to be clung to and passed on. It does not start with blame. I do not have the right to tell my parents’ stories, and so I can neither accuse nor excuse them. But I can exfoliate this shame4 from myself by telling the truth as I know it, in my own words, because it is time. See? It’s even Biblical.
“A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in a setting of silver.”
—Proverbs 25:11, ESV5
And, dear God, “If you are a thing with ears,”6 make my tongue silver. Make it smooth enough to fit these golden apples into a frame I can hang on my bedroom wall. A picture with no serpent and no Adam being tempted by something round and lush and sweet inside, something that tastes like freedom and ends with exile and painful childbearing. All I have is my own story to offer as memorial to all of those whose stories will never be told. This may not be much, but the truth that pulled me out of my kitchen table shame spiral was knowing that my story has power. Maybe not in and of itself, because it is hardly unique. I have heard enough stories like mine to know that real oppression exists within the God-over-men-over-women model upheld by fundamental Christianity, and this oppression has done real damage; not only to the women living under that model, but to the men as well. Healing from the trauma of oppression is a process as unique as the individual, but it often starts with recognizing that we are not alone.
I see you, I see all of you. We are connected, and so I am every human who has ever known shame, and yet I have no right to tell your story, either.
Know that your shame was never yours at all.
Know that your pain is still felt, and will not be forgotten.
Let it be enough: for one golden moment, feel yourself whole.
“O sister, dropped seed—help me—
I was made to die but I’m here to stay.”
—Ocean Vuong, “The Last Dinosaur”
Let us begin to rewrite the story. Let us imagine that from the seed of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil grew another tree called Experience. King Solomon, author of the book of Proverbs, would later call her Wisdom. She is every lesson ever learned, the greatest of all teachers. To her we bring our children and together we stand and stare up into her multitude of twisted branches, and we say, “these are all the ways of Being that we know of. None of them are perfectly straight. They are gnarled and scarred and knobby with decisions made poorly or not made at all. See there? That’s my branch. Now it is time to add your own. Be mindful of your own space and that of others, and always grow towards the light.”
Then we shut up, step back, and trust them to ask the right questions in their own time. Words are powerful: especially the truths that have grown deep within us and have ripened into ideas we can plant in the minds of those who think we are worth hearing.
I look into my daughters eyes and smile. She smiles back, relieved, mirroring me.
I am slow rolling thunder, sweet baby. And so are you.
Vuong, Ocean. Time is a Mother. “The Last Dinosaur.” Penguin Press. 2022.
O’Dell, Angela, and Carlson, Kyrsten. Math Lessons for a Living Education: Level 2. Master Books. Green Forest, AR. 2020. First printing March 2016.
Ambrose, Elizabeth Johnston. Imago, Dei. “Her Father Talks to Her About Sex.” Rattle. Studio City, CA. 2022.
The term “exfoliation of shame” was used by Australian Stand-Up performing artist and author Hannah Gadsby on Glennon Doyle’s podcast, We Can Do Hard Things, aired March 29th, 2022.
The Holy Bible: English Standard Version. Crossway Bibles. 2001.
Acevedo, Elizabeth. The Poet X. HarperCollins. 2018.