Later, they used this as shorthand. I’d tell a story and they’d look at each other, in unison they’d say, “80 percent.”

It’s taken me until my forties to reckon with the way in which that was probably the most misogynistic move my dad ever pulled. For decades I just let it be my compass. His voice kept me subjecting myself to that same kind of misogyny in my marriage. When the man I married told me regularly while we were dating that I needed to lighten up… well, I still married him. I reminisce now about having been a teenager whose mother had just died in her home from a long, cruel illness that slowly took everything from her while dating a man who told me I needed to lighten up and I just sob for the way in which I fundamentally didn’t believe I had the right to exist.

My father had been training me to distrust myself my whole life but now he was training my husband to distrust my voice as well.

It’s wild how even now I feel all of these urges to explain that I am a passionate communicator who will occasionally say things such as, “there were like a hundred bees” to describe the way there were a lot of bees or “it’s ten bazillion degrees out” to say it’s really hot. There’s still a nagging voice inside trying to convince me it was all just about the way I spoke, that’s all my father meant by his warnings, and if you knew how I talked you’d understand and approve of his tactics and you’d certainly trust my ex-husband’s narration.

I have two brothers whose fervor and fury make me seem chill except that they’ve never been called fiery or dramatic a day in their lives and no one ever warned anyone they dated to dial back what they had to say. The kind of patriarchy I grew up in was overtly demeaning to women. There was nothing shy about the way we called men the head of the household while blaming women for the transgressions of men. In our church and therefore our home, it was women owing men their bodies, their allegiance, their secret keeping, their souls. We were not to tell a man no and somehow we were also supposed to remain pure and never cause a man to stumble. We were to submit while they laughed at our expense. I married in that context with the intention of upholding that lifestyle, that holy covenant of subjugation.

You cannot actually just walk away from the evangelical church, slap on the label of progressive, announce to the world that you don’t think it’s a sin to be gay and then magically expect your marriage to be healed of the deep seated misogyny it was contracted in. The evangelical church teaches you your whole life that a woman’s body and soul belong to a man. That shit needs excavated and that kind of reckoning requires two wholly motivated individuals which is tricky because marriage benefits men greatly, making it difficult for them to want to flip the whole thing on its head.

I dedicated a solid decade of my life after leaving the evangelical church to believing I could heal my marriage if I tried hard enough. The onus was on me to rid my marriage of the misogyny we were steeped in. It was a battle I’d never win because equality in a marriage can never occur if it’s a battle in the first place. 19 years into my evangelical christian marriage wrapped in a progressive christian facade, I gave up. The only way to ever be my own was to stand on my own and say no to the ways in which my husband was still trying to control and undermine my autonomy and agency. Divorce in that context would test my resolve like nothing else. I still today, almost four years out now, will sometimes think, “god it would have been so much easier to just uphold the status quo,” followed quickly by, “easier is so not the point, not the goal, not the way for me!”

“80 percent” still pops into my consciousness regularly. When I get angry with the way I’m treated and with the way my kids are treated, when I think something is wrong or inappropriate, when I think in full sentences on my own and stand by my own opinions about how things should be, when I’m a grown ass woman with a whole personhood of her own, I think “80 percent.” I’m learning, slowly and agonizingly, learning to follow it up quickly with a hardy, “fuck that so much.”

I used to get in trouble in elementary school. For wearing the same outfit at least three times a week, more if I could. I didn’t know how to say these are the only clothes I feel like breathing in. Everything else felt like being choked. And if I said it, no one would hear. The fights over wardrobes morphed through the years. Screamed my head off in preschool over tights and curlers. Battled with my mother over bras in middle school. Patterns and shapes and fits made me rage. My favorite photo of kid me: I’m wearing an oversized hooded flannel, boys jeans, boys sneakers, standing next to my mother in her pearls, burgundy lipstick and perfect curls. My closet often still feels like a war zone. A battle between a kid who just wants her combat boots and a girl who wants to please her mother.

My pastor husband known for his progressive Christian values of equality and justice was just kidding around about… what the fuck was that “joke?”

I remember our friends explaining that it was so funny because it was so unexpected, so out of character.

Haha.

My stomach hurt. My mind raced. My heart ached.

I spent the rest of the evening at our friend’s house playing along, making peace, acting the part because when I tried to say something my reaction was the problem.

I was fuming and boiling and exhausted.

On the way home that night, without the audience of our friends who thought everything he said was amazing or hilarious, I tried to confront it. I attempted to explain why I not only didn’t think those jokes were funny, I felt hurt by them. This led to enduring twenty seven rounds of convincing me that I’m too harsh and uptight and reading into things and assigning bad intentions where there were none and focusing on the negative. My problem. I was the problem.

I felt insane.

For the underlying feeling that this man didn’t respect me and that underneath all of the personal disrespect was a deeper seated disrespect of women as a whole, I felt crazy.

I witnessed the jokes like that. Not one joke one day but a lifetime of jokes, comments, and behavior that left me always wondering exactly where I stood with this man I called my husband and hundreds called pastor.

“I’m a good husband!”

“You just expect me to be perfect all the time!”

“You’ve always had a hard time letting things go.”

Reality was a shapeshifting beast I wrestled with daily during my two decades of marriage. What I observed, what I experienced, what I felt, well those things would feel like my story, but then he would narrate it and a misty fog would jerk my entire worldview and all of my perceptions out of focus and rearrange them completely.

I was a woman gone mad.

What kind of woman thinks ill of her good good husband, her good good pastor husband?

I’ve been out of that marriage and recovering now for over three years.

Reality can still be a beast showing up in my nightmares sometimes, but I am clear about the kind of dinner tables I sit around now and I simply have no interest in a room full of people who will laugh while a wife is feeling crushed.

It feels like it goes without saying that I never wanted it to be this way. And yet self help gurus have had a lot to say lately about estrangement and their words cast those who’ve had to make that brutal choice as flakey irresponsible kids who just want to be trendy. Kind of like when folks leave the church. Or get divorced. We like to blame the leavers. Not so much the abusers.

I think the online discourse about estrangement is mostly about folks who go no contact with their parents. I am deeply acquainted with that choice as well. My father is not in my life either. Whether it’s your own parent or the person you have kids with or a friend, cutting someone out of your life is excruciating and it mostly happens after you’ve tried everything. The hill I’m willing to entirely die on (and in many ways have): folks walk away out of desperation, when they are all out of choices, and it is devastating.

When my ex and I first separated we still held hands and snuggled and visited and had family dinners and game nights and were generally intertwined. There were nights of pulling him into my arms and my bed and holding him through all of his feelings. We took the kids to Disneyland together. Took one of our kids to universal studios. We were enmeshed.

It took a long time to get to where I am now. I won’t be in the same space as him now unless it’s a public event for the kids like a school graduation or open house. My walls are tall and made of concrete. I used to have none. And then I tried to live in the middle. I tried boundaries with a person who had shown me for two decades they weren’t interested in respecting my boundaries. I tried no relationship between us but getting together for family gatherings for birthdays and celebrations sometimes. I thought I could carve out a third way. Lines kept being crossed. I sat around a dinner table laughing with a man whose choices for our family were choices I stood in complete opposition of, choices I understood to be harmful.

While I continued to invite him in I was still living inside the war with myself. I was still living completely disintegrated. My divorce was many things and at the heart of it all it was my integrity. I couldn’t find a way to stay whole while staying close.

No one sees the fight. It was I who begged him to see that divorce didn’t have to mean a broken family. I was the one fighting hard for that. I thought the healthiest thing was to keep gathering as a family for the kids. When he bailed on our family movie nights and Christmas Eve plans because it was too hard for him, I was patient and understanding and thought we’d get there in time. When he did show up to family gatherings but disrupted it all with explosive breakdowns, I both carefully explained it away to the kids and then tended to this man who couldn’t put his own shit aside long enough to spend a few hours with the kids he wasn’t regularly seeing. And I kept showing up to family time through behaviors that still make me shutter. I fought so hard to stay close. For the kids.

The thing is this: together is not the healthiest thing. Proximity is not the healthiest thing. I have to say that to myself twenty seven thousand times a day when he emails about how damaging it is to our kids that I choose to stay away from him. Do you know how much more damaging it would be to our kids if I kept smiling around the dinner table?

My kids have a whole me, not a manipulated me. That is what I will go down protecting.

I’m gonna keep on speaking up loudly for the misfits who finally stopped breaking themselves into a million pieces just to appease a world that worships family as everything. Family isn’t everything. Whole people are. And family should be the people who don’t break you.

I love the way her skin feels like warmth and home and tingly high school giggly feelings that I never let myself have.

I love the way she smells, like heaven, I nuzzle my face into her neck where it meets her shoulder and I sniff and sniff and sniff and cannot believe my luck, am I allowed to feel that?

I want to hold her hand walking through the grocery store and while I drive and while she drives and walking through the park and while we’re running errands and every second of every day no matter what I’m doing.

I love when she dresses up for date night and I think my god in heaven in all its holiness how did I live so many years without her and am I really allowed to think like this to want like this to yearn like this to be like this?

I love the way she purses her lips when she looks sideways at me about to laugh.

I love her squeaky giggle.

I love when she changes into her sweats and looks as sexy as date night.

I love my arms around her, I love her arms around me, in the kitchen, on the couch, at the movies.

I love my hand on the small of her back. Always. Forever. Dear god. Jesus help me.

I love her hair up in a bun, I love her hair wildly curly, I love her hair straightened all silky smooth, I love her hair all over the place.

I love her ideas and dreams and musings and stories and the way she uses her whole body to talk and the way I always want more of her, more of her silliness, more of her seriousness, more of her everything.

I want to cook for her every night, snuggle her every morning, hold her every struggle, carry her every delight, breathe her in every second.

I love the way she finds me when we’re working to understand each other, I love the way I find her, I love our work to become, I love our fixing and finessing and puzzling until I’ve sunk into the ocean of her being.

I love her hips and her thighs and her thoughts and her lips and her desire and her eyelashes.

I love her I love her I love her.

If I still wasn’t supposed to, I would anyway.

I’d bust through a thousand cages to get to her, break every rule, fight every religion and all of its tenets, I’d claw my way out of every hell in every lifetime to get to her.

I didn’t know holding

I knew smile through it

Grin and bear it

Nothing to see here

I didn’t know holding

I knew performance

Space taking

Aren’t you over it already

I knew evangelical grief that turns funerals into altar calls

Literally my father led the Jesus died for your sins talk at my mother’s memorial

I knew she’s in a better place

And it is well with my soul

I didn’t know holding

I didn’t know you could squeal over chocolate Carmel coffee and eucalyptus showers and sob about your dead mother and shitty marriage at the local dive bar

All in one breath

I didn’t know it could be held

The beautiful and the terrible and the keep going every minute this world forces on us

I didn’t know I could hold multitudes

And cry every year and every day for my mother and my brother and the earth

While laughing and creating and getting bigger and better at taking space

And then she asked me to meet for coffee

And our worlds collided

And next thing I knew she memorized birthdays and anniversaries that hurt

Organized altars of flowers and people

To carry what I’d thought too heavy for anyone to ever let me hold

She laughed with me through the McDonald’s drive thru the day she took me to see my missing brother for the first time in 14 years

And she held me when I shook through walking away from him

There’s a before her me

And an after her me

And I much prefer the one who has learned to hold

That I can hold

Hold earth shattering grief

Hold blown apart worlds

Hold a life that no longer exists

Hold beauty and terror and tiny beautiful things and boring every day life and recreating myself and my life from dust

I’ve had friends generously try to empower me through it. My friends know what I went through and what it was actually like and so they want me to feel proud of getting out of all of that. I’ve had a hard time accepting that because my anger wasn’t ever about not being proud of myself. It’s about the truth and what I’ve had to go through to hold onto it.

My friends are right, though, and while my soul still screams at the injustice of manipulative storytelling, I am proud of what I survived, of what I stand for, of what I’ve worked tirelessly to preserve, of what I’m teaching my kids.

While I did not, in fact, end my marriage, I did eventually learn to end my own suffering.

In a long lineage of women wearing self deprecation like a crown, I walked away from those patterns and chose pleasure, safety, self preservation.

In a long lineage of women sitting quietly through jokes that aren’t funny and sermons that aren’t true and the words upon words that work to spin her upside down until she doesn’t know what she thinks, I walked away from those patterns and chose truth.

In a long lineage of women “staying for the kids” as if a broken household is somehow better for kids than wholeness with a single mom who knows who she is, I walked away from those patterns and chose to build a home where I flourish so my kids can flourish.

In a long lineage of women believing the idea that it’s more spiritual to accept being mistreated than it is to protect yourself, I walked away from those patterns and chose to respect myself enough to be assertive and defend myself.

In a long lineage of women disappearing so that men can succeed, I walked away from those patterns and chose to begin building my own legacy.

I walked away from the path that would have my kids believing I agreed when I didn’t and okay when I wasn’t, the path that had me acting and covering for and the whole room breaking from the intensity of the charade.

I wasn’t responsible for ending my marriage but I sure as hell have been responsible for healing from it, and in that truth I stand tall and proud.

It will make my whole week.

All I want in life is to go to the beach in the rain sometimes.

And to wear hoodies every day with a hot coffee in tow.

I squeal with delight when I find a frog or a lizard on the fence post.

I have also walked through the hallways of the darkest places on earth-prisons and state hospitals.

I have done so in order to hold other people who don’t have the capacity to hold me.

I have held and held and held when I needed to be held.

And I have bent backwards to love harder through many levels of hell.

I have sat at death’s bed and walked away motherless and determined to mother.

I don’t give up.

And I cling to what I believe in my bones is everyone’s truest self even when all evidence is contrary.

I am a hellbent on seeing deeper, truer, better in everything kinda girl.

I am stubbornly committed to hope and to healing and to the best in even the most difficult of humans.

And

I spent decades convinced of the upside down reality that I am just impossible to please.

Just don’t ever let go of the past.

Just expect perfection and lose my shit when I don’t receive it.

Just a pessimistic person who doesn’t let things go.

Just a girl who doesn’t see the good.

To recover from that?

To recover from a manipulative story about who I actually am inside?

It takes grit like you can’t imagine.

And mostly, it takes quiet walks in the dark and misty forest where all I hear is my own heart whispering joy and satisfaction.

The truth will set you free.

And sometimes that takes every ounce of tenacity and courage you have left in your tired traumatized bones.

The trees have roots when we don’t.

They’ve been around long enough to know better than us.

Deeper.

So I walk in their mist.

And listen to their stories.

They know who I am.

And I am beginning to know again too.

I don’t have either of my parents in my life any more but they still feel like pillars to me, just pillars I fell from a long time ago. I look back at them every day, study them a bit. I guess I’m always trying to make sense of where I come from, investigating them to try to figure out me. I just know their absence feels a lot like presence, heavy even.

My father’s absence could be explained by his conservative religious values. Is he not in my life any more because I’m gay? Yes. Because I have transgender kids? Definitely. Because I don’t believe in Jesus? Sure. Then I think about how my mother was staunchly conservative to the core.
And how if she were alive she’d rather die than lose her babies from her life. And she’d certainly never stand by while one of us bounced back and forth between the streets and jail. I think. But I’m making it all up.

I imagine what she would have done when my ex husband left.
She wouldn’t have agreed with the stand I was taking.
A woman doesn’t stand for herself, she falls on a sword for her husband.
She still would have hopped on a plane.
Ran her fingers through my hair.
Grocery shopped, sorted laundry, carried me.
She would have even found a way to admit she was proud of me.

I have made up more elaborate stories about the role my mother plays in my life postmortem. I tend to believe it was her voice in the oak tree whispering to me that I actually did know what was happening to me, that I could trust my knowing, that my marriage was never going to be okay, that I’d never be okay while still married to him. It sounds crazy and I do not care. You know what seems more insane to me than imagining your dead mother speaking to you about your problematic marriage in an oak tree? The way we go back to work the day after the funeral. The way the funeral is just days after the death. The way we cease to speak anything real about people after they die. The way we move on. The way we send a couple of meals to the bereaved and call that support. The way we’re afraid to mention someone who died because we don’t want to make anyone sad. That’s actual insanity.

So I’m going to keep talking to my mother on the side of the road when the blue birds are all nestled in the arborvitae. I’m going to keep imagining our relationship is still a push and pull between a woman who was afraid of being wild and a woman who was afraid of not. I’m not okay with her absence either way so I figure I might as well fuck it with society’s weird ass backwards grief practices and just sit in the grass with candles scream crying at my mom for things I was mad at her about when I was 13. I think that’s sanity. Because it’s interacting with what’s real and true rather than stuffing it aside because it’s uncomfortable. If I were to assemble a book of healthy grief practices I’d be placing imagination at the top of the list.

When I’m grieving my mother I imagine her still here, still growing, still challenging, still becoming, and still interacting with me and my wild life. I think about how at 42 years old I feel that I’m just beginning to grasp the idea of me, just getting started, just now feeling like an actual independent person who knows what she thinks without first consulting with a pastor to see if her thoughts make sense. My mother never made it to 42. Imagine all that she would have become!

The way my father’s edges spilled over. She’d been his line. His cover. The holder of everything he didn’t face.

Our home. The walls browned. What had been pristine turned rotten. The division of labor is crystal clear when a mother falls ill and there ceases to be any laboring.

Us kids. It was doctor appointments and teacher conferences and rides to practice and the schedules and the charts and the homework, yes. It was also our souls. Our big souls in tiny bodies. Every worry, every conflict, every dream, everything we had to say, every doubt, every trouble, every way in which we were becoming, it was all hers to hold.

When my mother became ill when I was 12 that meant I was left with the parent who didn’t parent. When my mom was too sick to be everything to everyone, I found out the truth about my father. He was head of household in name only. Our entire family structure: a ruse.

I took over where she left off. I believed my brother’s fate to be entirely on my shoulders. When he ended up unhoused, back and forth between jail and the streets: my fault, my fault, my fault. My father’s feelings, I would listen and hold and listen and hold. A teenager losing her mother, listening and holding, listening and holding for the man who should have done the holding, but he couldn’t keep it together.

A pattern quilted into my DNA it would seem.

When I was 39 years old I tried to fall apart. For the first time. I saw that my life was being held together by my willingness to be unbreakable. And I needed to break. My shoulders bruised from decades of holding the wounds of men who refused to carry anything that felt heavy, anything that didn’t make them look mighty.

I asked to put some of it down. I asked to take a turn to be unstable. I asked for him to hold while I fell apart for a minute.

He said it would be too hard. He was too used to my carrying.

So he fell apart even more. He raged at my needing and he left. Left me to be even more stable, more responsible, more resilient than I had already always been. He threw fits and named it all grief. I took up the task. I did what I always did. I held.

His demons. His trauma. His failures.

I filled in the gaps.

I covered and corroborated.

When he threw his body in my driveway scream crying so loud the neighbors checked and the kids woke, I calmed everyone and explained and I physically carried him into my bed.

And I held. And I held. And I held.

When I was the one going through something, the one asking for help, the one so desperately needing to fall apart, I held.

While he tried to convince folks who love me to be angry with me, I held. While he bailed on our family, I held. While he built a new life of success and status and pleasure in the wake of the storm he caused, I held.

Until one day I looked at our now separate lives and the way he got to go to Europe for a month for leisure, got to send me sporadic dates that worked for him to see the kids, got to write the story, and I said no more.

I looked at my mother’s legacy.

Women, for generations, passing down tired shoulders.

Shoulders carrying the secrets and the failures and the wounds of men who’ve been trained to deflect and to seek status and whose afflictions have made their families suffer in silence.

My mother died before she got the chance to break the cycle.

When I was the age she was when she died, I began to live for me, to carry only what is mine to carry.

The church that my then husband and I co-founded in our living room had become little more than a livestream event. That time in the life of our church is something I feel ashamed to write or speak about. Because it did not end well, but we sure made it look like it ended well. It’s painful to name that because it’s also true that there were deeply meaningful relationships and moments and I ache for those genuine realities while also regretting the pieces that were really fucked up. I remember how often we talked about our desire to end it well and we boasted that we were indeed doing so, but I’d go back and do absolutely every part of it differently in every way.

Do you ever see yourself in like an out of body sort of way? Like you’re so detached from the version of you who lived a certain season of your life that you watch her like a movie where you’re screaming at the television screen: “OH HELL NO DO NOT GO OUT THAT DOOR ARE YOU FUCKING CRAZY DO NOT DO THAT GIRLLLLL!” You know what I mean?

But it wasn’t a movie, it was my life, and I made those choices and walked through those doors. Also true: I was traumatized and trying to survive. That’s the part I’m just beginning to hold space for. The both/and-iest reality. I was a mess and I was a mess because my life was a mess and there is grace and I’m allowed to speak my truth even when I really messed some shit up.

You know how mega churches have these massive stages with smoke machines and crazy lights and so much production it’s like you’re at a concert? That way of doing church services is just a big flashy exaggerated presentation of this way of being that runs in and through every church I’ve ever known, including the one we started in my little living room in North Park San Diego.

It’s The Show.

When you’re in it you believe in it and you carry it like conviction and protection and duty and you think you’re genuinely serving folks. It’s the six days of falling apart at home then shiny smiling here to serve you on Sunday. It’s the culture of a thing that has a leadership model with those who speak from the microphone and those who show up to hear it.

In the summer of 2022 my marriage ended badly, really badly. It was not a peaceful separation and it had thrown not just me and my children into the depths of survival mode, but our closest friends and family were all reeling from it and everyone of us were consumed with just the how to get through the next day and the next day after that of it all. Meanwhile we co-pastored a church that was almost exclusively meeting online and that we felt had reached its end. Monday-Saturday my now ex-husband and I were in the unhealthiest patterns of our relationship to date and I was hanging on by less than threads. On Sunday we sat side by side to literally put on a show. Our church services were on Youtube and we laughed and gave sermons and played games and at one point I think I read a letter giving some vague statement about how things were rough for us personally and we were doing our best to show up. Then weeks later we announced we’d be closing the churches “doors.”

I will never forget the day of our last church service. Two women I admire with everything in me laughed and said they were actually so relieved when we announced we were closing the church because for a second there they thought we might be getting divorced. I smiled. I said nothing. My ex and I were no longer living together and it was so volatile between us that I desperately begged him for a one day truce where he let me back into his good graces just for the day so that we could get through the closing of our church in a way that felt safer to me. So many folks had been stuck with the shrapnel of our explosive relationship and deserved to at least know why it felt as tense as it did but we kept our secret split close to the chest and not even our board of elders knew the truth.

I’ve been thinking about how many times I stood at the podium over the years ragged and lonely and desperate and not okay and needing help and using the microphone to plead with our congregation to be honest about it if they were not okay. I’d assure them it was safe to show up as they were. I’d preach what I couldn’t live. Integrity was a thing I could only pursue on the other side of blowing up a life that was in so many ways… a show.

I know that what I have to share is a lot. And fiery.

Writing is so important to me: life giving and calming and invigorating.

And writing about my life is a minefield.

I lived through the storms of the last three years of my life pretty silently.

So much of it felt like an escape room I’d never escape.

I have watched quietly as my incredibly painful life was packaged neatly for sale. I’ve watched as my kids’ brutal custody situation was posted about and then discussed between my ex and our former church members. I sat there staring at my screen thinking dear god these are kids who are living this reality and there’s a whole other grown ass human involved whose story of this is buried here. And I said nothing. And I fell asleep at night bawling and truly believing my life was hopeless. Because that is how it feels to believe that saying something would obliterate you but saying nothing will eat your soul alive.

I started writing here recently and just decided that I trusted myself with that.

Thank you for being soft and supportive and caring enough to look.

I will never as long as I live put anything I have to say behind a paywall. AND I’m grateful beyond measure for the way folks are paying for my writing here. I can’t even find the words for how that heals and holds.

She doesn’t leave everything she’s built and endured and survived for decades in order to be trendy. She doesn’t finally say no more to her husband of two decades because she thinks he’ll take it well. She doesn’t start over from scratch on her own with no college degree, zero credentials, no work experience outside the home, no savings, piles of debt, and not a single account of her own nor a car title in her name because she believes she’ll have a chance in hell at financial stability.

When folks leave the churches they grew up in they are called selfish and their reasons are stated for them. Those reasons are never true and always condescending as fuck.

The same happens to women who get divorced.

When anyone’s life is entirely turned upside down, a safe assumption is that it hurts like actual hell and that they were pushed to the very brink. It’s safe to say they opted for truth and sanity over lies and gaslighting and upholding powerful systems that hurt people. It’s also pretty safe to say they had no real choice.

When I was separating from my ex-husband I didn’t get to choose what I actually wanted and needed, that was never on the table. I wanted a life together raising our kids as an intact family unit. I wanted him to have equal parenting responsibilities. I wanted financial transparency and autonomy. I wanted honesty. I needed bodily autonomy and respect and space while around him. I wanted accountability and recognition of what I’d been through so I could heal. I wanted continued partnership without the romantic and sexual aspect. None of that was possible, it did not happen.

So my actual choices were: A. to stay in a marriage where I was manipulated and his coercive control and self centering would mean I would always be helper and server and never the main character in my own life. Or B. I could claw my way out of all that and face his rage and retaliation and live with his public manipulation and continue to do parenting on my own.

When I left the evangelical church I didn’t get to keep the community I had spent a lifetime building and receiving support from. If I stayed I’d be selling my soul. I’d be signing up for anti-gay, white supremacist, misogynist, hellfire stories. I left because I wanted my soul. Not because I knew I’d be safe and secure and get to hold onto the things I loved about the church.

Without safety nets in place, folks don’t have a whole lot of choice in our world. Real freedom looks like security no matter which path you take.

In this world of hierarchies and abusive systems we are regularly faced with choices that don’t at all feel like choices.

Relationship shouldn’t require submission and self disappearing. Community shouldn’t require uniformity and falling in line. Yet so often they do. That leaves us with impossible choices. And Oh. My. God. Don’t get me started on a woman’s right to choose and how obviously she should be able to, but she doesn’t actually get to not just because we restrict abortion but because we’ve created an environment that even in the best circumstances makes it dangerous and lonely and impossibly difficult to actually birth and raise children. Where’s the choice in any of that?

Folks who walk away are in my book the bravest of them all.

Folks who walk away to save their souls are the most deeply misunderstood and misrepresented and subsequently the most resilient.

Those who refuse to stay to keep what’s comfortable and instead leave to find what’s true have the resolve and grit of a thousand lifetimes and I hope society begins to hear them.

Women and marginalized folks are looking at what this world offers and doing what they have to do. To survive. In a world that doesn’t give us freedom, we’re creating our own definitions of it, our own paths. That always involves mischaracterization and wild folks are saying, “go ahead and call me what you will, you’ve no idea what I’ve faced.”

As for me, I never felt like I walked away, from church nor marriage. To me, it just felt like breaking and crisis and survival.

Today I feel free because even though I felt I had no choice, I got away from that which broke my spirit and I built a wild new outside every box world for myself. It looks from the outside like a lot of things it is not and I’m mostly at peace with that because I know what I survived.

I didn’t grow into a gay woman. I didn’t become someone who prefers women and is just happier dating women.

That might be a true story for some folks, growing into queerness with time, and that’s beautiful. That’s not my story.

I was gay when my dad told us kids that being gay was an offense worthy of disowning us over.

I was gay when I took that very seriously and subsequently built a life that upheld his creed.

My sexuality isn’t something I grew into, it’s something that was buried long ago and continued to be entombed for decades.

It was buried by my father’s patriarchy. Buried by the self loathing I was groomed to carry.

Buried by a marriage that didn’t allow for me to recognize up from down.

Buried by a world and a life that groomed me for heterosexual wifehood.

Buried by manipulative men.

Buried by conditioning that said men were my center: without their gaze, their lust, their touch, their word, their headship, I was nothing.

There were so many moments over the years when the truth tried to claw its way out of the dirt. And every time it did it scared the shit out of me and hurt like actual hell. In fear and shame I doubled down on the stories that kept me underground.

I didn’t turn gay. It’s not even that I discovered a new facet of myself. Wouldn’t call it an awakening so much. I fought my way out of the systems and relationships that bound me because all I knew was that I was not okay. And then I unearthed the girl I’ve always been: gay AF. It wasn’t change and evolution over the years that led to gay in my forties. It was that I spent my life very unwell and finally hit rock bottom at 39. When I got out of a marriage that convinced me I didn’t have a firm grasp on reality, I could then finally see so many truths with clarity. Including my sexuality.

There’s a whole hell of a lot of grief in that.

But right now in my life? Joy is healing me.

Every single time my hand is on the small of my girl’s back I take a deep breath and whisper to myself: I belong to no man. And I squeal with delight. Mostly because she’s so fucking cute.

There are so many ways the world works to bury our truths. In excavating mine I’ve learned that the only way to heal is to name it and name it precisely. When you’re gaslit out of your own knowing and being, speaking the truth is how you patch yourself back together.

Only to be needed

So we lost our hunger

Replaced it with helping

We married men who told us to lighten up

Stayed for the kids

Lost our desire

Replaced it with duty

They trained us to be submissive and supportive in equal measure

So we acted as cheerleaders for the men who hurt us

It’s hard to be believed

When for so long you were so well behaved

Mostly I walk around with the profound feeling that I am not to have words. That this is the point. His story is meant to be the story.

If he alone posts about our divorce it’s a writer being vulnerable about his experiences. If I then write my experience we’ve got an ugly war between realities on our hands. Gross.

There are myriad ways in which his writing feels like a trap to me. I couldn’t expect that to be understood.

A few months ago he posted an article titled, “Why we got divorced and how I talk about it.” I have no words. Except that I have many. And the feeling that I’m not supposed to have them plagues me.

At the end of the long article droning on and on about how positive his outlook is and how great our marriage was and how, and this point is very important as it’s repeated throughout, there was absolutely nothing hidden and all was as it seemed, he then writes about how our differing views of what led to our divorce are like the Netflix baking show Nailed It. We each just have different ingredients and ideas of their importance. Or something.

He asserts full confidence that I would agree with his ingredients. I’d just add a few of my own.

My ingredients involve things that led to me going no contact with him unless absolutely necessary for legal purposes or the kids need something.

My ingredients have me in recovery.

My ingredients crushed me.

He says that when it comes to having a good marriage, we crushed it.

Our marriage crushed me.

And now every day I do the work to find my actual voice again.

The voice that says that article was crap.

Just like I forgot about the way her skin against mine feels like desire.

Or how her green eyes give me those fluttery feelings that stay long after she’s done looking at me.

I forgot about the way a trail of ferns through a damp cave can lift my mood for much longer than any other mental healthcare plan I’ve ever tried.

I’ve tried them all.

I forgot about daffodils lining the sides of freeways.

How they make me squeal.

I forgot about chasing newts in the ditch with rainwater up to my knees.

I forgot how many colors of leaves litter the road where my heart lives.

It was easier to forget.

Remembering feels a bit like crawling into a coffin at first.

But after a few painful stretches, it begins to feel like resurrection.

Oh, my bones say, oh this is me, that’s right.

Slowly, I let my body love what she

remembers.

Oregon summers.

Kissing women.

Raincoats and puddles and dark skies.

Her naked skin against mine.

The moss.

I let myself crave it all.

I remember.

and that to me everything is a nail

this, he says, is why i see problems

in his behavior

because i am a hammer

who only sees nails

he forgets that my mother put a

hammer in my hands when I was too small

to hold it upright

forgets that she trained me

to see everything beautiful

with a hammer

to walk into rooms

with an eye for where the hammer

can heal

raised me to see what’s underneath

the thirty layers of old wallpaper

to collect rusty nails

and make them into wreaths

with our hammers, we stopped on the side of the road

to collect junk from ditches

and we made it art

my mother taught me that a hammer

is for restoration

and creative problem solving

maybe I’m a hammer

but to me,

my mother’s daughter,

everything is the possibility

for renovation

everything is the possibility

for beauty

to this hammer, nothing is just a nail

Says he was a good enough dad. Says he didn’t cause harm.

He’s well aware this isn’t how I see it, how I experienced it.

He tells me in private emails how wrong my story of our marriage is.

How out of my mind I must be to see his parenting the way I do.

My story can’t be erased.

It is impossible to pinpoint that first moment I left my body.

The way I froze.

The way I turned against my own flesh.

How suddenly the spark of pleasure coursing through my veins disappeared.

I am so unsure of what came first but I know I disconnected with my body in a thousand moments of becoming a woman:

Hearing my mother chuckle through, “I just have to put on my face first!”

The way “have to” echoed in my bones.

The forced curlers and pink dresses and the “stop throwing a tantrum!”

The way “tantrum” echoed in my bones.

The giggling answering machine messages from boys in fifth grade and following and begging and staring and teasing and the grown ups who’d egg them on and laugh through, “Oh come on, relax, they just like you is all.”

The way “Oh come on, relax” echoed in my bones.

The countless sermons from mouths of men I was trained to adore and blindly trust and all of those proclamations of male headship so carefully labeled “love” and the way they’d make “submission” sound sweet and fun and sexy.

The way “submission” echoed in my bones.

My first time being “dumped” by a boy I never wanted to say yes to in the first place but “want to” wasn’t my job and “no” had no route from my gut to my lips. The way I tormented myself when his reason was she’s “too flat and didn’t kiss long enough.” I was 12.

The way “too flat” echoed in my bones.

Moments of disembodiment that all added up to an adolescent who’d lost her place in the world.

By the time I was a teen I had nowhere inside of me to ground.

My mind wasn’t mine. Religious indoctrination of the fear of eternal torture in hell made my mind a scary place where I was terrified of my own thought process. Eternal conscious physical pain for anyone who didn’t believe the right things seemed wrong to me but thinking that way might mean that I was one of those people destined for the fiery pit with satan’s never-ending sadism. My mind was not a safe place to be.

Church made sure of that. With its constant refrain of “lean not on your own understanding,” I was certain my thoughts were evil. I was taught to take those thoughts captive, surrender them to the Lord, and to fill my mind with only HIS ideas.

School taught me that my mind was untrustworthy in another way as well. I couldn’t keep up with the work load. I couldn’t pass tests, even when I knew all of the answers. I couldn’t sit still. I couldn’t hear what the teacher was saying. I believed I was stupid and a failure. School, too, made me distrust my own mind.

And my heart? Well, my religion told me that my heart was a liar. My parents explained to me when I was tiny that my desires were evil. A sinner, inherently, I would always crave the wrong things. My heart was to be tamed. I was to desire only the things the Lord had for me. My own will, my own craving, my own passion… sinful. I was to cast it all aside and live as a martyr, bending always toward HIS will, HIS way. This self disappearing act was the only way to be good, to be pure, to be accepted. To be pleasing.

Trained to despise and fear my own mind and my own heart, I lived in my body, my safe place. But by middle school my body, where I found sanity and power in childhood, was no longer mine either. It belonged to the men who preached and the Bible I was clobbered with and the boys who were just being the boys they were raised to be.

It is not surprising then that adulthood was sedentary. The most I moved my body was a family walk and very rarely a hike. I no longer ran and if I ever tried I felt like I was going to die. It wasn’t even appealing to me any more, that rush of power and freedom. I named myself not an athlete. Not the type who works out. Not an active person. Called myself couch potato. I wrote disembodiment into my personality. Meanwhile, living inside my head, a war raged on: a war with myself.

I’ll never really know exactly why it happened when it did. Maybe it had something to do with the ages of my kids. They were all at school full time for the first time. That and our proximity to the gorgeous mountain hiking of mission trails regional park led me to what felt at the time like a random new practice. I began walking the trails every morning by myself. Quickly I found myself purchasing actual workout clothing and running shoes. One day right before the big hill that rendered me breathless just from walking it, I ran. I just took off.

And there I was.

I didn’t know it was me at first. That red-hot-heart-racing- head-pounding power? I just knew that it felt different and that I was finally ready for different.

I had only run for a few days when it happened. In the piercing ache that courses through a body that’s been neglected for over two decades, I heard a distinct yet entirely unfamiliar voice. She was clear as day and that clarity caught me off guard, scared me to death really. I lived in confusion my whole life. When you’re used to being confused, clarity feels like a threat to your life.

The voice in the woods stated clearly that my marriage was a problem-that I’d never be whole or well inside of it. This didn’t feel like a new truth at all. I had ruminated in such thoughts for nearly twenty years. It’s just that now this thought was clear instead of muddy. Instead of pushing it or dissecting or arguing mercilessly with it, I simply heard it. The truth no longer at war. I kept running. I pushed myself to the point of collapse and then I crawled to the three hundred year old oak tree I knew so well. I’d been meditating in her branches for years. But now she was holding my clarity rather than my confusion and I swear to god she was relieved to find me in that state.

In my tree, gasping for breath while clinging to her bark to hold me up, I heard all of the same questions I had been asking my whole life but this time without fog. I held on so tight to that tree and I longed to stay there forever. If I left her branches my life would crumble to these big questions I was no longer bending into oblivion. I let them be. I heard them. I heard me. I heard my ache to feel seen. I heard my ache for space in my own goddamn life. I heard my rage for the way I was being manipulated and shut down. I heard my desire. I heard my resentment for the way I was still fighting for bodily autonomy and the years of blatant disregard and coercive control with zero accountability nor amends made. I heard my understanding. I sat in my own thoughts and my own feelings. And I believed them.

It scared the ever-loving shit out of me.

It wasn’t my mind that got me out of my marriage. Nor was it my heart. My body took over. My body had tended to my sickness, held me through every internal war and now she was screaming: ENOUGH! It was time for her to make me well. My body healed my mind so that I could trust it. My body bound my shattered heart back together so that I could trust it. My body taught me to trust each part of myself I’d been programmed to hate and reject. My body knew the only way to wholeness and she carried me through every devastating step I’d have never chosen to take. I no longer think my new practice of running through the woods was random at all. I think it was my body knowing it was time, my body being sure I was ready, my body trusting the path before me, and carrying me all the way home to myself.