Scary Mother = Scary God = Constant Vigilance

Why I Stayed in it for So Long

Photo by Lucas Pezeta

Age Eight:

“On your knees!” My mother roars at my four-year-old brother as we stand together on our neighbor’s front steps in our quiet, Colorado neighborhood. The neighbor lady and her son, who is my brother’s age, stand behind the screen door, stunned into silence. My brother kneels, sobbing, his shoulders shaking, his body trembling. At eight, I’m standing slightly behind my mother’s tall, lithe body. I’m not the one in trouble this time, but I feel everything my little brother must feel: hot shame spreading across the skin on my face and neck, my breathing shortened into small, terrified gasps.

The neighbor boy’s older sister, who is my friend from school, appears at the door next to her mother, her eyes wide. The humiliation of what she is seeing, the secret shame of my family, clamps onto something deep within my body.

“Pray for forgiveness,” my mother hisses into my brother’s ear.

My brother called the neighbor boy a terrible word that he’d heard our grandmother say. Deeply embarrassed and furious at her own mother, my mother has reverted to the panicked state that circles and haunts her, the panicked state that keeps my brother and me alert and enmeshed with her. We live in that panicked state, in anticipation of her outbursts, beatings, humiliations, and life-altering punishments. She gives away our pets, bans us permanently from friends, and uses physical violence on us with a randomness we can’t make sense of.

Yet there are also times she barely reacts at all.

My nervous system has taught itself that constant vigilance is safest.

I adhere to my mother out of a primal fear that if I veer off the course she’s set for me, I might not survive.

Age Twenty-Eight:

I’m sitting cross-legged on gold shag carpet in a pastor’s small apartment near the beach in San Diego. He’s a pastor and a surfer, intent on starting his own church that teaches surfers about God. He’s cross-legged like the rest of us, in his OP shorts, grey t-shirt with a local coffee shop logo, a Spider-man tattoo webbing up the side of his leg from ankle to knee.

He’s reading from Ephesians chapter five to our group—six surfers and me, three men and three women, all of whom are tan, blond, and barefoot. I’m the only non-surfer, new in town after years on the east coast. The reading commands wives to submit to their husbands and tells husbands to love their wives like Christ loved the church. I grew up hearing my mother quote this verse to my father. But here in this apartment, it sounds different.

I raise my hand. “This isn’t how my mother quoted that verse. Her Bible said wives should submit to their husband if the husband loves his wife like Christ loves the church.”

The pastor has a kind and crooked smile from a long-ago tree-trimming accident and it makes him seem even more earnest. “Did you check your Bible?” he asks.

I open the heavy, green leather version my parents recently gave me. I’m proud to show these surfers that I can easily flip to the verse. But when I do, there’s no if. This is the exact same Bible my mother uses, so I’m baffled. What does this mean? The skin on every last inch of my body comes alive with a heightened sense of apprehension.

I look up at the pastor. “There’s no if.”

He shrugs as if to say, What can you do?

But now I’m off-balance. A familiar sense of doom slithers into my gut, as though my mother is stomping up the stairs toward my childhood bedroom, pissed that I ratted her out. My chest tightens and the air ekes in and out. I need to fix this. I need to be more vigilant with my Bible and God, and find out what he actually says and wants from me.

I must adhere more closely to God. I have the same a primal fear I had with my mother, that if I veer off the course he’s set for me, I might not survive.

Today:

God wanted to root out and expunge my sins, just like my mother. I spent nearly thirty years trying to root out the unthinkable defects that lay deep within me. I followed the edicts of Christian talk radio men who told me to erase everything I wanted, needed, and longed for. More of you and less of me, we all sang in church with eyes closed and palms open to receive whatever God might give. I believed that if only I could purge the sinful, ugliness that was my very self-hood, perhaps God would stop being mad at me.

Maybe I could finally find peace.

It took me far too many years to understand that peace wasn’t coming. Nobody was going to save me. It was all an illusion.

But I didn’t come to know this until I was nearly fifty.

Eight years have passed since the day I let go. Yet even now, I sometimes feel compelled to be vigilant. And I’m still mining my tender psyche for those parts of me I erased. They’re in there. I know this because I’ve located most of them. Each time I find a remnant of the frightened and lonely shards of myself, I cup it in my hands, speak gently to it, and assure it that we’re okay now.

My mother and her God are no longer coming for us.

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What I Learned in My First Year as a Widow by

Mary Roblyn

Writing about Mining Your Own Tender Psyche

It can be arduous. It can take a long time.

Contact me if you need empathy, and a second pair of eyes.