R-0010: On Isolation
1. Education
Jezebel's early education took place in public school, where she first encountered the judgement Agnes and James reserved for anyone beyond their spiritual perimeter. Her classmates were analysed and filed accordingly: this one's parents were divorced; that one's family were atheists; another was a Christian in name only, which was arguably worse than not being a Christian at all. The social audit was thorough and ongoing, to the point that the Indexer cannot recall a single childhood friend who did not possess some disqualifying feature. This would have produced a sufficient degree of isolation on its own but it did not operate alone.
In parallel with public school, Jezebel was enrolled in ballet classes, which consumed the after-school hours that might otherwise have been available for the ordinary, unstructured socialisation of childhood. The ballet studio was not a social environment in the way that it might have been: these were not friends. They were seen at scheduled times, and never outside of them. The studio was another institution that Jezebel moved through without accumulating the relational sediment that normally should gently blanket a childhood.
When Agnes and James decided to transition Jezebel into homeschooling, the timing was retrospectively perfect. It coincided almost precisely with the end of her potential dancing career, which meant that here two primary sources of socialisation were removed in the same motion. This was probably not a calculated move, but the outcome was the same regardless of intent.
What followed was a particular variety of educational isolation that the Indexer has since come to regard as its own distinct thing. Agnes outsourced the curriculum largely to college-level textbooks and recorded lecture series and then withdrew from the process almost entirely. She would spend the better part of the day upstairs in bed, researching on her computer or phone, or out with friends. Jezebel was largely responsible for educating herself. The house was quiet for hours on end. The day would pass without human contact until Ishmael returned from school, or James from work, or Agnes from wherever Agnes had been.
Ishmael's situation merits a special note in this narrative. Agnes and James had reached the limit of what they could provide educationally for their eldest child, and so Ishmael was returned to public school and enrolled in the International Baccalaureate programme. This was a reasonable decision. Ishmael was, without question, the more academically gifted of the two children. What is worth noting is that this decision produced a household in which one child was embedded in an institution with peers, structured social contact, and the ordinary friction of adolescent life, while the other sat alone in an empty, quiet house with a pile of textbooks and a ludicrously large case of DVDs.
Ishmael, for their part, did not compensate for this. They were tired after school, and they expressed that tiredness in the form of frustration whenever Jezebel attempted to make contact. I do not entirely blame them. They were a teenager, growing up under the weight of the Family's expectations, who wanted to be left alone. The problem was structural: Jezebel had no one else to talk to. Ishmael's need for rest and Jezebel's need for contact were placed in direct competition by an arrangement that gave neither of them any other options.
Agnes did eventually enrol Jezebel in two homeschooling co-ops. The Indexer notes this without particular warmth, because the co-operatives were subject to the same evaluative process as every other social structure Jezebel had ever been placed in. The other families were assessed, found wanting in various spiritual particulars, and the appropriate social distance was maintained. The co-operatives were not communities, and Jezebel's association with any children who did not pass Agnes' high threshold was firmly punished.
2. Family
The family unit that Agnes and James had constructed operated under what might charitably be described as a siege mentality. The phrase the Indexer recalls being deployed most often was some variation of it's us against the world, which sounds in isolation like an expression of solidarity. In practice, it functioned as a justification for not needing anyone else, which is a subtly different thing.
Ishmael, as the eldest and as the child whose assigned gender at birth aligned with Agnes and James' hierarchical expectations, occupied a structurally different position in the family than Jezebel did. Their childhoods did not overlap in any meaningful way. By the time Jezebel was navigating the isolated years of homeschooling, Ishmael was already operating in a separate world. The gap in experience was wide enough that the sibling relationship never solidified into anything resembling the solidarity that the fortress mentality ostensibly promised. Ishmael, during those years, did not appear to like Jezebel very much.
James worked full time. His presence in Jezebel's daily life was confined to the evenings, when he was tired, and the Indexer remembers the math and physics lessons he occasionally provided with a genuine, if qualified, warmth. They are qualified because they were infrequent, and because James' attention and time were demonstrably more concentrated on Ishmael and the promise they held.
Agnes' relationship to Jezebel was of a different character entirely. Agnes was not distant. Agnes was enmeshed, perhaps even in the clinical sense: the boundaries between her interior life and Jezebel's were effectively nonexistent in one direction. Jezebel was the designated recipient of Agnes' assessments of everyone in their lives: her friends, her acquaintances, her family, her sex life and fantasies, James' family, the neighbours, the congregation. These assessments were, without meaningful exception, critical. Agnes processed her world through a continuous stream of judgement, and Jezebel was the most available audience.
The extended family offered no structural alternative. Agnes and James had settled in the Pacific Northwest, at considerable geographical distance from both families of origin. Agnes spoke of her own family with consistent contempt (except for her abusive mother, who was portrayed as a saint of constant suffering). This had the effect of closing off any potential relationship before it could be evaluated on its own terms. James' family was slightly warmer and more functional, but still geographically remote and infrequently visited. The California relatives, who were closer in proximity, were spoken of poorly, with the sole exception of those who were missionaries, whose vocation apparently elevated them above the general critique.
The net result was a child who was isolated from her peers, isolated from her extended family, isolated within her immediate family by the unequal distribution of attention, and who received the majority of her adult contact in the form of her mother's editorial commentary on the inadequacy of everyone she knew.
3. Religion
As stated in a previous record, Agnes and James met at a Holy Roller church during the height of the Jesus People movement. Throughout Jezebel's childhood, they remained people for whom listening in the Spirit was a legitimate method of arriving at conclusions, and who would seriously entertain almost any claim however ludicrous, provided it was wrapped in the correct theological vocabulary. This meant that the quarantine line they built around Jezebel was not constructed primarily through reasoning that could be engaged or contested: it was constructed through a deep-seated respect for divine revelation. Unfortunately for Jezebel, revelation is not subject to appeal.
The Family moved through churches. There was an early, more or less mainstream, non-denominational congregation, then a Lutheran Brethren church, which occupied the more conventional Protestant centre. Each of these produced the same response from Agnes and James: protracted dinner-table analyses of the congregation's spiritual shortcomings, its insufficient faithfulness, its compromised doctrine. No church was ever quite right. The Indexer suspects no church could have been, because the problem was not the churches.
The final destination was a home church affiliated with the Households of Faith: non-denominational, non-hierarchical, recognising no ecclesiastical authority above itself, whose theological distinctives included a commitment to the establishment of Christian governance in the United States and the complete rejection of spiritual authority above that of a given family's patriarch. James, who had received what he understood as a divine calling to preach during his time with the Holy Rollers, had never been able to act on that calling within any institution that required ordination. The Households of Faith did not require ordination, only the conviction that one had been called and the agreement of the current elders. James had been waiting for exactly this moment. With their joining of this movement, Jezebel was forced into attending a church that had cordoned itself off from every mainstream Christian institution as comprehensively as Agnes and James had cordoned their family off from everyone else.
It is worth stating plainly what Agnes and James' theology cost. They have, by their own account and without apparent distress, declined to acknowledge Ishmael's non-binary gender identity and Jezebel's lesbianism. They have stated, with the clarity that only genuine conviction produces, that their faith takes precedence. The Indexer does not dispute that this is their sincere position. She simply observes that the position requires loving one's interpretation of an ancient text more than one loves one's children, which is, whatever else one calls it, a choice. While they complain about not remaining in contact with Ishmael, or not knowing the Indexer to this day, I would take the opportunity to remind the reader that this situation is entirely self-inflicted.
Agnes and James believe that no one is as correctly religious as they are. This is not a conclusion they reached, but a premise they started from: The organised churches were wrong, the Family was compromised, the neighbours were worldly, the classmates were spiritually deficient. the co-op families were inadequate, and at the centre of this universal insufficiency, Agnes and James stood together, certain of their discernment, and built a very small, very sealed world.
4. The Retrospective
The Indexer is in a position, at this remove, to observe something that was not visible from inside the cordon: Agnes and James have never once approved of a friend or a ("male") lover.
This is not a rhetorical exaggeration for effect. Upon reviewing the record, I cannot locate a single exception. Every friend Jezebel brought to their attention was processed through the same evaluative apparatus that processed the classmates, the extended family, the congregations, and the neighbours, and was found to contain some disqualifying element - the wrong beliefs, the wrong lifestyle, the wrong associations, the wrong influence. My two "heterosexual" romantic relationships were assessed and returned with annotations. The standard was applied consistently and the standard was never met.
The Indexer has spent some time considering whether this pattern reflects a genuinely high bar, sincerely held and consistently applied, or whether it reflects something structurally different: a bar that exists not to be cleared but to ensure that it cannot be. There is some distinction to be made between a parent who wants their child to find a worthy partner and a parent who has organised their evaluative criteria such that no partner could ever qualify. One of these is love with standards, while the other is the quarantine zone extended endlessly into the future.
I am not entirely convinced that Agnes and James could accept even the most impeccable candidate the specific constraints of their theology could theoretically produce. The hypothetical figure - devout, orthodox, male, within the correct doctrinal tradition, of appropriate character and standing - would still arrive from outside the isolation zone. He would still belong, in some structural sense, to a world that Agnes and James have spent decades classifying as insufficient and evil. He would still, eventually, be subject to their judgement.
I note this not primarily with bitterness, but as a matter of evidentiary record. The isolation documented in this file was not a temporary condition of childhood, subject to revision upon adulthood, bur rather as a feature of the system. The cordon was not built to come down. It was built to hold Jezebel, and the Family, permanently within it.
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