There are seven children around the table. My youngest brother has yet to be born. When he is, he will bring the total to eight. But for now, there are seven children circled around the broad oak table in the kitchen. The dishwasher hummed and ratted and the counters were wiped clean. The floors are swept and all that remained of our breakfast of biscuits and gravy and milk was the white crust around my sister Ruthie’s mouth. She was four, with dark mischievous eyes and curly pigtails, which she would pull out the first chance she got. She sat next to Cathy, who was seven and had curly blonde pigtails. Cathy always left hers in. Then, there was Becky, nine, with a valance of blonde hair above her gray-green eyes. Zach and I sat next to each other, our freckles and our brown hair got us mistaken for twins. He was eleven, I was twelve. We had the same crooked smile. Caleb, the baby was sitting in the highchair. Finally Jessie, fourteen, with a tangle of curly hair and freckles sprinkled lightly across her nose. She was wearing makeup. While we were getting dressed I had asked her who she was putting it on for.
She told me, “It’s important for a young woman to look nice and perhaps you could learn something from my example.”
I wetted the cowlick on the back of my hair, combed it with my fingers and told her to “Shut up.”
She ran to tell mom that I said “shut up.” It’s a forbidden word, along with “get” “got” “thing” (because they are examples of lazy language) and “gee” “gosh” and “darn” (because they are too close to “Jesus” “God and “Damn.”) All of these words are also laminated and taped to the wall near the spoon that hangs above my mother’s head.
My mother is sitting at the head of the table. The Bible is open in front of her. Behind her, taped to the wall, are laminated pieces of paper. Some have Latin words. Others have Bible verses. In the middle of this patchwork of our education is the spoon. A large wooden spoon with the words, “Whoever spares the rod hates their children, but the one who loves their children is careful to discipline them,” written in my mother’s careful handwriting on the bowl. There is a long crack that runs through the Proverb from where the spoon was broken on Jessie’s behind.
We bow our heads to pray. School has begun.
Every day our first and last lesson came from the Bible. First from our mother, who read to us at the head of the table and then, from my father, who read to us as we squeeze together on the couch, spilling over onto the salmon-colored carpet of our Texas ranch home.
That day, as we balanced on the squeaking wooden chairs with our notebooks, worn, torn and hand-me-down, in front of us, my mother read from Psalm 68. She read with her head tilted down as if in prayer.
She was trying to teach us to pray the words from the Bible.
She wanted us to “hide God’s word in our hearts.” And she told us stories about people persecuted, enslaved, and ruined; people who, in their misery, would recite God’s word out loud and find comfort. Many of the people she mentions are Jews, trapped in concentration camps.
“People who are in misery,” she said, her voice tense, “can call out on the name of the Lord and He will deliver them. Corrie Ten Boom, who served in a concentration camp for trying to save Jews in Nazi Germany found strength from the word of God that she had memorized and hidden in her heart. I too know the power of God’s comfort every morning when I have my quiet time.”
She closed her eyes and raised her hands.
“In God, whose word I praise,
in the Lord, whose word I praise—
in God I trust and am not afraid.
What can man do to me?”
We children sat on our hands listening to my mother’s voice cry out to God over the thunking of our ancient dishwasher: “God sets the lonely in families, he leads out the prisoners with singing; but the rebellious live in a sun-scorched land.”
Baby Caleb began to applaud by banging his hands on his highchair. “Yay!” he cried. “Amen!”
We children giggled and our mother grimaced. The lesson was over.
“Time for Latin roots,” my mom said and we groaned. I groaned the loudest because I didn’t want anyone to know how much I loved the lesson.
Behind my mother, taped to the wall were the Latin roots we’d covered that year. Ante, acer, acid, acri, alli, allo, alter, alt(us), am, amor. Today’s word is anthrop: man.
My mom reviews them with us. She pointed to a card, “What words begin with ‘Ante-‘?”
“Antebellum.”
“Antemortem.”
“Antechamber.”
Next word. “What words begin with ‘acri-‘?”
“Acrimonious.”
“Acrid.”
I like these word puzzles. I try to listen and think of words I know with the roots in them. It’s like finding a secret door in an old familiar house.
“What words have the root ‘anthrop’ in them?” My mother asks. Chairs squeak and the dishwasher thumps. “Think, children. Anthrop. Like anthropology, the study of man. Anthrop.”
“Philanthropy!” I shouted, a little too excited. “That must mean loving man or something. Right?”
In history we learned about Philadelphia, the city of love. And in the Bible we read about how Paul, the apostle talks to the Philippians. Our pastor has also told us how Paul spoke to them in brotherly love, a love we ought to have for one another. Putting all of these pieces together, I felt like Nancy Drew.
My sister rolled her eyes at me. My brother sighed.
“Good job!” My mother said. I’m proud, but when she asked for another word, I pretended I wasn’t thinking of misanthrope. Zach looked like he wanted to elbow me.
My mom orders us to write the Latin roots in our notebooks. Mine notebook is from last year and I struggle to find a clean page. Becky complained that she has no more room.
“Use the other side of the paper,” my mom snapped.
Caleb was fussing, so we moved to the living room. Caleb, Ruthie and Cathy were allowed to play, while my mother wrestled with the stereo and Jessie, Becky, Zach and I climbed onto the couch in the dark family room. The room had a brick floor and when we moved in there was an opening for a bar. My father put drywall in the opening and my mother hung one of her favorite quilts over it. The bar was turned into another pantry, where we stored 10-gallon buckets of flour, sugar, and wheat grain. The adjacent wall was lined with oak shelves and cupboards. It’s here where my mom keeps our schoolbooks, pens, pencils and paper. Despite being connected to the sunroom, the family room is dark and always cool.
Often, in the summer, when the Texas heat bore down on our home, my mother would frantically draw the blinds to all the windows. “Keep them closed!” She would yell at us. And for a few seconds, I would think, “This is it, it’s the rapture. We aren’t allowed to see outside because it’s raining blood and we haven’t gone up to see Jesus.”
But then, I would peek out the window and all I would see is the hot sun bouncing white off the crushed gravel driveway. It’s not the end of the world just yet. And, I feel relieved, but guilty, because we are all supposed to eagerly await Christ’s return. But I don’t.
It was the fall, so the shades are open and the morning sun is blocked by the oaks that marshal up from the creek behind our house. Mom pulled the stereo out from one of the cupboards. Zach groaned. It was time to listen to the tapes.
My mom found the tapes at a homeschool conference where she was looking for Christian textbooks. She came back with an armful of books that call evolution a hypothesis (“a theory must be proven”) and discuss the existence of dinosaurs (“it wasn’t long ago that man and dinosaur shared the earth”). She also carried a series of cassette tapes she purchased from a family that has 20 children.
My mom described the family in glowing terms. “They are kind and respectful to their parents,” she said, eyeing us over the rims of her glasses. “The girls wear skirts.” Another look, this time toward Jessie who has refused to wear the dresses my mother picks out for her.
“And the whole family built the house they live in.” She was rewinding the tape and we could hear it whir uneasily. I hope the stereo eats the tape. But there is the thunk, click—the tape stops. My mom hit Play. Zach elbowed me. I pinched him.
“Stop it!” Jessie yelled at us.
We were at the part of the tape where one of the daughters describes her temptations to flirt and to date. “But I know my parents are wise and Godly and they believe that courting is God’s plan for my life. My father will protect my purity, until I am blessed to marry a Godly man. Some people think courting sounds so old-fashioned. But who wouldn’t want the help and guidance of their parents, the people who love them the most next to God?”
As I listened to this girl, I pictured her, standing at a podium (we can hear an audience shuffling on the tapes). I imagined her white face framed by thick hair that is brushed into a ponytail, her long skirt falling to her calves. She is, of course, wearing long sleeves. She is speaking carefully, looking into the crowd and spotting the ones with the painted nails, the purple eyeliner and the thick rebellious lips and pleading with them.
“It’s hard to wait for God’s timing,” she continued. “But in that time of waiting devote yourself to learning God’s word, hide it in your heart, learn the skills to create a Godly household.”
Zach drew pictures of men with guns in his notebook. Jessie rested her head in her hands, elbows digging into the arm of the couch. My mom’s head tilted to the side. She looked at us, but in those moments she didn’t see us. The little kids were gone, a trail of toys left clues to their whereabouts—anywhere but here. The tapes were long.
“Give your heart to your father,” the girl said. In my mind she clutched the podium, two small spots of red on her cheeks. Perhaps she would say she was feeling the presence of the Lord, or that the Holy Spirit was laying this “on her heart” for the audience.
“He will protect you. God has given him to you to care for you. To guard your purity. Use your time of singleness for the Lord. Devote yourself to him and HE will give you the desires of your heart.”
I wondered if she would ever get married.
That spring, Jessie and I went to a conference with our church youth group. Joshua Harris, was the speaker and we all donned our best scrunchies for the event. Joshua Harris was the author of a magazine for evangelical homeschooled teens called New Attitude (Ed. note–Which I choose to believe he named in honor of the Patti LaBelle song), which ran articles on how popular culture was a godless influence alongside lighthearted features about how girls could wear fashion trends modestly. One article was written as a response to the Joan Osborne song, “What if God Was One of Us” and replied to every line of the song with a Bible verse.
Christians, the article argued, ought to avoid that song because we only ever thing on the things that are pure and hold. A few years later, Joshua Harris would shut down the magazine and publish I Kissed Dating Goodbye, a book that condemned dating as a sinful practice and argued instead for the return to courtship, where couples were matched by their parents and spent time together doing supervised and chaste activity.
This book led to national notoriety for Harris, who eventually became the pastor of the Covenant Life megachurch in Washington D.C. But even before then, when he was just 19, Joshua Harris was as close to a homeschooled celebrity as they came.
Consequently, in the eyes of the two thousand evangelical teenagers gathered in that Dallas megachurch, Joshua Harris was our holy heartthrob. It’s not like we had other options. Or holy options, that is. Like so many of our peers, my sister and I had been shielded from popular culture. Unless it was Sesame Street or Disney films, we were not allowed to turn on the TV. Of course we snuck peeks at “Petticoat Junction” reruns while mom was at Sam’s, and greedily watched Nickelodeon at the neighbor’s house, when we could, but despite our best efforts, our world was small.
Even the music we listened to was controlled. Our home was filled with Christian rock, the dulcet sounds of Michael W. Smith and Amy Grant’s inoffensive rhythmic pop-hymn hybrid. But my parents never played music more worldly than James Taylor and Carole King. And we were considered a liberal household. Once, a friend from our home school group was forbidden to play at our house, after her mother discovered that she’d listened to Amy Grant and danced around in my mom’s old bridesmaid dresses. I overheard my mother tell my dad that the girl’s mother believed the music “glorified romantic love over the love of Jesus.”
Of course, we tried to push the boundaries of our small world as best we could, my siblings and I often huddled over the radio in the garage, using cassette tapes to record the songs we liked from the Top 40 station, before we got caught, fighting in whispers about whether that really was a swear word in the Madonna song and if it was a sin to hear it. Yet, as hard as we pushed our margins, we couldn’t seem to move beyond them.
Consequently, Joshua Harris, was the god of our small world. He was everything the young men should be and everything the girls should marry. My sister and some other girls from the youth group, put on lip gloss and knotted their baggy shirts at their waists as soon as we arrived.
Joshua Harris was the main speaker at a conference for teens. A couple other youth pastors spoke in between sets of noisy bands, who played holier imitations of top 40 hits. Clusters of girls jumped up and down to the music, while the boys watched and occasionally tried to bump into them. The shy girls moshed in their little groups at the ends of the pews, denim skirts hooping around their ankles, white Keds and braids flying. The more brave girls, my sister among them, jumped in the middle of the pews, bouncing chastely against the boys from our church. These girls wore shorts and were the ones who snuck in lip gloss and knotted their t-shirts to emphasize their adolescent waists, flirting with that gray area between mainstream femininity and what they had been taught as modesty. We had to been taught to desire a husband and yet not act like it. Dress like a young woman, while being careful not to entice a young man into lust. It was a wicked tension, no more fraught than at church youth functions where holiness and hormones ran high. The sanctuary of the church smelled of musty books and lusty teens.
I merely sat in between the groups, trying to look prayerful instead of bored. A college-student volunteer next to me patted my knee and called me a “serious girl.” I was secretly pleased and hoped that I looked mature enough to warrant Joshua Harris’ attention.
Joshua Harris took the stage to rousing applause. The lights behind him flashed cool blues and bright neon pink. He carried a Bible in his hand and opened in prayer. For the next hour, we listened rapt, to this man, not much older than us, describe to us in clear language precisely what we were feeling and how it was a sin.
“Young ladies,” he said, eliciting a ripple of nervous laughter, “you are created by God to be man’s helper and as such we look upon you as lovely.”
More laughter.
“There is no need to dress in a way that draws our eyes to you. God has made it so that we men always look at you. Don’t tempt us to fall by wearing immodest clothes.”
I tugged on the hemline of my shorts, feeling as though my five-inch inseam should be longer.
He went on, describing the visual nature of men and in turn, reassuring them that to look was natural, but to allow themselves to think about girls was sin. “Seek help and accountability from your parents,” he said as the boys in the audience suddenly grew still and wide eyed as they stared at their knees.
The talk culminated in the request that we pledge ourselves to remain pure. Pledge cards were passed around. Each card was printed with a cross on it and a ring, which symbolized our pledge to keep ourselves pure until marriage. There was perforated attached card that we could take off and share with our parents, so they could keep us accountable. The girls were encouraged to give our hearts to our fathers to keep us safe until we could give our hearts to our husbands. When, I wondered, were our hearts ever allowed to belong to us?
The boys were encouraged to be respectful of women.
After the final prayer, we were ushered into our 15-passenger vans and taken back to our churches, given pizza and soda and more prayers, prayers that we would not forget the lessons we had learned.
And until our parents came to pick us up, the boys played showy games of basketball in the church gym, while the more bold girls looked on and the meek girls cleaned up. I cleaned, but just because I wanted to look like the kind of girl I was supposed to be.
During his sermon, Joshua Harris had told us that men notice a holy woman, but despite my every effort that day, no one had noticed me. I saw a boy come talk to my sister, she laughed and the lip gloss shone on her lips.
I wondered if the girl on the cassette was like me. Trying so hard to be good and holy and going unnoticed. Perhaps, we were going about this wrong. Perhaps we too needed knotted shirts and lip gloss. After I thought that, I immediately asked God to forgive me.
