That prom day was the first day of my Hell. That Hell was the rest of my high school years.

I was grounded - thoroughly and completely. My parents took my phone (it was just an extension in my room - this was 1988, pre-cell phones for certain, and even pre-cordless, if I remember correctly), they disallowed me from going anywhere after school, in the evenings, or on weekends. I was given no privacy. My room was searched through while I was at school, and I often got in renewed trouble because of things that my mother read. WHY I didn't stop writing things down, I will never know. (But look, I still continue to write things down via this blog - so I truly never learned).

I lived in the lower level of a raised ranch house. Therefore, my bedroom windows were level with the ground. I went out after my parents went to sleep almost every single night. W would pick me up at the bottom of our driveway (lived in a very rural area), and we went to his house, where, remember, his mother was NOT, b/c she worked nights. We would then watch movies, have sex, and eventually bring me home. We had a few near-misses - where we would fall asleep, and I would find myself creeping back up my driveway in the daylight as I knew my father's alarm was going off. But I never actually got caught in the act. I think, however, that my father is part Ostrich.

W played football while he was in school, and me, being his little girlfriend, got to wear his Letter Jacket. (How Grease-esque.) My parents insisted upon me returning it. I told them that I did, but instead, I hid it in my trunk. One morning, my father went outside to leave for work before the sun rose, and saw my trunk light on, and went to help me avoid a dead battery, and found the letter jacket in there. He threw it in the woods, and we had another week of very tense dinner table conversation (or lack thereof).

What I feel so terrible about now is the knowledge that my entire family went through hell during this time. Not just me. My brother and sister were stuck between me and my parents - in turn hating each of us, and blaming us for the discord that had become our home. The fighting was constant. My sister, especially, had a hard time, as she told me later. W and I did plan on running away, if things were to cross another line, and I had a constant bag packed. My little sister was very upset by this, and I discovered in the past 5 years that she, too, had a constant bag packed, and planned on insisting that she come along, rather than be left alone in the house without me.

My father reacted by succumbing to the prayers and the courting and the begging and the pleading, and he became a Christian. I remember the night he told my mother - he had done it privately, as most people did while I was in this small New England "bible-based, non-denominational" church - the huge altar calls and hoopla wasn't something I saw until Liberty - which is the next chapter. We were driving in the car on the way home from a concert of a Christian Singer which I was Forced to go to because I (at age 17) could not be trusted home alone, and they thought I was asleep. He told my mother that he had accepted the Lord into his heart, and that he was a Christian. I knew it was because of me. Right now, 16 years later, I cannot remember if he SAID it was because of me, and all I put him through, but it was. Perhaps because I had shown him that there really is Sin in the world, and that if there is Sin, there must be someone who presides over acts, and deems what is Sin and what is not Sin.

I also have another theory, though. I do believe that people look to religion to serve other purposes in their lives. I believe that my father had a very hard time justifying the randomness of his idea that I should not be having sex - and that Christianity provided to him a very nice pre-written set of rules. He is a very legalistic person, who likes black and white, and I think that when he took the time to look close enough at the theology of Born Again Christians, he saw how the rules and biases really fit in well with his own fears and ideas. It gave him the o.k.

And my theory for my mom: she's a very stoic person, she keeps a real reign on her emotional side, and always has. Church gives *her* the okay to be emotional. It takes away whatever barriers she's put up between herself and her emotions, and gives her Permission to Cry. When she's at church, the minute the music and the singing starts, she starts to cry and cry.

But, the story. I really was all-out rebelling at that point. Only with sex, though. I didn't drink, I didn't ever try any drug. I was also VERY monogamous. But I was sneaking out the window constantly, which led to me falling asleep in classes during the day, and getting very poor grades. I also would sneak out of school, either down a back driveway when the security guard was peeing, or in my the trunks of friends' cars. I also (horror of horror) bought a new phone, and plugged it in to the wall so I could call W and tell him when to come and pick me up. There were also occasions, when my mother was working when I got out of school, that I would take my dad's Jeep, and drive (without a license) to where W worked.

There was one point where I had sort of wised up, and decided to play things a little smarter. I wrote a "note" to W about how I was so pleased that we saw the error of our ways, and that we'd decided to start to focus on the Lord. I then put that note on my dresser, under a book, but with a corner sticking out. I very closely saw where the lines were on the paper, and knew that if when I returned home from school the lines were in a different place, my mother had read my "note."

Sure enough, when I got home, the note had moved. My mother called me from work soon after I got off the bus and told me that she had thought things over, and decided that I seem as though I deserved a second chance. She said that W and I could take her car and go out to dinner that night, as a little test.

I think we had 2 weeks (at most) of very limited freedom before I came home from school one day to my entire closet emptied out on the floor of my bedroom ... Including the extra set of sheets into which I had folded my birth control pills. My mother later told me that Jesus appeared to her during her "quiet time" and told her where to look in order to find proof of my continued sinning.

My parents were so unable to get me to "shape up" and get back into the church, and get rid of my "attitude" - oh yeah, and my boyfriend -- that they made us all go to Family Counseling. Christian Family Counseling, of course. Another thing for my siblings to hate me for. It was so tedious. We had to draw pictures on a flip-chart of how we viewed our family. My siblings put the four of them in one corner of the paper, and me way off in a different corner. I hated them all, and I wanted to leave, and not have to deal with them, and their stupid religion.

But that got sooooo tiring! I got sick of hating my family. I got sick of being grounded and not being able to participate in any social life whatsoever - with or without W. Honestly, I was also getting sick of W. He had graduated the year before me, and spent almost the entire year unemployed. He didn't want to go to college, and he dissuaded me from doing the same. When I decided that I did in fact want to go to college, he jeered at me, and made fun of me for being a "nerd" and for thinking that I was better than him. But at that point, it just made me sick.

He stopped being worth all the fighting to me. I no longer wanted part of our "future plans" wherein I would graduate high school and be a secretary for my entire life (that became so ironic later) while he kept dreaming about money falling into his lap so he could open his own dog kennel.

I thought long and hard about things, and I decided that I didn't only want to break up with W, I wanted to rejoin my family. I made a very calculated decision that I would, for real, become Born Again. That I was sick and tired of the divide between me and my siblings and my parents, I was sick of the tense dinner table, and sex really wasn't all that fun, anyway. Especially since I now found W to be rather gross.

I did not "believe." I actually felt that I could NOT become a Christian. There was a belief in our church that if god "called you" to him, then you could accept Jesus Christ into your heart, and be Born Again. I never felt called. I never felt a pull. There were many times that I would say the words, and I would TRY to mean it. But the people around me, at my parents' church, were heaped over in tears because of the "power of god," they were jubilant, they were .... so INTO it, and I just never felt that click. So, during the times of my life when I did believe in teh doctrine, I felt that I was just not called. I had not been chosen, and I would, in fact, go to Hell. But at the very least, i could be a part of the community, and perhaps one day, god would call me, or not. but i didn't want to be on the outs anymore.

My parents went away to Hawaii for a week, and left us home with friends. While they were gone (and I had a bit more freedom, because the friends were not as attuned to my sneakiness), I broke up with W. I presented this fact to my parents with much celebration when they returned, and we started on the Road to Repairing our Relationships.

This was the March of my senior year. So I had 4 months to actually enjoy my senior year. I was able to re-strengthen friendships, attend parties, go to the Prom (with a male friend who was not a boyfriend), and do normal senior year things. My parents did decide that I was not Ready to attend college away from home, so I had to attend a commuter college for a year, to "prove myself." Which I did. I got a 4.0, had a very successful internship in a prosecutor's office (I was a prelaw major), and was accepted at American University, where I really really wanted to go, b/c I wanted to go into law, and perhaps even politics, and I was excited about academics and about my future.

however ......

posted by Zuska @ 1:28 PM

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