Broken Halo

When a young woman who doesn’t yet know herself gives away her power to another, hell surely cometh.

I came into this world foot first. War loomed in the distance, the countdown to Pearl Harbor already in motion on the day I fought my way out, my heels dug into the walls of my mother. It wasn’t simply a breech birth; it was a footling-breech. One leg exited while the other became caught in the birth canal—perhaps a presage of an equally painful journey that awaited me at midlife.

 

       My roots are deeply buried in Orange, Texas, the land of Cajuns, cowboys, pirates, and Paleo-Indians—my childhood—a maelstrom of social upheaval and change.  Before the war, Orange was a sleepy town of farmers, ranchers, and sawmill workers. The lumber export of longleaf yellow pine and cypress grew into a booming business, and the accompanying wealth brought a level of culture and aristocracy to the proud, quiet community. A town with two major rivers, the Neches and the Sabine, running through it and out into the Gulf, provided the fishing and shipping industries with opportunities.

 

       WW II changed everything when the U.S. Navy awarded the Orange Texas shipbuilders a major contract to build destroyers. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the town’s population exploded almost overnight as thousands of starving families from all over the country moved to town from the backwoods of Texas and Louisiana, hungry for jobs.

 

      My family moved into quickly assembled makeshift war housing called Riverside, duplexes covered with gray asbestos shingles and supported by wooden blocks forced in the swampland, covered with wet sand transported from the rivers. During that period, women became known as “Rosie the Riveters,” but after the war, they were expected to return home and remain barefoot and pregnant. Feminism thrived in some parts of the country, but not in Orange, Texas—not in my hometown or in my church.

 

      I was taught that a good girl marries a good boy, stays home and raises a family, and until such time, she keeps her legs together. It was a sin to dance, to play cards or dominoes, to mix bathe (girls swimming with boys), to smoke, drink, or curse, that the most important thing a girl did was to give her life to a man, and to his God.

 

       At sixteen, I met a handsome, dark-haired preacher-boy. He was twenty-three, a college graduate, and a high school teacher. He sought a wife; I aimed to meet the expectations of my family, peers, and church leaders.

 

We married three months later, both of us virgins.

I was a wife now, a seventeen-year-old adult. I now had what so many girls then would give anything for—a man to love them.

We spent our wedding night in a nearby hotel. My new husband sat tying his shoes the following day as we prepared to return home. “There’s one thing I need to tell you,” he declared, glancing up at me, then back down to his shoe-tying task.  “God will always come first in my life.  You’ll be second—but God will be first.”  Then he stood, pulled his Bible out of the suitcase and opened it.  “And we will read the Bible together every day.” 

 

In our three short months of courtship, we had never discussed this topic. That topic had never been addressed with him or anyone else in my life. The idea of such had never crossed my mind. I went to church, read my Bible, yes, but…

 

I felt pushed aside; it felt almost like a slap. My role in the marriage wouldn’t be as an adult but as a child, with a male figure always present, dictating what I should do and what to believe.

 

The pious statement clearly defined the submissive role of a wife. The role of the good wife. I was secondary.  Further, when I needed an opinion, he’d give it to me.  Our life together would be his life—not mine. 

 

I felt like a squashed bug, and I didn’t understand why.

 

 Something got trapped inside me that morning. Something undefined, yea unborn.

 

Years later, I discovered that something was the child struggling to become a woman. The footling breech ensnared again, desperate to discover who she was and what her voice sounded like.

 

 Before our marriage, I had believed I was important to him, but not now. God came first, him second, and I, a distant third. (Years later I discovered what he meant; it wasn’t God who came first, but his denomination.)

 

A seed, a husk of that precious little girl who had fought her way into this world now burrowed deep into my soul, shut away from the sun, waiting.  

 

However, sorrow indeed cometh when a young woman who doesn’t yet know herself gives her power to another. 

 

In her book,* The Dance of the Dissident Daughter*, Sue Monk Kidd writes, “When this disenchantment, this ripeness begins, a woman’s task is to conceive herself.  If she does, the spark of awakening is struck.  And if she can give that awakening a tiny space in her life, it will develop into a full-blown experience that she will want to mark and celebrate.” 

 

The spark of awakening came a quarter of a century later. The day my dad died—the day I started questioning everything I’d been taught about God, and consequently, taught to others.  It was also the day I grew up.  I was 41 years old.  

The day was no different than any other Monday for stay-at-home, submissive preacher’s wives—foreign missionary wives.  My three older children were in school.  Laundry, from a weekend missionary-family retreat, lay in piles awaiting their turn in the washer. 

 

My limp two-year-old son lay in my lap sick with bronchitis and asthma, his breath raspy, coughing, when I saw my preacher-husband come in the front door.  

 

 “Gene just called,” he said. “Your dad dropped dead of a heart attack.” 

 

 Numbness obliterated all feeling.  

 

“Why didn’t Gene call me?  I finally asked.

 

“He knew you and the baby were here alone.” 

 

“But it’s my dad!  Why hasn’t anyone called me?” 

 

Someone will call—Mother, my sister, brother, someone.  

 

I waited for my family to bring me into the loss. 

 

No one did. 

 

I felt cut out of the reality.  Nine hundred miles away, my family grieved together, but no one called me. Not my mother, nor my sister, nor my brother brought me into the circle of grief by telling me my dad was dead—come home. 

 

 I’d sat with a neighbor once, after she’d found her husband dead from a heart attack.  

 

The police officer offered to call her son in another state and tell him of his father’s death. 

 

“No, no, that’s my job,” she’d said. “He needs to hear this from his mom.”  

 

How comforting, how loving that must have felt for the son. 

 

I waited, not understanding why the call was so important to me.  Finally I called home.  Mom answered.  “Yeah, he’s gone,” she mumbled flatly.  “Are you coming?”

 

It was May in southeast Texas.  Hot. Humid. They found my sixty-six-year-old dad collapsed, sitting in a fishing boat at a bait shop.

 

I wanted to bury him in his ubiquitous khakis, but Mom stuck him in a blue suit, her one chance to dress him her way. Handsome he was, too, with his red hair and ruddy complexion, but he was rock hard and cold when I placed my hand against his cheek. 

I overheard Mother talking to friends and family who’d called their regrets. “I just really feel Jesus helping me get through this; if it wasn’t for Jesus, I don’t know what I would do,” she’d say, over and over. 

 

My soul wrinkled, for I felt jack-shit. 

 

Then why isn’t Jesus here for me? I didn’t feel God’s love, and I certainly didn’t feel any comfort. All those years of ministry to others at their time of need, and no one ministered to me. Not even God.

 

 I’d been a fool. There wasn’t any supernatural ‘man upstairs’ holding out his arms, comforting me in my grief. I felt nothing but pain.

 

The one man I longed to love and accept me unconditionally was dead; so were my chances. 

 

Forever.

 

I’d done all the right things.  I’d married a preacher-boy and made my family proud, receiving my father’s blessing—based, not on me, but on the marriage.  A marriage that raised the family’s worth in the church and the small community.  

 

I didn’t recognize what was happening at the time, but I slowly began to discard everything I’d been taught. I started anew. I read voraciously, began university, formed my own opinions, and discovered my voice. I learned how to express what was within me before ‘the takeover.’ I opened my eyes to society and saw the goodness in the world. I discovered who I was, and for the first time in my life, I liked myself. 

 

The problem was, the more I liked me, the less my husband did.

 

“I always felt superior to you before,” he said one day. “Now, I don’t. I feel inferior. Can’t you go back and be who you were before?”

 

To do so meant my death. My body may last a little longer, but my soul would dry up and blow away. 

 

I drove to White Sands National Park, climbed atop a dune of sparkling sand and watched the wind whip over the 270 square acres of sand-piled desert. The grains blew into the air, scattered, and then sifted down in a new location. They ever advanced, ever changed, yet remained within the confines of their primordial plot.  

 

I squinted off into the distance as if I still expected God to top the dunes on a big white stallion and carry me off to glory. 

 

No one came. 

 

I shut my eyes, gritty against dashed hope, knowing what I had to do. Knowing if I didn’t, I would surely die. 

 

Sometimes, divorce is the only way out of an unhealthy relationship. A woman has to get out, get her head screwed on straight and then start over. I didn’t divorce God, I divorced my husband, but at the time it felt like the same thing. In a way, it was.

 

Years of control through guilt, passivity, submissiveness, and domination had taken their toll. After a lifetime spent in a high-demand church with a theology that was unhealthy for me, my spirit felt chewed up and spit out, mangled and desiccated. Such theology teaches a woman that she is only complete when she has a godly husband to serve and obey and that she must submit to his control as if she were a child needing a watchful parent. My life was filled with “holy-sounding” platitudes and meaningless clichés. 

 

It is unauthentic to pass off as Truth, experiences not yours, simply because other people tell you it is. I had spent a lifetime doing so. I didn’t know I had a choice, and to stay in my marriage—I didn’t.

 

But when you learn you’ve glibly handed out pat answers to life’s most complicated questions; when you realize, despite sincere effort, you’re a phony; that the answers, yea, the ‘truths’ you’d given out weren’t yours at all, but those given to you within a patriarchal world view, you must go back to the beginning. 

 

In The Cherry Orchard, Anton Chekhov asked, “What is truth? You can see where there is truth and where there isn’t, but I seem to have lost sight, and I see nothing. You boldly settle all the important questions, but tell me, my dear boy, isn’t it because you are young and the questions of the world haven’t hurt you yet?” 

 

The questions of the world hadn’t hurt me until my dad died.

 

I realized I had been expected to latch on to everything they believed, to seal those beliefs in concrete, never modifying, never adjusting, and never changing.  Remain in my ‘primordial plot’. 

 

I had done just that for a quarter of a century. Blinded by the dogma, my awareness of disconnection from my truth lay buried at a deep, emotional level, a level I kept locked away. 

 

Until the tough questions of the world hit me at mid-life—until the event occurred that interrupted the dogma of that system. The dogma that didn’t allow me to see my disconnection. 

 

I took the first halting steps down off the pedestal of preacher’s wife and into the dead end of me. Several years would pass before I realized the patriarchal God of my father, and of my husband, had faded and a new, much more personal, balanced aspect of a higher power within me appeared.  But to get there, a long journey lay ahead.