Week 10: Adolescent Wrestlings
I’ve been working on a poem for a few months now about my relationship with the church I was raised in. I’m not sure if it’s done or not yet, but this week I was struck by the following stanza in it:
“While other adolescents were planning for first dates and lengthy lives, I was preparing for
Armageddon,
marriage,
children,
and my own death.”
I know that all may sound a little dramatic and grim, but it’s quite true. The teachings of my youth focused heavily on being prepared for the end (via either death or spontaneous disappearance) and finding a suitable spouse with whom to create “image bearers”. And, honestly, it really left me at odds with myself.
Any time I considered letting the public know I was involved with someone, I became terrified of what would happen if it didn’t work out.
Would I then be seen as tainted?
Would my ability to find my soul mate and start a family be compromised?
Would I be able to find my way back to the path God had laid out for me?
On the other hand, what if I died or the rapture happened before I found someone and married them? That thought was, in some ways, more terrifying.
Was I really gonna leave this life without having sex?
Was I wrong to be concerned I was going to miss out on having sex?
Was it sinful for me, a Christian girl, to be thinking about sex this much?
There was also the looming terror of being “left behind” which frequented my nightmares about as frequently as I recommitted my life to Jesus. After all, I was filled with doubt and I never seemed to be able to play my part 100% right at church, so it seemed like my chances of being left behind were a lot higher than my friends who, as far as I was aware, were not filled with lustful thoughts about the boy 1 row over and 2 seats up in their Science class.
All of this left me seeking to detach from myself and the body I’d been told all my life was inherently sinful. I wanted to instead be attached to a personality and a brain that behaved and thought the way a good, steadfast, Christian girl should and a body that would appease my husband but not lead anyone to stumble - especially myself.
I suppose that’s part of why I believe in investing in singleness as a discipline for oneself. I was taught to be single for my “future husband”. By being single, I was honoring him and preparing myself for him. But, in doing that, I never got to live my life for myself. I never got to explore who I was and wanted to be as a person apart from developing a persona which would - hopefully - be pleasing to him. The model of singleness I was given treated this time as preparation for someone else, but I believe it should actually be a time of purposely investing in and discovering myself.
In hindsight, it’s kinda funny that I didn’t uproot my view of singleness sooner. You see, I was talking to a guy shortly before I began to seriously grapple with what I believed my personal relational and sexual ethic should be, and he told me he really wanted to get a tattoo. When I asked him why he hadn’t gotten it yet, he told me it was because his mother had told him to wait until he was married to make sure his wife liked tattoos and was okay with them before putting one on his body permanently. While it was refreshing to hear someone talk about a man’s body in the context of attraction in evangelical relationships, I still wasn’t a fan. I asked him, “But if she’s your wife, if she’s your soulmate, then wouldn’t it make sense for her to also like tattoos and therefore be okay with you having one?”.
All the pieces were there, I just couldn’t believe them for myself. Maybe it was shame, maybe it was internalized misogyny, but it took me awhile to center myself in that question: “If I have these dreams, desires, thoughts, plans, etc., if these are the things I truly want to lean in on, then wouldn’t it make sense for me to just move in that direction for myself?”