Despite my mother’s best efforts to explain the depths of Female Mystery to me, I was in love with at least one of Our Girls out of every batch who lived in our chalet. I would hang around The Girl Of The Moment full of longing and misinformation as to what Girls want, let alone when they might want it. Gauzy descriptions of What Happens On Your Wedding Night and/or King David’s Sin and how to get an actual twenty-year-old named Jane—who was visiting us from Wisconsin and who had short sassy blond hair that positively sparkled in the sunlight while framing a perfect face and dazzling blue eyes—to kiss the twelve-year-old version of me was another matter altogether.
The Girl Who Let Me was French and the same age as me when we met in the summer of 1964. We were both thirteen. She was the village pastor’s niece visiting from France. It was early July, so the hay field above the back road was full of field flowers—Queen Anne’s lace, ox-eye daisies, and buttercups—tangled up with the tall grass into lovely swaying thickets of vivid color. Swiss Alpine meadows are made mostly of flowering plants. The day was warm and the dense two-to-three-foot-tall hay field–flower meadow provided sweet-smelling privacy, a screen to shield us when we lay down while being serenaded by crickets.
I’d happened to walk past the village parsonage that morning. It was a large three-story house about a quarter of a mile from ours. The Girl Who Let Me was standing by the gate. That’s where we met. Like all the state-owned buildings in the canton of Vaud, the village parsonage had solid shutters painted with wide green-and-white stripes, and it was made of imposing masonry.
I’m guessing that The Girl Who Let Me had been looking at the mountains, waiting for a boy, any boy, to come along. I wish I could remember her name. I said hello, and she said hello, and I said I lived up the road—not mentioning that I was one of the weird missionaries, though later she told me she knew who I was because her uncle disapproved of us Schaeffers and said so. Anyway, that first day she didn’t ask awkward questions. I asked her where she was from, and she answered Paris, and then, with a sudden flash of inspiration, I asked her if she’d like to go for a walk because the crocuses were still blooming only a fifteen-minute hike up the steep path.
She said yes!
Just as we got deep into the pine and beech forest after walking about a half a mile up the trail (which cut almost vertically into the woods from our back road up to the peaks above us), The Girl Who Let Me put her hand in mine. She actually initiated the contact by slipping her fine-boned delicate cool little fingers into my palm. I didn’t dare to look at her in case that would make her realize what she’d done since I assumed this hand-holding was some sort of mistake. Maybe she was so used to pairing up two by two for school walks—as the Swiss and the French made their youngsters do when forming them up in rows—that we weren’t really holding hands the way I hoped we were (like a married couple On Their Way To The Wedding Night) but just doing something she thought all children had to do on walks.
One of the great things about The Girl Who Let Me—besides the fact she kept holding my hand the way I hoped some Girl would someday and that “someday” was miraculously today—was that she turned to me and said, “Tu es très mignon” (You’re very cute). Oh, for the chance to walk up my mountainside into that spring day again. I’d like to really talk to her this time. I’d like to ask her who taught her how to keep gently guiding my hand away from her lap and how many babies she has had during the years since we met and whom she married and if her life has been happy and if she remembers me. Mainly I’d like to thank The Girl Who Let Me.
Does she, like me, bathe her grandchild toddlers these days while singing “Ba Ba, Black Sheep” at the top of her lungs and then howling with them “like wolves”? Does she draw pictures for her grandchildren of “bad kitties” knocking over plates and glasses while the cats are jumping over a table chasing mice? Is Beatrix Potter’s A Tale of Two Bad Mice also a favorite in her household? Has it surprised The Girl Who Let Me that the best thing that ever happened to her is her grandchildren’s love? Does she feel disconnected from that thirteen-year-old French girl who let that American boy hold her hand? Could she please send me a picture of herself as she was then and one of herself now with her family around her because I can’t remember her face, only that her hair was light brown and a bit frizzy, and that she was so very slender, and that her Nipple was a pale translucent mauve that matched the lavender crocuses on the mossy bank just above where we were lying.
We kissed in the woods. She let me touch her breast after I managed to push her bra up, or rather push a cup up—after she opened her blouse (matter ’a fact as you please). It wasn’t a big lacy contraption like the ones on our chalet’s laundry line. It was simple, small, and made of a flower print decorated with tiny pink rosebuds. The problem was that I couldn’t kiss her and stare at The Nipple, so I intermittently did one activity while pretending not to do the other since I was more interested in seeing—AT LAST—than in kissing. And that’s why I can’t remember her face. Seeing The Nipple was like looking into the sun; it obliterated my ability to perceive almost anything else.
The Girl Who Let Me used her tongue’s tip and flicked it back and forth over my tongue tip so quickly that it felt like the electric toothbrush Dad had recently purchased and let me try out. I was startled. I’d never been told that tongues would be involved! I knew all about how “Your precious seed will swim up into your wife’s womb and meet the precious egg,” but Mom said nothing about tongues.
I kissed The Girl Who Let Me with my mouth closed. Then, during the second kiss I suddenly felt this little wet sliver of something push through my lips, past the gate of my teeth, and then meet my tongue and flick back and forth at a rate of about fifty revolutions per second. I was fascinated and delighted. She was doing something to me on purpose.
She initiated all phases of our physical contact, while I carefully lay across and away from her at a right angle, not on her. I was keeping my crotch pressed firmly to the ground. I didn’t want this wonderfully accommodating and supremely kind Girl to feel my dreadful erection pressing against her, something I was embarrassed by and knew that she—and of course all Girls—would hate! I was sure she’d jump up and run for home if she discovered my shame.
Even after I learned that Girls don’t mind feeling an erection pressed against them, for several years after kissing The Girl Who Let Me I thought that the light speed-tongue-flicking method was the proper way to use tongues when kissing. It took several more encounters for me to understand that maybe The Girl Who Let Me was as inexperienced as I was that blissful morning and that maybe she’d heard about tongues from a friend and misunderstood the technical details. Still, I had good reason to trust her expertise: The Girl Who Let Me was French. Mom always said that the French were “tragically promiscuous.”
Later, when I kissed other Girls, I assumed that they didn’t know the right way to kiss. Their tongues moved so slowly. I resisted all newfangled tongues thrust all the way into my mouth like slow writhing snakes. I loyally stuck to what I’d been taught by The Girl Who Let Me. After all, she’d been so kind—not once but every day for two golden nipple-exposing, tongue-flicking, hand-holding weeks.
What did The Girl Who Let Me want that afternoon? By patiently guiding my straying hands away from her lap (again and again), she made it clear that kissing—and a glance at The Nipple—was all I was going to get. And, of course, with an erection to hide, there was no climbing on top.
It was one thing to stick my Little Thing into my ice sculpture. Who cared if Seth saw my erection? We experimented all the time. How far could we pee over a cliff? What did it feel like to shove a twig up It? (Big mistake.) Could we write our names with pee in the snow? But Seth seeing my Little Thing was one thing. A Girl seeing It, let alone feeling It pressing against her, presented a whole different magnitude of mortification.
The Girl Who Let Me and I had a spiritual connection, too, that gave our inexpert tongue flicking a friendly foundation. As I said, her
uncle was the village Protestant state church pastor. Even though he was a “liberal Barthian,” as Dad had called him, nevertheless The Girl Who Let Me and I were both connected to the pastoring trade. Also, she wasn’t a villager but an outsider like me. So when one bright morning I walked down the path to the vicarage gate, and she wasn’t there, my heartsick pang cut deep.
She’d said nothing about leaving! I walked back to the vicarage every day for the rest of the summer. The Girl Who Let Me never was at the gate again. I finally asked Alice where The Girl Who Let Me was. Alice (who always knew everything about my doings) said that “ta petite amie” had returned to France.
By early fall I drummed up my courage to go right up to the front door of the vicarage and ask the pastor where his niece was and if I could have her address. He told me that she’d been sent back to France early because of me and never to come to his house again. I spoke French to him, but he answered in English, as if to emphasize that I was most certainly an unwelcome outsider. I was a “bad influence,” he said. And he also said that his niece had traveled to Huémoz to breathe “good mountain air,” not to be “molested by American boys.” And, he added a parting shot in haughty Swissified English, “what a large pity it is that ze authorities were so foolish as to have giving your family residency permit C for unfolding of your sect amongst us!” (The Swiss were not generous with giving residency permits to foreigners. The most coveted permit was the full residency, unlimited “Permit C.” My parents had these permits, but other workers at L’Abri rarely got them, and this was a subject of constant prayer, “that the hearts of the commune of Ollon officials might be moved”).
I’m sure The Girl Who Let Me didn’t tell her uncle about us, let alone what she let me do. She had always greeted every mention of her uncle with a sigh. So how did he know I’d “molested” his niece? Maybe the hay wasn’t high enough by the edge of the forest path, and he’d been scanning the mountainside above the vicarage using binoculars. I could only be thankful that my parents and this local Swiss pastor weren’t on speaking terms.
Four years after The Girl Who Let Me and I were kissing on that mountainside, I got Genie pregnant and she turned out to be my wife. If the Girl Who Let Me ever reads this, then I’d like to say to her—rather to you, Ma Chérie—that all this stuff about waiting for the “right time and right age” and “right person” is nonsense. How long do we think we have? Many of my friends say they envy me my grandchildren. That’s odd. Measured by their idea of success and how to achieve it, Genie and I and our children have taken the “wrong path” by having children “too young.” And the strange thing is that my aging and envious friends’ childless children are doing just what their parents pushed, begged, even forced them to do: “succeed,” with a vengeance, while putting having children on hold.
Serendipitous, messy, and joy-filled bodily-fluid-lubricated natural life, babies, and grandbabies (in other words, Love) matter most to me. I hope, Ma Chérie, that you found your own version of what Genie and I (and you and me almost) stumbled into by dumb luck and horny abandon—a life full of children, grandchildren, and friendship.
When I run into the sorts of striving people who are shocked if you have a child before age thirty-five or so, if at all, as they chase a second master’s degree and who act as if Nature and Love are a mere footnote to Career, Mom’s example of putting Life first kicks in. Mom’s idea that Family is a blessing has proved true. I am glad I had babies at the “wrong” age. Whatever path led to two-year-old Lucy and me working on my old broken Pinocchio, as we glued him back together, let alone her joy as she hugged me and exclaimed, “Thank you so much, Ba, for fixing him!” is an experience I’d choose a thousand times over anything my career has ever offered me. And six-month-old Jack grabbing my nose and shrieking with delight while radiating effervescent joy is not a blessing but the blessing of my life.
When at age seventeen, you get your girlfriend pregnant, and later your own children start families fairly young, you wind up with grandchildren the same ages as some of your friends’ children. So when Genie and I walk around with Amanda (age eighteen) and Ben (age fifteen), people assume they’re our kids. “You’re too young to be grandparents of a eighteen-year-old!” they exclaim with a smile, as if offering Genie and me a compliment. What’s really happening is that we’ve upset their idea of what it means to be good, upstanding, twenty-first-century, kids-canwait, upper-middle-class whites.
Most upper-middle-class white North Americans think that it’s normal for black, brown, and Latino people to have grandchildren “too early.” But upper-middle-class whites aren’t supposed to have kids early, let alone have teenage grandchildren before they’re in their sixties. Sure, we live in a nice house overlooking the Merrimack River, and between us, Genie and I have ancestors who sailed on the Mayflower and one (Genie’s mother’s great-great ... grandfather) who signed the Constitution of the United States. So we seem okay as far as that goes, at least to the sort of people who really care about trying to get their children into Harvard. But I think that some of our snobbier friends suspect that Genie and I may also lead Wolfman-at-full-moontype double lives. Maybe at night we turn into junk-food-loving porkers, sneak off to a trailer park with our brood of kids and grandkids, and lounge in a Winnebago surrounded by brokendown cars up on blocks, watch wrestling on TV, buy liquor with ill-gotten food stamps, scarf corn chips and bean dip, gain weight and put on dreadful sweat pants, sprout mullet haircuts, then trudge the isles of Wal-Mart until dawn breathing the plastic smell and loving it while, with each step, the cheeks of our suddenly gigantic bottoms rise, quiver, fall, and rise again like massive sacks of Jell-O strapped to the hindquarters of water buffalo.
My parents put me on the Grandchild Path by their life example of putting people and relationships ahead of material possessions and even ahead of their theological beliefs. When it came to living, Mom was balanced and moderate. She believed in planning children whether she officially said God was sovereign or not. On the other hand, she didn’t believe in planning too much, let alone think that material stuff, prestige, and Career could ever make anyone happy if he or she gave up (or postponed) Love, Family, and Children for a materialistic mirage.
But not all Evangelicals were as sensible as my parents were when it comes to family matters. Consider that in 2009 over 6,000 women met in Chicago for the “True Woman Conference,” to call women to “Complementarianism”—in other words, to join the Reconstructionist Patriarchy Movement called by another lessforbidding name. The organizers used their conference to launch the “True Woman Manifesto.” A clause in the preamble reads, “When we respond humbly to male leadership in our homes and churches, we demonstrate a noble submission to [male] authority that reflects Christ’s submission to God His Father.”
“We are believing God for a movement of reformation and revival in the hearts and homes of Christian women all around this world,” the group’s leader, Evangelical best-selling author/guru and “motivational speaker” Nancy Leigh DeMoss, said in her opening remarks. The other speakers at the conference included some of the foremost leaders of the twenty-first-century “mainstream” Evangelical world.50 I’m guessing that none of those leaders would have publicly embraced Reconstructionism. Nevertheless, by lending their presence to that meeting, they were implicitly endorsing the Reconstructionist view of women and the “divine male headship of women ordained by the Bible” to which my mother paid lip-service (when pressed) but contradicted by the way she lived her whole fiercely independent life.
Women are “called to encourage godly masculinity” by submitting to men, says the “True Woman Manifesto” those leaders assembled to sign. Women must “submit to their husbands and [male-only] pastors.” According to this view of what I’ll call Godly Groveling Women, women must “honor the God-ordained male headship” of their husbands by allowing their Men to rule them. Thus, selfish rights (as in the Bill of Rights) are “antithetical to Jesus Christ.” So The Godly Groveling Tr
ue Woman believes that she must (as it were) rent her womb to God (and thus to a Reconstructionist revolution in whatever name) in order to embrace “fruitful femininity.”
In other words, roll over, Mom. Your Most Private Place is not yours, and it’s not private. Your womb is God’s, and He needs lots more Spiritual Warriors. And while we’re at it, no more Talks. You’re a second-class citizen, Edith, who must follow your husband’s lead, for the Patriarchy Movement tells you so!
For those who missed the conference, the way to a “Complete Submission Makeover” was made easy. According to the True Woman Web site, “Don’t miss out—take the 30-Day True Woman MakeOver to discover and experience God’s design and calling for your life! Join Nancy Leigh DeMoss on a journey through Proverbs 31, 1 Timothy 2:9–10, and Titus 2:1–5. For thirty days, we’ll send this email directly to your inbox, complete with biblical teaching; helpful links, printable downloads, and recommended resources.”51
What Nancy Leigh DeMoss was doing with her “Complete Submission Makeover” was to extend the reach of a fringe fundamentalist movement—the “Quiverfull Movement”—into the Evangelical mainstream. (The name of the Quiverfull Movement alludes to Psalm 127:3: “Lo, children are an heritage of the LORD and the fruit of the womb is his reward. As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man; so are children of the youth. Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them: they shall not be ashamed.”)
Some Quiverfull leaders have argued against allowing daughters to attend college, as worldly outsiders might destroy their faith. Daughters, they say, should stay at home after they graduate from homeschooling. Daughters should practice being a “helpmeet” to their fathers, training to someday “serve” those godly husbands God will send their way. Some Quiverfull women are not allowed to drive. Others make lists of their daily tasks to submit to their husbands. Quiverfull wives are carrying on at least one of Mom’s rules, however: They believe that it is their duty to be sexually available to their husbands at all times. If a husband strays because of a wife’s refusal, it’s her fault.
Sex, Mom, and God Page 15