Author’s Note: Some names and details of this story have been changed to protect identity of the individuals.
Her name was Tirza. She was beautiful beyond measure staring back at me from behind the table with her brilliant green eyes and naturally highlighted curvaceous golden brown hair. She was slender and her effervescence matched mine, her laugh like a bubbling brook. She was feisty and sarcastic and her personality was a perfect match for mine, as neither of our personalities gelled very well with the vast majority of the rest of the girls we knew from the Movement. And if our personalities did match others, we never found out because if a daughter risked exposing her true self, she risked her security and position. Tirza and I met at our state’s home school conference and it didn’t take long for us to begin an incessant conversation filled with all things girly. We were instant kindred spirits. Before the weekend was over, names and addresses had been exchanged and it wasn’t more than a handful of lazy summer days before the first letter arrived in my mailbox with a gorgeous handwritten script, curly enough to match her hair.
Raised in an equally oppressive, legalistic, Patriarchal home, neither she nor I had very many options beyond the call of betrothal and motherhood. If we were going to find our way, we would have to forge those waters on our own. But in those tender years leading up to our much-anticipated graduations, we were set on dreaming about our futures, which for us blazed brightly and were full of promise like a new morning when the grass is freshly green and woolly newborn lambs greet the dawn. Tirza was two years older than myself, and was scheduled to graduate the year before I was.
Slowly our letters waned with the fury that we had once sent them. Excuses reigned on both of our parts, but primarily they centered around the fact that I was preoccupied with hurriedly attempting to find a job to get out of my abusive home life, and hers was completely different. She was courting a mutual friend and had been promised, or betrothed, to him.
Jason ran around with a group of guys that my parents had begun to allow me to socialize with more frequently the summer right before I graduated. This was really unheard of in my world, but the main reason for this change was because I was trying to reach out to Dani, and these guys were very much like her big brothers and in time, became like mine. Because all of our families were connected through attending Immanuel Family Fellowship, socializing with one another was deemed acceptable as long as there was heavy adult supervision. Somehow through a twisting of connections in the homeschooling community, Tirza and Jason had been introduced to one another. And it was assumed that based on the reformed theology and their parent’s commitment to the Movement, that that was sign enough from God to promise these two young adults for one another.
Jason was a tanned, slightly shorter than average guy, shorter than the graceful Tirza by nearly two inches. He usually had our entire group in stitches due to his satirical, witty and often hysterical view of the world and his surroundings. Not overly a thinker and a tendency to take the world with a Johnny-come-lately attitude, he appeared to be very much the opposite of Tirza in this way. Whether the odd couple truly was lopsided in their match for one another no one cared to notice. It would be one of the very first weddings of second-generation homeschoolers since the Movement began in the late 1970’s and both sets of parents were certain that God had arranged their marriage in His courtroom.
Though I knew that the two were engaged, I never saw them together. Tirza wrote of him but briefly once, and all that magical summer I never once heard Jason mention her name, except when I brought it up. It was odd, but I paid it little attention and our friends followed suit. After all, they were just courting and because of that, not really meant to be seen as a couple in the public view…at least, not in this stage of the game. I heard of her wedding plans, of her china pattern, of her dreams of happy home and creature comforts. But little mention of him, except when I mentioned him to her. Again, I paid little heed, and chose instead to immerse myself in her dreams of excitement of her future. If Tirza’s dreams had come true- along with her dreams of freedom- then mine were shortly to follow. Or so I thought.
And then one day I received a dreaded letter from Tirza. I knew something was wrong from the moment I tore into the envelope, as my name and address were written in a markedly different form. The handwriting was forlorn and droopy, not the perky, cheery scroll I was used to receiving, instead, it was naked of the curvatures of her lovely script.
Dear Chandra,
Hi, how are you? Sorry I haven’t written in a while. I got a new job at our local Wal-Mart store and it has kept me really busy. Sometimes I like the work atmosphere and sometimes I don’t.
My heart feels like it is going to break in two. After a very rocky and up-and-down relationship with Jason, he called it off about a month ago. It’s been very hard on me and I don’t know what I am going to do. Our wedding has been called off- all of my hopes and dreams- gone.
Sorry, I know that this letter is more of a note, but I have to go to work. I will write more later. Thanks for being a good friend.
Grace and peace be yours abundantly,
Tirza
It didn’t take long for Jason’s story to begin to unfold, and it was a story that unless you were close to it, you would not have heard about it. It was a story that had it been allowed to leak through the chinks, it would have rocked the Kool-aid world of our families. As it was, the few that did know about it understood one thing: keep it under wraps because if it were exposed, their credibility would have been destroyed.
It began when Jason was fourteen in the bedroom of his grandfather. His grandfather had always been a recluse and somewhat bizarre. His grandfather was a large man and it was easy to overpower the small frame of Jason, who took after his father. Greedy, hungry and beyond redemption, a two year incestuous relationship began.
His mom first noticed the difference in him becoming more and more defiant and despondent. Jason had become the adolescent that her Movement friends were telling her to fear: mouthy, defiant, withdrawn and hateful. Attributing it to the dreaded pubescent stage and his public school, she pulled him out and began homeschooling him the summer after his relationship with his grandfather began. His father in this process was the typical overbearing, controlling Patriarch whose ego was fed by his wife and who was generally emotionally absent from the lives of his sons.
In some ways, being pulled out of public education was a good thing for Jason, as his mom’s new found interest in protectiveness meant that even being left alone with his grandfather was now out of the question. And since Jason could not be left alone, his grandfather’s interest in him slowly subsided and eventually died out. Jason chose not to tell a soul about the humiliation that he had endured. It was an assault not only on his budding manhood, but also on the dignity of his soul. And the further and deeper his mother went into the Movement- wearing homemade dresses and insisting that her sons resemble the Amish- the deeper he buried his secret shame.
He covered it well. He was always out for fun and sought to deflect the attention on himself by trying to make others laugh. He was easy to get along with and hilarious to boot, so it made him a choice companion at a homeschool social event.
But then came the day when his parents chose him a soul mate. And Jason thought that once again he could hide the feelings that had been rumbling and formulating the last few years. He really didn’t want to come clean. He knew what it would mean if he did, and he just wasn’t quite there yet. Surely he could hang on for a little while longer…Surely he could get over this thorn in his flesh, this could be conquered! It would be!
He prayed, he fought, he never conquered. And the wedding date with Tirza was fast approaching. Their relationship was rocky and tumultuous and he had relatively no feelings towards her other than something of a chum. It was strange and it perplexed him but he just couldn’t shake it. And then the time came when Tirza had had enough of his excuses and demanded to know what was wrong with her. Why he wasn’t interested in holding her hands, why he wasn’t tempted to kiss her. She had caught him at a weak moment, when his guard was down and he was tired of fighting.
Jason’s mom had grown into the proverbial nagging, controlling mother that most sons grow to despise. But this was ten times worse. Hearing her drone on and on about Tirza and the wedding, the pressure of procreating grandchildren for his mother to help raise, and his secrets weighing him down put him over the edge. Truth was, with the secret he was carrying and his family’s newly adopted attitudes on sex, he had had enough. He was done with this religious dogma, he was done with the mind games, he was done with people who didn’t know anything about his real mind and heart and all he knew was that he wanted out. He was done, and he didn’t care what the fallout was.
He told Tirza everything. How the wedding was off, how he was moving out of his family’s home even if they disowned him, how he was molested by his grandfather and how ever since he had hit puberty, he had feelings towards men that he couldn’t explain. Jason had done it, and broken Tirza’s heart in the process. But at least the weight of the world was no longer on his shoulders and now he could go on and live the life he wanted to live…that he needed to live.
Jason’s family did disown him for quite some time. Because his little brother was beginning to follow his older brothers lead, his mom and dad did wake up in time to stop the bleeding and to realize that the Movement, and Immanuel Family Fellowship and the Kool-aid that both offered, was not doing their family any favors. But the damage had been done. Jason was an outcast and he was gay. And because of his family’s inability to be open and honest, and because of their stifling religiosity, his family missed an opportunity to show Christ’s love to him.
Jason left the Christian faith, and honestly though it deeply saddens me, I understand it. Tirza after wondering in the desert for years and falling in with the wrong crowd did come back to the faith and is now living out her dreams of being a wife and mother. Both of them never completed college, and both have held jobs at mass-market retailers. They have since reconnected and both realized that the homes in which they were raised were filled with suffocating Quiverfull practices that squelch the life out of the families that the Movement is said to save.
