The Contested File

One of the earliest traceable patterns in this file is the systematic conditioning of my childhood joys. While this eventually came to encompass anger, fear, and sadness as well, my joy was the first target of Agnes' controlling touch. Whenever I experienced happiness that rose to external visibility, my mother would chide me with the same phrase:  Keep an even keel. I am sure that Agnes intended this as kindly, maternal advice meant to build emotional resilience in a young child, but it was actually a slow, deliberate sanding-down of my emotional range until exuberance looked like a moral failure. The earliest moments I remember this phrase being deployed against my happiness are moments that seem harmless: laughing, out of breath after playing tag; coming to show her some precious trinket I'd found in the grass; sharing the invitation to a school mate's birthday party; laying in the sun on the warm pavement in July...  Each time, she'd look at me sternly and tell me t...

I was the dumb child of the Family. This is not to say that I am unintelligent: I have succeeded in undergraduate and graduate school, am a published author, and have been recognised by multiple governments as a "global talent" while immigrating. If Agnes were piecing together this file, she would likely hold up my success as a "Christian homeschooling success story," and other members of that community would agree with her. But, this is not Agnes' file. It's mine.  Until when I turned 14, the bright and shining star of the Family was Isaac , whose status as "the eldest son" combined with their genuine intelligence, curiosity, and easy-going temperament to create the perfect golden child of the Family.¹ ² While I certainly had personalised activities in the form of ballet ³, soccer, and music, I was acutely aware of being the Second Child. Isaac appeared to progress through their education at such an accelerated rate that they received special att...

There are moments from that church that still baffle me with their surrealism. These events happened in plain sight, witnessed by multiple people, and yet somehow left me feeling as though I’d briefly slipped into an alternate reality. This particular incident took place years after we’d joined. By then, the church had moved into a proper building, rented in the afternoons from a traditional, aging congregation in the rural Northwest. We had a small sound system that I operated, using the few years of experience I’d gained with the Lutheran Brethren and had continued to develop. Aside from my father, I was the only one who could reliably run the system, and the community was small enough that I was a known factor. Isaac would sit with me in the corner, managing the slides with lyrics and scripture. I was under no delusions about my role. While I was trusted to control the volume of the sermon, I was not permitted to speak in church. The only reason I had this “authority” during the se...

We didn’t exactly “join” the Household of Faith Family of Churches (HOFFC) group. That word implies a structure, membership, some kind of defined leadership and clear spiritual authority. It felt like settling into something soft and wet and without edges, a place where structure should have been but wasn’t. There was no pastor, no real leadership, just a group of men who taught that their authority over their families was enough to constitute a spiritual order. There was no pastor, no outside accountability for the fathers. An elder board existed, but only in the sense that they encouraged the other fathers to take more control, never less. Each household was its own hermetically sealed ecosystem, damp and airless, and the Sunday gathering was simply all those ecosystems pressed together in one room.¹ My parents’ spiritual trajectory had always orbited in the periphery of mainline Christianity, dating back to their roots in the Jesus People movement. Between James’ enthusiasm for scho...

Perhaps one of the most significant impediments to the compilation of this file is the recurring designation I received in my early years:  liar .  I am not speaking of the minor childhood fibs that form a developmental milestone. No, this classification extended beyond individual moments to my entire childhood, where I was treated as if dishonesty was my natural state. It permeates my memories so thoroughly that I cannot guess when or how I may have “earned” this designation.  What I do know is that the mechanism was consistent. If I said something unexpected or unapproved, if I recounted the day in a way that differed from an adult’s tale, especially my mother’s… well, the conclusion was foregone. I was lying. I remember in the early times protesting my innocence, or trying to be as precise as a young child can be to guard against such an accusation, but I quickly learned that these would not protect me. To put it bluntly, honesty was an attribute unique to everyon...

Up until my early teens, James and Agnes piloted our family by three guiding principles. First, a code of evangelical Christianity heavily influenced by their background as Holy Rolling Jesus People; second, a gauzy haze of cultural conservatism; and an unusual third, the phrase "The Truth stands up to questioning." This final principle may come as a surprise to any reading this file. This is hardly an adage associated with American Christian fundamentalists by either those within or without the subculture. I can only assume that it is somehow related to their time with the Jesus People - a Christian response to the freethinkers of the 1970s, where my parents met in their 20s.  Regardless of its origin, this phrase permeated my early childhood. While my access to pop culture was regulated and controlled to an unusual degree compared to my peers in public school, I was still allowed to engage in some minor aspects of pop culture through the mediation of my parents. Under the p...

My biological family is small and paranoid. On the outside, I suppose we appeared as a reserved, bookish, but relatively functional and healthy American family, but there were always harsh repercussions inside the family for speaking about each other and the group with those perceived as outsiders. This continues to the present day: my mother interrogates me whenever I visit home to know if I have committed the cardinal sin of speaking about them with my therapist, my friends, and whatever assortment of "outsiders" she is currently frightened of.  So let's break the seal, and introduce the Family. Agnes  - The mother, and bloody heart of the Family. If she doesn't contain strictly multitudes, there are at least two versions of her which may make an appearance. Secretive, shy, and an inheritor of her own family trauma, her primary emotion is rage. Deeply concerned with keeping up appearances with the outside world, she hides this behind a sturdy facade of correct and r...