A Rocky Transition to the Wilderness

When children feel it is in everyone's best interest to protect their parents, far too much is left unsaid

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Note: The story of my faith journey, church trauma, and spiritual abuse is inextricably linked to the stories of my parents and sisters, but this is my story. Their experiences, memories, and hurt are separate from my own and I do not speak for them. Details are also their own and not mine to share, and so I keep the details where they matter only to my own experiences.

I learned how to bottle my emotions when I was eleven.

The year after my family’s life imploded was a precarious one. While my fifth-grade year had been smooth sailing for me, my parents struggled through a year of my dad commuting over an hour every day so he could work as a draftsman for a construction company and my mom worked on weekends as an organist at a local Episcopal church. I convinced myself that my parents could work things out and we could stay in Illinois where I was eagerly anticipating an exciting sixth-grade year full of sports, friends, and school activities.

But change was quickly coming around the corner. My baby sister was born that July, and while we waited for news about my mom and sister, my dad received news that he had received a Call to serve as principal and Director of Christian Education for a church in Wyoming.¹

Everything came crashing down.

The next three months were a whirlwind of activity. My sister Lisa and I traveled with my dad and his cousin across the country to Washington state for my uncle’s wedding, stopping in Wyoming on the way so he could look at the church and meet with the pastor and people on the board before he made a final decision. My mom stayed home with Rachel and our newborn sister, Johanna, anticipating a decision that could once again take her over one thousand miles away from her family in Michigan. By October, we were packing up our house and moving across the country.

I was beyond devastated, but after two years of struggles, my parents were hopeful for the changes that were coming, even if it meant a move to the middle of nowhere.² While I didn't keep my displeasure to myself, the truth was that I wanted my parents to be happy.

Sixth grade is a terrible time. Middle school is a terrible time. There is a reason I’ve never wanted to teach middle school students; I don’t want to relive that miserable three-year experience. And it didn’t help that I would be moving after the start of the school year.

Part of my dad’s call was the charge to expand the church’s pre-K and Kindergarten program to a K-8 school over the next few years. Because his oldest daughter was going to be in seventh grade in less than a year, he had determined that the school should immediately be open all the way to seventh grade the following year. He saw my schooling for my sixth-grade year as a temporary situation that would soon be resolved by me attending a Lutheran school in less than twelve months.

We toured both the town’s middle school (where I would have been one of about 250 students) and the K-12 school in the next small town over, where four of our pastor’s kids attended school. The pastor’s second youngest daughter was also in the sixth grade, his older daughter was driving age, and, despite the fact that I had voiced my preference for the middle school, my parents decided that I would have a smoother transition to sixth grade and then to a new seventh grade if I were to attend school with the pastor’s family.

So while my parents sent my third-grade sister to the public elementary school in our town, they entrusted my care to three teenagers and a classmate in a situation that was less than ideal.