As I sit here in my mom’s extremely cluttered living room, listening to the washing machine work over-time on my fifty-seven loads of laundry and Baby Bug snoring softly in her bassinet beside me, my shoulders ache and I wonder what to write about… Should I keep it light and talk about the fun I had with my nieces painting rocks in the front yard while Baby Bug slept in the house contentedly on her Grandma’s big soft belly? Or should I write about Baby Bug’s first day at Sunday School and my first day back to meeting (church for those who are not long time readers). I’m tempted to keep it light. It’s past my bedtime. My shoulders are killing me and I feel like I’m a million years old. But it would be a shame not to jot just a few words down.

Today was a big day. It was Baby Bug’s first day to go to Sunday School and it was my first day back after being gone for ten years. Sure, I’ve come and gone now and then over the years but I lurked. I stayed in the shadows and avoided people as best I could. I kept a low profile because when I left the meeting, it wasn’t on the best of terms and a bunch of other stuff that I’ve written about before but is now lost in my many archives. I thought they were gone for good but I guess if you click on the right things you can still find them somewhere. Good luck on that. I’m offering no help.

Today I was back and I was officially welcomed. It was strange but good. From the Aunts coming at me with opened arms and a cups of hot coffee to my Uncle standing up after the breaking of bread and giving a little speech about joy and reconciliation… it was just a lot to take in. And I hate to admit it but I think I was mostly just self conscious because I had a little baby with me. I was very aware of her ability to squeal and cry and bring even more attention my way.

Thankfully, the meeting room proved to be quite interesting to Baby Bug. She loved the hymn singing and all the loud clear voices quoting scriptures and praying. She spent a lot of time checking out the ceiling fan whirring up above her and looking at the big black and white contrasting letters of the verses that were hung on the walls. She listened to her great uncle give the gospel with better attention than her seven-year-old cousin who was sitting beside her.

After the meetings were over, she was a really good baby and only had “stranger anxiety” with a few people who got too close too fast or laughed a little too loud when she wasn’t expecting it. Sometimes I think Baby Bug is the most fussy when she is bored. When we stay home all day doing the normal routine she can be a regular Miss Crankypants. But when we’re out and there are new things coming at her from every direction, she’s the perfect angle baby. I always expect her to have a rough time when I take her to the mall or the grocery store or like today a big new building with new sounds and new faces… but she loves all the stimulus. Her eyes are bugging out of her head and she probably skips a few naps but she’s very well behaved. She smiles and laughs and coos like a perfect little baby. And when we gets home she goes right to sleep with no fussing at all. She’s tired.

I’m tired. We are both just wore out. But it’s been a lot of fun. It’s been good for my heart. Maybe I’ll write more about the rock painting and the big Sunday dinner and my never ending laundry tomorrow. Or not. Maybe I’ll have something even better to write about. I have no idea what I’m doing tomorrow.

This is my Aunt Keren (Yes, her name is spelled that way. It’s in the bible, look it up.) This is her shop. She’s a dressmaker. She’s been sewing for a bazillion years and she’s very good at it. I grew up playing with the scraps of fabric out of her trash can. She let me have a drawer in one of her many dressers and I made a dollhouse out of that drawer. The walls were lined with fabric wall paper, the furniture made from cardboard and yarn. The dolls were Barbie dolls and I made elaborate outfits for them out of material I would scrounge from her scraps. She taught me to sew. One painful “Auntie Rule” at a time. She taught me to iron and to back tack and to always go slowly and carefully because ripping out seams is never fun. But ripping out seams is better than wearing something with crooked seams. She pounded that into my head.

She pounded a lot of things into my head. My Aunt may have single handedly been the biggest adult influence on me…ever. I am so overwhelmed by this topic and what I have to write about today that I don’t even know where to start. I want to explain everything from start to finish. I want to say it concisely so I don’t run on and on for pages. But mostly I just want to say it correctly and I am intimidated by the mere task of it.

I hung out with my Aunt today for the first time in fifteen years. I’ve missed her. We talked and talked and talked until the moon came up. I brought six receiving blankets to her shop to sew, I only sewed one. (And yes, I’m slow, but not that slow!) That was how much we were talking. I don’t think either of us got very much done.

There is just so much to talk about. (not to mention we both talk a lot by nature anyway…) So many things have gone down over the years. So many misunderstandings. So many things that I was wrong about. So many things that blow my mind. I don’t know how I can possibly fix some of those things in just one post. Maybe I will be writing about this for a very long time to come. I don’t know.

It started with the post I wrote the other day. She emailed me. Something she’s started doing lately now that she reads this website, (scary!). I expected chastisement. I got love. She pleaded with me not to lump her into this giant ball of hurt that I have about my past. She tried to tell me that I’ve rolled everything all together, my childhood, the meeting (my religion), my family and how I was excommunicated…and I can never cut that out of my life no matter how much I want all my sad feelings to go away.

I decided to hash it out with her. Why not. What do I have to lose? I’ve had nothing for years and years. Plus, she’s been reading my website and she keeps coming back, it’s not like she’s written me off as a complete heretic like I thought she did. So we emailed. And we emailed and we emailed. And then I decided to just drive out and visit.

Visit we did. I don’t even know where to go from here. But I just want to say that walls that have been built by me around my heart are starting to come crumbling down. I feel like the East Germans throwing concrete bricks and rebar in Berlin. I want to leap and jump for joy. This fact alone scares me it makes me so happy: there is a possibility that some day I might be able to sit down with my family at a great big table (seriously, there will be about a hundred people sitting at that table, my family is that big) and laugh and tell jokes and be noisy like how I remember from when I was a kid.

I don’t know if I’ve ever articulated how much I’ve missed that. I think I disguised it as anger. I’ve since made my own new family with friends and Toby’s relatives and so many dear people who have taken me in. But I have always always always always missed my family. It’s been a broken part of me for so long it makes me cry just thinking about it.

I know it won’t be perfect. I know I have a lot of things I need to apologize for. I’ve said a lot of mean things about them over the years on this blog. I also have a new life now and a lot of the beliefs I’ve adopted are not in line with theirs’. But I don’t care. That seems like small potatoes compared to what has happened today and yesterday. If I can spend fifteen years trying to get over them, I can spend the next fifteen years figuring out how to be part of them again.

I’m finally coming home.

Time to Go

The dust has settled, the boxes are packed. A pile of trash stacked six feet high is collected in the front yard with a big sign that says “Free”. A pile of cardboard boxes and broken things are stacked in the back of the house waiting to be loaded up in the truck to be taken to the dump. Everything in between is swept up or taped shut or in a pile to be put away in the house somewhere. The garage sale is officially over. The dogs are happy because they are lose to run the property again.

My parents are at meeting (church) and I’m left to be the cleaning fairy and hopefully do ten loads of laundry and maybe my mom’s dishes that she hasn’t been able to get to in three days. But as I sit here in the quiet of what has been a noisy roar these last few days, my thoughts clamor around in my brain begging to be written down and possibly put to rest.

Whenever I spend more than a day or two with my mom and dad in my old home town, the inevitable subject gets brought up. The subject is never far from anyone’s thoughts. So it didn’t surprise me at all when it came up after dinner last night.

We went to dinner with my grandfather and my aging great aunt. As we were leaving my Grandpa hugs me and asks if he’ll see me at meeting on Sunday. Sadly, I have to smile and tell him no. I see the disappointment in his face. He is crestfallen. It hurts me that I have to keep hurting him in this way. His life is centered around serving God. He is a true Christian in every sense of the way. He only wants the best for me and in his mind going to meeting would be just that. The point that we differ on is that I don’t want to be part of the meeting any more.

I could go on and on and on about this. And in my own weary brain I am. I know every argument and I know that I must examine my own motives before I go launching into judging others. Is it pride that keeps me from wanting to go back? Is it that I want to justify my choices? Is it just the fact that I don’t want to give them another chance to reject me? Is it that I want to run run run away from my relatives that say hurtful things? What it boils down to is that I am more afraid of the people, than I am of God.

I have a clean conscience before God. He knows everything I’ve done and I have peace with that. I’m not hiding anything. But just the same, I don’t think I need to dredge up every wrong thing I’ve ever done and put it on display for the meeting people to say, “Brenda is such a wanton woman, she must grovel, grovel, grovel to us to prove to us that she will never go astray again.” or “Oh, that Brenda, she is such a villain. Let us learn from her example and keep our children from going to colleges far away and learning the evil doctrines of the world.”

That makes me so angry when I see that happen. I understand why it happens. If I had kids, I’d want to protect them from making bad choices too. But I hate it more than anything when I see my parents being judged for my choices. My dad really believes that it is his fault that I’ve left the meeting because he let me go to college in a town far away. If he could have kept me close I would have married a nice meeting boy and lived happily ever after. And maybe I would have. But I would still be me. I would still be struggling against the confines of my close knit family that makes me feel afraid every time I make a choice that might not be in line with theirs’. Seriously, I think it would come down to what color skirt I wore, or what I bought at the grocery store. Or if I skipped town for a day and didn’t call and invite somebody to go with me. Some day we would have disagreed on something and I would still be the black sheep of the family.

No matter how many people have good intentions in wanting me to come back, it will eventually come down to something like this. Every member of the meeting has their own take on what I must do to be accepted back into the fold. I don’t have the time, nerve or fortitude to jump through every body’s hoops. I will never be able to please everyone. Making it past the first round of family members would probably cause me to commit more horrendous deeds than I’ve already done. Sometimes I think the only way to be accepted is to lead a double life. Put on a front that you are this or that and keep who you really are, a deep dark secret. As anyone knows, who has read anything on this blog, I’ve never been one to keep secrets. Which is really the whole reason I created “Secret Agent Josephine” in the first place…

And that is why I can never spend more than two or three days in my old home town.

p.s. Sorry to drag everyone through my dirty laundry but sometimes you just have to write it down to get things sorted out. The garage sale was fun and in the end we made $300 plus probably $40 in pennies that we haven’t counted yet.