Hannah Unincorporated

I left the church three years ago. The rage and despair I feel grow in tandem each day.

Another mom finds me today at the children’s museum, and I recognize her instantly, she is the one from my Very Last Church, the last one I tried before giving up.

She approaches me with small talk, about kindergarten for our children, do I have a membership to the museum, what a busy day it is, and oh, her son is going to kindergarten in the fall, but don’t worry, not an eight-hour-a-day kindergarten, just a CHRISTIAN kindergarten, and it’s two hours long, not eight hours.”

She puts great emphasis on the word. 

I wasn’t worried. I guess she was.

“Oh, okay, nice,” I say, trying to keep things neutral. 

“Because he’s a difficult child, I can’t just homeschool him,” she says, just a few feet away from where he is playing, from where he can hear her. “And he doesn’t want to learn from me.”

She drones on, but I’m back to my own kitchen table at ten years old, pinching my skin between my fingernails until I bleed because I, too, was a difficult child, and couldn’t focus on my homework. They called it disobedience. This is why God had to die, Hannah. Because of you.

She asks me where my son is going to school, and I answer hazily with the name of the program, mentioning I can’t afford to stay home, I think it’ll be good support for my (probably ADHD like me) kid, trying to stave off the inevitable. It comes regardless.

I didn’t even start this conversation, I didn’t ask for this, but she says it anyway, “Oh, you think that will be BETTER? You think a public school will be better?” Her voice is sickly sweet, disdainful, she’s waiting for me to say something, but I can’t do this, I can’t have this argument, so I leave somehow. I escape. 

Tirian doesn’t need to see my fight with some mom in the children’s museum, I tell myself. I couldn’t even if I wanted to, the Good Girl haziness is so heavy, I think I smiled at her and said it was nice to see her as I was leaving (it wasn’t), have a nice day (have the day you deserve). 

I call my mother in law later, she still attends the same church. I don’t know why I call her. I shouldn’t, I already know she will try to placate me, and I don’t want to be placated. I get placated, she tells me that if the church kicked out all the sinners there would be nobody left, and I stand holding the phone, burning with rage, cold and numb on the outside. 

I say things back that stop her, at least for the moment. “How far do I have to run from the church to escape these people?” and “How is literally anyone supposed to attend a church when all the church people act like this” and “How is there no recognized difference between brokenness and mistakes versus attaching the name of Jesus to unrepentant pride?” but at the end I just end the call and slam the dishes around in the kitchen, because it doesn’t matter, not really, and it won’t change her mind, not really. It’s the undying evangelist in me, always trying to convince un-convincable people, even now that the gospel keeps me up at night instead of helping me sleep.

Escaping the chains I was born into is always bound up in these tiny moments, and I am cut through with loneliness and grief at the duality of it–I love these people, I love them, and I hate them. I should just leave, and not care what people think, but the authoritarianism runs too deep to escape, I do care what they think, I care too much.

The woman at the museum didn’t bother to ask any meaningful questions, and if she did, I wouldn’t have told her anyways, how having a baby nearly killed me, what it was like to get a DID diagnosis with a two year old, the nights delivering pizza and working at bars on top of my day job to pay for an apartment and go to therapy to try and put myself back together in time to be his mother. How I lost my marriage. What it’s like to meet the parts of your soul one by one and call them all by their own names. How the church, the ones who forbade birth control, left me to die when I couldn’t be a mother. 

I didn’t tell her because she didn’t ask.

And I didn’t tell her because she wouldn’t care.

Christianity doesn’t let you care, at least not any form of it that I’ve found. And no, I’m not asking, so if you’re here to convince me, don’t bother. 

I don’t want pity. I want more for her, even for that girl at the children’s museum, for her son. I want more for my son. I want more for me, even though I don’t say it that way to the Christians, because it’s Pride or Greed or something, but truly, I just want to live, I just want to be okay, I just want to know a God who is gentle, if one exists at all. 

I don’t know if I’ll do this blog, if I’ll even post more than this one, singular post. It’s so hard to encompass everything here, and I guess I can’t, but there is a part of me that misses church and community.

The blogs and books from other people leaving in hope of something better is what gave me the courage to come this far, so I guess I’m putting this out into the universe for the sake of someone like me. I escaped the prison that the church built around me because of those people, and maybe I’ll be that person for someone.

My faith now is placed that there is light to be found at the other end, and to say to others, “Courage, Dear Heart.”