I Was Raised Conveniently Christian with Good Manners

And it took my childhood innocence away

This is not a piece about religion. And I’m holding your hand. Love you xo.

Originally published on Medium.

Manners are everything in my part of the south. Manners trump comfort. They trump thoughts. They trump feelings.

The most important thing a good Southern girl can do is present a pretty package and say yes, sir and yes, ma’am to anything and everything. And always, above everything else, you are to respect your elders.

No matter what.

Because manners are specifically, if not exclusively, important when dealing with an older generation. While this applies to all people older than yourself, it is mainly applicable to the treatment of the elder men.

I was taught that respect is earned with age, not with your actions. And they have nothing to do with being kind to others. They are simply placed so that the older men get to do whatever they want to do while telling you what they want you to do for them.

And then once they die, it can be your turn to know everything.

Even if you have your very own family with your very own children, this rule still applies. The elders even get to parent your children.

You are never alloted true adult status within the familial ecosystem until all the older ones are dead and gone.

Or until you do what I did and leave the family when you realize that’s bullshit.

---

Being a Christian is also highly important here.

Except in the house I grew up in, we didn’t go to church on Sundays. The people who raised me were always hungover on Sundays. So the man of the house would throw us kids in the car half asleep, still drunk, and sort-of dressed, and dump us in the church parking lot down the road for Sunday School.

This was not because they wanted us to be closer to God. This was because they wanted to sleep in. And a house of God will take stragglers.

We were conveniently Methodist due to the proximity of the closest church. If we lived one mile closer to town, we’d have been Presbyterian.

I didn’t know the difference.

We only ever went to church as a family on Christmas Eve. We’d get dressed up and become Christians for a night. We held the white candles with the cardboard thing that caught the wax. We sang the hymns (the Christmas ones we knew, so it was convenient). We’d say the Amens and shake the right hands and smile the right smiles.

But I never did the praying thing. It never made sense to me; talking to an invisible stranger that wasn’t even there and couldn’t talk back.

At big family dinners, there would be a lot of hand-holding in a circle where someone would bless the meal. That was always a prestigious honor, usually one given to the oldest male in the circle. But only doing it a couple times a year with extended family always felt awkward to me. And performative.

But whether it was during the circle prayer, or that one night of the year at church, I never closed my eyes. That was something I couldn’t do. That was giving too much of myself to a thing I didn’t know. A thing I didn’t understand.

A thing I didn’t trust.

I still bowed my head like everyone else. But once everyone closed their eyes, mine stayed open. It was a fun little secret. It felt like cheating. It felt like staying true to myself. And I really liked spying to see what everyone’s faces did.

Heads hanging low enough to connect to their higher power told me so many things. Some eyes closed so tightly, they crinkled with apologies. Some looked vacant. Some looked happy and serene.

And some smiled a smile that seemed sinister. As if a room full of closed eyes was the only place their secrets could safely bubble to the surface.

You can tell a lot about somebody during a circle prayer. There’s a tendency to think you’re alone when your eyes are closed. It’s easy to think you’re presumed pure in a room full of prayers.

---

We never talked about religion in my childhood home. But the woman who raised me would pull out God whenever I was in trouble. If I was suspected to be lying — which was often because I have always been a very good liar and even better at lying about lying — she would make me swear on a bible that I was telling the truth.

I had no problem lying with my hand on a book.

She’d threaten me. She’d tell me that God knows the truth and is always watching me. But that always just made me feel weird and uncomfortable.

And when that wasn’t enough to scare me straight, she’d have to go find a bible in a house that didn’t have bibles.

One time I swore I was not lying on a thesaurus.

The only bible I recall us having is the one that was given to me by my maternal grandmother. She was the only grandparent I trusted. And I still have it. It’s hidden away in a wooden keepsake box I haven’t updated since I was a child.

The bible is tiny and used to be white and has my name embossed on the vinyl cover. I liked it for that reason. I never owned anything with my name on it. Being named after a Beatles album and not something more common like, Ashley, didn’t allow me the ability to find my name on anything.

Those little license plates they have in gift shops? Never an Abbey.

Keychains? Not made for Abbeys.

So this bible with my name printed in silver made me feel seen when I so very rarely did. And I’ve only known it to have one corner chewed off by the dog who bit part of my face off when I was a baby.

It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense why I would still have it. That bible isn’t sacred to me in the way it should be. And it’s a tangible reminder of the time those parents left me alone with a Doberman Pinscher when they ran out of beer.

I have the scars to remind me every day, I don’t need a book for that.

Maybe I keep it somehow as a reminder of all the things I was told were important and true, but was waiting for them to feel that way to me.

---

We had a man of the cloth in the family; a chaplain. He was some version of a cousin to me and I only saw him on holidays in a room stuffed with other versions of cousins I didn’t know that well. It was hard to feel comfortable in a room full of people who didn’t view me as worthy because they were all still alive and older.

A chaplain’s job, as it was told to me as a kid, is ‘to tell someone they’re allowed to go to heaven when they’re dying’.

“Even if they’re not a good person?”, I would ask.

“Yes. Because his job gets them in.”

Like a fastpass at an amusement park. Got it.

I never believed in heaven. It seems like such an easy and beautiful thing for a child to believe in. But I never did. I tried. I had a brilliant imagination, but I could never go all in on heaven. It always felt like a lie.

We’d never have any proof of its existence, so how could I possibly believe in it? Santa Claus gives us proof. I believed the hell out of Santa. But there’s no earthly pay off for heaven.

And just like God, heaven was something only brought out during times of anger at home. Heaven was something I could only have if I admitted I was wrong. It was a dangling carrot during times of punishment. Never aspirational, never a promise or positive reinforcement.

Heaven and God and the Bible were just things pulled out of someone’s back pocket when they just didn’t know what to do with me.

---

Not having religion as a part of my upbringing in any structured form, and having manners be the only real pillar of what it means to be a ‘good girl’, meant I just said yes to everything. I was never taught I could say no. I’d get spanked for saying no to something. I was only taught that the way to respond to an elder’s request is always, yes, sir.

Yes is pretty. No is ugly. And we do not argue with an elder.

When I was around 2 or 3, my uncle-in-law started molesting me. Some members of the family knew it was happening, but chose the well-mannered way to handle it and pretend that it wasn’t. Admitting you had a child molestor and sexual predator in the family — or God forbid, having anyone find out that you did — was terribly uncouth.

It took me 20 years to officially come out to the family about it. I guess I had gotten so used to respecting my elders by keeping it to myself that it’s just what I kept on doing. But over the years I had become so sick of being uncomfortable at holiday dinner tables.

When we all held hands and bowed our heads, my molester’s face was always smiling.

And I was the only one in the room who saw it.

So for 20 years, I held hands before Thanksgiving dinner with the man who raped me.

---

When I finally told the woman who raised me what happened, she got angry instead of sympathetic. She showed rage instead of tenderness. She seemed inconvenienced. And she kept making me repeat it.

I was 22 years old and in college. We had been discussing over the phone when I’d be coming home for Thanksgiving and she finally asked me why I didn’t like Mike.

I had been telling her I didn’t like him and that he made me uncomfortable ever since I was 2 years old.

Twenty years later, she asked me why.

I was sitting on the world’s most uncomfortable sofa and the conversation felt like a dream I couldn’t find my way through. The kind where you’re trying to run but your legs feel like sandbags.

And she kept asking if it really happened. As though this were just one of my lies.

If we were in the same room, I wonder if she’d have made me swear on the closest book.

Soon the phone tree was ignited and the rest of the family started to find out. And for weeks I came home every day from class with countless messages on my answering machine. Various versions of cousins asking me questions about what had happened.

And I respected every single elder and called them back.

---

A week or so later, it was the grandmother’s turn to fact-check me.

This woman was an exceptionally prudish human. And therefore didn’t know most of the sexual details of which I was referring to. So while I tried to remain good and do what I was told, I was forced to give an 80 year old woman a lesson in sex-ed.

And I did so, like a good girl, as she repeatedly excused her son-in-law’s actions.

Every detail she asked for, every phrase or act that she asked me to define and explain, was met with an excuse as to why he did those things to me.

A lot of people in the family took this as an opportunity to praise me for being so beautiful and attractive to men.

A lot of people told me I should pray.

I took myself to therapy instead.

---

One night I got another phone call. I had been watching ER, alone and in the dark, on that same uncomfortable couch that had been my only source of solace for a month.

It was the chaplain.

He called to tell me that he had spoken to Mike that day in his office. He told me that Mike had cried with his head in his hands… that part always stuck out to me. Why was it important to explain how this man looked as he was crying? Why was there a need to emphasize his sadness?

Is his sadness the most important piece of this story?

Why is this even his story at all?

He was polite and well-mannered to me on the call. It was all meant to make me feel better. Besides, he was an elder man and a man of the cloth. So he definitely knew best.

I remember just looking at that cordless phone with a battery as drained as I was. It was the first time I had the audacious thought to talk back to an elder.

But I just stared at the phone with no words, and no answers as to why I wasn’t being treated like a child who had been raped.

I looked at those phone buttons, glowing green in the dark. The episode of ER was the one when Doctor Romano gets his arm chopped off by a helicopter. And I remember thinking, that’s an appropriate reaction to pain and trauma. There was blood and screaming and frantic activity on the television screen.

The reaction perfectly matched the pain. But I never felt an appropriate reaction to my pain.

And I imagine he gave Mike a ticket to heaven that day.

---

A couple weeks later I received a handwritten letter from the patriarch of the family. It was seven politely monogrammed pages with uneven sentences of scribbled and scratched out phrases and typos. The pages were folded into thirds and hastily packed into one of those business envelopes you can get at the drugstore for a couple bucks. The envelope was too small for the job and had already begun to fall apart; its corners and seams were ill-prepared for such an atrocity.

He wrote for seven pages how good of a man Mike was, and why he needed to stay in the family. Clumsy and convenient correlations to religion were spattered about. Torpid references as to what family and respect and loyalty means stained my fingers with cheap ink.

I realized right then, that all of the manners I was forced to have as a child would never be granted to me. Not even now.

Manners were never for me to receive, they were only for me to give.

The first brave thing I ever did was never speak to that man again. And he died fifteen years later without my presence at his funeral.

---

Eighteen years later, we’re in the middle of a global pandemic when everyone is questioning their God — or finding their version of one for the first time.

And I got word one bright and sunny afternoon that Mike had just died. He lost a short-lived battle with a very aggressive form of cancer.

His obituary began with something to the affect of :

Michael Allen Worley went home to be with the Lord…

Well-mannered people who knew what he had done to me bowed their heads, held hands, and closed their eyes to honor his life in a room I never stepped foot in.

Mike died in April.

April is Child Sexual Abuse Prevention Awareness Month.

That was the correct response to my trauma.

---

Religion just wasn’t in the cards for me. It never had a fighting chance. Maybe if it was explained to me better — or at all — I’d be different? I don’t know. But I don’t feel like I’m missing anything without it now. And I don’t think religion needs to be the thing we all have to work towards.

If your religion makes you feel full and happy and warm, I am genuinely and honestly so very happy for you. Because that is what I think religion is supposed to do.

It just wasn’t that for me.

I still struggle with trusting things I cannot see or touch. I still don’t pray. But I do believe in so many things.

And I do have faith.

My kind of faith is maybe different than yours, and that’s ok.

I close my eyes now. I meditate every day. It feels safe there. Maybe that’s the same thing that you’re doing when you pray, but calling it something different is ok.

I think the thing I desperately wanted to find as a child was never religion. It was never the concept of ‘good’. It never had anything to do with manners or respecting someone just because they were born before me.

The thing I was waiting to find, was me. The voice I was hoping to one day hear when I closed my eyes, was mine. And the trust I needed to have in order to heal and begin a life the way I wanted to live it, had been waiting for me all along.

I just needed to respect myself enough to see it.