sr sue asked me to think about what i would need to make a commitment to catholicism. i've had that question hanging over me for awhile now. more so since sometime in march, when i had a meltdown one night in the car with P. i don't recall what sparked it, exactly, but i found myself crying pretty hopelessly, telling him i'm scared to lose my identity, that i don't want to do this. to his credit, he was nice about all of it; when i asked him how he would feel if i asked him to become a jehovah's witness he admitted that it would feel terrifying even though what they believe isn't too different. there's an identity bound up in that label.
i don't know that he'd thought about what i believe as an identity. in my experience, people with neat labels for their ideologies often treat the difficult-to-label as more or less nonexistent. i've been told before that bisexuals don't exist - you're just playing around or being selfish. that tendency carries across more categories than sexuality, i suppose. if you're not one of Us and you're not one of Them, you must not be anything at all.
when i was 15 or 16, i had a bunch of big fights with my dad. some of them i was having alongside the big fights i was having with my chronically lying, damaged, deeply religious boyfriend. sometimes they were the same fights. J wanted me to come to church with him, and my dad wanted me to come to the kingdom hall with him. i didn't especially want to do either. there were other tensions between us - dad came over once and i didn't have my little brother ready to leave the house and he started bawling me out. my response was to scream that i wasn't zach's parent and slam my hand into the door. you know, for emphasis. i hit one of the window panes and watched it break around my hand. we fought about things like that; his desire for me to be an obedient child and an adult simultaneously. he'd been antagonistic about my comic books for a long time, telling my mom that it was idolatry and she shouldn't let me read them. by this point, i still liked comic books, but i was also in my vampire-books, black-clothes, marilyn manson and bad religion in the cd player phase. he forbade all of it. and he forbade me to see or speak with my unsuitable, catholic boyfriend. like any melodramatic teenager in love, i stopped coming to his house every weekend; he pressured me, and i dug my heels in.
this is probably the defining moment of my teenage rebellion. i remember him threatening to take my mom to court if she didn't force me to come to his house. i remember telling him he could show up at the house to get me, but i wouldn't be there. he liked to think he wasn't like his dad, but they both always wanted things the way they wanted them. he just kept telling me i *would* come to his house, and i *would* come to the kingdom hall with him.
it's typical of me that i both could and couldn't see the big deal in all of this. i did not understand why it mattered to my dad that J was catholic, and i don't think i understood how much it mattered to J that i wasn't. but this i understood. like all witnesses, i'd been raised to believe that you didn't baptize babies, because they can't make that decision, they can't devote themselves to jehovah, and as much as parents might want to think otherwise, this isn't something they can do *for* a child. and so i knew, down in my bones, that you could not compel faith. to force me to come to the kindgom hall, when i wasn't sure i belonged there, seemed blasphemous to me.
at the time, i didn't know what to believe. the witnesses told me that women were a compliment/complement to men. they told me that my mother and my boyfriend wouldn't be in the new system. they told me that jehovah was all-powerful and all-seeing. and frankly, J's god seemed to say much the same thing. and it just didn't make sense to me. the inconsistencies of the bible couldn't be explained by telling me to have faith. i didn't feel any different from a man, and i knew transgendered people. why would you create this spectrum of gender and sexuality, just to cackle evilly and tell everyone to get back in their box? and, of course, like many people who have experienced trauma or abuse at first or second hand, i could not accept that compassion with the power to stop these things just didn't stop them. my father's father used to beat him, and so did J's dad. our dad terrorized us when he drank. it seemed to my unsophisticated mind that jehovah either couldn't stop these things, or wouldn't. if he couldn't, he was no better than me. if he wouldn't, i wanted nothing to do with him. but of course, i'd been raised in faith and you can't just walk away from that. i couldn't escape the feeling that there was something, or the feeling that i needed to go looking for it.
i remember being in the backyard during one of these fights and telling my dad that i just wanted him to accept that what i believed was just as important to me as what he believed was to him. it was one of those moments where i was actually being sincere or vulnerable, and got smacked for it. he said, in a disgusted, incredulous tone, "you don't believe *anything*." at the time, i didn't have the vocabulary or the confidence to explain myself, so i just went stubborn and silent, my usual plan B.
i was baffled by his reaction for years. after all, he'd fallen away from the witnesses for a long time, and had only recently come back. i don't think it occurred to me until this last year that he never stopped being a jehovah's witness; he just became a very bad one for a little while. but inside, he was always this, always devout.
we are what we're made. this is going to be an important point, whenever i get around to my actual point, i think. i am, always, my father's daughter. i set my will in opposition to his. i refused it when he tried to give me money once because i wanted to owe him nothing. i became someone who didn't drink, because he drank. i tried not to be him, and it shaped me. i look more like him than any of the other children. and in her most candid moments, my mother has told me how much like him i can be, how this worries her for me. i have his social awkwardness, his distance, his cynical mind and edged commentary. like him, i can be judgmental and overbearing in arguments. i'm observant, and when i am most angry or most hurt, i pull those observations out and use them to strip people naked. i could be him: an aging intellectual who never had the opportunity to develop his potential, isolated from friends and family, drinking alone to make the time pass. in some ways, i am the same shape as him, and in others my shape is defined by the white space of not being shaped like him.
the problem with calling god a father is that we all have one of those, one way or another. we mold god in the image of our dads, of what they were or what they wish they had been. my dad and J had a lot in common. god was someone to be feared, and to try to love, and to feel guilty - either for loving or for not loving. but for me, god was someone who told me to obey and didn't explain why. someone who was clearly flawed, but expected me to act like they were perfect. god was the naked emperor.
TBC
