Pulled in Different Directions
After years of questions, several events spark a true deconstruction process
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.
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The previous chapter
And now
Before I was offered a teaching position that put me back into a Lutheran high school, I was already facing multiple situations that challenged the way I saw the world.
Our inability to find a church that felt like home, where I was willing to transfer my membership, left me feeling unmoored. I had appreciated the pastors and their sermons at the church where we had our son baptized, but I felt lost in the crowd every time we attended, and there was not much to keep us there. The church was going through some transitions, and I was desperate for some stability.
When we started going to church across the street from where I was now teaching, I appreciated the Saturday night contemporary worship. I enjoyed occasionally seeing coworkers at church. It worked for us, but again, it didn’t feel like home. My husband, Jeff, became frustrated with my lack of commitment, not because he was desperate for us to find a church home, but because he wanted me to stop indecisively floating around. But I still desperately missed our Indianapolis congregation. I missed seeing my friends and having a pastor who knew us and our family in a variety of contexts. I missed both the worship and being known.
And I didn’t know how to get there in Fort Wayne.
The instability wasn’t just present in our worship life. Our babysitter situation was working, but I still struggled with knowing whether we had made the right choice. Our son wasn’t helping. He continued to struggle to sleep, and I showed up to work exhausted most mornings because the night before I had nearly fallen asleep in the rocking chair during middle of the night feedings. When he was four months old, she called me while I was on my college campus to ask for permission to give him baby Tylenol.
“Is he ok? What’s wrong?” I could only imagine the worst-case scenario.
“He’s fine. He’s been fussy, and I just felt around his mouth and he’s cut a tooth.”
I felt like a failure as a mother. How could I have not known that my own baby was already cutting teeth? It would certainly explain his fussiness, but I was his mom. I was supposed to know these things. How did I not notice?
Then, during the second semester, our babysitter left her husband, moved out of her house, and moved into a new one. It was closer to me when I went to work, but far less convenient for Jeff, which put additional pressure on both of our schedules. In addition to the stress of a new routine, I also wondered about the troubled marriage our babysitter was leaving. How much did our kids and her grandkids see? Was it anything they would remember? Was I screwing everything up while trying to do all the things all at once?
And yet, I was so happy to be back in a regular classroom. I continued to grow as a teacher while teaching composition at the college. I loved being back in a college classroom and learning and discussing big ideas with other adults. But friendships were still hard to come by. I had gotten closer with my graduate school classmates, but I wasn’t being invited to hang out outside of school. My new high school colleagues had welcomed me as a fellow faculty member, but many of their work friendships were already set. I still was not seeing the couple of college classmates whom I knew lived in the area, which made me feel more isolated than ever. I still couldn’t shake the feeling that Fort Wayne was nothing but a small town disguised as a small city. We had lived there for over a year, and it was never going to feel like home.
And then family situations got more complex, shaking up my faith in new and uncomfortable ways.
