Sometimes Jeremy dragged one of my sisters off and did the same thing to her. I remember feeling sorry for them, but utterly powerless. The molestation continued until I was fifteen when Jeremy left for college. Years later, after going to therapy, I realized what a miracle it was that I never got pregnant.
Being molested by my brothers was only one of many violations I suffered. I’ve had to find a way to come to grips with much more than that.
6
STRUGGLING THROUGH THE TEEN YEARS (1988–1993)
Listen, mom and dad, do you know many times your daughter sneaks out in the wee hours of the morning to have sex with her boyfriend?… I’ll take pictures for ya.
—“Dr.” Pastor Jack Schaap, sermon, First Baptist Church, 2012.
I knew punishment and fury would always be inextricably linked in our home. No matter how immersed he was in IFB philosophy, my father never mastered the concept of administering “biblical discipline” without wrath. He raged through every beating, crimson-faced and roaring at the top of his lungs about our shortcomings, our selfishness, and our failure to please both God and him. Year after year, his anger seemed to intensify, as did his unpredictability. Sometimes he seemed bent on finding any excuse to punish us, as if he was searching for a reason to unleash his hair-trigger temper and vent pent-up hostility.
I’ve always suspected that this was what brought on the terrible beating I got when I was thirteen for the crumbs on the dishwasher. Under his orders, I had spent an entire weekend day exhaustively cleaning the house. I had dusted and vacuumed, polished and scrubbed, straightened and tidied until the place was immaculate. I had been beaten for minuscule oversights like wiping around canisters on the kitchen counter rather than under them and failing to line up the cans in the cupboard neatly with all the labels facing front, so this time I had paid scrupulous attention to detail. Or so I thought.
Before my father left for the day, he commanded, “I want this kitchen spotless when I get home!” I knew what that meant: The smallest infraction would merit a beating. So I was taking no chances. I devoted hours to working my way through every drawer, the pantry, and each appliance in the kitchen.
As soon as he got home, he began his usual white-glove test, combing over every inch of counter and cupboard. I held my breath as he lifted each object, inspecting the spaces under them for dust and crumbs. Then he opened the cabinets and scrutinized every shelf of dry goods for disorder. I was just tentatively starting to exhale when he opened the dishwasher. I felt a surge of panic, but I reminded myself that I had emptied it hours earlier, taking care to make sure every dish was perfectly dry and neatly stacked in the cabinets. I had even double-checked to make sure no silverware had slipped into the space at the bottom.
There was a moment of silence as he peered inside the machine. Then his back went rigid and my heart stopped.
“WHAT IS THIS?” he bellowed. “COME HERE AND LOOK AT THIS!”
Timidly, I approached. To my horror, I saw a fine line of golden crumbs along the ridge at the top of the machine’s door. It must have been slightly ajar when I wiped down the counter, and I had knocked a few crumbs onto the lid without noticing.
“YOU THINK YOU CAN GET AWAY WITH SLOPPY, CARELESS WORK LIKE THAT?” he roared. “GO TO YOUR ROOM! NOW!”
Terrified, exhausted, and fighting back tears as usual, I did as I was told. A few minutes later, he barged into the room, slammed the door behind him, and locked it.
“Take off your clothes and lie down!” he yelled. “Face in your pillow!”
I did as I was told, tucking my hands into the familiar position under my stomach. The motions were so ingrained I didn’t need to hear the words. Soon enough, I heard the whistle of the rod, followed by the sudden shocking force and the intense, agonizing pain. I flipped onto my back as I always did, fully exposed to my father. It’s a testament to the abject terror we all felt that, even as teenagers, my siblings and I gave no thought to modesty during our beatings and instinctively rolled over naked on our backs to protect our thighs and buttocks, which he always targeted.
For some reason, I specifically remember counting in my mind during this particular beating: “34 … 35 … 36…” I lost track after 37 hits, overwhelmed by the intense pain and the knowledge that there was more to come. When it was over, I could barely stand, but I managed to maneuver my way to the linen closet, where I used an old towel to wipe up the blood. Lying awake that night—I didn’t move much—as I was racked with fever and chills.
Years later, after my departure from the IFB, I saw the Julia Roberts thriller Sleeping with the Enemy, about a woman who escapes a cruel, sadistic husband. There’s a scene in the movie where the main character opens a cupboard and finds all the cans aligned perfectly—a chilling warning that her abuser has returned to her home after discovering her whereabouts and is stalking her. Seeing it hurtled me back through time to that terrible day in the kitchen in my parents’ home in Colorado and triggered a full-blown panic attack. The cans were aligned identically to the ones I had arranged in the cabinet when I was a teenager.
It strikes me as odd now that never once did it occur to me that there was anything sexual about the beatings my father gave me. We were almost always at least partially naked during our beatings, and it was totally acceptable behavior in our home. He had disciplined all of us this way since our toddler years, so I thought his demand that I take off my clothes was just part of the discipline process.
I knew what my brothers had done to me was wrong, but I believed my father was spanking us for our spiritual benefit. So what if our developing bodies were fully exposed to him on a regular basis? I had never heard of BDSM (bondage, dominance/discipline, sadism, and masochism). I was still laboring under the delusion that his only motivation was to save our souls. How naive I was. In retrospect, it’s a wonder I didn’t realize he had been sexually abusing us in many different ways for years—and not just during our spanking sessions.
Back to High School
After our year of homeschooling, my siblings and I returned to Silver State as if nothing had happened. Jeremy and Jason rejoined the football team, which made them big men on campus. Meanwhile, I became a basketball and football cheerleader. In keeping with IFB modesty standards, we wore split skirts that fell below our knees, harking back to the culottes my mother used to make. Dancing was forbidden in the IFB, unless it was with family members (yet another rule that drained the joy out of life) and we weren’t allowed to perform any cheers that involved moving our hips in an “ungodly” way, so our routines were grossly lacking. We became acutely aware of this whenever we played public schools, because their squads’ impressive flips and drills made us cringe in embarrassment. Our moves could have been choreographed by the Three Stooges in comparison.
My parents’ financial situation had improved considerably by this time, thanks to my father’s now booming carpet business. IFB children are drilled from a young age to have the strong work ethic required of “disciplined servants of the Lord,” and as teenagers we spent long hours working alongside Bart, providing free labor for him. My brothers cut the tile and laid the carpet, mastering tasks that are typically done by adult men, while my sisters and I went along to do the cleanup on each job.
Making the most of their newfound affluence, my mother drove a convertible, and my father bought a new super-cab pickup truck every few years. Bart and Sandy became well known for throwing ribeye-grilling parties in our backyard for all their friends from church. “The steak is on us,” they’d proclaim with magnanimous grins. But no matter how much they spent on the things they wanted, they were relentlessly tightfisted when it came to their kids. They thought nothing of dropping $200 dining out, but they “couldn’t afford” braces for us. When school started, we were given $50 each for new clothes, so we were still forced to shop at Goodwill. When I needed money for my cheerleading uniform, my parents humiliated me in front of the entire squad with their theatrics. “You want how much?” they dem
anded. I’ll never forget the decorative throw pillow that lay for years on our living room couch with the embroidered words, “If you don’t fly first class, your children will.”
Years later, when Melissa and I went to counseling after breaking free of the IFB, we realized their miserly behavior had been yet another form of manipulation. My father used money, just as he used physical violence, to keep us dependent and helpless. He refused to let us get jobs, assuring us that he would pay for our college tuition. But, as was so often the case with Bart, he fell through on his promise when the time came. Melissa took a year off school to work to help pay for Meagan’s school expenses and then used student loans to get her own degree. I too depended on student loans to cover the costs of college, and the first check Joseph wrote each month after we were married was to repay my unpaid school bills, a hefty blow to our meager budget.
Road Trips from Hell
One of my mother’s perks as a United Airlines employee was that we could all fly standby for almost nothing, and when I was in high school we traveled extensively. We went to Disneyland, Walt Disney World, Hawaii, Chile, and even took a cruise to the Bahamas. By the time I was eighteen, I had visited almost all fifty states. My brother Jeremy wanted to take his senior trip to London before graduating from college, so we all went. After I left home, my parents and brothers went to Russia, Africa, India, Ireland, Australia, and the Cayman Islands.
Despite the cult’s reclusiveness, traveling wasn’t as uncommon as you might think. Many IFB kids I knew in Colorado had been all over America. But often the only places they visited on their trips were IFB churches and IFB colleges. The Bob Jones network was extensive, so you could travel from an IFB stronghold in the West to one in the Deep South and still feel right at home. This allowed members to have the illusion of seeing the world without actually getting exposed to any new subcultures or viewpoints. As insular and isolationist as they were, the cult maintained a number of missions that preached hard-line IFB ideology around the world, and teenagers were sometimes sent to places like Mexico and Africa to help build and paint IFB churches. To protect them from the corrupting influence of the locals, they were cloistered in the mission churches, with the girls cooking and cleaning for the work crews and the boys doing manual labor and preaching in the evening.
Our travel itineraries sounded enviable, and I felt very lucky to have the opportunity to go places, but my father made every trip nerve-racking. He never budgeted correctly, so we were always precariously short on funds. We would pack suitcases full of dry cereal to take to London or end up with $15 spending money per person in Hawaii for the whole family. To cut down on expenses, my parents often booked two small hotel rooms, assuring the front desk staff there were three people per room, then packed us all into one room while they took the other. My maternal grandfather had passed away by that point, and, after my father reconciled with his mother-in-law, he got into the habit of inviting her along, which made us even more crowded, though she was able to defray some of the expenses. When our flights were delayed or we got bumped from a full flight, we usually slept at the airport rather than spring for another night’s accommodations.
My mother and father could never seem to get anywhere on time. The two of them would scream at each other all through the drive to the airport, glare at us as we rushed through security, and then yell at us to “Run!” to our gate. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, United employees flying standby were expected to dress up. For my parents, that meant making my sisters and me wear full-length Sunday dresses, and we were always sprinting through O’Hare International Airport, desperate to catch a connecting flight without tripping and sprawling flat on our faces. Nowadays, I’m habitually early when I travel. I get to the airport three or four hours before every flight because having to rush brings back memories of all those miserable, stress-filled trips.
Flying standby meant we had to wait for everyone else to board and then squeeze onto packed planes, splitting up and grabbing any seat available. After all that, the eight of us would have to de-board whenever a latecomer with a paid ticket showed up. We would cringe when we heard the familiar “Janz party of eight, please return to the gate,” and then we’d all stand up, maneuver awkwardly out of our middle seats, and slink off the plane under the baleful glares of the legitimate fliers. As a self-conscious teenager, I already felt like a freak in my ankle-length floral dress, and this was almost more humiliation than I could bear. On the flip side, once in a great while we would find ourselves on an empty flight and slump blissfully into the luxurious oversized leather seats of first class.
It didn’t take a genius to deduce that my father’s real incentive for the vacations was to bolster his reputation as a man of means in the IFB, not to expand his kids’ cultural horizons. The itinerary was always suited to my parents, not to us, and the minute we got home, he and my mother would start regaling everyone in the congregation with tales of their latest trip, reveling in the status it gave them in the church. But for my siblings and me, every trip bred anxiety. We knew the bills wouldn’t be paid for months after we got home. Would we have money for food? Would we get our paltry $50 for school clothes in the fall?
Even on vacation we couldn’t escape my father’s goading. If we went to the beach, he would grab us as we swam and shove us out into the deep part of the ocean, laughing as we struggled against the undercurrent, frantic to get back to shore. And if he thought we set a toe out of line, he would whip off his belt for a makeshift spanking session. Even more menacing were the times he would growl, “When we get back home…” Those words could ruin the rest of a trip.
The Creep Factor
My father’s dominant personality trait was his predilection for violence, but his obsession with sex came in a close second. Although the IFB leaders typically forbade discussing any details about reproduction or physical relationships between men and women (we weren’t even allowed to watch most PG movies), Bart talked candidly about sex, even with our friends, when we were teenagers. He used to boast about having had sex with my mother seven times on their honeymoon night and said it stressed her body so much that she broke out in hives the next day. He told that story to every teenage boy who set foot in our house, even with girls around, and the boys all called him “Superman.” My mom would laugh and say, “Bart, stop that!” But she attested that it was true.
Such lewd conversation seems starkly out of place in a subculture where college kids weren’t even allowed to hold hands with members of the opposite sex. But in spite of—or perhaps because of—all that priggish repression, many of the males in the IFB reveled in crude locker room talk.
Unfortunately for my sisters and me, we sometimes bore the brunt of my father’s overactive sex drive. By the time I was in high school we had our own in-ground pool and, in the privacy of our backyard with our own family, we were allowed to wear bathing suits rather than culottes and T-shirts. Melissa was quite large for her age and developed breasts early. One afternoon when she was about fourteen, she was swimming with my father when he suddenly ducked underwater and yanked her swimsuit straps down to her waist. She was standing in the shallow end, and the water only reached her belly button, so she ended up with her breasts fully exposed. She was devastated. She turned crimson, pulled her swimsuit up hurriedly, and bolted from the pool sobbing.
My father just laughed. “Oh, don’t be such a baby, Muffy,” he called. “I was just playing around!”
But he wasn’t. I remember him pressing against me underwater frequently, deliberately rubbing his erect penis against my back. I felt deeply embarrassed and I wanted him to stop, but I couldn’t put the correct label on his behavior. And getting mad was not the way to handle my father unless you were up for a beating, so I had long since learned to laugh my way out of uncomfortable situations. Trying not to panic, I would giggle and wrestle my way out of his arms pretending it was a game, but scrambling out of the pool as fast as I could.
When I was around fifteen or sixte
en, he often wanted me to lie next to him on the couch in our living room, while he watched Fox News. He would always position my rear end against his groin. Before long, he would start making ejaculatory movements against my body. I could feel his erection rubbing against me, but I pretended not to. What else could I do?
Unable to escape, I retreated into my imagination just as Melissa did with her art. I used to pretend I was Anne Frank. The IFB has always been enthralled with Jewish culture and, despite the fact that our textbooks often omitted women’s suffrage and black history entirely, we learned a lot about the Holocaust. Maybe it’s because we were forever envisioning ourselves being persecuted by our government the way the Jews were by the Germans in World War II. Maybe that sense of “kinship” explains why the IFB encouraged support of the Jews for Jesus conversion effort in the 1970s. Repulsed by what my father was doing but pinned against him and unable to wriggle free, I slipped away to an attic room in my mind, listening for the pounding of German soldiers at the door, waiting for them to drag my family off to a concentration camp. If Anne could endure all that, surely I could get through this. She became one of my heroes. I even carved out a place in my closet where I would sit with my books “in hiding” imagining the Nazis were coming soon to take me away. I developed a vivid imagination, creating an alternate universe for myself as a way to escape the pain of my immediate surroundings.
Once, when I was fifteen, my father came into my bedroom, lay down next to me on my bed, and began kissing my neck. Soon he was groping every part of my body. I squirmed my way out of his tight grip, feigning a fit of giggles, then rolled off the bed to escape. As I’ve said, any display of negative emotions would have been an invitation for a beating, so making light of these excruciating situations with him became my coping mechanism.
I Fired God Page 10