My religious upbringing was based on what the neighbors believed.
My mom didn’t think twice about sending us off to Lutheran church with them, despite her own soft Catholic upbringing.
I’ve no doubt it was probably driven by her desire for some quiet and alone time, and what could it hurt, anyway. God is God.
I’d be sitting in Sunday school classes and a midnight Churching on Christmas with the neighbors.
Was my mom even there with us at Lutheran church on Christmas eve?
I honestly don’t know. Maybe. Your guess is as good as mine, and the only ones who could say with certainty are dead. So ~shrugs~.
So I attended Lutheran church, and it was a pretty enough place with stained glass windows and I think we might have had wine from the goblet. I think it’s where I also first learned that I was bad.
Of all the things I can’t recall, I do remember attending vacation bible school there. My mom probably looked forward to those two* summer weeks of quiet time more than I can imagine.
*it could have been two weeks, or one week, or two days. I have no idea. i remember it feeling long.
Did I like going? I think so.
I enjoyed the glossy books we got, and this one particularly sticks in my mind.
What I didn’t know was that we would get report cards sent home with us from our time in Vacation Bible School.
As clearly as I remember The Boy Who Gave His Lunch Away, I remember my Vacation Bible School report card having a big Needs Improvement in self control and behavior.
Now Reader.
Is that really any surprise?
Who we are is who we are. I most certainly still need a Needs Improvement in those areas.
But I can still remember the FEELING of seeing that in print, my deficiency in not a learned skill, but in the very essence of my being.
I am generally a star student and pride myself on A-plus-plus-plus-pluses.
The directive was to share it with our parents, get our mom to sign it in acknowledgement, and return it to the teacher at Bible school.
To say I was anxiety-riddled would be an understatement. That I can STILL remember this, now…well, the body keeps the score.
So I did the only thing my eight or seven year old good-girl brain could think to do: Shared it with my mom and got her to sign it and returned it like a good girl so Jesus would love me.
Except I did the opposite of that, Reader.
I had a seven year old brain and also we’ve just established that I’ve been graded a Needs Improvement in behavior.
So I tore that report card up into the tiniest pieces possible and pushed it down deep in my bedroom waste basket, as if it never existed at all.
I fretted and anguished and agonized over being asked about my unsigned / unreturned progress report.
When I was asked where my signed report card was, I had it all worked out. “I … um… lost it.”
My first lie in front of Jesus and the Bible School Teacher.
But guess what? That was the end of it.
What did this teach me? It taught me that some things that people in charge do, doesn’t really matter at all. Sometimes it’s better to just ignore the shit we don’t like and it’ll just poof, disappear.
I do know that I despised going to Vacation Bible School after that, where my rambunctious charm was not appreciated.
It taught me anxiety and fear of going where I had to pretend to be less than myself. Of not being good. enough. In today’s speak, they dulled my sparkle.
The freckle-faced girl in the daisy dress was taught she had to shrink to be acceptable for polite society.
Or maybe she was just a little too rambunctious and the teacher had had enough of all those summer kids and was just trying to do a job with a little bit of peace.
I think I was probably too loud, didn’t listen fast enough, talked too much to everyone around me and generally wanted to whoop it up. Much like Current Me.
I’ve been self-practicing and doing my own EMDR therapy**, only instead of healing anything, I’m only dredging up old memories that are stuck in my brain, so basically I’m doing myself no good whatsoever.
**don’t tell my actual clinically licensed friend this
Why is this memory so … stuck with me? I can’t say for sure, but maybe it was the first time I wasn’t told I was a Good Girl and Little Me was shook.
Maybe it’s these simple, throw-away incidents that shouldn’t matter at all, but do, and frame us in, and always make us second-question ourselves.
I’ve got hundreds of memories where I wasn’t good enough for someone’s sensibilities. It’s probably why I take being not chosen or excluded so hard, even now. I’ll fret and talk it out and generally over analyze every stupid break-up, friendship fizzle, misspoken word, exclusion of an event or whatever – I will TRY to shrug it off, and eventually I do, but man is it a lot of self-therapy and trying my friend’s patience while I hash it over and over. And over. Before I finally just figuratively tear that shit up and toss it in the trash, where it belongs.
So what have we concluded here, Reader? Well, as we know, I’m not for everyone. And everyone’s not for me. I think there’s a lesson in here somewhere, but I really don’t have it yet. Sometimes you get away with lying? That doesn’t sound like the lesson VBS was intending to teach me.
All I know for sure is this: I probably still could use a little improvement in self control and my behavior overall.